Phantom Lightning

Flashback, 1981: 'Absence of Malice'

2011-12-01T14:50:00.007-06:00

This post is the second in my "Flashback 1981" series: viewings and responses to films released as close to thirty years ago as possible. The first, on Sidney Lumet's Prince of the City, was posted on this blog in late August.

Why 1981, one might ask? Two reasons, both of them mostly arbitrary. The first is that I have often neglected films of the 1980s and early 1990s much more than any other historical era—while I've enthusiastically explored silent film, classics of the early sound era to the mid-twentieth century, and developing New Waves and changes in international cinema in the 1960s and 1970s, I for some reason have been mostly uninterested in films of the 80s and 90s, until now. Secondly, I was born in 1984 and did not really start paying attention to movies as a social art form until the late 1990s, so I feel like it will be interesting to further explore and chart the changing cultural climate of the era into which I was born.

Absence of Malice 116m., R, USA

Release Date November 19, 1981

Distributors Columbia Pictures

Director Sydney Pollack

Writer Kurt Luedtke (uncredited: David Rayfiel)

Producers Sydney Pollack & Ronald L. Schwary

Music Dave Grusin

Cinematography Owen Roizman

Editor Sheldon Kahn

Production Design Terence Marsh

Cast Paul Newman, Sally Field, Bob Balaban, Melinda Dillon, Luther Adler, Barry Primus, Josef Sommer, John Harkins, Don Hood, Wilford Brimley, Arnie Ross, Anne Marie Napoles, Shelley Spurlock

Originally, I had intended to post an entry in this "Flashback 1981" series about twice a month, hoping that by keeping tabs on successive releases in late 1981 I could get a very general sense of filmmaking trends and styles of the time. There were a few films I was especially looking forward to watching or revisiting: the Walter Hill actioner Southern Comfort (scored by Ry Cooder), released on September 21, 1981; My Dinner with Andre (October 11), which I saw about ten years ago and, I would expect, might appreciate a little more fully this time around; Shock Treatment (October 31), the semi-sequel to The Rocky Horror Picture Show, which might have made a fine, excessively-80s addition to my hungover Halloween weekend movie marathon; and Terry Gilliam's Time Bandits (November 6), which hardly needs an excuse to be rewatched.

I'll be honest: much of the reason I didn't rewatch or write about any of these movies was a hefty work schedule, and the fact that there were plenty of new releases in theaters that I decided to catch up on instead. But another reason is that a surprising number of movies from the early 1980s—even those which might be considered classics, or at least fondly-remembered—are surprisingly difficult to find on DVD. I could only find Southern Comfort, for example, in a shoddy version posted on YouTube, and The French Lieutenant's Woman, which I assumed would be one of those overly stately "literary" movies available on a bare-bones "Special Edition" reissue DVD, was nowhere to be found. This makes me wonder if early-80s movies occupy a no-man's-land of past releases that have been given the cold shoulder by studios when deciding which of their holdings to reissue (though I suppose this is true of past releases from any period—it only makes sense that studios would give their attention to titles that have the greatest name recognition).

In any case, it's somewhat fitting that my second post in this Flashback series addresses Sydney Pollack's Absence of Malice, as it would make a nifty double-feature with Sidney Lumet's Prince of the City. Both movies are about rampant corruption and the almost-inevitable loss of honor and morality in modern social institutions. Prince of the City's undercover narcotics officer is torn apart by guilt and self-loathing after he starts turning evidence over to an Internal Affairs investigation—he feels like he's betrayed his coworkers and friends and, what's worse, violated the unwritten code of honor among lawmen. Meanwhile, Absence of Malice's Megan (Sally Field), a journalist who begins investigating a liquor distributor for possible ties to the mob, compromises her integrity and destroys the lives of those around her with sensational stories that value tawdry gossip over the truth. Both movies even feature Bob Balaban in practically the exact same role: a weaselly government agent who, in his dogged efforts to advance his own career, cares little about what actually happens to the people he exploits.

Between the two movies, Prince of the City is unquestionably leagues beyond Absence of Malice. Lumet's film is an epic, troubling account of how law, big business, the drug trade, and the federal government intersect in ways more symbiotic than antagonistic, ultimately shattering the lives of more than a few people. Its atmosphere of greed and self-compromise seemed particularly attuned to the economic state of the U.S. in the early 1980s, when urban drug trafficking was escalating at an alarming pace and Ronald Reagan's corporate-friendly government made the lower and upper classes drastically stratified. Absence of Malice, on the other hand, doesn't really seem to consider the specific sociopolitical climate of its story; it's a general (even cliched) take on the old journalistic cautionary tale about writers valuing "the scoop" over the actual lives of the people involved. Although Paul Newman did admit in a 1983 interview that the film was a direct attack on the New York Post's sordid "Page Six" gossip column, similar subject matter had been tackled in Billy Wilder's 1950 film Ace in the Hole and is even more pertinent today. In other words, Absence of Malice could have taken place anywhere at any time; Megan's lack of journalistic integrity has more to do with her own ambition and her romantic relationships than with any kind of external pressure from a corrupt industry or government. (Not that this character-based approach is less valid than a sociopolitical one; in the context of Absence of Malice, though, it's certainly less interesting.)

What the movie has to say about journalism and letting your emotions distort your occupational duty is simple, trite, and uninteresting, but Absence of Malice does feature some performances that lend the film a tough, compassionate humanism, giving it a much greater sense of gravity than might be expected. Field handles the vulnerability of her character more ably than her steely resourcefulness (for a character who's supposed to be so singlemindedly ambitious, she seems remarkably passive a lot of the time), but it's nice to see her in a semi-serious dramatic role in what was arguably the prime of her career (two years after her Oscar nomination for Norma Rae). She's someone I've always wanted to see more of, and Absence of Malice is a nice indication of her unique onscreen presence.

But the movie really belongs to Paul Newman and, in a significant supporting role, Melinda Dillon. Newman plays Michael Gallagher, the liquor distributor who, after he's slandered in Megan's article and unduly investigated by slimy federal prosecutors, plots his devious (and too-convoluted) revenge against the public institutions that vilified him. Absence of Malice is ultimately a revenge story posing as a morality play, but at least that revenge is given sophistication and quiet, burning anger by Newman. In what might be deemed the middle period of his career (after the youthful vigor of movies like Hud, yet before the twilight irascibility of, say, Nobody's Fool), Newman is still quietly heroic, world-weary and stoic but restraining untold feelings. His Gallagher is an iconic Hollywood prototype (the cynical, intense crusader who's always one step ahead of everyone else) in a movie that's supposed to reflect real life, but that's what makes him so interesting and appealing to watch; rather than him seeming out-of-place, it's as though the movie strives yet fails to reach the same level of energy and bravado that he displays. Gallagher is granted one emotional breakdown: a suitably unsettling scene in which he claws at Megan, hissing furiously at her until he literally throws her onto a dirty warehouse floor. It's a pivotal and impressive scene, mostly because it unleashes the pent-up hostility of his character and allows some uncomfortable cruelty to sneak into a movie that's otherwise pretty tame (even though it pretends not to be).

Melinda Dillon's character is a bit more simplistic: she's all saintliness and misplaced trust as the Catholic school-worker who's most tragically affected by Megan's dishonorable actions. It's no coincidence her character's name is Teresa. But the movie obviously needs to give a human face to the negative repercussions of Megan's slander, and that face is given sensitivity and a poignant sense of naivete by Dillon (another actress whose late '70s/early '80s work I need to catch up on). The best moment in the whole movie, in fact, is her resigned, matter-of-fact attempt to suppress a shocking revelation about her (printed in another of Megan's articles) by walking up and down her block and stealing all of the newspapers from her neighbors' front lawns.

Stylistically the movie is even less distinctive than Prince of the City; Lumet and Pollack both come from television backgrounds, which lent them both a concise, uncomplicated style that could be either powerfully compact or lifelessly dull. With Absence of Malice, Pollack is content primarily to point and shoot, although he has the good sense to evoke both the sun and squalor of the Miami setting, and to let the characters dominate the storytelling. If those characters sometimes seem a little one-note, not to mention in the service of disseminating overly trite moral lessons, then at least they are given occasionally-exciting life by at least three actors who were all working at the top of their game.

