Screening Notes #15

The Loneliest Planet (2011): At 42, Julia Loktev is a really brave and confident filmmaker. I know this because she banks the entire success or failure of her second feature (well, Gael Garcia Bernal's presence was probably a bit of a safety net, but still) on a single 3 or 4 second gesture in the midst of the only sudden spike of concrete stakes in the film, a moment that is paramount to the emotional arcs beforehand and after. Without this brilliant paradigm shift, The Loneliest Planet might have resembled a mere pale imitation of its closest aesthetic cousins: Kelly Reichardt's Meek's Cutoff and Gus Van Sant's Gerry. With it, Loktev transforms a film that is superficially just a collection of shots of a young married couple being guided through a hiking trip in the Caucasus Mountains into a profound – seriously, profound is about the only adequate word to describe this – study of the narrow line between thinking you know someone on an intimate level and realizing you don't in fact know anything. Loktev's uneasy, hard-cutting sound design and languorous visual rhythms are simultaneously entrancing and uncomfortable, and once the decisive moment comes, the tension that the rest of the film spends slowly, organically diffusing is nearly unbearable. As close as the Reichardt and the Van Sant movies are to my heart, neither of them shook me up on a visceral level quite this much.

His Girl Friday (1940): My clear favorite of the Hawks films I've seen (I haven't seen nearly enough for this preference to hold any water), His Girl Friday is thrillingly energized and politically incorrect, combining a satire of cynical hard journalism and a comedy of remarriage in adventurous ways. Hawks' sense of humor here is bracingly dark, particularly in an extended set piece that comprises most of the film's second half when a death-row inmate hides away in an office desk while Cary Grant, Rosalind Russell, a horde of fast-talking newsmen, and very skeptical law enforcers prattle on in competing directions, their voices overlapping with the fervent intensity of the dialogue in Bringing Up Baby. The gravity of His Girl Friday grows from the knowledge that death is looming just around the corner, ready to intrude on the plot's maniacal accumulation of facts, speculations, and exaggerations, and indeed it does at one point, catapulting a dismissal as brisk and no-nonsense as Hawks' filmmaking. When the eventual reuniting of Grant and Russell as lovers does occur in the final five minutes atop the first instance of non-diegetic music in the film, it collides awkwardly with Hawks' calculated tone throughout, but aside from this minor hiccup the director never allows a second for sympathy, or even an understanding of this seemingly amoral professional environment, to develop.

Midnight (1939), The Philadelphia Story (1940), The Lady Eve (1941), and The Palm Beach Story (1942): Does distance make the heart grow fonder? Each of these films sets out, at least partly, to tackle that question by separating their central lovers for a substantial portion of their middle sections. Ultimately, it's the two Sturges films that come closest to proving the old adage, if only because they approach an unanswerable curiosity with the batty sense of logic necessary to access it, while the Cukor and Leisen films reach for finales of romantic grandeur that are not fully warranted by their uneasy mixes of cynicism and corniness. I get queasy when The Philadelphia Story pairs its borderline misogynist attempt to "correct" Katharine Hepburn's star persona with an elegantly shot but insincere late night swoon between her and Jimmy Stewart (the romance is tampered by the sensation of Cukor putting Hepburn in her place), or when Midnight's errant couple (Don Ameche and Claudette Colbert) crescendos to marriage despite an hour-and-a-half worth of separation and bickering (sure, to an extent this is what screwball comedy is about, but Ameche and Colbert never once look like they're having fun together). On the contrary, I can't help but smile at Sturges' simultaneous embrace and mockery of romantic comedy tropes, nowhere as hilarious as the shot in The Lady Eve of Henry Fonda and Barbara Stanwyck building to a climactic kiss while a horse butts its head into the frame.

Argo (2012): Argo’s confused, ultimately myopic perspective shines through in its clash of tones. Affleck is clearly at home during the scenes affectionately mocking the movie business, but when he has to swiftly cut back to injustice in Iran to service the narrative, he resorts to leaden orchestral drones and hectic imagery of throngs of gunslinging, hell-raising Iranian dissidents. It’s possible to make the case that Affleck is deliberately pointing out the frivolity of an industry that can so casually muscle up the capital for a fake product and quite possibly know nothing about the conflict they’re helping alleviate, but the delight he takes in representing these quick-witted, narcissistic producer figures clearly overshadows any stab at social commentary. Affleck casts himself as the CIA hero, which is telling: this is a self-congratulatory celebration of how witty, persevering, and sensitive we Americans, and especially those Hollywood types, can be.

Saraband (2003): See my updated Bergman list for my thoughts.

Magic Mike (2012): Seeing this again, I was struck first by how great it is (perhaps even better than I initially gave it credit for being), and then by a couple details I hadn't explicitly noted in my earlier review. One thing is Soderbergh's tic of composing his characters in the lower half of the frame in expansive medium shots, letting large areas of activity dance on top of and around the ostensible focal point. We see this most memorably when Tatum and Pettyfer flirt with the birthday girls at the night club early on (the frame at this point teeming with party lights and people), and in a later, comparatively tame moment when Tatum and Horn are having a beer in front of a go-kart course. In these instances, Soderbergh treats the eye to the spatial context of his characters while also rendering them insignificant in their larger landscapes. My other takeaway was how emphatically the film reverses Laura Mulvey's Male Gaze theory, particularly in Horn's first trip to the stripclub, where for an unusually extended period of time she scans the stripper routines, her blank, slightly smug expression providing a possible entry point into identification for female viewers.

Jiro Dreams of Sushi (2011): I nearly beelined out of my apartment at 1 AM in search of LA's best sushi when the credits for this scrumptious-looking documentary began to roll. The greatest pleasures of Jiro Dreams of Sushi – and this could be a good or bad thing, depending on your expectations – are the frame-filling close-ups of shimmering sashimi wrapped up by master chef Jiro Ono, an 85-year-old workaholic with Ozu-like levels of quotidian precision and no plans of retirement (sidenote: I've always admired this distinctly Japanese sense of humility and determination, and this film is a showcase for it). On a primal level, director David Gelb's film is a sustained romance with what I can only assume is his favorite food, replete with images of fresh fish, tanks of unidentified saucy concoctions, and select, high-paying groups of adoring consumers. The whole thing is set to bittersweet Max Richter tunes that underscore the sad truth of food movies: the actual food is out of reach, the screen impervious to our desire for a taste.

