Viola (2012) A Film by Matías Piñeiro

With the emergence of Lisandro Alonso, Lucrecia Martel, and Pablo Trapero, among many others, onto the international scene in the past decade, the Argentinean cinema has been thriving. Joining them is Matías Piñeiro, a young writer/director who now has three feature-length fiction films, a short, and feature documentary under his belt, not to mention considerable critical accolades across the world. His recent film, Viola, especially, was a hit with American critics this year after a strong showing at 2012's Toronto International Film Festival. It's a light and airy quasi-romantic comedy that recalls Eric Rohmer in its casually philosophical chattiness as well as Hou Hsiao-hsien and Jose Luis Guerin in its stylistic atmosphere. It's quite good, and I wrote about it for In Review Online here.

Computer Chess (2013) A Film by Andrew Bujalski

My review of Computer Chess, mumblecore writer-director Andrew Bujalski's funniest and richest film yet, went live today at In Review Online. I dare you to look at the image above and tell me you don't want to see this film when it comes out in nationwide arthouses over the next two weeks.

Post Tenebras Lux (2013) A Film by Carlos Reygadas

If I needed any further proving that the rowdy, sleepless Cannes Film Festival atmosphere is no place for properly digesting challenging, multilayered art cinema, revisiting some of the 2012 festival's best international films as they've slowly trickled into American theaters in 2013 has more than done the trick. First up was Abbas Kiarostami's Like Someone in Love, the slippery surfaces and deceptively controlled structure of which struck me as intriguingly baffling at the decorated world premiere, only to make absolute, rewarding sense in the comfort of my normal routine with the luxury of much-needed time for contemplation. Holy Motors continued to be a beautifully wild, extraterrestrial object, albeit one whose layers of human sadness felt all the more acute. Now I find myself a week removed from a second screening of Carlos Reygadas' Post Tenebras Lux, the closest thing to the main competition's obligatory provocation, and the seemingly punkish assaults on viewer complacency and fiercely non-conformist gestures that gave me such a queasy feeling in the Grand Théâtre Lumière have now congealed into a cogent, expressive whole. The film still has its tangents that feel fundamentally irresolvable, but it now seems less exhibitionist in its abstraction, and more like a unit of ideas and feelings that can only be captured and arranged in this particular serpentine manner.

Reygadas is a director whose highbrow influences tend to announce themselves with regrettable bluntness, and if Silent Light was his Dreyer pastiche, Post Tenebras Lux seems a tenuous attempt at a Mexican rendition of Tarkovsky's Mirror. But like Silent Light, which was far more interesting in its departures from the Danes' tics than in its devotional quotations, Post Tenebras Lux grows more singular as the distinctive preoccupations of its maker allow surface abnormalities to protrude from an impressionistic, Mirror-like foundation (after all, Tarkovsky's inextricably autobiographical cine-poem fundamentally defies duplication). Some of Tarkovsky's main ingredients are here – a house in the middle of the forest with dark wood interiors, a dying man who is in some warped sense the protagonist, unannounced detours to the past and future, a visual appreciation of nature for its own sake – but by the time Reygadas is done with them, they produce a flavor that is nearly unrecognizable from its source.



Reprising Battle in Heaven's emphasis on class distinctions, Post Tenebras Lux flips that film's arrangement to prioritize not the Mexican working-class type but rather the wealthy, Westernized Mexican, a decision that generates an immediate critical distance. The film focuses on Juan (Adolfo Jiménez Castro), a casually manipulative, sexually frustrated architect living in the mountainous woodlands of Mexico with his acquiescent wife Natalia (Nathalia Acevedo) and their two spirited toddlers (played by Reygadas' own children Eleazar and Rut). At the core of the film is a domestic melodrama that nearly balloons later into a class thriller, but Reygadas is much less concerned with the particulars of Juan's life than he is with his internal world, which, in a recent Cineaste interview, he admits to sympathizing with.

