Belleville Tokyo (2010) A Film by Elise Girard

The two main characters in Elise Girard's Belleville Tokyo are named Marie and Julien, and the film is a story of them. They're married, and Marie is expecting a baby, but the relationship is waning because of Julien's infidelity. The story, set in Paris, begins in summer and ends in winter, and title cards indicating each new month make abrupt appearances throughout. Much of the drama is relayed through static wide shots in urban and domestic spaces, and when the camera moves, it moves in succinct, assertive gestures - a pan or a tilt, never on track. Backgrounds loosely reflect inner emotional states and generate aesthetic appreciation, particularly in the final chapter of the film when the troubled couple is surrounded by a gentle snowfall that seems to materialize Marie's sense of self-confidence as she pushes her unstable lover further and further away.

If all of this sounds like a kaleidoscopic pastiche of art films past, it's because it is. Girard's film might as well be titled The Story of Marie and Julien, but it's not just Rivette's presence that hovers over Belleville Tokyo; it's also Rohmer's, Renoir's, Godard's, Varda's, Tati's, Ozu's, De Sica's, etc. Many of the film's inspirations are implicit, but others are openly addressed: only 15 minutes or so have past by the time Girard treats the audience to the extended sight of a poster announcing a Jarmusch retrospective, and though Marie (Valérie Donzelli) is also in the shot receiving a phone call that may or may not have narrative significance, the subject of the shot is Jarmusch. It's as if Girard, in addition to advertising her Jarmusch love, is priming the audience to anticipate the film's snow-covered denouement, which seems to hearken back to Stranger Than Paradise.

Cinephilia runs amok in Belleville Tokyo, and Girard expresses her boundless enthusiasm by situating the film's plot within Paris' culture of cinephilia. Marie works at an arthouse cinema with an overflowing collection of film prints that is seemingly based around Jean-Marie Rodon's beloved Action Films, both a distributor and a theater of the highest-quality classic films. That Marie's time at work amidst a temple of Hollywood movie posters and the floating scent of celluloid is treated as a respite from the claustrophobia and distress of her personal life is instructive in understanding Girard's own position in her work. The act of filmmaking, and of film viewing, is an escape from the harsh reality of life, but it's as if Marie - and by extension, Girard - doesn't realize that the filmmakers she adores peer deeply into life as a way of getting closer to it and understanding it. When the cinema screens Visconti's L'Innocente and Julien (Jérémie Elkaïm) introduces it, Marie interprets the film's notorious infant murder scene as Julien subtly announcing his fear of the future, and promptly exits the screening in irritation. For Marie, if the cinema too closely approaches reality and too accurately conveys inner emotional states, it makes her uncomfortable; as evidenced by the Intervista poster in her living room, she seems to prefer the fantastical flights of cinema, a safe alcove of movie magic and canonization.

Fittingly, Belleville Tokyo becomes more hysterical the closer it gets to messy emotional truth and more tone-deaf as it approaches the calamitous outcome of Marie and Julien's struggles. My theater laughed harder at the climactic argument between the couple (shown in the film's longest static take) than it did at the earlier scenes in the cinema office between Marie and her slapstick duo of bosses. The latter are willfully delightful, while the former should be harrowing. Belleville Tokyo is fetishistic to the core, which explains why it gets all the surface features right (the unfussy compositional sense, the measured editing, the carefully choreographed but organic blocking) but none of the intangibles. It lacks the probing intelligence of Rohmer, the knowing self-reflexivity of Godard and Rivette, the quotidian calm of Ozu, and the performative chemistry in Jarmusch. It plays like a parade of references splayed out for enthusiasts to pick up on, or for casual viewers seeking inoffensive entertainment to subconsciously acknowledge and feel all the better for it.

Cries and Whispers (1972) A Film by Ingmar Bergman

There's a chilling image early on in Cries and Whispers that gets to the core of the film, perhaps even to all of Ingmar Bergman's oeuvre. It's a tight close-up of Harriet Andersson's face as she lies in bed. It shows a women in a comfortable setting, with a soft white pillow filling up the edges of the frame. Yet the strange progression of feeling that flows through Andersson's face suggests that the pillow has no power over human emotion. Andersson's playing a dying woman named Agnes, but the film has not yet made the fact or nature of her illness clear when the shot arrives. As it begins, Agnes is just waking up. Her face goes blank for a moment before stretching into an odd contortion. The first hunch is that she's yawning, but that supposed yawn shifts effortlessly into a gape of seemingly horrendous pain, and ultimately resolves itself into another blank facade, this time graced by a hint of a smile. It's a close-up of unorthodox length, and across its long runtime it captures a myriad of powerful emotions co-existing: indifference, relief, pain, sorrow, misery, boredom, catharsis, happiness. Bergman's films have always made it an uncomfortably blunt truth that a psyche cannot possess one of these states without the rest of them. Cries and Whispers seems built entirely around that idea.