Mean Girls (2004): Once upon a time I was a cynical middle school student who held an uninformed prejudice against Mean Girls because everyone else at school liked it. I recently got around to catching it on the satellite TV programming of a Virgin America flight (because all the on-demand features, including the so-called foreign ones like Damsels in Distress and To Rome with Love, would cost me more than it sets me back to watch a studio picture in a theater these days), and I was pleasantly surprised, feeling a sensation in the gut in which I realized all the ways I've grown (and not grown) since 2004. The movie, directed by some guy named Mark Waters and, more importantly, written by Tina Fey, is surprisingly sharp, honest, and quotable even when it's trafficking – self-consciously, of course – in all the overblown clichés of high school life that I so vehemently despise. So, whatever, it's pretty good. But the sappy final thirty minutes do threaten to spoil all of Fey's prior commentary, so that's a fairly damning blow against it.

Rise of the Guardians (2012): In the realm of kiddie animation, I go to Dreamworks for their usual stark contrast to the monolith of "prestige" that is Pixar: their fun and unapologetic genre pastiches, their nods to the complexity and wealth of possible human behavior, their forward-thinking and often decidedly unreal digital animation, and their occasionally sophisticated sense of humor. Of course, they do allow plenty of duds in the mix, and Rise of the Guardians is one of them, weirdly fascinating and visually dazzling though it may be. The film borrows the cut-and-dry fatalism, black-and-white worldview, and cornball sentimentality of Pixar, finally dumping its antagonist (who's only fleetingly humanized) down a black hole to hell and elevating its group of iconic protagonists to saintly levels because of their steadfast belief in mere hope illogically conquering darkness (a concept that makes less and less sense in today's world). Still, I like how the film brings new shadings to archaic holiday myths, such as how it renders Santa as a tattooed Cossack or how it playfully suggests that all fantastical figures work together in a sort of capitalist framework that can actually fail if business dwindles (how's that for holiday cheer, kids?), and I especially like the film's robust visuals, which luxuriate in wintry textures and hazy pillows of light that are simultaneously magical and naturalistic. No wonder Roger Deakins was the visual consultant on the film.

Flight (2012) A Film by Robert Zemeckis

For a director who has spent the last decade toiling in the still nebulous terrain of computer generated imagery, Robert Zemeckis' return to live-action filmmaking, Flight, is decidedly grounded, eschewing the radically innovative technological impulse of Zemeckis’ past work and centering its focus on individuals making do with their lot in life. With the exception of its jolting first-act spectacle – the disastrous flight from which the film gains its title – Zemeckis' latest commits to a low-key atmosphere of psychological introspection, shifting the director's emphasis on soaring movement, eye-popping lights, and huge ensembles to a much humbler canvas: the contours and minuscule eruptions in Denzel Washington's pudgy, sunken face, the use of conversation as the primary dramatic activity, and a pastoral working-class milieu where the villain is as small-scale as a nip of Smirnoff. Zemeckis reportedly sacrificed his initial sum of cash to encourage Paramount to back the project, and the personal compromise clearly reflects the artistic development. Flight feels like a conscious simplification of expression for the 61-year-old Spielberg descendant even as it repurposes his showstopping wizardry to less transparent ends.

At the center of Flight is the towering performance of Washington as alcoholic pilot Whip Whitaker. By now it's become relatively par for the course that Washington should contribute an air of authenticity and tactility to even the most paper-thin Hollywood stories, overshadowing and sometimes obliterating the integrity of the supporting characters and subplots around him. That's nearly the case here, though it's also fair to say that Flight never intends itself to be anything less than a muscular Denzel Washington vehicle; Washington is the spotlight, and the fact that secondary elements of the script feel underdeveloped or weakened by heavy-handed execution only supplies greater significance to Washington's act of dramatic immersion. The film opens with Whip dozing after an all-night binge of sex and drugs with airline hostess Katerina Marquez (Nadine Velazquez, who floats naked in front of Zemeckis' calm camera), downing the remains of any open bottles, snorting cocaine, and then scurrying to a flight he has to pilot that morning. It's a shocking introduction to this character, playing against Washington's characteristically composed, morally firm screen persona, and the film feels the repercussions of Whip's hastiness on its ensuing 90 minutes.



What's interesting, and a thorny decision by both Zemeckis and screenwriter John Gatins, is that the subsequent plane crash results not from Whip's questionable physical state – he exhibits remarkable grace under pressure despite his condition, and the film makes brazenly clear that Whip's the only guy who could have avoided a potentially tragic massacre and orchestrated a far less fatal open-field slide – but from an unpredictable malfunction with the aircraft. Laying the blame directly on Whip's alcoholism would have been grounds for safe and easy moralizing, but by introducing an outside variable Flight both erects the dichotomy of fate and chance that is one of Zemeckis' key concerns and forces Whip's self-analysis to come about on internal rather than external terms. After the crash, a generous attorney named Hugh Lang (Don Cheadle) goes to work on brushing under the rug reports of Whip's incriminating blood work, so the threat of imprisonment still looms over his future, but the fundamental conflict of Flight is nonetheless firmly within his psyche: the question of whether or not he will admit to his alcoholism, stop living a life entrenched in lies, and ultimately clear his conscience and secure his identity.