NEXT: Warren Beatty's Reds (Dec. 4)

New Releases: 'Drive'

2011-10-13T21:02:00.001-05:00

Drive
100 minutes, R, USA
Release Date   September 16, 2011
Distributor FilmDistrict
Director Nicolas Winding Refn
Written by   Hossein Amini, based on the book by James Sallis
Producers   David Lancaster, Bill Lischak, Michel Litvak, Linda McDonough, John Palermo, Marc Platt, Gigi Pritzker, Adam Siegel, Jeffrey Stott, Gary Michael Walters
Music   Cliff Martinez
Cinematography   Newton Thomas Sigel
Editing   Mat Newman
Production Design   Beth Mickle
Art Direction   Christopher Tandon

Cast Ryan Gosling, Carey Mulligan, Bryan Cranston, Albert Brooks, Oscar Isaac, Christina Hendricks, Ron Perlman, Kaden Leos, Jeff Wolfe, James Biberi, Russ Tamblyn, Joey Bucaro, Tiara Parker

In his recent appraisal of the Dardenne Brothers’ The Kid with a Bike, Jonathan Rosenbaum laments what he sees as “the most detestable [single trend] in contemporary commercial filmmaking...: exploitation movies that go out into the world as ‘serious’ art movies.” As an example of the moral hypocrisy, the underhanded audience-pandering, that would have extreme violence standing in for sensitivity and seriousness and depth, Rosenbaum cites Drive as an example. He’s right—Drive is the most extreme example in recent (or even distant) memory of a movie that so badly wants to have it both ways. It wants to eat its cake and have it too, to use an outworn aphorism; or more accurately, it wants to shove some nasty dessert in our faces, smearing it roughly into the mouths/eyes of audiences distanced by irony and detachment, but the movie also wants to pretend to gently offer us such desserts on a gleaming silver platter. Is it a disgusting badass exploitation flick or a sensitive existential character study? The movie doesn’t know, and it doesn’t ask or expect us to decide. Some critics have graciously labeled the movie “ambiguous,” but that seems like an overreaching way to say that the movie can’t decide what it wants to be (thematically, conceptually) because it has nothing on its mind. This leaves us with a movie that is unquestionably well-made—it builds and maintains an astonishing level of dread and stoic misery with impressive formal exactness—but insultingly fake about its own pretensions.

The director, Nicolas Winding Refn (who’s made some fascinating movies before, especially 2008’s Bronson), has offered an excuse for Drive’s bipolar nature in interviews: he is interested, he says, in the duality of macho action heroes, whose (typically) rigid black-and-white moral decisions mask an unsettling aggression and a penchant for snapping into brutal violence instantaneously. If he’s trying to deconstruct action movies’ typical characterization of their protagonists, he’s in some good company: this duality has also been on the mind of directors such as Robert Aldrich, Sam Peckinpah, Kathryn Bigelow, and David Cronenberg (whose A History of Violence may be the textbook example of this kind of morally-shaded deconstruction). Those directors, to varying degrees, all tackle the emotional drives, the external circumstances, and/or the latent psychological neuroses that lead their action heroes to commit acts that could be reasonably deemed either selflessly heroic or viciously bloodthirsty. Movies like Kiss Me Deadly, Straw Dogs, Point Break, or A History of Violence don’t attempt to tidily explain their characters’ proclivity to violence, but they do at least try to explore it, to place the characters in such a world and to convey their actions in such a way that might suggest why they’re so willing to do such awful things.

What seems self-defeating about Drive is that Refn is operating on a different wavelength here: this movie’s style is more reminiscent of Jean-Pierre Melville than of, say, Peckinpah. Melville’s cool, distanced observations of professional lawmen and criminals at odds seemed so stripped-down that they avoided fleshing out their characters at all. Le Samourai and Le Cercle Rouge, for example, primarily seemed to observe their stoic characters going through the motions, filling their preordained roles of policeman or thief almost obligatorily, seeming to know that they were already caught up in a web of fate that would kill them in the end. It doesn’t seem off-base to call such films existential because the characters are defined almost exclusively by their actions; like Meursault in Albert Camus' novel The Stranger, Melville’s characters often seem resigned to the fact that they have no free will, that a series of causes and effects have led them to carry out their actions, and that emotional or psychological reactions to the world around them would not in any way influence their behavior. Camus’ writing in The Stranger is deceptively simple: he does not psychologize or appraise his main character, but at the same time there are a wealth of interpretations that the reader may reflect back on to Meursault. (Why does he kill the nameless Arab? Camus’ unwillingness to even ponder this question forces us to question why we do anything in our lives, just as Melville’s films sometimes seem like tauntingly cryptic observations of human specimens trapped in a cage.)

Drive, apparently, is meant to be a similarly existentialist observation of a character switching robotically back and forth between sensitive self-sacrifice and god-awful brutality. The Driver (Ryan Gosling), as he’s known, spends his time working in a garage and performing stunts for Hollywood action movies. By night, he hires himself out as a professional driver for thieves, hitmen, disreputable businessmen, whoever—his only stipulation is that he’s given a five-minute window to pick up the loot or the henchmen, anything beyond that window is not his responsibility. He doesn’t know what to do when he’s not driving; early in the movie, he returns home for less than a minute, dejectedly looks around his apartment, and immediately leaves again, aimlessly driving around Los Angeles. This robotic state of being—just keep moving until the ride is over—is meant to be a stripped-down representation of human existence. Melville's influence is all over the beginning of this movie, especially in a meticulously-planned opening heist that reveals the one and only pleasure the Driver feels in his life: knowing that he’s good at what he does.

But the Driver’s clocklike existence is impeded, burst apart, by a random meeting with a next-door neighbor, adorable Irene (Carey Mulligan). She has a young son named Benicio, whose father is in prison for undisclosed (but easily-guessed) reasons. The Driver and Irene almost involuntarily become attracted to each other—they fall into the other’s company, they smile and flirt awkwardly, tenuously. Gosling and Mulligan are so good that we believe in their mutual attraction; each fleeting glimpse and touch suggests characters who don’t want to feel anything for each other (she’s still married, after all; he lives his life based on a principle of austere isolation) but do so anyway, against their will.

A week later, Irene’s husband, Standard, is released from prison. We think we know where the movie’s going here—a tense confrontation in a hallway makes it apparent that Standard distrusts the friendship between his wife and the Driver—but there are no altercations between the two, and only the slightest antagonism. In fact, after Standard is mercilessly beaten by a couple thugs in a parking garage, the Driver hesitatingly, and foolishly, offers assistance to Standard. In order for Irene and Benicio to remain safe, Standard must pull off (wait for it…) One Last Heist, for which the Driver will act as accomplice. We know the heist will go horribly awry, but when it does it still catches us off guard: Drive takes its time getting to its lower depths, spending nearly an hour with drawn-out, quiet scenes of mounting dread before the bodies start piling up. And after such a long stretch of quiet intensity, the blood splatters—a head, literally, explodes—and the movie smacks us awake with its aggressive contradictions. Sensitivity and slaughter—all, apparently, in the name of jerking around the audience.

The movie is so well-made that I wanted to believe it had more to say, that there was a reason for its attention-grabbing nastiness. But the Best Director prize that Refn won at the Cannes Film Festival (where audiences reportedly stood up and cheered at the exploding-head scene) was, all evidence indicates, a reward for a well-brought-off prank, essentially congratulating the director on making artifice look substantial. I’m willing to admit that the exploding-head scene is incredibly powerful—it does viscerally reflect the movie’s conflicting states of mind, and allows the slowly mounting tension to erupt, with disgusting liquescence, at just the right time—but things get worse from there (in terms of gore as well as in terms of phoniness).

The epitome (or the nadir, depending on how you look at it) of this “sensitively violent” hypocrisy comes in a scene set in an elevator: the Driver and Irene share a long, slow ride to the ground floor, with the Driver trying to make amends to her for hiding the truth about his partnership with her husband. (I’m not kidding when I say that, after Irene slaps him in the previous scene, the Driver sheds a single, lugubrious tear.) An admittedly gorgeous slow-motion shot—set to an opulent techno-synth love song, with the fluorescent lights of the elevator flickering grandly—has the Driver sweeping Irene to the corner of the elevator and kissing her passionately (here we have a relief of the prolonged sexual tension that mirrors the aforementioned relief of the film’s mounting threat of violence; both moments are technically faultless). But there’s another man in the elevator with them—a villainous hitman, which the Driver detects when he spots a handgun bulging from the man’s jacket. (Why would Irene and the Driver passionately make out in an elevator next to a total stranger? Because it would make a good scene…that’s all that really matters here.) The elevator reaches the bottom floor and violence erupts: the Driver pushes Irene out of the opening door; he proceeds to kill the bodyguard in outrageously violent fashion, essentially crushing his skull by stomping on it incessantly. (Refn reportedly asked Gaspar Noé for advice on how to make the head-stomping scene more visceral and disturbing. You know you’re heading in the wrong direction when you’re asking him for filmmaking advice.) Though the scene was shortened so that the film could receive an R rating, we’re still not spared grisly images revealing the full extent of the victim’s mutilation. Irene backs out of the elevator in horror, as the Driver gapes back at her, wordlessly, bloodstained. We’re sickened…but isn’t it all in the name of love?