Western Mexicans tend to have chronic dissatisfaction and see life from a disconnected point of view...It's the reality that many people are divided in their minds between their will and action. Few people can accomplish their will. So the film is autobiographical in that sense, too, in the way that I wrote about my feelings, and it came out in an automatic and instinctive way.
-Cineaste, Summer 2013

Now, one can never be entirely certain that Reygadas doesn't beat his dogs, talk down to his underpaid laborers, and stay up all night ogling internet pornography while his wife snoozes in the adjacent room (all of which are Juan's conspicuous character flaws), but the assumption here is that thought and action have been consciously separated. The autobiographical dimension relates to Juan's psychological profile as a man disembodied from his own surroundings, longing for a simpler time free of adult obligations. His morally questionable behavior, meanwhile, suggests the troubling realities of a divided Mexico, where significant socioeconomic gaps inspire a nagging feeling of unrest, which, for Juan, leads to violence and vice. Again, the assumption is that Reygadas is critical of this behavior, but at the same time, it can be difficult to justify the film's worst, most tasteless scene, in which a Kubrickian skyward close-up frames Juan as he kneels over to pummel his disabled labrador, whose harrowing squeals "suggestively" stand in for his presence offscreen. (As an owner of a dog with a terminal impairment, there's just no excuse, aesthetic or otherwise, for this garbage.)



Aside from this stray moment (which appears to be driven by little more than Reygadas' compulsion towards provocation), Juan's actions throughout the course of the film form a plausibly contradictory individual torn by boundless love for his family and ugly entitlement. The film is smart enough to avoid suggesting that Juan is simplistically redeemed by his familial devotion or, on the contrary, that his sins taint his human potential; instead, Reygadas sidesteps the level of judgment entirely by evading the shackles of A-B narrative structure and inhabiting the schizophrenic consciousness of his lead character. The logic behind Post Tenebras Lux's grab-bag assemblage is never announced. Past, present, future, reality, and dreams are intermingled without regard for literal causation, and it's impossible to say with authority if anything onscreen at a given moment can be traced to a verifiable, diegetic source; everything is vulnerable to the faulty, distorting filter of subjectivity. There are no familiar signs of a scene's beginning and end, and no fluid transitions from scene to scene. It's like reading an essay in which there are no thesis statements or transition sentences. New ideas just arrive, unannounced and uninvited.

That's the thinking behind the film's formidable teaser, a surreal episode of Eleazar scurrying in a muddy field with horses and dogs as the woozy, distracted camerawork approximates the girl's untutored vision. Later, this scene is offhandedly justified as a dream sequence, but, with the exception of the blurry vignette which frames the shot, Reygadas' way of presenting the action avoids the usual markers of "dream language." The sounds of the animals are mixed with an almost terrifying clarity, and natural elements – wind, water, mud, and, as the scene quickly descends to night, thunder and darkness – feel tactile. This hyperrealist approach, with its emphasis on heightening the lived experience of the character and his/her physical environment, remains Reygadas' default mode even as fantastical objects and scenarios – a conspicuously unreal animated devil figure entering the family's country home in the middle of the night, a man tearing his own head off like it's a weed that needs picking – figure their way into the film.



The "WTF" moments that are scattered throughout Post Tenebras Lux arrive within longer stretches of emotional and narrative directness. They are tied, more often that not, to feelings that are genuine and visceral for the film's characters. The devil seems a byproduct of the family's wavering religious faith, as well as an omen of the troubling plot progressions to come for Juan. A (possibly metaphorical) extended sequence at a clammy French brothel – filled with the kind of unpleasant sex Reygadas' is suspiciously attracted to – stems from Juan and Natalia's admitted problems in bed and ostensible insecurity. Repeated sojourns to a seemingly arbitrary British rugby match comment obliquely on the many wars being acted out in the narrative proper (between Western and Non-Western Mexico, upper-class and lower-class, brothers and sisters, and fathers and mothers); the film's final line, spoken by one of these players, is an oddly poignant gesture of optimism amidst so much prior unrest. Although these rugby scenes in particular have become a red flag for those eager to call Reygadas' out on the possibly dubious extent to which he is willing to stretch his associative montage, the results, to me at least, always feel right. The film's editing is off-kilter and strange, but rarely knotty for its own sake.