This is some heavy existential stuff, typical of the mysticism that has always been on the fringes of Zemeckis' body of work. In itself, Flight's preoccupation with philosophical issues of the self, the divine, and the relationship between the two is commendable at a Hollywood level. Unfortunately, Zemeckis has the tendency – already especially evident in the cerebral sci-fi Contact – to overplay the Big Ideas inherent in his material, feeling the need to layer on directorial cues when rich subtexts are already self-evident in the action. For instance, when Whip's foil, the heroin addict Nicole (Kelly Reilly), is first introduced, we hear Red Hot Chili Peppers' downer hit "Under the Bridge" on a radio nearby, a tune about loneliness and isolation that speaks all-too-neatly to both Whip and Nicole's juncture in life (Whip has been abandoned by his wife and son, and Nicole is mistreated by a rotten landlord). Later, Hugh takes Whip to the crash site for a glance at the wreckage, which – by virtue of conveniently being on the grounds of a monastery – doubles as an opportunity for Zemeckis to spell out his religious belief. Yet while the result of the crash (only 6 casualties rather than a whole plane's worth) is cited as an "act of God" on multiple occasions, the same phrase is used to apply to the rare form of cancer suffered by a young man Whip encounters when hospitalized after the accident, as well as the unexpected aircraft defects. God, it seems, is capable of hostility as much as benevolence. It's this thematic ambiguity that balances out some of Zemeckis' more heavy-handed gestures.



Flight, however, despite its theological core, thankfully does not lay all responsibility for human affairs on God: though the divine may have a part in major existential happenings, it cannot continue to play a role in individual lives. Put simply, at a certain point a man must take what he’s given and decide his own fate. This is where Flight gets interesting, and where Washington takes center stage. The middle portion of the film is dedicated to charting Whip's on-and-off relationship with alcohol, his interior battle with addiction after miraculously surviving a traumatic event. On either side of him is Charlie Anderson (Bruce Greenwood) and Harling Mays (John Goodman), two longtime friends placed, fairly schematically, on opposite ends of the spectrum: the former is a supportive colleague and the latter is a caricatured druggie who conspicuously guzzles Budweisers while driving (the film's attitude towards Harling is one of its muddiest points; his thoroughly irresponsible behavior is always supported by blaring musical accompaniments and rockstar tracking shots, shifting the tone from somber character study to amped-up stoner comedy on a dime). Whip is tugged every which way by these diametric points of reference (perhaps influencing the naming of his character), but ultimately it's the time he spends alone that proves most illuminating. As he hooks up with Nicole and starts living with her in his inherited Georgia farmhouse, the improvement in her trajectory only emphasizes how stagnant and even self-destructive Whip is. At one point, she returns from her new grocery store job late at night to find Whip watching old family videotapes in the living room (assumptions about drug addiction and class are not the only clichés Flight traffics in), a collection of empty bottles surrounding him as his sentences descend into incomprehensibility (Washington is so convincing in this scene that I'd be surprised if he wasn't at least half as drunk on set as his character is onscreen).

At a certain point, it seems as if every one of Flight's strengths (its quiet introspection, its largely effective supporting ensemble, the stock it puts in the power of an individual) is also hampered by a weakness (the sudden burst of a gaudy genre trope, the introduction of a poorly written character, the use of religion or class as an explanatory umbrella for narrative action), but fortunately nothing ever does pierce the surface of Washington's beautifully realized character. Everything here has been integrated to poignant effect: the insecure covering of his lower lip, the knee-jerk use of mouth spray to combat the stench of alcohol, the donning of dark sunglasses to ineffectively conceal intoxication or a high (occurring at two pivotal points in the film: before the flight and before the legal hearing that will decide his fate), and the frequent resorting to an uninflected one-word answer to avoid facing the truth. These telling details accumulate into one of the most honest, genuinely moving studies of addiction Hollywood has ever produced, something that not even the film's sentimental coda – in which Whip directly reports of his failings so that the film's moral compass is clear-cut – can undo.

We Won't Grow Old Together (1972) A Film by Maurice Pialat

Maurice Pialat's second full-length feature We Won't Grow Old Together is a devastating exploration of a slowly disintegrating romantic affair that is about as brutally honest about the self-destructive interdependency of relationships as any film ever made. As is typical of French cinema of this era, it concerns a brutish, self-involved artist type and his ethereal, sophisticated partner, a tendency seemingly reflecting an autobiographical realm for filmmakers like Godard, Truffaut, and of course Pialat. But whereas Godard and Truffaut's early romances are tinged with a certain swagger, Pialat's work is defined by its serene neutrality. We Won't Grow Old Together takes as its subject the relentless coiling and recoiling of a relationship, with characters variably looking villainous and sympathetic, and Pialat's camera remains a curious, impartial observer, never quite passing judgment even during the lovers' more explosive fights. There's an unknowable complexity to human relationships, Pialat understands, and his respectful approach preserves this truth.

Things get even more complicated in adulterous relationships, which We Won't Grow Old Together proves – imperceptibly at first – to be studying. Jean (Jean Yanne) is married to Françoise (Macha Méril) but has been involved with a mistress named Catherine (Marlène Jobert) for six years. Françoise's screen time is radically truncated in favor of Jean and Catherine's, making it appear initially as if Jean and Catherine in fact married and Françoise is the mistress (that Françoise embodies a level of acceptance and even support for her husband's extramarital activity is an idiosyncrasy I can only interpret as being part of a different mid-century French mindset). But Pialat's choice to focus on the relationship of unmarried lovers is pivotal: this is a situation in which no formal agreements have been made and only emotional rather than concrete stakes are on the line. Such a relationship superficially grants a lack of concern for one another's feelings, and Jean takes this to the extreme by assuming a degree of license for psychologically and emotionally abusive behavior. For Pialat, this arrangement is fertile ground for emotional honesty.



The film begins with Jean inviting Catherine to the Camargue region where he is visiting for one of his several odd jobs as a cameraman. (Jean is, as so many New Wave protagonists are, a filmmaker and a cinephile, and his sporadic references to great directors are the vehicles for Pialat's own cinephilia.) On this trip, Jean treats Catherine like swine (or, as he puts it, a rat) for no discernible reason, showering her with bitter remarks and disturbingly direct (albeit untruthful) summaries of her personality. We learn that Catherine is an aspiring actress with inconsistent success, and Jean's cruel behavior seems to stem as much from his inability to possess her artistically as it is to do so personally. During these spiteful rants, Pialat's detached camera (either remaining wide or fixed in eye-level two shot, but only rarely relaying information in the shot-reverse-shot formula) makes plain the angelic composure of Catherine in contrast to the animalistic tendencies of Jean, which is not so much a passive submission to Jean's vitriol as it is an assertion of her own strength. Among its many other compassionate qualities, We Won't Grow Old Together is a celebration of Catherine's wisdom and resolve.