How susceptible does Refn think the audience is? I understand that that’s precisely what he’s trying to challenge—our willingness to believe that action movie heroes behave virtuously and rightly, despite the violence they perpetrate—but by pairing his characters’ emotions and their violent atrocities so intimately, he makes them both seem ridiculous. The gore, the brutality, seem like little more than ploys in order to make us sit up and pay attention because they serve the fatuous notion that the Driver is committing them out of love, out of selflessness. Concurrently, the tenderness he feels towards Irene and Benicio just seems like a pose to inject some humanism into an aggressively heartless affair. Cynicism and artifice posing as compassion is the worst kind of anti-humanism imaginable.

How are we supposed to feel about the Driver? It would be fine, maybe even commendable, if the movie didn’t ultimately try to answer that question, instead forcing us to decide. But Drive does ultimately provide an answer for us. Refn goes to great lengths to convey the Driver’s rugged emotionalism, his man-of-few-words vulnerability; he may crush skulls with his feet and force a bullet down a man’s throat with the claw of a hammer, but really he’s just misunderstood and lonely. Swooping slow-motion shots of Irene and the Driver walking down hallways, set to melancholy yet romantic music, as Irene quietly takes in Gosling’s chiseled profile reveal just how enamored we’re supposed to be of his gruff manliness. And even though he’s (at times) maniacally violent, he’s better than the movie’s real villains—a loudmouthed gangster (Ron Perlman) who sets the plot in motion by sending his goons to beat the shit out of Standard; a conniving businessman (Albert Brooks) who emotionlessly stabs a man in the eye with a fork, then repeatedly plunges a butcher’s knife into his throat. The final showdown, in fact, is between one of these villains and the Driver, and when the latter character seems to prevail, driving off into the sunset while undergoing extreme blood loss, there’s no question that we’re supposed to take satisfaction in his victory. (This final showdown is filmed almost entirely in shadow, with sharp objects sticking out of bodies in silhouette—an approach that you might think would be preferable, since it doesn’t indulge in hollowly shocking violence, but which may be just as off-putting by acting infinitely more serious than anything in this movie deserves.) There’s no moral ambiguity here; there are heroes and villains like always, it’s just that the former act more violently than they usually do (or, at least, that violence is shown to us more unflinchingly).

The majority of critics have been duped by Drive’s sleek style, by its initial patience and its quietness, by sensitive performances in the service of paper-thin characters. Make no mistake, to the extent that Drive works beyond its style, it’s almost entirely because of the cast. Gosling is fascinating to watch whether he’s in sad-eyed sensitive mode or psychotic bloodlust mode—the contradiction inherent in his character would seem much more juvenile in another actor’s bloodied hands. Mulligan is miscast but we can’t help but care for her, and their chemistry is remarkable. In supporting roles, Albert Brooks, Bryan Cranston, and Ron Perlman may not make their characters seem like actual human beings (Cranston fares best of all), but at least they make them charismatic and interesting to watch. Like practically everything in Drive, the performances are technically proficient and well-honed, but they disguise an underlying attitude towards the world (and the audience) that is seriously deluded, hypocritical, and condescending.

Why condescending? Because the movie assumes we’ll take its aesthetic at face value: that open ending, those artsy compositions and lighting, the meticulousness of the framing, they all must mean that the movie is serious and deep and extraordinary. But it gives us nothing beyond its style to merit such faux-profundity. Nobody in the movie is deep or interesting enough to warrant Drive’s self-seriousness. The film’s makers assume that audiences today are so cynical and ironic and detached from actual emotion that we’ll take a semblance of emotion for the real thing—in other words, that caring about characters (or, by extension, about human beings) is now just a matter of images and surface appearances, that all it takes is good cinematography to convince us of the movie’s sincerity. More than any Quentin Tarantino movie, Drive antes up the violence and the grittiness of earlier exploitation movies and asks us to believe that they stand for innovation and intelligence. There’s more sincerity in any one scene of Jackie Brown than in all of Drive.

Classics: 'A Matter of Life and Death' (1946)

2011-09-22T09:36:00.001-05:00

A Matter of Life and Death (Stairway to Heaven)
104 minutes, PG, UK
Release Date   December 25, 1946
Distributor   Universal Pictures
Directors   Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger
Written by   Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger
Producers   Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger
Music   Allan Gray
Cinematography Jack Cardiff
Editing Reginald Mills
Production Design   Alfred Junge
Special Effects   Henry Harris and Douglas Woolsey
Cast   David Niven, Kim Hunter, Robert Coote, Kathleen Byron, Richard Attenborough, Bonor Colleano, Joan Maude, Marius Goring, Roger Livesey, Robert Atkins, Bob Roberts, Edwin Max, Betty Potter, Abraham Sofaer, Raymond Massey

You’re sucked in to A Matter of Life and Death (or Stairway to Heaven, as it was known by its American title) before the end of the opening credits, which are etched into an impossibly blue background that soon segues into the lush expanse of the cosmos. Stars and planets shimmer in this animated effects shot, which pans across infinity until it finally alights on earth and dissolves into the story proper. Over this fantastic first shot, the words of a narrator can be heard: “This is the universe. Big, isn’t it?” One of the overwhelming feats that the movie accomplishes is that it convinces us of both the universe’s immensity and of individual humans’ significant role in it: there may be an infinity of things we don’t know, questions we’ll never be able to answer, principles of reality we’re not even minutely aware of, but that doesn’t make us less important in the grand scheme of things. In a particularly romantic and extravagant mood, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger convince us that the universe would stop functioning if humanity was relentlessly violent and murderous towards one another; that, in other words, it’s humanly love that keeps the wheels of heaven and the cosmos rolling—a nakedly sentimental lesson that aches with the sense of urgency bestowed by World War II (A Matter of Life and Death was released in 1946).

If you’re engrossed in A Matter of Life and Death by the end of the second minute, you’re completely entranced by it before the end of the fifth, and maybe around the fifteenth or so you’re bowled over, speechless, enamored. How could you not be? Technicolor has never seemed to pop as much as in Jack Cardiff’s cinematography for Powell and Pressburger films, and of those, never as much as it does here. The oranges and yellows of a burning wreck, the greens of an idyllic garden, the deep red of Kim Hunter’s lipstick—they’re all impossibly lush, as though the color is throbbing, realer than reality. (Here is a movie that incontrovertibly disproves the theory that the more fantastic is a film’s premise, the less immersive that movie’s evocation of reality will be.) The vibrancy of the colors is accentuated because half of the film—the half set in heaven—is shot in silky black-and-white, while all the earthbound scenes dazzle with their color. (The color process is even mentioned by name in one surprisingly self-reflexive line of dialogue, as an angel laments the lack of Technicolor in the heavens.) The color scheme is clever and exquisitely done (every dissolve from black-and-white to color will likely leave you awestruck), but it also perfectly complements what the movie’s about: between eternal heaven and an earthly life in which you’ve found true love, the more magical, hopeful, and blissful of the two worlds is undeniably the latter.

That’s the key to the lasting appeal of Powell and Pressburger’s films: technically masterful though they are, they impress most of all because of their aching humanity, the intense empathy with which they view their characters. At times the vivid emotionalism of their stories, their larger-than-life dramas, can date awkwardly, as they do with Black Narcissus's repressed nuns or The Red Shoes' non-ballet sequences. A Matter of Life and Death, though, carries out a sublime balancing act: as technically innovative as it is achingly sincere, it's the work of humanists as well as stylists.

The movie is about a cosmic oversight: RAF pilot Peter Carter is supposed to die. We meet him at the tail end of a failed air strike sometime during World War II, desperately trying to radio back to land while his wrecked aircraft struggles to remain in the air. He contacts an American radio operator named June and, improbably (but charmingly), they fall in love over the airwaves. Carter quotes classical poetry to her before he leaps from his plane without a parachute—here's a movie so stylized and so unabashedly romantic that quoting Marvell and Sir Walter Raleigh doesn't seem out of place.

Carter is scheduled to die on this night, but he doesn't: the heavenly transporter assigned to retrieve him cannot see him through the dense fog (occasioning a wry joke about typical British weather). So Carter washes ashore and almost immediately finds June bicycling down the beach, a coincidence that would seem contrived if the movie wasn't already operating on such a cosmically-charmed, magically-predestined wavelength. We cut from the gorgeous Technicolor greenery on earth to the black-and-white (though opulently stylized) bureaucracy in heaven, where the angelic transporter responsible for Carter is being reprimanded for his mistake. He's called Conductor 71, but apparently was a French aristocrat beheaded during the Reign of Terror.