An echo of this shot emerges later in the film when Agnes' oldest sister Karin (Ingrid Thulin) reacts to Agnes' younger sister Maria's (Liv Ullmann) frank pronouncements of the distanced state of their relationship. Karin buries her face in her hands, beginning to laugh but also cry, and when her face returns from her hands, the distinction between the two is still not obvious. Cries and Whispers boasts some of Bergman's finest and most respectful direction of actresses, a skill he was able to master throughout his career, but here the performances reach majestic levels of complexity and candidness. Andersson with her gasping, unflinching morbidity, Thulin with her ice-cold hatefulness and detachment, Ullmann with her self-involved vulnerability, and Kari Sylwan (as the maid Anna) with her bruised despair; it's impossible not to think of the film first in terms of its faces, big, bold, and passionate, always dominating the screen. A consistent editorial device is a cut to one of these faces staring directly at the viewer, positioned in front of a black abyss. There's an urgent confrontational quality to it.

Limited to a single setting and utter silence with the exception of dialogue, ambient whispers, the infrequent use of Chopin and Bach, and the occasional impact sound, Cries and Whispers distills Bergman's aesthetic to its simplest form. The film feels very little need to couch its spiritual questioning in narrative forms; it uses the enclosed tomb of a countryside mansion as an arena in which to directly address matters of faith, death, and love. Sure, there's a narrative here - Agnes is slowly dying from cancer and the event of death gradually reveals the ugly truth of the sisters' relationships - but Bergman doesn't treat it as such. Rather, the film is a trance-like parade of the most harrowing of emotions, treated in an almost free-associative manner. In the following order, Bergman shows confrontations with mortality, petty displays of vanity and sexual desire, scorching proclamations of self-hatred and insularity, hallucinatory stages of grief, troubling instances of emotional denial, and, finally, an ambiguous vision of posthumous bliss. Stitched together by the pulse of red transitions and the direct address close-ups, there's a great fluidity to this evolution, a sense of logical emotional development that could never come through on paper.

Bergman opens the film with a characteristically moody introduction, a sequence of images divorced from dramatic context. Shots of the outside of the manor on a foggy morning are framed by Sven Nykvist with unusual compositional dynamics - twice, a fat tree is placed just off center in the frame, seeming to insist upon blocking the view of the yard. As the only exterior shots potentially taking place in the "present" (the rest occur in idyllic recollections by the central characters), it's as if Bergman is establishing the present as something that is unreachable, forever shrouded in mist: these women, in their womb-like mansion (Bergman allows only the faithful Anna a brief view out a window), seem to exist perpetually behind the present tense, so fixated on death and despair that they're constantly leaning backwards, their only source of positivity in the past. These images then bleed into close-ups of ticking clocks, one of Bergman's signature motifs. The insistence upon time further situates the sisters in a march towards death, and the next scene features Karin, Maria, and Anna literally waiting for the death of Agnes in the adjacent room. (In fact, at one point Maria even appears dead in a pose that would recently be echoed by a dead woman in Manoel de Oliveira's The Stange Case of Angelica.) Time moves too fast and too slow simultaneously; Agnes both craves a release from her imprisoning pain and fondly recalls instances of pleasure that make the fear of doom palpable.

The figure of Anna offers the only respite for Agnes' consuming misery. Anna's treated with a lack of respect by Karin and Maria, and especially by Karin's malevolent husband Fredrik (Georg Årlin), who later tries to lay off Anna without so much as a thank you for her long-term work, but she retains a core of dignity against all odds, ostensibly due to a belief in God and an understanding of death. This makes her the most suited to deal sympathetically with Agnes' illness, as well as rendering her the mystical presence of the house, a kind of death prophet. The sadness that ignites within her at the prospect of Agnes' end, which is ever so subtly suggested to be rooted in lesbian interest, is overwhelming, but it does not cause her to break down as drastically as Karin and Maria. The two sisters feign self-control, but their devastation manifests itself in immature acts of wickedness towards one another. Death can be a uniting force, but for these women it's something that eats away at their weak inner being, separating the already significant emotional gap between them even further.