Lest it seem unwise that Catherine remain involved in such a problematic relationship, let me point to the ways in which Pialat displays an understanding of the complexity of human behavior and how breaking free from long-term relationships is never as easy as simply walking away. After a certain length of time watching resolution follow psychological combat, it becomes clear that the film is adopting a structure of repetition: Jean explodes at Catherine, Catherine deflects, Jean returns to her to offer cool tenderness, and the cycle repeats. The closest the film comes to schematism is in a too-clever cut from Catherine declaring her wish to never see Jean again (or something to that effect) to a shot of Jean picking up Catherine from a business meeting presumably only a day or two later. Aside from this rather calculated effect, Pialat allows great space – through pauses, through cresting and falling tension, through wordless sequences of narrative cushioning – for the vulnerable emotional landscape between the two to develop organically. The film does not follow a tight-knit timeline either: one moment, the lovers are conversing in Jean's car in Paris; the next, they're at Catherine's mother's (Muse Dalbray) seaside cottage. Dissolution and reconciliation, as unwise a cycle as it may seem given the destructive circumstances, is occurring at a naturalistic pace that is only obscured slightly by Pialat's steady fascination with the process of break-up, which manifests itself in an elliptical cutting rhythm that often forgoes the chunks of time the two spend apart to focus on moments of connection.



Pialat balances Jean's aggression with scenes of comparative serenity that, if not quite capable of justifying the continuation of this affair, at least pose high points that suggest why Jean and Catherine got this far in the first place. Of particular note is the section of the film spent by the sea, where the neutralizing effect of the ocean and Catherine's parents seems to illuminate an otherwise subsumed affection between the two that is crystallized in a lovely scene of late-night waltzing. Suggested by a single long take of Jean and Catherine in the middle of a crowd, the scene shares the rejuvenating ambiance of a similar moment in Claire Denis' 35 Shots of Rum, but unlike Denis' climax, which seems to crystallize undercurrents in the rest of the film, the peace and quiet rendered here is only fleeting. When they return to the cottage, Jean makes a sexual advance on Catherine during a comfortable embrace in bed and upon rejection finds himself tearing her shirt and throwing another fit. It's harsh and disruptive, but utterly plausible in the rugged emotional terrain cultivated by Pialat throughout the film.

We Won't Grow Old Together pulls a fascinating paradigm shift in its third act by placing sudden emphasis on Jean independently coming to terms with the cruelty of his behavior. Faced with a Catherine whose patience is wearing increasingly thin, Jean must consider the question of whether or not making a concerted effort to resolve issues is worthwhile. Françoise returns crucially in this section to side wholeheartedly with the abused Catherine, even as she calmly directs her husband towards an overdue resolution. Here, Pialat peels back Jean's rigid surfaces to reveal a clumsy, fundamentally sensitive beast underneath. It's the kind of radical openness and enduring compassion that cinema rarely has the time, energy, or intelligence for, and it transforms the film from an insightful study of a romantic relationship to a broader, more devastating investigation into human frailty. I can't think of a shot that could better clarify this than We Won't Grow Old Together's perfect parting gesture: an image, repeated from earlier in the film, of Catherine flailing about joyfully in the ocean, overtaken here and there by a wave. It's an impression of happiness that will likely haunt Jean forever, representing a kind of emblem of the casualties of his behavior even after any specific memory of Catherine has faded.

On Showboating, Oblivion, and Tom Hanks

If you've seen the fascinating disaster that is Cloud Atlas, you may be interested in my new review over at The Daily Notebook. This is one of those films where the fact that nothing "works" is exactly why it works. Genres, plots, and images collide, converse, and ultimately crumble, and A-list actors engage in a dress-up party. What's not to like?

Out of Sight (1998) A Film by Steven Soderbergh

The characters in Steven Soderbergh’s films are often defined by a particular moral code and the extent to which they’re willing to bend or break it. Out of Sight, a brisk, stylish popcorn movie that belongs to the more commercial half of Soderbergh's directing persona but is just as distinctive as the rest of the his output, offers a poignant expression of this theme in the shape of an illicit romance between Jack Foley (George Clooney), a charming bank robber, and Karen Sisco (Jennifer Lopez), the US Marshal on his tail. Inherent in the premise are romantic comedy as well as crime thriller undertones, and Soderbergh plays each out to its logical extreme without ever making the film fit squarely in one genre. A master of tone, he is instead able to infuse the breezy two hours with an unrelenting sense of tossed-off cool, lending a feeling of detachment that is both comic and haunting. The result is a work that points ahead to Soderbergh's star-studded Ocean trilogy even as it attains a dramatic gravity never quite reached by that slick franchise.

In fact, the Ocean movies may have never occurred had Soderbergh not detected and exploited the oozing charisma of George Clooney, which provides the fuel that runs Out of Sight and ultimately so many of the actor's subsequent films. (This is not to say Clooney hadn't already proven his chops in film and television (I haven't comprehensively surveyed the actor's pre-'98 career), but that Out of Sight was ostensibly the first major motion picture to place so much stock in his low-key magnetism.) As Jack, Clooney is compulsively watchable; confident, quick-witted, level-headed, and forever armed with flirtatious banter or silencing one-liners, he's able to make even a death threat in the midst of a bank robbery sound comforting and easygoing. It's obvious that a man this affable couldn't find himself stuck in jail for too long, though he does get arrested early on after an impulsive inner-city robbery that the film eventually cycles its way back around to in its fractured chronology. Prison is treated throughout Out of Sight as an entirely non-threatening limbo zone for the criminals Jack surrounds himself with, an inevitability that comes and goes in an almost arbitrary fashion. It's a trope that is in keeping with Soderbergh's forward-moving outlook on life, his propensity to underplay external circumstances in favor of internal stakes.