Sent back to earth to reclaim Carter's soul, Conductor 71 freezes time as Carter and June canoodle in the forest (the kind dotted with impossibly bright colors) and tries to convince Carter to cede himself to the heavens, thus righting the cosmic balance. Carter unsurprisingly refuses and proposes a trial: he will defend himself in a heavenly court, using June's and his own love as evidence, and argue for the right to continue living.

As usual in fantastic stories like this, we have a parallel storyline that could propose a rational explanation: June suspects that Carter's visions are hallucinations brought on by brain trauma, and enlists the help of her friend, Doctor Reeves, in diagnosing him. The relationship between Reeves and Carter is fascinating to watch, a burgeoning friendship built out of mutual respect and a reckoning with unexplainable laws of the universe that they can't hope to fathom. (David Niven and Roger Livesey, as Carter and Reeves respectively, make their friendship a moving one; neither actor has ever given as sensitive a performance as they do here.) Reeves believes that Carter's hallucinations and faltering health are the result of a concussion, the effects of which may be alleviated by brain surgery. The entire climax of Carter's heavenly trial, then, may be nothing more than Carter's own anesthetized brink-of-death vision, a parallel fantasy in which he's allowed to plead for the right to go on living.

Released in the immediate aftermath of World War II, A Matter of Life and Death's impassioned plea for love and brotherhood is honest, direct. The movie tells us, adamantly and sweetly, that love is its own heaven on earth—preferable, in any case, to the legions of G.I.s that we see filling the heavens in A Matter of Life and Death. The message seems less cloying when we consider it as a desperately hopeful response to the ravages of war.

A Matter of Life and Death's cosmic courtroom

Late in the film, a showdown occurs during Carter's heavenly trial between the prosecutor—an American named Abraham Farlan, who was killed by British soldiers during the Revolutionary War—and Carter's British defense counsel, a semi-major character whose death I won't give away here. A surprisingly long sequence (maybe fifteen minutes in all) consists of their proud, vitriolic back-and-forth, a dialogue reflecting fraught British-US tensions at the time. (After the war, much of the British public was resentful of the lingering presence of US soldiers in some of their cities.) The debate turns increasingly towards the merits and injustices of each respective culture—even a dull British cricket match and a grating American pop tune are used as detrimental “evidence” against each other. The argument goes deeper, addressing values, crimes against humanity—slavery, the exploitation of foreign cultures, invasion. An all-American jury is eventually proposed to act as demonstration of the country's sense of justice and honor—a jury that contains a multicultural assortment of Americans, reflecting both a nod to American “melting pot” eclecticism and a criticism of the United States' takeover of cultures. (An all-black regiment of the American army seated in the audience at this heavenly trial—as well as the appearance of numerous slaves in heaven—offer potent visual illustrations of American racial inequality.) For a long stretch, the movie turns away from Carter altogether, instead focusing on British-American antagonism. The move at first seems bold and disorienting, and definitely adds unexpected folds into the fabric of the narrative, but really the whole film could be described as “about” British-American relations—considering that June is British and Carter American. In the end, then, the love between June and Carter offers a union between both the man and the woman and between the US and the UK—hopeful in every way. While the lengthy dialogue between the American and British counsellors come off as slightly didactic or transparent, this should be seen as an admirably direct and earnest address to the audience—propaganda, in a way, but with the most beneficial aims in mind. Like Chaplin's climactic speech in Monsieur Verdoux (1947), we're directly asked to consider war a massive injustice, an inhumane crime committed by states against multitudes of citizens; the speeches in both films may be didactic, but only because war is the catalyst and social dialogue the aim.

A Matter of Life and Death fascinates beyond its sociopolitical subtext. It seems to hit upon a new idea suddenly, in the middle of a scene, yet somehow incorporate it naturally into the movie as a whole. We are introduced to Dr. Reeves as he is operating a camera obscura in his attic, essentially allowing him a godlike reflection of everything going on in his village in the immediate vicinity. The images his camera obscura offers us are gorgeous, fuzzy, dreamlike—Dr. Reeves' elaborate mirror setup acts as a parallel to the film camera, offering us visual access to worlds we otherwise would not know. This brief introduction to Dr. Reeves doesn't seem to have much of a point beyond allowing Powell (who typically addressed the directing duties, as Pressburger concentrated on the screenplay) and Jack Cardiff an excuse to experiment with perspective and framing and indulge in their visual inclinations. But it also seems like a natural diversion somehow, and warmly suggests Dr. Reeves as an inquisitive, playful, enthusiastic innovator—a scientist who stands in contrast to Carter's flights of fancy. Or, later, consider a brief cutaway to a group of British soldiers rehearsing a performance of A Midsummer Night's Dream—a moment partially played for comedy, but also an appropriate allusion for a film that's somewhat about the knotty relationship between gods and mortals. In short, the movie is lively, intuitive, and incredibly fast-paced, fascinating for the unexpected directions in which the agile narrative takes us.

The special effects are rightfully celebrated as some of the most innovative and beautiful of the time (or ever), and there's no question that the vast expanse of the heavens—the seemingly endless staircase, flanked by immense statues, that stretches into infinity; the massive courtroom, a sort of floating coliseum, somehow surrounded by blankets of wispy clouds and shimmering sky—are astonishing in their vastness, their meticulousness. The sets themselves are elaborate blends of matte paintings, models, and enormous locales with seemingly hundreds of extras—a fantastic visualization of an impossibly beautiful heaven. (Heaven in this movie seems remarkably like our typical image of the afterlife from fables and myths—which makes you wonder if its portrayal in the movie reflected popular culture's conception of heaven or if it helped to entrench it in our cultural collective.) The most awe-inspiring shot in the whole movie begins in Technicolor in an emergency room, tilts down and slowly dissolves into a serious of bubbles erupting in liquid, dazzling in color (an influence for the opening of Kwaidan?), until the image dissolves to black-and-white, tilting further down over the milky, cloudy expanse of heaven to introduce us to the first image of the courtroom—an endpoint that is an immense composition in itself.

But A Matter of Life and Death is also a “movie movie”—meaning its splendor, its unique power, can't be encapsulated by words. It's the kind of thing you have to see to believe, an appraisal which, I would suggest, is appropriate for all masterful cinema. The foregoing paragraphs have not, I'm sure, come close to the bewildering effect of this movie's stunning color or precise compositions, or the bleeding sincerity, the charming rosy-eyed optimism, that it offers.

New Releases: 'Another Earth'

2011-09-04T23:23:00.001-05:00

So far it's been a strong year for movies both American and otherwise, but we're never safe from grating pseudo-profound parables about tragic destiny and redemptive second chances—a lesson drearily reiterated by Another Earth. The movie won the Special Jury Prize at Sundance, where it reportedly received a standing ovation (according to Variety), and was almost immediately picked up by major indie distributor Fox Searchlight—all of which suggest that some audiences are still taking one-note, morose performances, grainy handheld cinematography, and head-smackingly obvious metaphors as signs of profundity and creativity. Really, though, the only sign of uniqueness to be found anywhere in Another Earth is in its basic premise, and even this shard of originality is limited to a few luminescent shots of the titular earth doppelganger suspended in the sky.

Brit Marling (also credited as producer and cowriter) stars as Rhoda Williams, a promising 17-year-old astrophysics student who has just been accepted to MIT. On the night of her high school graduation, Rhoda celebrates excessively at a house party that's shown to us in obnoxious two-second snippets—director/editor Mike Cahill employs the laziest brand of "naturalism" imaginable, cutting so restlessly that we can only assume a longer stretch of continuity would reveal how unsuccessful he is at conveying human behavior (this is a conclusion we'll come to sooner or later anyway). Driving home, Rhoda hears a news story on the radio about the discovery of another planet: a second earth, suddenly discovered just outside of our own earth's atmosphere, with unknown physical properties. Drunkenly, Rhoda cranes her head out the car window and gazes at the parallel planet, majestic against the night sky. She crashes head-on into another car; a woman and her young son are killed instantly, while the man in the driver's seat is put into a coma. It's a sign of the movie's laziness that the family is blissfully chatting away about the name of the toy in the young boy's hands immediately before he's killed; this isn't just your average nuclear family, this is something so blissfully perfect it's destined for cruel annihilation at the hands of a sadistic Higher Being and an overly calculating writer/director.