If there's anything close to a built-in retort to viewers frustrated by Post Tenebras Lux for its obscure, dawdling nature, it's Natalia's impromptu, tone-deaf version of Neil Young's "It's a Dream," which she performs on the family's out-of-tune piano at the request of her husband as he ails in bed from a violent tiff with his down-and-out employee. As this excessively civil wife tends to do, Natalia heeds Juan without question, but her ensuing performance is much more than just a half-hearted compliance with her husband's demands; it's also a headfirst dive into the bittersweet emotionality of the song's lyrics, and her eventual tears reveal a complex mixture of regret and anger over Juan's hasty decisions as well as a sincere affection for him. Only a rock could watch this and be unmoved. It's this kind of delicate, tender moment that Reygadas tends to use to bring into sharp focus the themes and emotional subtexts of a given film, and here it's pregnant with the many levels on which this chronologically jumbled, possibly liminal movie exists: the mysterious, distorted realms of dreams and the past, the fractured present, and the imposing future. As Natalia croons "it's a dream / only a dream / and it's fading now / fading away / just a memory without anywhere to stay," I found myself sharing in her sense of wistful loss – a feeling directed not towards the impending dissolution of a family and a relationship, but towards the film itself.

Kuichisan (2013) A Film by Maiko Endo

Over at In Review Online, I wrote about Kuichisan, the directorial debut of former Battles vocalist Maiko Endo. The film is opening at Anthology Film Archives in New York City tonight and will run for one week. I was no huge fan of this tediously arty city-portrait-cum-somnambulant-mood-piece myself, but I still found a decent amount of stuff in it to commend.

Before Midnight (2013) A Film by Richard Linklater

With Before Midnight, Richard Linklater continues to cement his status as one of the most special American filmmakers. The third chapter to a trilogy that started with 1995's Before Sunrise and continued in 2004 with Before Sunset, Midnight arrives at an alternately hopeful and despairing synthesis of the series' pet themes: the elusive nature of love, the psychological and physiological effects of time (both compressed and vast), the balance of life and romance, and the perpetual deadline of mortality. Indeed, if this turns out to be the conclusion of the series (I'm going to hope it's not), it's a beautifully appropriate one. My full review is up at In Review Online.

New Outlet: In Review Online

As of today, I'll be contributing occasional reviews to In Review Online, which is currently edited by Kenji Fujishima, the founder of the blog My Life, at 24 Frames Per Second as well as a critic for Slant Magazine. Throughout its brief but illustrious history, the website has been host to several talented young critics who have since become remarkably successful in their trade – Calum Marsh, AA Dowd, Simon Abrams, and Andrew Schenker, among others – and it continues to feature a rotating cast of great writers to this day, so I'm more than happy to be involved. My first review – of 91-year-old Alain Resnais' possible farewell to cinema, You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet – is now live at the site. The film's not only as wise and assured as you'd expect from the veteran master, but it's also stranger and livelier than anything I had prepared for.

The Thing (1982) A Film by John Carpenter

John Carpenter's The Thing opens in crisp whiteness and ends in a dark, smoky inferno, a fitting visual progression for a film that also shifts from relative normalcy and stability to paranoia and enveloping fear of the unknown. Its compositions are first airy and spacious, and later they are hazy and claustrophobic. Enemies are seen with perfect clarity when the film begins; by the end, it's not only difficult to spot them in the shadows, but it's nearly impossible to know whether they are an enemy or a friend. This is the linear descent of Carpenter's bleak, nasty horror film, and it's a shift that is carefully and tensely modulated over the movie's runtime. Plot is thin and characters are simply defined, the better to place emphasis on mood and tone.

Simplicity is the name of the game in The Thing. A loose rehash of the premise of the Howard Hawks-produced, Christian Nyby-directed The Thing from Another World (1982) as well as a distilled adaptation of John W. Campbell Jr.'s novella Who Goes There?, Carpenter's film seems determined to minimize any specific associations with prior versions of the same material. It concerns a group of men at a scientific research station in Antarctica on an expedition only given context by a brief insert shot of the sign at their temporary base. Connection to the outside world has been cut off, while relentless gusts of wind and -40 degree temperatures envelop the crew at all times. The film begins with a random invasion from a Norwegian helicopter, whose only passenger is a crazed scientist hell-bent on sniping one of the crew's many faithful Alaskan huskies. The lunatic is swiftly dispensed with, but as a mysterious alien phenomenon starts to plague the base, the full implications of his fleeting appearance make themselves clear. By the end of the of the film's prologue, the simple conflict that sustains the entire plot has been established: a group of scientists fighting an unknown, rapidly-spreading parasite.