This is a tendency that speaks directly to Out of Sight. Soderbergh cares less about the physical markers of one's worldview than he does about how worldview shapes a way of personally relating to the world (at one point in Magic Mike, Channing Tatum dumbfoundedly blurts "I am not what I do," which is about as close to a direct summary of the director's outlook as he'll allow). A perfect example: Soderbergh stages Jack and Karen's first meeting in the claustrophobic trunk of a getaway car where Jack has temporarily kidnapped Karen after escaping from prison, about as enclosed and separated a space as possible from the outer world. In this tight, awkward physical scenario, Jack and Karen have only their words, their thoughts, and their body language to rely on – they can't even see each other's faces. Accordingly, there's a strange, hushed intimacy to the voices in this scene as the two drift from the obvious topic at hand to small-talk concerning movies and love stories. Even though Karen pulls a gun on Jack once the car has stopped and the trunk has opened (back in the outside world, social roles are reclaimed), it's obvious that there's romantic chemistry during this smooth ride of darkness, and after it the film becomes increasingly focused on their ill-fated attempts to revisit that indescribable feeling while upholding professional differences.



The truth is, however, that love can't realistically be acted upon for such diametrically opposed figures, so the few overt love scenes in Out of Sight feel like dreams more than concrete occurrences, making the final irresolvability of Jack and Karen's romance that much more tragic. The film is seductively old-fashioned in its approach to cinematic romance, presenting love as an ideal escape from the constricting boundaries of life. In a key sequence, one of Soderbergh's finest in two-and-a-half decades as a director, Jack visits Karen at a lounge and woos her with his soothing verbal play before the two retreat to a hotel room to make love. Shot in warm tones in front of snowy Detroit panoramas reduced to luscious blobs of blue and white, the entire scene is lovely, but it's elevated to something haunting and mysterious by the somnambulant rhythm of Soderbergh's cutting and the actors' movements. Here, Jack and Karen seem to move differently and speak differently than they do under the professional circumstances of the rest of the film, with flirtation bubbling out of every gesture. Soderbergh takes his time to show the two in any sort of contextualizing shot, instead remaining fixed on their faces and their bodies glowing against the moody nightscape. This lack of context – it is unclear both when and where exactly the scene takes place in the frame of the narrative – only bolsters the sense of love as an escape, something pure and possibly unreachable within the lives led by these characters.

Fortunately, the situations surrounding Jack and Karen's central romance are compelling in their own right, and provide an understanding of why the two leads are bound by their respective lifestyles. Subplots are sprinkled throughout Out of Sight – a mansion robbery aided by cohorts Maurice (Don Cheadle), Buddy (Ving Rhames), and Glenn (Steve Zahn), a snapshot of Karen's relationship with her father (Dennis Farina), compulsory flashbacks to various prison activities shot in harsh sunlight – but because of Soderbergh's light touch they never descend into heavy exposition, and the same stylishness brought to the love scenes is spread across the rest of the film. Nonetheless, this is still a film built confidently on the nuanced chemistry of its two would-be lovers. Clooney set a high standard of charm here that's arguably never been exceeded, and Lopez, who has has not been involved in such strong material since, has never been more naturally alluring. Their final scene together on either side of a cop car divide is a crystallization of the submerged infatuation simmering out of the rest of the film, a bittersweet, wordless goodbye that's tinged with all the unspoken longing of the preceding two hours.

Andrei Tarkovsky, Ranked

(This is the fourth entry in the Favorite Directors Blogathon. Next month is Bela Tarr.)
Unlike some of the other participants in this blogathon, I didn't put a terrible degree of thought into the scheduling of my posts in terms of what director might fit well with a given time of year. For instance, Kubrick probably would have made more sense for November in light of the tantalizing month-long tribute to the director that's just over the horizon at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and Bergman might have gelled nicely with the Christmas season, and maybe if I wanted to get creative Lynch would have been a clever pick for the Halloween month, but alas, none of this materialized. That said, I can say I've found a justification, however abstract, for picking Russian master Andrei Tarkovsky in the Thanksgiving month. On a certain general level, Tarkovsky's cinema is a great big thanks to the world and everything in it: his beloved family and homeland, the gift of memory and love, the ever-expanding collection of global artwork, the physical landscape, the natural elements, the feeling of the divine in the everyday, and much more.

Similar to some other reclusive filmmaking giants (Kubrick, Malick, etc.), Tarkovsky was never a prolific director, although it wasn't necessarily because he didn't want to be. Tarkovsky was subject throughout his career to stifling government censorship, culminating in a self-imposed 1982 exile from Russia that was essentially encouraged by the Russian government who denied he and his wife visas for re-entering the country. These political struggles speak to a fundamental core of melancholy in Tarkovsky's work, but his films are anything but bitter or depressive; rather, they are defined by their unceasing search for the sacredness in life that can be found against all odds. If you don't believe me, you haven't read "Sculpting in Time," Tarkovsky's lucid, thought-provoking summary of his thoughts on cinema and creative work in general, and one of my favorite books of all time. Or you haven't flipped through "Instant Light: Tarkovsky Polaroids," a book that gives intimate access to the filmmaker's personal polaroid collection, every shot of which seems to glow with unearthly light. Or you haven't really watched his films.

Tarkovsky's not a director I've written a great deal about, simply because I've always felt that transcoding his films into written language seems fundamentally inadequate and almost counterproductive. It's also because, as much as I'm emotionally and spiritually connected to Tarkovsky's work, I often find myself intellectually out of step with them, since they appeal to the sensual self as much as they engage critically and comprehensively with philosophical and political concepts that sometimes feel out of my reach. But maybe if I can get over this hump, it will be easier in the future to translate what I find so consistently inspiring and moving about his work.

(Note: Regretfully, I have been unable to get my hands on a DVD of Nostalghia, Tarkovsky's second-to-last film, so it is left out of this list for now.)