Rhoda is sent to prison for four years for driving while intoxicated and vehicular manslaughter; when she's released, Brit Marling's dead-eyed stare (conveyed via shaky, grubby-looking shots of her character staring out of train windows while an aggressively somber score drones on the soundtrack—courtesy of a band named Fall On Your Sword, whose music is as bad as their name) tells us that Rhoda is, you know, sad. (Marling has been lauded for her performance, which is baffling—she operates on one unchanging wavelength for the entire movie. That's why we can't take her plight seriously—a performance that only aims for soul-crushing guilt can't even approach believability or empathy.) Rhoda takes a dreary janitorial job at a high school and eventually approaches the man whose life she ruined four years ago—the driver of the car she hit, a former composer named John Burroughs (William Mapother), who used to teach composition at Yale University. Another Earth is obviously concerned with the depression and hopelessness we all go through as everyday human beings, given that its two protagonists are once-promising intellectuals attached to MIT and Yale—does the movie assume we would be less interested in their difficult situations if they were just two hardworking nobodies, toiling away at nine-to-five jobs?

Anyway, Rhoda shows up at the home of Dr. Burroughs. She's rehearsed her apology, a confession that she hopes will alleviate some of her debilitating guilt. Suddenly face-to-face with the man whose wife and son she killed, though—he's now an alcoholic oaf in a refuse-stained bathrobe, a figure we might expect to see in an Off-Off-Off Broadway play about 1930s tenement dwellers—she pretends to be a consultant for a cleaning agency and offers to pick up his deteriorating home, free of charge. He accepts halfheartedly. She keeps on coming back, cleaning his house (get it, she cleans up his life!) and tearing up the checks he gives her afterwards. They develop an attachment somewhere between helpless desperation and genuine attachment, a relationship punctuated by clunky visual metaphors like one of Burroughs' deceased son's old T-shirts, which Rhoda absentmindedly sends through the wash, predictably instigating a feverish (but, needless to say, oh-so-humanly-imperfect) rant by Burroughs replete with twitching histrionics. This is the kind of movie in which no relationship can exist without a prop department's worth of meaningful things.

Four years after the discovery of that parallel planet, it's still unexplored when Rhoda is released from prison. Communications sent to Earth 2 have gone unanswered; no evidence has suggested that the planet is habitable, and it's never explained how or why the planet simply popped up right next door to ours'. (The whims of a lazy pair of melodramatists are the most likely explanation.) Actually, this vaguely sci-fi setup, which almost inadvertently raises a slew of metaphysical questions the movie never begins to explore, remains compelling for a while. Beyond its potency as a dreamy visual accent, the existence of Earth 2 makes you believe (or, at least, hope) that the movie is going in some promising directions. The best scene in Another Earth is a televised radio transmission from one of "our" NASA officials to a seemingly abandoned control center on Earth 2; suddenly, though, this official's radio call is answered—astonishingly, by her parallel self, her doppelganger, in this alternate universe. It's a tense, mysterious, unpretentious moment, and if the movie had at least touched upon some of the quandaries raised by this bizarre metaphysical moment, it would have at least been interesting.

But it becomes apparent almost immediately after this suspenseful scene that the ominous parallelism of Earth 2 simply exists as an allegory for the lame existential crises experienced by Rhoda and John. Rhoda is obsessed with the parallel planet; desperate for escape, and clinging to the possibility that, on Earth 2, her "other self" never drunkenly killed a woman and young boy, she enters a contest in which the winners will be chosen to join the first civilian excursion to Earth 2. Some of these parallelisms would have been intriguing if the movie had handled them with any dexterity, insight, compassion, or grace, but these are concepts that Cahill is apparently unaware of. Will Rhoda win the essay contest, in which she professes her guilt and asks, self-loathingly, for a second chance? How will the outcome of this affect her relationship with John? Will she have an epiphany and realize the true emotional value of the tragedy that she has undergone—a realization complete with a frenzied scene in which Rhoda runs at breakneck speed at the side of the road to overcome her guilt, a scene which surely must have had Cahill shedding a single tear behind the camera? Since the movie won esteem at the Sundance Film Festival, the answers to all of those questions should be easy to guess.

Levity, spontaneity, originality—these are things that Another Earth is unconcerned with. It's so desperate to prove itself as something deep, something real, something important that it ends up as something diametrically opposite. This is a common tendency among first time directors (Another Earth is Cahill's first feature film), but at least sometimes we can acknowledge and understand this tendency (the attempt to make a mark in a film industry that's dauntingly hard to break in to) and recognize the natural skills, technical or otherwise, of the woman or man behind the camera. Not so in this case: judging from Another Earth, Cahill has no promising tricks or ideas or sentiments in his arsenal.

Am I being too hard on him, and on Another Earth? The movie is bad, but after all, it's just a typical American indie drama, one of many trite, lifeless, self-involved, precious cinematic dirges that find success at Sundance or Tribeca—no better or worse than most. The answer is yes, I am being too hard on the movie and on Cahill—because my frustration should be directed towards American independent cinema in general, not primarily at the filmmakers but, just as importantly, at the distributors and film programmers and industry "pundits" and scenesters and marketers who take this as something valuable, who give it a standing ovation, who put this forward as something we should celebrate as emblematic of American independent moviemaking. Give Cahill and Another Earth's crew credit for one thing: they've made an industry believe they're seeing something new and enlightening. This means the shame should be placed on the movers and shakers (the ones who decide which movies are picked up for distribution—which movies American audiences will see) who have bought into Another Earth's dog-and-pony show. They see grainy handheld cinematography, vacant and morose stares from attractive newcomers, and stories revolving around a distinctly non-humanistic pain and suffering and, desperate to pitch ticket-buyers that new underdog success story, see something worth selling. At least Hollywood knows what it's selling: brand merchandise that may not give consumers nutrition but, a lot of the time, gives them entertainment. Indie distributors like Fox Searchlight (which, needless to say, operates at the behest of 20th Century Fox—about as far from independent as you can get) pitch us gourmet organic food and then regurgitate slop onto movie screens.

Flashback, 1981: 'Prince of the City'

2011-09-02T01:15:00.001-05:00

This post is the first in a new series I'm starting: viewings and responses to films released as close to thirty years ago as possible. The first entry is Sidney Lumet's Prince of the City, originally released by Orion Pictures and Warner Bros. on August 21, 1981. (Yeah, I'm a little late on this one—I have a busy work week to blame.) I hope these posts will offer a snapshot of the cinematic and social climate in 1981, and will be an interesting way to chart developments and/or innovations in film since then.

Why 1981, one might ask? Two reasons, both of them mostly arbitrary. The first is that I have often neglected films of the 1980s and early 1990s much more than any other historical era—while I've enthusiastically explored silent film, classics of the early sound era to the mid-twentieth century, and developing New Waves and changes in international cinema in the 1960s and 1970s, I for some reason have been mostly uninterested in films of the 80s and 90s, until now. Secondly, I was born in 1984 and did not really start paying attention to movies as a social art form until the late 1990s, so I feel like it will be interesting to further explore and chart the changing cultural climate of the era into which I was born.

Prince of the City   167m., R, USA
Release Date August 21, 1981
Distributors   Orion Pictures & Warner Bros. Pictures
Director Sidney Lumet
Writers Jay Presson Allen and Sidney Lumet, based on the book by Robert Daley
Producers Jay Presson Allen and Burtt Harris
Music Paul Chihara
Cinematography Andrzej Bartkowiak
Editor John J. Fitzstephens
Production Design Tony Walton
Cast   Treat Williams, Jerry Orbach, Richard Foronjy, Don Billett, Kenny Marino, Carmine Caridi, Tony Page, Norman Parker, Paul Roebling, Bob Balaban, James Tolkan, Steve Inwood, Lindsay Crouse, Matthew Laurance, Tony Turco, Ron Maccone, Ron Karabatsos, Tony DiBenedetto, Tony Munafo, Robert Christian, Lee Richardson, Lane Smith, Cosmo Allegretti, Bobby Alto, Michael Beckett, Burton Collins

Commercially unsuccessful and middlingly reviewed upon its release (it was deemed inferior to Lumet's 1973 crime drama Serpico), Prince of the City is now generally seen as one of Lumet's strongest hours (or, to be more precise, nearly-three-hours). And that it is, though I don't consider myself one of the director's fans: too often, he oversells visual metaphors with a deadening obviousness, and he sometimes allows his actors to overplay or to encapsulate their characters in broad, simple character traits. While his background in directing TV series and made-for-television movies in the 1950s and '60s can lend his films a swift, tough conciseness, it can also make them overly schematic in their narrative arcs—as though he were still working under the rigorous scheduling and episodic demands of working for a television studio. (This blueprint-following brand of filmmaking especially hampers his 2007 film Before the Devil Knows You're Dead.)