A recurring visual element in Bergman's work, particularly with Nykvist as DP, is the alarming use of rack focus to bunch faces up against one another. That technique is used frequently in Cries and Whispers, often when loosely conveying Agnes' subjectivity. One of the sisters will enter the frame and turn away in fright at the sight of Agnes in pain just as the other sister intrudes in the foreground, coming aggressively into focus. For a film so restrained in its visual palette - Bergman and Nykvist rarely move the camera and rarely cut away to wide shots - it certainly finds ample ways to aestheticize the interplay of human faces, extracting a dramatic intensity through such minor means as a precisely choreographed rack focus. The relative subtlety of such maneuvers balances out the film's oppressive use of blood red, a conceit of remarkable effectiveness and remarkable obviousness simultaneously. That it's both points to the great power of Cries and Whispers; red is a color whose implications are built so intrinsically into our lexicon of artistic analysis that it begs to be paired with such vital thematic material. This is a film whose depths are integral to human nature.

Screening Notes #13

Phone Booth (2002): Larry Cohen originally proposed the seed of this idea to Hitchcock, and it's no surprise. Decades later, Joel Schumacher took the seed and grew it into an economical gem featuring a man and an unseen sniper that thrives on its precise distillation of time and place. Phone Booth would make a neat double bill with John Cassavetes' Faces; both films use extra-marital relations as a narrative motif, and Schumacher and Cassavetes realize the potency of the human face and its ability to carry drama. Characters seem defined by the presence or lack of sweat beading down their face at any given moment, while Schumacher's montage is often narrowed to bustling cross-cuts between NYC windows and tormented expressions. Colin Farrell is in top melodramatic form, conveying waves of exposition through his face alone, and when Forest Whittaker enters as a vulnerable police chief, one can sense the film's artificial sweat budget (whatever that might have entailed) rising exponentially. This really is edge-of-your-seat entertainment, as they say.

Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story (2007): Continuing adventures in the offhand surrealism and half-assed improvisation of Judd Apatow-produced comedy (see: Step Brothers, Anchorman, Pineapple Express, Get Him to the Greek). In fact, these are attributes that seem to emerge only when Apatow is in the producer role, instilling in them a strange sort of extra-textual cohesion that poses a challenge to the auteur theory and gives the films a distinct tone among American comedy. Step Brothers remains the most interesting mess, but Walk Hard is a special breed of genre spoof: structured yet happily uneven, hokey but weirdly emotionally involved, straightforward and digressive at the same time, quotable yet only in the most unconventional sense (long lines, recurring bits of dialogue that are slightly altered). It feels like a film that was made on-the-go, incorporating various ideas from crew and cast members alike, resulting in a very strange and very engaging hodge-podge of American music mythology and other, more private inspirations. Some flashbacks - as well as wild animals in domestic settings - seem to mine the exaggerated Americana of Lynch, while one episode of a drugged-up John C. Reilly wreaking havoc in underwear plays like a variation on Leos Carax's Merde.

The Wind Will Carry Us (1999): My issue with Kiarostami's film is the same issue Ignatiy Vishnevetsky expressed with mumblecore movies - namely, that it seems to be "building itself on certain absences instead of particular presences," but before I say anything more I should address that this is just a first-time impression and I believe I have every right to be wrong. Only days after seeing this enigmatic bare-bone of a film have its non-gestures and vague symbols started to coalesce into something interesting. During the viewing, I will admit, I found this to be relatively unimaginative (planted camera panning with the action) and at the most schematic end of Kiarostami's sensibilities, from the redundant joke of the protagonist searching for cellphone signal right down to the doctor's sentimental monologue and the "life-goes-on" final shot. I'm already beginning to see some of the merits of these decisions in retrospect, but there's one sticking point that hasn't escaped me. I think there's a pretty crucial distinction between the kind of living-as-filmmaking-as-living approach that Pedro Costa takes with his portraits of the lower class and the cerebral autocritique Kiarostami is after here: one involves living with and gaining the respect of the subject and the other involves presenting a character who gains no respect and proceeding to critique his hasty entitlement. Given the seeming hostility of many of the Kurdish village-folk here in the presence of Kiarostami's camera, I'm not sure that making a statement about the ethical dilemma of exploiting the less fortunate for the gain of the higher classes makes it any less exploitative to go ahead and actually engage in the act of filming them.