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1. The Mirror (1975): Since seeing The Mirror for the first time some three or four years ago, I've yet to unlock the greatest mysteries of why it works so remarkably on my soul: the questions of how it moves the way it moves, what makes certain images and cuts so unbearably poetic, and how it manages to tie together its disparate threads so elegantly, remain the kind of unanswered and potentially unanswerable questions we expect of great art. It's Tarkovsky's most bluntly personal work, covering anywhere from his childhood to his father's war experience to his mother's domestic experience to the history of Russia, yet it's also the one that can, for the likeminded and motivated, cut deeper than any straightforward narrative could. During The Mirror, I find myself tearing up, contemplating, becoming riveted, angry, and filled with joy. I'm even bored on occasion. The film is the ideal platform for meditation, for putting one's life into the proper perspective.

2. Stalker (1979): The mysteries and complexities of Stalker are so robust that the film has inspired its own body of scholarship: Geoff Dyer's "Zona: A Book About a Film About a Journey to a Room" was released earlier in the year to ecstatic reviews, but it still only scratches the surface of Tarkovsky's dreamlike odyssey. Truth is, there is no definitive truth about Stalker. It's as much of a tantalizing litmus test as anything else, but it also doesn't drown in noodling self-absorption. Instead, with its adventure narrative (I know that sounds like Indiana Jones or something, but on a basic level Stalker conforms to the genre) that moves deeper and deeper into the unknown, it's designed in such a way to provoke escalating curiosity in the viewer. Along the way, Tarkovsky provides some of the most shimmering images in his oeuvre: a long traveling shot that takes the three central characters into the Zone, a slow dolly forward through a decrepit tunnel, a glimpse of a stray dog in the middle of a misty stream, a shot moving backwards that settles on a painterly panorama of the three figures resting beneath a light rain, and a final image of a young girl telepathically willing a glass of milk to shake off a wooden table. Stalker is nothing less than majestic.

3. Ivan's Childhood (1962): I can't think of a filmmaker living or dead who has better conveyed the sense of childhood innocence fading abruptly and sometimes violently from life than Tarkovsky, and this idea was present even in his feature debut, the swampy and dirt-caked anti-war film Ivan's Childhood. In it, one can already glimpse Tarkovsky's distinctive focus on dream sequences at the expense of narrative momentum, his ability to build zones of seemingly aimless reverie that float in and out of the story with ease. The film morphs to the obstructed consciousness of young Ivan (Nikolay Burlyaev), a 12-year-old boy who has been thrust into a dispassionate lifestyle as a Russian spy on the Eastern Front in World War II, working as a gofer for the gruff soldiers who represent his only tentative family unit. Moody, extraordinarily photographed military scenes are juxtaposed with ecstatic mental wanderings evoking peace and simplicity and carried to sublime heights by Vyacheslav Ovchinnikov's spare score. This was my entry point into Tarkovsky's body of work, and it remains a perfect and surprisingly developed encapsulation of his signature themes and atmosphere.

4. Andrei Rublev (1966): Epic, episodic, and hugely ambitious, Tarkovsky's fiercely unconventional biopic of 15th century icon painter Andrei Rublev was exactly the kind of film he needed to make early in his career to cement his position as an elite European director and propel his career into its next stages of artistic development, even as Soviet authorities did their best to ban the film for as long as possible. For more than three hours Tarkovsky cycles through turbulent moments in Russian history – the Tartar invasion of an innocent village, shot with punishing verisimilitude, is a remarkably complex set piece – while maintaining a compassionate engagement with Rublev's struggles for artistic expression in a brutal, faithless world. It's fitting that the titular figure shares Tarkovsky's name: both artists fought through intense career-long government censorship and a lack of public response to their work. But the film is much more than just a monolithic act of solipsism – it's a plea to all creators working under oppressive circumstances to continue creating at all costs under the knowledge that it will, if not instantly then at least one day, be someone's inspiration to keep living.

5. The Sacrifice (1986): When Tarkovsky began working in exile, his films gained a particularly potent sense of existential doom and shifted away from the explicit reveries of love and warmth in films like Mirror and Ivan's Childhood. As Tarkovsky's final goodbye to filmmaking, The Sacrifice is the pinnacle of this tendency. Post-production on the film occurred in step with the director's slow death from cancer, and as a result an atmosphere of apprehension hangs over it, with Tarkovsky's characteristic spiritual questioning acquiring an additional charge of directness. As Alexander, Erland Josephson hurls his profound confusion at the sky in the midst of a possible incoming natural disaster, and the markers of stability that define his life (his family, his sanity, his faith) start to disintegrate. Meanwhile, the landscape around him remains, a soggy island resting on the precipice of nowhere. The Sacrifice is about the impossibility of reconciling a relentless search for something higher and the stubborn physicality of the Earth, a difficult-to-represent concept that has never been better represented than in the film's famous climax, a 10-minute single-take sequence of Alexander burning his house down and running mad in the fields.

6. Solaris (1972): I'm in dire need of a theatrical screening of Solaris, because it's the kind of film that I suspect would be significantly enhanced by a large-scale presentation in the presence of an attentive audience. As it stands, it's my least favorite of the Tarkovsky films I've seen, though that's not to imply that it's anything less than a typically epic, thoughtful piece of filmmaking. Its long-winded conversational intimacy, which is couched inside the grandiose design of a psychologist visiting a space station to investigate a curious phenomenon only to be barraged by the memory of his dead wife, may not translate to the small screen as adequately as other Tarkovsky films, but the central fixations are all there in full swing: the divide between the body and soul (materialized as the space between Earth and the cosmos), the troubling elusiveness of the past, and the inherent melancholy of an earthbound existence. I find myself admiring the hypnotizing setup (including a ghostly walk among misty landscapes and a sci-fi vision of Tokyo freeways) in favor of the amorphous body that comprises the latter two thirds of the film, but this is still essential viewing.

Other November/Halloween entries in the Favorite Directors Blogathon:

- Loren Rosson's William Friedkin rankings over at The Busybody.
- Jake Cole's Roman Polanski rankings over at Not Just Movies.