But it's easy to dismiss such quibbles in the context of Lumet's long career, which undeniably expressed the cohesive style and thematic concerns of an unassuming auteur. The director (who passed away less than five months ago, on April 9th) offered us at least two great films, 12 Angry Men (1957) and Dog Day Afternoon (1975), and several almost-great ones (Network [1976], The Verdict [1982]). He has been deemed one of the quintessential "New York directors"—not unlike Martin Scorsese or Woody Allen, the director's adopted hometown is a driving character in many of his films. Some of his works would be inconceivable set in another city. He also returned consistently to the theme (which always fascinates me) of how large-scale institutions (television networks, police forces, urban governments, the court system, hospitals and health care) influence the lives of individuals embroiled within that system—and, correspondingly, how individuals may actively resist or refashion those systems.

Prince of the City is one of the finest examples in Lumet's filmography of both of these tendencies. His status as a New York filmmaker has never been more impressively displayed than in this film: the city is an indelible backdrop here, a writhing, squalid creature that instills moral crises in more than a few characters. The aspect of Prince of the City I'll likely remember more vividly than any other is its encapsulation of a pre-Giuliani New York, a snapshot of a city that could not be more foreign to us than the New York we now know. Like the city as seen in Taxi Driver (1976), Chantal Akerman's News from Home (1977), or Bette Gordon's Variety (1983), New York here is a grittily evocative contradiction: glittering and disgusting, monumental and festering, impressive and disheartening. Prince of the City is absolutely a product of its time and place, which here should be taken as a thunderstruck compliment rather than a disparagement—it is the most immersive portrayal of New York in its Ed Koch days that I've ever seen.

The film is also a complex, sprawling document of the ways that numerous forces of law and order interacted (and, to an extent, still interact) in the city. The story concerns an esteemed narcotics agent, Danny Ciello (Treat Williams), who undergoes a crisis of conscience (and self-identity) and decides to work with the FBI's Chase Commission in exposing corrupt agents on the New York police force. Like any other undercover narcotics agent at the time, Ciello relies upon addicts and junkies for information, often being forced to supply them with hard drugs in order to get them to cooperate (and, more distressingly, simply to survive). One of the film's strongest scenes is his excursion to the underbelly of Manhattan at three in the morning to console an informant suffering from withdrawal; rescuing the shivering, desperate man from a grimy alleyway during a rainstorm, Ciello drives him from one supplier to another, looking for anything that will placate him (heroin, coke) and keep him in Ciello's good graces. Eventually, Ciello winds up chasing down another junkie named Jose, beating him mercilessly in order to score two bags of coke for his informant. Shortly thereafter, Ciello, in the midst of self-loathing, drives Jose to a decrepit rattrap of an apartment covered with graffiti—then simply watches in helpless horror as Jose beats his girlfriend for getting high off of his stash. Swiftly and unforgettably, Prince of the City evokes a cesspool of a world in which the close relationship between narcs and junkies makes it easy, as Ciello later confesses, to mistake heroes for villains, right for wrong—to commit unspeakable acts and defend them, sometimes self-righteously, as ultimately moral behavior.

It is this blurring of previously absolute moral codes that leads Ciello to provide testimony to federal agents investigating corruption. Initially, he is told that their targets will be the true overlords of the urban drug trade: wealthy suppliers, lawyers, judges, mayors, city officials that are bought off in order to look the other way, or even to facilitate the profitable narcotics industry. Ciello is immediately (and, as it turns out, rightly) distrustful of the agents who approach him, including Rick Cappalino (Norman Parker), a kind, mild-mannered young agent who genuinely respects and empathizes with Ciello but has no way to defend him from the manipulations of the system in which they find themselves. (Parker gives what may be the most sensitive performance in the whole movie, which seems amazing to me—I had never heard of him before, and besides this film he appeared mostly in television series.) Ciello vociferously tells the FBI he will never betray the trust and camaraderie of his partners in narcotics, he will never rat on them, and at first he is told he will never have to. But of course, as powerful corporate and business agents are targeted by the FBI and exposed by Ciello, accusations against him and his squad force him to expose their past indiscretions—confessions which ultimately have deadly, soul-shattering consequences.

The brotherhood between Ciello and his partners—and the antagonism between Ciello and the federal agents who work for the Chase Commission (and, especially, between Ciello and the prosecutors who consider him a corrupt rat but still hypocritically rely on his testimonies)—is powerfully established by a huge and mostly impressive ensemble cast. Countless crime dramas and police stories have been about the unbreakable bond between the partners who work together, but rarely has that bond been as believable as in Prince of the City. Even when Ciello is initially pressured to deliver information about fellow cops, he tells his partners (drunkenly, despondently), and they respond to him with understanding, sensitivity. (An abrupt cut to a low-angle close-up of Ciello on the brink of madness and self-disgust in this scene is devastating.) They still don't believe he could or would ever betray them. The fact that he inevitably does is an indictment not against Ciello but against the system: the faceless, interconnected network of corporate, government, judicial, and police institutions that conspire to exploit one man in order to obtain a conviction, to offer their functionaries promotions, or to protect or dismantle a lucrative criminal enterprise.

Prince of the City is the most thematically complex of Lumet's movies I've seen—there's actually much more to be said about the film's employment of characters emblematic of different social forces and how they respond to and coerce Ciello's behavior. (He's a man who mistakenly believes he's in control of his own fate, his own morality—the movie is tragic partially because he eventually realizes how untrue this is.) It's tempting to claim that a movie like this—so long, so complex, so dark in tone and subject matter, so attuned to character and to societal forces—could no longer be bankrolled by a major studio, but this isn't exactly true: recent epic crime dramas like Zodiac (2007) and The Dark Knight (2008—more allegorical but almost as insightful) remind us that signs of creativity, intelligence, and power can still be found in Hollywood action movies.

What may be peculiarly early-80s about Prince of the City, though (aside from its garish costuming—itself a time-capsule wonder to behold, or bemoan), is its stylistic simplicity, its un-flashiness. Again, this may be largely the result of Lumet's origins in television, which serve the atmosphere and elaborate themes of Prince of the City extremely well. It seems like most crime dramas made today would be distinguished by a certain aesthetic panache: to return to the two examples above, Zodiac abounds in David Fincher's elaborate, sleek, razor-sharp form (though at least there it serves a purpose), and The Dark Knight delivers its themes through operatic superhero machinations. Or we may think of Michael Mann's so-beautiful-they're-hollow digital compositions (in his movies, the overabundance of style is itself a form of substance), or the self-conscious grittiness of movies like Narc (2002) or We Own the Night (2007), with their grainy handheld cinematography.

While Lumet does include a few stylistic flourishes—like cuts to the identification cards of policemen or federal agents accompanied by throbbing electronic music, or quotes from Robert Leuci, the narcotics officer who was the real-life inspiration for Ciello, splayed at the bottom of the screen in bold newspaper-esque lettering—for the most part his aesthetic choices are subtle, careful, well-thought-out. He gives the impression of a documentary-like remove from the material, but his cutting between expanded extreme long shots in wide angle (which make the characters near-microscopic), solid, static medium shots that simply observe groups in conversation, and emphatic close-ups of characters at the height of self-loathing or desperation reveal a sensitive knowledge of the material's emotional and psychological undercurrents. It doesn't seem overblown to claim that Lumet's style here is reminiscent of the precise yet "invisible" style practiced by classical Hollywood masters like William Wyler or Anthony Mann, though the subject matter is considerably (and justifiably) darkened and deepened for its early-1980s setting.

The weakest aspect of the movie, as I see it, is Treat Williams's performance in the lead, though this is something I'm still debating: his performance is either completely original or drastically off-base in its interpretation of Ciello's early moral crisis. There's a manic energy to it that seems miscalculated early on, though this desperation makes more sense as the movie progresses and Ciello becomes increasingly distraught by guilt, moral confusion, and self-disgust. An early scene has Williams shouting to the proverbial rafters, rabidly defending his impending actions to two federal agents, in a long and frankly irritating scene; the point, it seems, is to recognize Ciello's fraught attempts to rationalize his inner conflicts, his bipolar attitude towards the ethical leap and calamitous risk he's about to take, but this could be conveyed in a manner more subtle, more believable, and more in tune with how the character behaves at this early point in the film. I wonder if this style of overacting, of absolute self-abandonment and immersion, is something more common in movies of the late 1970s and 80s—a time, perhaps, when previous theories of Method acting coalesced with the expressive aesthetic techniques of American New Wave directors like Scorsese, Brian De Palma, and Francis Ford Coppola. After all, this bombastic acting style also irrevocably harmed Lumet's Serpico—a film that features such an overblown Pacino performance it's impossible to believe in the main character as a real human being (obviously, a quality that does not work well in a character study). In any case, my ambivalence towards Williams's performance corresponds strangely well to the movie's own ambivalence towards the character of Ciello—to the film's credit, it never decides absolutely whether its protagonist is a selfless moral crusader or a self-righteous hypocrite, a moral complexity that is unforgettably envisioned by the final freeze frame.