Wedlock House: An Intercourse (1959): What Brakhage is doing in this 11 minute short is not depicting a marriage but rather the memory of a dream of marriage. In this sense, Brakhage and his wife Jane feel like ghostly presences, for the most part reduced to shadows and bodily fragments portrayed in celluloid negative. It's a film that I feel could be played on repeat next to me as I sleep, and if I were to wake up, I wouldn't be sure if I was dreaming or not. The film plays with negative and positive space on the screen with amazing fluidity, using wafts of cigarette smoke, light flares, and a shifting spotlight in between waves of darkness to negate the visibility of cuts, and this seeming continuity of time, coupled with a jarring discontinuity in space, provides a kind of euphoria whose only equal is the notion of recalling a dream. It's haunting stuff.

Desistfilm (1954): A kinetic burst of beatnik energy, perhaps part of the delirious stew of influences behind something like Guy Maddin's Sissy Boy Slap Party or David Lynch's recent "Crazy Clown Time" music video. It's just some teenagers dicking around in a room, but with seemingly arbitrary pans and tilts, exaggerated performances, and funky camera angles, Brakhage makes it so disturbing and anarchic. Watch it.

Girls (Season 1 Pilot) (2012): I'm firmly in Adam Cook's camp as far as Louie goes, but I'm not sure I want to wait around with Girls to further dig into its supposed auteur cred. Quite simply, I have no interest in hanging around the people that populate this show. There are too many of them in my life as it is. I trust Dunham's honesty, her wit, and her ability to let visuals grow organically from dialogue (even if it dulls the considerable talents of DP Jody Lee Lipes), but I just don't need it. Call me biased.

Listmaking Blogathon

After reading my recent Vertigo essay - which resulted in a comment board casually ranking the best Hitchcock films - Loren Rosson III, a blogger friend and ex-co-worker of mine, was inspired to initiate a meme over at his blog The Busybody. The idea is that he will publish ordered lists of his favorite films by his 10 favorite directors once a month. Having already kicked it off with Hitchcock for July, his site has also plotted out the plan for the next 10 months, and he is encouraging other bloggers to join in on the fun by posting their own lists and commenting on others. It's a simple exercise that could yield vibrant discussion of some great filmmakers. I'll be following his lead and posting a list every month as well, and I urge you to do the same. As he says, these will be very personal lists not following any established canons, and I'm sure they'll change radically for me down the line, but it's nonetheless an interesting way to take stock in my cinematic taste at this point in life. Here's my plan for the next six months (the four after that have not yet been determined), intersecting with Loren's when possible:

August: David Lynch. The Full 11, plus shorts and oddities. (Déjà vu?)

September: Ingmar Bergman. The Top 14, for now.

October: Stanley Kubrick. The Top 10.

November: Andrei Tarkovsky. The Full 7.

December: Bela Tarr. The Full 10.

January: TBD

February: TBD

March: TBD

April: TBD

May: TBD

Magic Mike (2012) A Film by Steven Soderbergh

These days, Steven Soderbergh's career seems to have reached the end point of a slow, insistent turn towards a path rarely traveled in Hollywood. He's making wide-release films with studio money that exemplify 21st century D.I.Y filmmaking ethos - that is, movies guaranteed commercial treatment that feel as if they were made by one dude with a (ridiculously high-end) camera and some friends. And more often than not, that's practically the case. His latest film Magic Mike is like an informal companion piece to 2009's The Girlfriend Experience, a sharply observed portrait of the business of sexuality - this time set in a Tampa Bay where the males are the performers and the females the customers - in which the modus operandi is roughly the same: co-opt a subject (nightlife, sex), a hot-topic star (Channing Tatum here, Sasha Grey in TGF), and a genre (dramedy/dance film here, drama/prostitution exposé in TGF) from the universal interests of the masses in order to gain financing, and proceed to make probing, non-judgmental, humble cinema. Soderbergh strikes me as a filmmaker set upon providing gentle forms of rebellion to the reductive, predictable, conformist fare taking place elsewhere in Hollywood, not through grand gestures and cynical statements, but rather through down-to-earth socioeconomic detail and an impassioned curiosity for the various subjects he films.

Here, that subject is male stripping, and Soderbergh's characteristic lack of bias is especially impressive given the stigma surrounding such a profession. Magic Mike portrays the business of male stripping for what it is - a business, just as worthy of exploration as any other pastime humans choose to embark on, not as a target of ridicule or as easy fodder for girls-night-out exploitation. The film sees stripping both as an exaggerated extension of the primitive urge for sex and sociality and as a lucrative option for aimless but well-meaning twentysomethings forced into odd jobs by the reality of the American economy. Such is the case for Mike (Tatum), a charismatic, self-described "entrepreneur" with scattered ambition, as well as Adam (Alex Pettyfer), a bored 19-year-old who ruined his college football career after a misguided fight with his coach. Mike's already an established hunk at the local male revue (they call him "Magic Mike") and he enjoys plenty of sleepless nights and late afternoons waking up next to nameless females. He doesn't see the fault of his ways, but rather exudes the kind of self-confidence and jovial solipsism that is so pervasive in the modern post-collegiate world, where relative success in a small pond translates to a feeling of being on top of the world. It's precisely that feeling that encourages him to make Alex his project.