AFI Fest 2012: Nov. 5th - Nov. 7th

(Disclaimer: These notes were scribbled in between screenings while waiting in line for other films. Only minor editing, for grammatical and factual purposes, occurred.) Moving on to the second half of my experience at the 2012 AFI Film Festival, I'm at this point overwhelmed by plots, characters, images, and sounds, entering smoothly into a zone of viewer fatigue where films start to blur together and standout moments and provocative imagery become especially vivid. To use Cannes as a reference point, it's roughly the same point in time when the force of Nicole Kidman's notorious urine (from Lee Daniels' The Paperboy) or Carlos Reygadas' crude rendering of the devil (from Post Tenebras Lux) encouraged me to entertain the idea that I was possibly not as awake as I thought I was. The differences between Cannes and AFI as far as living patterns are, of course, abundant (now I have a car, access to more than just baguettes, a consistent bed, and there's an absence of language barriers), but the sensory overload is nearly identical.

Fortunately, in this haze I was greeted by the unique ray of light that is Miguel Gomes' Tabu. While Berberian Sound Studio may remain my most satisfying complete experience thus far, I found myself more inspired, more curious, and more genuinely perplexed by this work, the Portuguese critic/director's third feature. Gomes has managed a film that enters a realm of total unpredictability only ventured into recently by Apichatpong Weerasethakul, and in the past by Fellini, Jodorowsky, and Parajanov. Of these filmmakers, Gomes shares the most with Joe: Tabu, like Syndromes and a Century, Tropical Malady, and Blissfully Yours, has a bifurcated structure whose two halves appear disconnected on the surface but slowly and unexpectedly begin to form associative, poetic links. The first half, which begins after a surreal prologue in the African jungle that probably requires an even greater degree of imaginative association to be tied meaningfully to the rest of the film, concerns the experiences of a melancholy spinster (Teresa Madruga) in dealing with her racist but otherwise warmhearted elderly neighbor Aurora (Laura Soveral). I'm not sure if it was the fault of the lulling lushness of Gomes' shallow depth of field photography (one conversation is filmed entirely in close-ups that appear to be rotating slowly around their subjects, but it's really just that the table is spinning) or the low-key, languid nature of the content itself, but I found myself drifting during this section. This happens to me far too often, a situation where an image, a certain lighting technique, a line of dialogue, or the design of a set stimulates filmmaking inspiration inside my own brain that causes my focus to drift from the film in front of me to some vague, shapeless, prospective future film I generally end up not actually pursuing.



Still, whatever disengaging effect the first half had on me was wiped away when Aurora's old flame (voiced by Henrique Espírito Santo) begins telling the story of he and Aurora's past relationship over her deathbed. Suddenly the film switches back to the aged, windswept 16mm look used in the prologue. Starting as what appears to merely be a brief dialogue accompanied by a flashback, the man, known as Gian Luca Ventura (Carloto Cotta), ultimately winds up narrating the remaining hour of Tabu in a hushed, elegiac tone over the sounds of nature and the occasional vintage pop tune. His monologue shifts from the expositional and anecdotal to the poetic and comic and back again while relating in first-person the tale of his years living in a Portuguese colony in Africa in the 60's and falling in love with Aurora (played in this iteration by Ana Moreira), at the time the lover of his friend and bandmate. On the surface, it’s a traditional love triangle, a melodrama in the vein of a great Murnau silent, but the telling (by both Ventura and Gomes) is eccentric and incoherent, and the story (a film within a film?) amasses into something abstract and wistful, the stuff of sensations and glances on dry, sunny days in verdant hills. Gomes' camera is drawn to the wind caressing tall grass, the sun beaming against groups of African children, and the propulsive charm of Ventura at the drum set, and the weight given to these intangibles renders all narrative concerns secondary.

But there's a lot more going on here than just good vibes and relaxing rhythms. Ventura's story is a vision of love half-remembered that is filtered through a cinematic model for interpreting the past: all big, momentous gestures and quietly virtuosic imagery, the second half regurgitates Murnau (whose 1931 feature shares with Tabu a title and a two-part structure and is evidently the central inspiration for Gomes), von Stroheim, Sturges, and Bunuel (these are merely the associations I've turned to; another viewer could summon up different names) into a luscious pool of elusive cinematic referents. The suggestion is that the nature of memory is bound up in the personal experience of cinema, and that time (Gomes uses title cards that indicate single days in the first half and each passing month in the second) becomes warped and selective in hindsight. By the conclusion of this grainy, impressionistic odyssey, it’s easy to forget that there was a first half with dialogue and crisp framings and slim depth-of-field at all. Tabu marks a conversation between two different filmic approaches as much as between the past and present history of Portugal and of filmmaking. There's a whole lot to sift through here and it will require another screening to do so, but for now let me state what is obvious and far from original by now: this is one of the most magical delights of the year.



The serene feeling I had leaving the Tabu screening was no match for the next film on my plate, Amy Seimetz’s hothouse debut Sun Don’t Shine. This relentlessly dour vision of an impulsive and mutually dependent twentysomething couple on the hideout from Florida police with a corpse in the trunk of their beat-up Oldsmobile (the details of their crime are smartly elided by Seimetz) is admirably committed in its grimy atmosphere of sweat and sun flares, but its frequent insistence upon milking its already high stakes through contrived plot mechanics and oppressive non-diegetic sound grows wearying quickly. The film is much more interesting when it’s quietly studying its two central fuck-ups (played by Kate Lyn Sheil and Kentucker Audley), and, seriously, quietly is the operative word here; when Seimetz lays out the drama on a bed of ominous drones, complex character psychology is simplified and narrative heaviness takes hold. More effective, but no less predictable, is composer Ben Lovett's music box melodies that emphasize Sheil's character's emotional infantilism (she refers to having kids but is clearly doing a horrible job of raising them).

