Ten (d. Abbas Kiarostami, 2002, France/Iran/USA) A–
One of Iranian cinema's most cerebral pranksters, Kiarostami here places a tiny digital camera on the dashboard of a taxicab in Tehran, then steps back and allows semi-improvised conversations to take place in an uncanny valley between fiction and documentary. In an example of his graceful minimalism, Kiarostami auditioned a large number of non-professional actors, then simply provided the subject matter for their interactions and allowed them to forge their own characters and conversations. Kiarostami is hardly absent, though; he steers the conversations into feminist territory, evoking female characters grappling with unfaithful lovers, a restrictive patriarchy, crises in religious faith, divorce, motherhood, and other issues that Iranian women typically aren't allowed to confront so explicitly in movies. Because of this, Ten is at once an emotional depiction of universal themes, a revealing snapshot of modern-day Tehran, and a striking formal experiment in fortuitous improvisation and a sort of laissez-faire directorial style.
Bronson (d. Nicolas Winding Refn, 2009, UK) B–
Refn's stylish biopic relates the unsettling story of Michael Peterson, a London lad from a middle-class family who was imprisoned (initially to a seven-year sentence) for robbery, then spent the next 30 years in prison (most of them in solitary confinement) for instigating brutal brawls among prisoners and guards. Fittingly, he takes the alias Bronson – in honor of the Death Wish actor – for his vicious exploits. We should be thankful that the movie doesn't try to psychologize Bronson: there are no childhood traumas or mental anomalies to explain away his behavior, which of course makes his animalistic bloodlust all the more disturbing. While this means that there are no lazy plot devices to wrap up the main character with a tidy bow, it also means the movie can seem like all style and no substance: Bronson's violence is presented to us with a hypnotic arsenal of slow tracking shots and vivid patches of color, but any interpretations for its existence (a latent libidinous male impulse; society's propensity for turning violence into awe-inspiring spectacle) are entirely up to the viewer. But if the movie's point sometimes seems a little muddled, at least we have Tom Hardy's awe-inspiring lead performance and Refn's reliably dynamic style. (If he ever incorporates some strong ideas or genuine emotion into his aesthetic, he could be brilliant.)
This Is Not a Film (d. Mojtab Mirtahmasb & Jafar Panahi, 2012, Iran) A
The production backstory is well-known: sentenced to six years in prison and a 20-year ban on filmmaking by the Iranian government for allegedly "conspiring against the state," Jafar Panahi enlists the help of a friend (documentarian Mirtahmasb) to film his house arrest as he ponders film and the creative process. Meanwhile, the anti-government demonstrations of Firework Wednesday erupt on the Tehran streets outside — only a wall away, yet infinitely further. Knowing these circumstances won't prepare you for the singular experience of watching this quasi-film, though; the title, while a coy evasion of the punishment that was handed down to Panahi, is also correct in that you've never really seen a movie exactly like this. Close to certain essay films by Chris Marker or Agnès Varda, This Is Not a Film stands in awe of the creative process, cherishing the unexpected difficulties and fortuitous mistakes of the act of filmmaking, alleging that often it is the movie who "directs" the director. There's deep sadness, inevitably, as Panahi wonders if he'll ever be able to continue his next film project; but there's also a palpable love for Panahi's homeland and compatriots. Infinitely more complex than its anti-censorship foundation might suggest, This Is Not a Film ultimately makes the inspiring case that artists will continue to create, even after the tools of their expression have been cruelly taken away.