The nature of this parasite is elusive. An opening shot of outer space makes it clear that it is of an extraterrestrial nature, but it has no definitive size or shape. Instead, the alien (never seen in its pure form) latches onto a variety of hosts and attempts to "imitate" their physical body. At various points in the film, Carpenter reveals the different stages of this process: sometimes the alien is a heinous amalgamation of a known creature (human or dog) and a slimy, shapeless beast, and other times the alien has completed its full transformation into the likeness of its host. The vague, shapeshifting characterization of this Other begs one to interpret it along the lines of metaphor; therefore, instead of an actual external threat, it is a manifestation of any number of insecurities – fear, paranoia, mistrust, alienation – that arise within the group when confronted with an unknown force.



Unlike the Hawks-Nyby film, where character traits accumulate through a barrage of words, facts, and actions (a general Hawks tendency), Carpenter is more interested in the gradual reduction of character specificity. Characters become mere bodies ready to be cohabited by the titular alien presence, if not simply diminished to a basic survival mode. Whatever defining, archetypal features the people in The Thing start the film with (disco and roller-skating for Nauls (T.K. Carter), compassion and gentility for Garry (Donald Moffat), and scientific expertise for Dr. Copper (Richard Dysart), to name a few) evaporate as the film progresses. The closest thing to a headstrong protagonist, Kurt Russell's R.J. MacReady, has his leadership undermined by an array of disorienting cinematographic effects, most notably a creeping tracking shot late in the film that resembles a villainous POV only to reveal itself as MacReady as the shot moves menacingly through a door towards an unsuspecting character. Furthermore, the best source of scientific authority in the film, Wilford Brimley's Dr. Blair, is one of the first to lose his wits, leading to a frigid solitary confinement outside the base.

One by one, starting with the husky who escapes the Norwegian's gunshots in the beginning of the film and, up until he meets his grisly end, stalks the base like a premonitory Danny Torrance from The Shining, the characters in The Thing are brutally molested by the alien force. The scientists learn that their flamethrowers are the best means of staving off immediate threats, but they also understand that whatever method the alien uses to spread its terror throughout the group will remain frighteningly unknowable and dependably lethal (an early bit of wonky DNA-testing and computer research warns them that the creature's powers could annihilate the entire human race in no more than two days.) As the death toll rises in this small, tight-knit group, so too does hysteria, paranoia, and panic. Many of the film's early sequences occur in the open spaces of the Antarctic tundra, but later the scientists are confined to the cramped interiors of their base, where extraterrestrial liquids lay splattered across surfaces, ready to possibly birth new offenders or violate new hosts. Carpenter prefers clustered group shots to a frantic interplay of close-ups, emphasizing the close proximity of the men to one another even as any one person may not be what they seem.



The Thing's special effects hew closely to those of Alien (at the time released only three years prior), borrowing Ridley Scott and H.R. Giger's suggestions of violent oral assault and their emphasis on phallic-like extensions emerging from layers of thorny flesh. It's obvious that Carpenter felt compelled to coast on the hair-raising success of Scott's film, but despite his somewhat opportunistic thefts, his use of such a sexually charged monster to provoke male anxieties makes perfect sense in the context of a film about men struggling to put trust in one another. The alien only gets larger and more tentacle-driven as the film goes on, moving in sync with the scientists' growing uncertainty in the face of a powerful force uncontrollable through traditional science.

Ennio Morricone's doom-laden music – all synthesizer drones and spine-tingling cascades of strings – rarely lets up, laying on thick the atmosphere of fatalism and dread that guides the film to its logical, death-shrouded conclusion. It's a heavy, intoxicating score, perhaps a little too portentous at times, but it's one of the key elements that makes The Thing such a dark and oppressive experience (also, I should add, such a distinctly 80s experience – see also DP Dean Cundey's illogically beautiful neon stylings). Carpenter's film doesn't so much catch its viewer off guard with such relentless aesthetic decisions as drip slowly and inexorably towards an apocalyptic finale in which neither human logic nor divine hope will save these men from disappearing entirely from existence in an icy no man's land.