It's not that Mike is good-for-nothing, or that Soderbergh is framing him as a villain. In fact, it's quite the opposite. From his ostentatious SUV that he prides himself on by keeping perpetually "new," to his casual but invested relationship with his booty call Joanna (Olivia Munn), to his ridiculous future goal of launching a business of custom furniture assembled from junk parts, everything about Mike is both convincingly flawed and convincingly real. When he senses Alex needs to come out of his shell, his decision to befriend him stems, yes, from a genuine kindness, but mostly from a subconscious desire to increase his sex appeal through an act of charity. The film is remarkably true to the ways that social gamesmanship occurs through bravado; significantly, Dallas (Matthew McConaughey), the megalomaniacal owner of the strip club, is the most obnoxious of all the film's central characters, but in his own way, he displays a tight control of every social situation he's in. (It's the perfect role for McConaughey, who hasn't been this expertly sleazy since Dazed and Confused.) Soderbergh, ever-alert to the process of how things can rapidly change for better or worse (see: Contagion), conveys the transformation of Alex from a go-nowhere stud with a good Schwarzenegger impression and a motherly sister (Cody Horn) to a drugged-up, testosterone-fueled dancer who wouldn't admit he cares about anything but partying and women, and yet there remains a sympathetic core to his character.

The majority of the film's astute, unfussy observations of modern life emerge during its narrative setup. Among them: Alex reveals that he got the same construction job as Mike through Craigslist, and shortly after, we see in the corner of the frame as the boss denies an employee a second soda for lunch, one of his regulations for a non-union, under-the-table gig; later, when Alex successfully pleas for a +1 at one of Mike's regular nightclub digs, he asks naïvely upon receiving his first drink, "Is this free?" Both are minor nuances in Soderbergh's mise en scène, but they add volume to the film's sense of verisimilitude. As Magic Mike enters its third act, it starts to shoehorn its characters into somewhat expected molds (Adam's spiral out of control, Mike's escape from the stripper business as a form of heroism, Adam's sister as a romantic saving grace) and integrates standard genre tropes into its plot (a trippy, color-coded party, a drug deal gone bad, a chance at upward mobility with the prospect of the business moving to Miami). But at the same time, this mash-up of the ordinary and the iconic, the spontaneous and the schematic, the monotonous and the escapist, is exemplified constantly in the lives of these strippers, who are used to shifting between normalcy and performance. It's built into the core of the film. The sadness is that Mike has lost the ability to distinguish between the two modes, despite his desperate efforts to shake off his play persona. Among its many strengths, Magic Mike conveys the whirlwind effect that occurs when standards of obligation collide with transient pleasures.

Again, Soderbergh acts as his own DP here (another sign of his mild independence), and it's integral to the unique texture of his latest films; nothing else would have made a globetrotting epic like Contagion feel like a small-scale experiment, or The Girlfriend Experience a Godardian essay, or Magic Mike a feel-good Aaron Katz movie. Soderbergh's always seeking an angle that will problematize the action onscreen, that will infuse a sense of chaos into the bloodstream of a scene. In night clubs, he shoots faces from beneath, letting flares from the dancing overhead lights obstruct the image. In the strip club, in addition to presenting the dance moves legibly in extended wide shots, he'll mix in a strange beneath-the-glass-floor perspective that recalls a similar shot in Bela Tarr's Almanac of Fall. After one dramatic punchline, he cuts not to a clear shot that will capitalize on the joke, but rather to a collage of unfocused neon lights that only gradually reveal a setting. It's all a way of making a prosaic portrait feel anything but controlled and boxed-in, as well as a way of reflecting the spontaneity of the lives onscreen. Even when it's obvious where the film is headed, this visual experimentation brings a notion of imbalance, making Magic Mike an exciting thing to behold.