Classics: 'La Ronde' (1950) and 'The Earrings of Madame de...' (1953)

2011-08-27T16:32:00.011-05:00

Max Ophuls

After watching both La Ronde and The Earrings of Madame de... over the last week, it seems safe to say that Max Ophüls is one of the greatest stylists that cinema has ever known. Stanley Kubrick, Paul Thomas Anderson, and Robert Altman have claimed him as a major influence, among many others. It does not seem too hyperbolic to claim that every graceful, extended camera movement employing a dolly or crane—especially the kind that floats leisurely through or over an interior space, following an actor's movements—are at least slightly indebted to Ophüls.

The pertinent question, maybe, is whether or not Ophüls' characters, ideas, and emotions are as beautiful as his camera movements—or, really, whether they're more than just beautiful, whether there's some tumult, some crisis, that affects us as powerfully as the aesthetic does. After all, Ophüls' films typically concern absurdly elegant aristocrats existing in a historical period (in La Ronde and The Earrings of Madame de..., late-19th and early-20th century Europe), struggling to cope with calamitous affairs of the heart, suffering from love and lust and heartache but ever maintaining a veneer of beauty and untouchability in the process. For Ophüls' detractors, these movies are about dilettantes who modern (especially middle- or lower-class) audiences couldn't care less about—characters defined more by their prettiness than by their emotions. For his legion of avid admirers, though—which included, famously, Pauline Kael and Andrew Sarris (this may have been the one subject both of them agreed upon)—Ophüls broke through the brittle shell of aristocratic respectability to show the pain and maddening desire that lingered underneath. His always-roaming camera, they argued, patiently observed the possessions and elegant environs of wealthy characters to emphasize the significance of small tokens, tangible things, as they fit into turbulent lives. They were accoutrements for people, but also embellishments for a sort of cosmic cycle of desire, love, and loss—props in a vast and tragic comedy seemingly staged for God's own amusement. The predominance of things and decorations in Ophüls' films also act as juxtapositional foreshadowing: their houses and their belongings may be in order, but everything else (everything inside) is in disarray.

It seems fans of Ophüls are rarely timid in their enthusiasm: many celebrations of the director proclaim him the most beautiful, the most humane, the most sensitive and underappreciated visionary in the history of movies. (Molly Haskell, in this excellent essay, lauds Ophüls as a defender of unassuming heroes and heroines, Stendhalian characters whose freedom and wealth are tenuous and unstable—values that could be forsaken in an instant for love and passion.) I may not go quite so far in my praise for the director, but I am (after seeing these two films, and with fond memories of his 1948 American movie Letter from an Unknown Woman still popping up constantly) unequivocally a fan. His camera movements and his characters may be pretty, but both the style and the characters are hiding something considerably painful underneath.

La Ronde

Admittedly, this may be harder to detect in La Ronde than in either Letter from an Unknown Woman or The Earrings of Madame de.... Ophüls' 1950 film was the first he made back in France after his brief tenure in Hollywood (which wielded a small number of too-little-known gems), and, as Terrence Raferty points out, La Ronde exhibits Ophüls in a playful, unabashedly wry manner that epitomizes his “European” sensibilities. (Usually, that descriptor means nothing and reeks of ethnocentrism, but with Ophüls it actually makes sense: a born German who worked in his home country, France, Austria, Italy, and the Netherlands as well as the U.S., he shared a cosmopolitan world-weariness, the bittersweet displacement of a refugee from his own land, and a sympathetic romantic fatalism with his European countrymen—although the winking self-consciousness displayed in La Ronde is a little closer to American comedies of the time.)

La Ronde is adapted from a notorious Arthur Schnitzler play that was written in 1897, finally performed in Budapest in 1912, and eventually staged in Schnitzler's hometown of Vienna in 1921. The play concerns a sexual merry-go-round, traversed over ten scenes, ingeniously plotted: in the first, a prostitute makes love to a soldier; in the next, the soldier seduces a seemingly naïve young chambermaid (who reveals herself to be more headstrong than we may have assumed); in the next, the chambermaid is taken by her fumbling employer; and so on, until the licentious cycle (“the ring” of the title) completes itself.

Ophüls' film adaptation introduces a new character: an elegantly bemused, disarmingly meta narrator who operates a literal merry-go-round as the sexual cycle rages on around him. In the first scene, this narrator takes us behind the camera, noting the artificiality of the studio set, even pointing out the lighting setups and cameras before the film itself gets underway. Later, Ophüls will cut to this narrator at the exact moment that a young male character (who fancies himself a virile stallion) is unable to perform in bed; after tinkering with the mechanics of the carousel for a minute, however, the narrator is able to kickstart the young man's libido and thrust the carousel back into motion. There's even another scene in which the narrator can be seen cutting an explicit sequence from a strip of celluloid with a pair of scissors—Ophüls finds numerous ways to dance around onscreen sex in this film, with characteristic flair and cleverness.

Although there are melancholy sequences (the best scene in the film is an uneasy dialogue between an aged, wealthy aristocrat and his young, beautiful wife, who realize, through evasive and somewhat defensive testimonies, that they still care for each other after years of sexless marriage), the overall tone of La Ronde is spry and relatively carefree. The film is, of course, about rampant infidelity and unimpeded lust, but the audience never sees any tearful fallouts between lovers because of this disloyalty. We witness instead, as the narrator points out, the familiar machinations of the game of sex: amorous men and women playing off of each other, embodying all manner of lust and flirtation and desire. The central metaphor is, of course, that carousel, but we may also think of a chessboard: one of the movie's prime delights is that we can chart the characters' strategic come-ons and invitations, reveling in the excitement of sex as a game to be played.

This may all sound very icy and hollowly clever, but for all of its lasciviousness, La Ronde is surprisingly sweet. The most charming sequence in the film may also be the most aesthetically impressive: a prolonged flirtation between an awkward young man-of-the-house and his beautiful chambermaid, who bat double entendres back and forth as they circle around each other in a vast drawing room. When their mutual attraction makes itself clear, the camera dazzlingly follows the young man as he half-runs to all of the windows in the room, drawing the shutters closed. (This scene is also incredibly sexy, thanks mostly to Simone Simon as the chambermaid, Marie.) There may not be much to La Ronde besides its effortlessly elegant sense of humor, its dazzling camerawork, and engaging performances by a huge international cast. In other words, it's light as air, but that happens to be enough: Ophüls' enthusiasm for the art of moviemaking as well as for the romantic games people play becomes contagious almost immediately.

The Earrings of Madame de...

If La Ronde is a somewhat lightweight offering from an undeniable master craftsman, then The Earrings of Madame de..., made three years later, is a tremendously powerful film that expands and deepens its creator's sensibility. I may still prefer Letter from an Unknown Woman, which burns with unattainable desire and the passion of mad love, but I have to admit that Madame de... may be the more sensitive film: all three of its main characters are the Stendhalian protagonists that Haskell cited—unheroic people who think they are free and happy, only to realize how trapped and unfulfilled they really are, forsaking everything for a taste of true love and passion.

“There is no happiness in joy,” says a character in another Ophüls film, Le Plaisir—a sentiment that helps to explain the melancholy power of Madame de.... The titular Countess (who remains unnamed throughout the movie—her plight is universal, not confined to the wealthy) sells the earrings that were given to her by her husband on their wedding night. At the beginning of the film, they obviously mean little to her; yet, as the film progresses, they take on greater emotional significance (both for her and for the audience), especially when they are re-gifted to her, through a taunting twist of fate, by a dashing Italian Baron with whom she is helplessly in love. The sequence in which the Countess and the Baron Fabrizio Donati waltz, night after night, falling deeper into the throes of love and passion, is rightfully celebrated as one of the most sublime in the history of movies: a series of dissolves orchestrates the temporal movement of the editing with the spatial movement of the gracefully-waltzing camera, as weeks are compressed into minutes and helpless passion is somehow, miraculously, visualized. The sequence seems effortless, light as air, but was clearly very meticulously planned out. Like the dance numbers in Swing Time or Top Hat—which seem similarly effortless but took months of preparation for Astaire and Rogers to perfect—the ballroom scene in The Earrings of Madame de... makes us believe that it's possible to convey the deepest love onscreen. (Maybe the most gifted composer can suggest passion sonically, and maybe the most brilliant writer can suggest its unequaled beauty, but don't movies seem especially suited to conveying such an inexpressible emotion?)