Sun Don't Shine's standout feature is its intensely claustrophobic Super 16mm handheld camerawork, constantly vibrating along with the vulnerable landscape between the characters. There's no more than a few instances when Seimetz offers any kind of spatial context to Sheil and Audley's jittery interactions; shots that exclude their faces are overtly abstract, as in the images of a golden sun glowing behind trees seen through the window of the rapidly moving car. Accordingly, the Florida landscape becomes a bright blur, simultaneously directing the focus towards the faces of the two leads and rendering the surrounding environment alien and uncertain. That Seimetz has made a film that so confidently limits its scope to a single car, a small number of supplementary locations, and two unstable characters is nothing to scoff at; that she resorts to infidelity and impulsive violence to cheaply bolster the complicated terrain of the central relationship is another thing entirely. Needless to say, the film – which finally and inevitably finds its doomed characters separated and without much hope for the future – leaves a sour taste in the mouth.



On the opposite end of the spectrum was Christian Petzold's Barbara; while Sun Don't Shine is messy, explosive, and defined by the instability of its central figures, Barbara is restrained and controlled, its characters taking considerable time thinking through the moral implications of their actions. In fact, the titular character (embodied by Nina Hoss), a fiercely independent and no-nonsense rural doctor, seems the polar opposite of Sheil: able to direct her contemplation inward, repressing physical displays of emotion (she spends most of the film outdoing the icy flatness of Charlize Theron), and always aiming for the best, most selfless outcome in any given situation. Driven from her job in East Germany by the oppressive Stasi government because of her desire to move to the West, she is forced to begin working in a country hospital where resources are scarce and patients are few. In between the occasional charged tryst with her East German boyfriend who manages to smuggle himself into her company, Barbara builds a relationship with her co-worker André (Ronald Zehrfeld) that is first businesslike and then strong enough to cause her the predicament of whether to keep working towards escape or to stick around with him in the quiet countryside.

I wasn't a fan of Petzold's previous film, Beats Being Dead, which I found dramatically inert and thematically blunt. Barbara, with its remarkable lead performance and complete tonal control, is the superior achievement, but I still find myself at a remove from Petzold's approach on nearly every level. Both films are set in rural hospitals, therefore limiting their visual palettes to sterile, muted colors and nondescript framings. They often rely heavily on talking heads against blank backgrounds to fuel their emotional and narrative crawl. Obviously, there's nothing problematic about the very fact that Petzold has decided to set these narratives in these milieus – the wonkiness of the hospital, set alongside the power of the police state, is one ideal platform for Petzold's interest in the behavioral impact of social class – but it's the fact that Barbara's atmosphere is as relentlessly cold and inhospitable as it is for the characters that makes it a suffocating watch, never offering a glimpse of a comparative paradise to ground Barbara's desires. It sounds silly to complain about a film consciously evoking the oppressiveness of its period setting, but on a fundamental level I find Barbara's execution bland and its themes of entrapment and repression (which feel very specific to this time and place) difficult to relate to. Seeing it again with a firmer understanding of its political context will likely help.



I finally concluded my festival on a bleak and disturbing note with Joachim Lafosse's Our Children, a film whose perspective balances questionably between detached and weirdly sympathetic. Inspired by a ripped-from-the-headlines story of a mother who killed her four children, Lafosse makes it his alleged goal to remove the tabloid generalizations and paint a portrait of an ordinary woman in peril, but the air of dread looming over the film from its very opening inspires a directorial approach that automatically neglects the possibility of hope or reconciliation at every turn. Lafosse follows a relationship from its pre-marriage ecstasy to the doldrums of increasing routine and obligation, and the inevitable conclusion to this downward slope – revealed in the opening two shots of the film – makes it such that Lafosse's vision of marriage and gender roles appears decidedly bleak. In the midst of this overwhelming decline, the ups and downs in the impressive performance of Émilie Dequenne as the murderous mother are paid rapt attention while Tahar Rahim as her husband grows comparatively distant, even looking villainous as the narrative gets closer and closer to its tragic moment. I take it for granted that this is an attempt to enhance the subjective experience of Dequenne, who feels as though she's being relentlessly blamed and burdened for the maintenance (or lack thereof) of the household, but it puts Lafosse in an uncomfortable moral dilemma, and the clear ambivalence in his approach is manifested in the aforementioned tonal divide.

For at least half of the film, Lafosse's camera, manned with a telephoto lens, is seeking any available surface (a door frame, a head, a pillar) to duck behind and dirty the right or left side of the frame, subsequently pivoting around it throughout scenes to glimpse the space and various characters. It's a stylistic choice that speaks to the directorial confusion throughout: implying a voyeuristic tone that's never actually materialized, this arbitrary use of the camera is not unlike the larger perspective of the film – interested but uncomfortable, aiming for closeness but desiring distance. The net result of this confusion is a disinterested affect and a feeling of low stakes throughout (the sub-Barry Lyndon musical theme that surfaces and resurfaces is perhaps supposed to lend an air of importance missing from the drama itself). Our Children may be heavy material, but it resembles a generic indie drama, and when the key moment finally comes, no measure of chilling restraint in Lafosse's presentation of it can save it from seeming implausible and absurd, an enormous atrocity bubbling out of an otherwise vague marital tension.

It's a bit of a shame to end my week with three films I was less-than-enthusiastic about, but such is the nature of the festival experience. Because of the rapid-fire schedule, once a game plan has been carved out in advance, it's hard to stray from it upon getting new recommendations. I regret not seeing Room 237 (which I had a ticket to, but I needed some fresh air after Leviathan), Tey, War Witch, Ulrich Seidl's Paradise films, A Hijacking, Beyond the Hills (remaining elusive to me, a recurring pattern from Cannes), Simon Killer, and Final Cut, but I also caught what I was most looking forward to. For the list-prone, here's a culminating ranking of the films I saw for the first time at the festival:

1. Berberian Sound Studio (Strickland/Britain)
2. Tabu (Gomes/Portugal)
3. Leviathan (Castaing-Taylor and Paravel/USA)
4. Something in the Air (Assayas/France)
5. Not in Tel Aviv (Geffen/Israel)
6. Barbara (Petzold/Germany)
7. Sun Don't Shine (Seimetz/USA)
8. Our Children (Lafosse/Belgium)