Love in the Afternoon (L'amour l'après-midi) A Film by Eric Rohmer (1972)

Of all the male protagonists in Eric Rohmer's Six Moral Tales, Frédéric (Bernard Verley) of Love in the Afternoon is the most tied down by obligation. As a result, the guiding conceit of the series - a man devoted to one women but tempted by a second - gains a charge of practical emotional intensity, a sense of dramatic stakes not as explicitly felt by the drifting, often vacationing souls of the previous five films. Frédéric is married. He has a child and is expecting another. He also works as an office manager in Paris. There's a tangible divide between private and public spaces, between duty and leisure, that Rohmer builds into the film only to gradually disrupt as his character, mentally adrift due to his unchallenging occupation, allows himself to be drawn into the various beauties he sees on a daily basis walking the city streets. "Their beauty is an extension of my wife's beauty," he claims in articulate voice-over, but the comment is so clearly a left-field justification, the kind of thought process Rohmer continuously and delicately explores throughout the series.

Love in the Afternoon's first thirty-odd minutes constitute a prologue, but it's so long that one quickly forgets there's any structural device at play at all. When that prologue segues into a "Part Two" with a sudden, unexpected cut, it has the force of a psychological rupture. It's fitting, because Part Two begins with the birth of Frédéric's child, which brings with it an additional jolt of familial responsibility and a greater weight on Frédéric's psyche. Halfway through the prologue, the film introduces Chloé (Zouzou), an old friend of Frédéric who begins to pose a threat to his marital fidelity towards the end of the section. She represents the antithesis of Frédéric's self-contained bourgeois reality: proto-grunge in her faded blue jeans and moppish hair, so slouchy with her posture that it registers as an affront to the casual professionalism of the office environment that she habitually visits, and unassumingly direct in her language and lifestyle beliefs, she's a clear product of the sexual revolution. This type of self-assured personality often characterizes the secondary love interest in the Moral Tales, but even among this batch Chloé is especially forward and original, more of an earthy presence than many of the ethereal women of previous works. As if to acknowledge this difference, Rohmer has each temptress from the previous films materialize as potential romantic objects in an atypical dream sequence of Frédéric imagining flirtatious success at lunch break, the suggestion being that such presences are too angelically removed to actually crack Frédéric's repressive shell in reality.

The precise history behind Chloé and Frédéric's relationship is kept oblique by Rohmer - we know that Chloé once dated one of Frédéric's best friends, and there are only fleeting hints of a brief romance between the two. This only serves to make the impact of their casual courtship even stronger. Frédéric's flirtation arises from convenience but is treated as fresh territory to explore. The film portrays a sense of how quickly and easily his narrow idea of fidelity can be tested when presented with an attractive and charismatic option. Chloé shows up at Frédéric's office on a nearly day-to-day basis without warning, and her presence in the work space serves to slowly leak the professionalism from the setting until Frédéric seems no longer capable of carrying on his office responsibilities. Private thoughts bleed into professional life, and soon there is no division of Frédéric's consciousness; everything is Chloé. Verley's performance exudes this idea completely. Every interior impulse sneaks out in his body language, from his blank stares when not in her presence to his seeming inability to refrain from affectionate gestures around her (hand holding, hugging, exuberant kisses on the cheek, arm around shoulder, etc.).

There are several outbursts of overt eroticism in the film, but even without them Love in the Afternoon possesses a sneaking sensuality evident in every line and gesture. When Frédéric tells Chloé how much he loves his wife Hélène (Bernard's actual wife Françoise Verley, supplying added resonance to the themes), he's usually avoiding directly communicating how passionately he longs for Chloé. When he makes a comment to Chloé about how great their friendship is, more often than not the unspoken addendum seems to be "so we should express those feelings." Rohmer's image patterns - his reliance upon medium close-ups, his occasional change of rhythm to a two-shot or a tighter close-up - are carefully choreographed so that every cut underlines a minor gradation in the emotions occurring beneath the surface of language, and every shot held longer than usual offers an opportunity to glean the internal monologue happening behind the speech. Punctuation also arrives in the form of the occasional slow dolly in, and in one instance Rohmer uses a zoom to gradually fill the frame with Frédéric's face. By the French director's unassuming standards, Love in the Afternoon sometimes feels downright expressive, especially when a strange theremin score plays behind the dream sequence and the opening credits, but it's balanced by some of the most ascetic interior sequences in the entire series (no picturesque backdrops here, just blank walls and the infrequent splash of color).