The Kid with a Bike (d. Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne, 2012, Belgium/France/Italy) B+
The Belgian masters of spare minimalism turn their attention to a motherless boy in a Parisian foster home. His immature dad works at a nearby restaurant but wants nothing to do with his own son, desperately holding any kind of responsibility at arm's length. (He's played by Jérémie Renier, a longtime Dardenne regular, in an echo of his deadbeat-dad role in 2005's L'Enfant.) The boy, compellingly played by Thomas Doret, is a red-haired spark of energy: we typically see him biking, running, flailing through the frame, often pouncing on boys much larger than him in a torrent of pent-up adolescent confusion. Really he's just looking for love, which sounds trite here but never comes off as stale in the film itself: the characterizations (sparse dialogue, seemingly effortless naturalism) convey emotion and honesty as subtly as possible. Ultimately The Kid with a Bike may seem less momentous than the Dardennes' The Son (2002) or less intense than L'Enfant, but it's also much more hopeful and has some of the brothers' most beautiful cinematography to date (it's shot by Alain Marcoen).
Cat People (d. Paul Schrader, 1982, USA) D+
Schrader's sexed-up remake of Jacques Tourneur's 1942 classic is a perfect summation of the writer/director's bizarre mix of Catholic conservatism and drugged-up, lustful hedonism – which, it turns out, isn't a good thing. Nastassja Kinski and Malcolm McDowell play sibling members of an ancient race of Cat People; if they make love with anyone outside their own race, they revert to their feline form at the point of orgasm, and can only become human again if they kill their lover. The story is ridiculous in a grandiose, mythical way, and it works whenever we're only watching Kinski: she has the kind of innate movie-star beauty where she only has to stand in front of the camera and we're instantaneously awed. An incredible movie could have been made around her alone. But unfortunately there are other characters – as her brother, McDowell is all bug-eyed insanity, an over-the-top self-parody that contrasts absurdly with Kinski's slow-burning passion; and as the zoologist who is irresistibly attracted to her, John Heard is an obnoxious epitome of crass early-80s machismo (you want to see him mauled by leopards as soon as possible). The movie is visually intoxicating, but its style can't mask a ridiculous moral prudishness: the underlying theme is that Kinski will unleash her dangerous wiles if she succumbs to her sexual impulses, but thankfully she's literally caged at the end of the movie, domesticated into obedience in a repellant metaphor for marriage. If the ending is supposed to be depressing (i.e., if Schrader finds marriage a soul-crushing imprisonment), you still have to notice the hypocrisy: he puts Kinski's nubile naked body on display for most of the movie, only to suggest that that kind of uninhibited sexuality has to be subdued and controlled somehow (preferably, it seems, by the arrogant zookeeper who's allowed to indulge his sexual whims any way he wants).
Cinévardaphoto (d. Agnès Varda, 2005, France)
Actually a triptych of short documentaries by one of the progenitors of the French New Wave, Agnès Varda. In the first short, Ydessa, the Bears, and Etc..., Varda employs digital video to peruse an art exhibit curated by vintage-photo collector Ydessa Hendeles. The exhibit covers several stories of an art gallery, overstuffed with photos from the early 20th century that somehow involve teddy bears; the gimmick is ostensibly a "narrative that explores world memory," and it's true that the photos (especially those of Nazis and Jews before and during the Holocaust) allow us to pore over them intently, trying to inscribe some sort of family history into the compositions (an investigation Varda accommodates by showing numerous still photos onscreen for long durations). While it offers a dense entryway into Varda's themes of photographic composition and its imprinting of memory, the next two shorts are more successful, especially Ulysses (from 1982), the high point of the collection. Varda re-explores a still photo she took in the late 1950s, a mysterious image of two naked male figures on a rocky beach, with the corpse of a goat in the foreground. Ulysses finds Varda at her most intellectually lively, drawing allusions and remembrances from a visual enigma; it also displays her blithe sense of humor (witness the follow-up interview with one of the photo's male subjects in the nude, or the scene of a goat proudly devouring a photographic print of one of its dead brethren). Finally, the last short – a documentary about the Cuban revolutionary movement made in 1963 – may be less dense and thought-provoking than the first two, but it offers a glimmering snapshot of an idealistic time and place that now seem petrified in history. Together, the three shorts provide a surprisingly entertaining deconstruction of notions of composition, remembrance, and community.