All the partial come-ons, incomplete caresses, and erotic not-quite-jokes culminate in Chloé's wordless sex proposal late in the film, which reveals all the previous moves to have been not just casual goofs of good friends but advances of barely contained sexual energy. Frédéric's consuming desire nearly gets the best of him, until an innocuous glance in the mirror reminds him of a previous scene of playfulness with his newborn son (the full realization of the film's shift to a Part Two). The moment is loaded with subtext, as the gravity of Frédéric's emotional infidelity finally subsumes his physical urges. It's sublime. Up until this point Frédéric has harbored a contradictory notion of fidelity that allowed for emotional dishonesty but drew the line at physical contact; his refusal of Chloé's offer both adheres to that moral code and revises it. Realizing that his emotional interest was merely an extension of physical interest, he returns home to Hélène (who at this point has all but disappeared from the film) in a newly sincere mode. Love in the Afternoon quietly asks if this insistence upon monogamy was inherent in Frédéric from the beginning of the film or if real psychological discipline was required to make it anything more than a vague theoretical stance.

Vertigo (1958) A Film by Alfred Hitchcock

I wonder if those responsible for the restoration of Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo realized, consciously or not, the meta nature of the project, seeing as the idea of restoring an old film mirrors so many of the ideas Hitchcock was getting at with his signature classic: trying to reclaim something from the past, to make it over into its ideal form, to resurrect a lost artifact in a new light. That Vertigo does exist now in varying forms seems the logical extension of its own motifs of doubling, projection, and representation, staging its Cinemascope print (the latest and ultimate iteration) as not necessarily the film finally actualized but as the film in one form - its most idealized - of many. This Vertigo is the Kim Novak of James Stewart's most sacred dreams, Madeleine at her most stunning and ethereal. Which, perhaps, gives it the kind of blunt experiential force necessary to match Scottie's (Stewart) obsessive desire, the eye-popping colors and unreal sense of space to bolster the audience's sympathetic alignment with Hitchcock's memorable protagonist.

After enough probing, the twisty, complex Vertigo reveals itself to be a fairly universal love story. Taking the kind of structurally convoluted, paradigm-shifting approach that can't help but dredge up a minefield of uncomfortable human behavior (the same path David Lynch would take to tell a fundamental love story with his own riff on Vertigo, Mulholland Drive), the film burrows into the complementary psyches of John "Scottie" Ferguson and Judy Barton (Novak). Though commonly understood chiefly as a vehicle for the psychological deconstruction of Scottie, Vertigo is in fact one of the most comprehensive studies of two people in the history of cinema. Both main characters - specifically, Scottie of the first half and Judy of the second - are without a fixed identity, prepared to be malleable entities to achieve what they desire yet simultaneously hiding some aspect of their inner life. Scottie routinely calls himself a "wanderer," and by the end of the film Judy proves to be one too; it's the slogan of a person desperately searching for love, aiming to frame themselves as perpetually "available".

Wandering, as a physical, metaphysical, and psychological notion, actually provides a succinct framework for understanding both the events of Vertigo and Hitchcock's underlying commentary. It is part of the reason why Scottie, fresh off retirement from detective work after succumbing to vertigo and letting a colleague fall to his death from the roof of a building in the opening scene, is hired by fair-weather friend Gavin Elster (Tom Helmore) to follow his wife Madeleine Elster (Novak again). He insists she has been periodically possessed by the ghost of Carlotta Valdes, a woman in a painting at San Francisco's famous art museum, Palace of the Legions of Honor. It is why Scottie subsequently becomes so magnetically attached to the pursuit of Madeleine, seeing as she herself, under the spell of Carlotta, resorts to wandering. For Americans, wandering relates to a lack of discipline and productiveness, and it's precisely this middle-class pragmatism and sense of duty that Scottie wants to avoid. He's more interested in a decadent European frame of mind wherein wandering without guilt and without fear of class slippage is honorable, and he glimpses that same mindset in the suave, sleek Madeleine, who seems to travel only to decidedly un-American locales (the art museum, an old, opulent hotel, the San Juan Baptista mission) around San Francisco.

Scottie's avoidance of duty and conformity - he's single, jobless, and, with the exception of the motherly Midge (Barbara Bel Geddes), practically friendless - is essentially a rejection of reality. As a result, Vertigo integrates the dichotomy of reality vs. illusion that is so central to art in its structural, aesthetic, and narrative elements. Novak's famous entrance into the film singlehandedly erects this idea. The first elaborate camera movement that spots her amidst the velvety beauty of Ernie's Restaurant feels like the out-of-body perspective of Scottie, who's seated in awe across the room at the bar. Then, there's something almost taunting and self-aware about her subsequent trip out of the restaurant directly past Scottie, pausing to be viewed in enigmatic profile. For a suspended moment, the light seems to dim in the room while brightening around the glowing Novak, as if Hitchcock is making an announcement of theatrical artifice: after this point, all will be an illusion. Once Madeleine has entered the film, Hitchcock creates strong visual distinctions between Scottie's world in her presence and his world without her. The camera glides with forward-moving elegance towards her, the images shrouded in a fog filter that transforms unglamorous San Francisco reality into a heavenly dream; back in the company of Midge, on the other hand, the film defaults to sharper images and stiffer, more conventional blocking and cutting, while Midge's apartment is haunted by a painfully and irrevocably real panorama of the city.

The events of the film's first two thirds, leading up to the "death" of Madeleine at the San Juan Baptista, are riddled with endless curiosities and coded with little hints that suggest there's nothing normal about Scottie's investigation. This is not just a man following an unsuspecting woman and gaining information about her - there's something tricky, perhaps conspiratorial, going on. All these hints gain retrospective power once Madeleine is revealed to be alive in the form of Judy in the final third of the film. Hitchcock compounds this sense of suspicion in several ways. First, there is Madeleine's repeated encroachment towards the camera/Scottie's perspective, getting at such an uncomfortably close distance that it seems impossible for her not to be aware of his presence. Then, there is Novak's unsettling sense of performativity for Scottie, particularly in her attempted suicide at San Francisco Bay, where she poses for quite some time with postcard perfection in front of the Golden Gate Bridge as if to tempt Scottie with her idyllic beauty. Finally, lines of dialogue slip out as the film inches closer to its ostensibly tragic moment that, in their vagueness and incompleteness, suggest another soul emerging from within the previously stoic Madeleine: "And if you lose me, then you'll know I, I loved you. And I wanted to go on loving you." One gets the feeling, a euphoric feeling, that Judy is coming out of the shell of Madeleine.

This sudden fusion of identities, this bleeding of the realms of fantasy and reality, is the most moving aspect of Vertigo. Lynch has become known for this same maneuver, a whiplash effect caused by the film seeming - at first glance - to be falling apart around itself, but here Hitchcock mastered it. In this moment before "suicide," before following through on Elster's scheme, she is torn between obligation and desire, which is manifested as a split between two distinct personalities. These two personalities are irresolvable, an idea given weight by Hitchcock's application of completely different character traits to Madeleine (radiant, softly speaking, cool, stunningly dressed) and Judy (brash, forward, pragmatic, gaudy). Indeed, they seem like two different people altogether. All of this underscores the similar irresolvability of reality and illusion. The clichéd visions of romantic love between Scottie and Madeleine - based on nothing more than simplistic platitudes of courtship, not real connection - have no place in reality. Scottie's spiral into obsession has a notable casualty: the friendship of Midge, who is last seen in the film fading into darkness in the vast expanse of a mental house hallway.

Enter in Scottie's vertigo to this framework and the film gains an extra dimension of meaning and significance. Consider Hitchcock's famous "vertigo shot," an invention that involves both backward camera movement and forward zooming; there's something elegant about that combination of forward and backward movement in the context of the film's themes. Judy's character arc, in particular, is defined by its back-and-forth movements, from Madeleine to Carlotta Valdes and back, as well as from Madeleine to Judy and back. Her psyche is constantly pulling itself apart by competing impulses, those of her heart and those of her job. Scottie, too, is conflicted. His eager sprawl towards his idealized romantic object is interrupted by jabs of reality, from Midge's vulgar painting of herself as Carlotta Valdes (intended as a lighthearted joke but taken by Scottie as an aggressive attempt to break the spell) to the concrete danger facing the suicide-prone Madeleine. Also, the film visualizes this conflict in its interplay of forward and backward tracking shots that tend to signal the entrance or exit from an illusionistic realm.

When a nun suddenly enters the bell-tower of San Juan Baptista as a creeping shadow and sends Judy leaping out the window in the final moments of the film, to me she registers as Death arriving to put the inevitable end to Scottie's cycle of obsession and self-deception, not necessarily as a tangible catalyst to Judy's hysteria. In this way, Vertigo is brutally fatalistic about the punishing end result of obsessive objectification. It reveals Scottie's harrowing make-over of Judy back into Madeleine - a striving for a perfect vision of the past that was itself a facsimile - to be inherently flawed and destined for self-destruction. Like so many great works of art, the film is about the danger of substituting art for reality, the actual chaos and imprisonment (rather than bliss and perpetual satisfaction) that can result from too fervently seeking an ideal, an idea that the ever-meticulous Hitchcock implicates himself in. His Vertigo is a towering achievement, a harmony of form and content so complex that it cannot be unraveled in a mere viewing or two.