Lest we assume The Earrings of Madame de... is just a beautiful movie about beautiful people falling in love, it's actually about how impenetrable these characters assume themselves to be, and how perfect they consider their lives to be. At first, admittedly, we may be put off by these characters. The Countess is selfish and manipulative; she knows how to play off of the men around her (including, and especially, her husband), staging fainting fits and flirting publicly with aristocrats, confidently aware of her standing in the Parisian upper class. She's not really vilified—she's simply abiding by the expectations and opportunities afforded to her in 1900 Paris. We sympathize with her inflexible social position and the behavior expected of her, but we also are dismayed by the value she places in material objects (and, maybe, the extent to which she sees other people as material objects). Her husband, an esteemed General, is hardly more likeable: a tyrant who is aware that his wife no longer loves him, the General simply accepts this as a consequence of aristocratic marriage in his society, finding social standing more valuable than intimacy between a husband and wife. All of this changes when the Baron enters the scene, however. Lives of shallow materialism and invincible pride are suddenly revealed to be empty; people and possessions are discovered to have real value. Those telling earrings reveal to the Countess how shallow her life had been; they reveal to the General how powerless he was over his wife, precisely because there was no love between them; and they reveal to the Baron how willing he is to sacrifice everything for a love he knows can never be recognized by society. If Ophüls' films can be accused of a sort of aristocratic aestheticism, The Earrings of Madame de... would seem to absolutely deflate that criticism: all of the beauty and wealth of their lives revealed to be totally meaningless.

Here, the agile camera movements are in the service of the actors, the characters: no stylistic flourish exists for its own sake. The glacially-paced tracking shot that opens the movie, which scans the Countess's jewelry and clothes like an auctioneer appraising goods, reveals how little these possessions mean to her; a remarkably swift camera during the scene in which the Countess and the Baron first meet (at a Parisian customs office) conveys the excitement, the giddiness, that the Baron feels upon first seeing her.

As sensitive as Ophüls is—and as finely tuned as Christian Macras's cinematography is to the movements and sentiments of the characters—the film may ultimately excel because of its cast. Is Danielle Darrieux's Madame de... one of the most romantic, tragic, unexpectedly powerful characters in the history of movies? The smoothness of her features, the deepness of her eyes, define elegance, yet she flawlessly allows traces of her sadness, her despair, her restrained passion, to suggest themselves. I was unsure of how much the movie would affect me emotionally until relatively late in the film, when, at a ball, the Countess is simultaneously spurned by the Baron (who finally discovers the real origins of the earrings he gave her as a gift) and forbidden to wear those earrings by her jilted husband. Darrieux's absolutely deflated performance in this scene is heartbreaking, especially because she so desperately struggles to maintain a semblance of elegance and cool resolve. Charles Boyer, meanwhile, as her husband—the cold, confident, yet not unfeeling General—uses his untroubled demeanor to present a man totally unwilling to believe there are cracks in his hypothetically perfect life. Boyer is no less excellent at allowing fractions of pain and jealousy to sneak into his cool stoicism. (Boyer and Darrieux had played lovers in the 1936 film Mayerling, by Anatole Litvak. It was a huge success, and almost twenty years later, the memory of their onscreen chemistry must surely have affected audiences seeing The Earrings of Madame de...—as though the couple who fell in love in Mayerling would eventually become the distant husband and wife seen in Ophüls' film.) And finally, the great director Vittorio De Sica, incomparably dashing and hopelessly romantic as the Baron, epitomizes one of those aforementioned “small heroes”—a man who has the bravery to simply obey passion, give in to love, though he knows without a doubt that it will destroy him.

The immediate pleasures of Ophüls's filmmaking—the silky, acrobatic black-and-white cinematography, the lush costumes, beautiful actors, opulent set design, meticulous plotting—may bring some viewers to the assumption that its style is more than its substance, that the director's humanity, his characterizations, couldn't possibly compare to his virtuoso aesthetic. Maybe not—but in Letter from an Unknown Woman and The Earrings of Madame de..., they come close. There is no joy in happiness; beauty has never been so sad.

New Releases: 'Beats Rhymes & Life: The Travels of A Tribe Called Quest'

2011-08-16T19:34:00.012-05:00

The most shocking moment of Beats Rhymes & Life, Michael Rapaport's look at the rise and fall of one of hip-hop's most influential and eclectic groups, occurs late in the movie. Maseo, a member of De La Soul, performing with A Tribe Called Quest at 2008's Rock the Bells tour (where estranged members Q-Tip and Phife Dawg reunited for what were allegedly their last live performances), is asked if he thinks Tribe will ever play in front of an audience again. “I hope not,” is his immediate, unexpected answer—and this coming from one of the group's most devout, respectful admirers.

By this point, antagonism between Q-Tip—acting as unofficial frontman, confident, charismatic, perfectionist—and Phife Dawg—ingratiating and often quiet, suffering from diabetes but addicted to sugar—had festered to its breaking point. Surprisingly candid behind-the-scenes footage at the 2008 Rock the Bells tour shows the duo (the two MCs behind some of the most memorable rap songs of all time) physically confront each other immediately before they're supposed to perform. In this light, Maseo's confession that he'd rather not see the two perform together again makes disheartening sense: their rivalry can only cast a suffocating shadow over what had been, years earlier, one of the most fertile partnerships in hip-hop.

How had things gotten to this point? Eighteen years earlier, A Tribe Called Quest released their first full-length album, People's Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm, and almost instantaneously changed what rap could sound like. The album provided two singles that would become unforgettable landmarks in the history of rap—“Bonita Applebum” and “I Left My Wallet in El Segundo” (the title of which, Q-Tip confesses, came from a recurring joke on the show Sanford & Son)—but the songs “Luck of Lucien” and “Can I Kick It?” arguably provide the album's highlights. (“Can I Kick It?” in particular provides a seemingly incontrovertible case for the art of sampling: the Lou Reed snippet that provides the song's hook is completely transformed by Tribe's lush production.) The ensuing years would see the release of two subsequent masterpieces, 1991's The Low End Theory and 1993's Midnight Marauders, which would cement Tribe's place in the annals of rap history. The beats on all three of these albums were jazzy, obscure, complex, and perfectly complementary to the group's smooth style; as one interviewee notes, their productions heavily sampled the unheard-of jazz LPs hidden away in their parents' record collections, which few other producers had sought out before. (This eclectic sound is one way, among many, that Tribe's influence may be detected in the later productions of Kanye West, Madlib, DJ Premier and Pete Rock, among many others.) The rhymes, meanwhile, were equally obscure, bizarre abstractions and non-sequiturs, smoothly delivered, without pretense, seemingly transplanted from some parallel alternate dimension. While many other groups were leaning towards violent manifestations of a life of crime or impassioned commentaries about the life of black people in the United States (Public Enemy, Gang Starr, NWA, or even Wu-Tang Clan, whose debut Enter the 36 Chambers was released the same day as Midnight Marauders), A Tribe Called Quest remained tantalizingly playful, even otherworldly.

Their music is so good one almost wishes Beats Rhymes & Life would concentrate on it more. While the process of making these three landmark albums is briefly outlined (including an excellent scene in which Q-Tip explains how he retrieved the drumline for “Can I Kick It?” from an old Lonnie Smith record), and a lineup of modern-day rap figures respectfully details the group's lasting influence, these formative early years are skimmed over in order to get to the bitter dramatic conflicts that defined the group's later years. But this is a gripe coming from a hardcore fan of the group who, confessedly, heard a few strains of “Excursions” in the documentary and mostly just wanted to listen to The Low End Theory from beginning to end. There's a lot packed into this 97-minute film; in fact, Rapaport finds an excellent balance between adulation and brutal honesty for both neophytes and faithful Tribe fans. (It helps that Rapaport is obviously an enthusiastic fan himself, especially judging from the attention he gives to Phife Dawg's outstanding verse on “Buggin' Out.”)

Tempers rose following the release of Midnight Marauders. Phife Dawg moved to Atlanta (partially due to his ailing health, as he struggled to overcome his addiction to sugar) while Q-Tip and beatmaker/DJ Ali Shaheed Muhammad remained behind in their native Queens. (Jarobi, who is sometimes considered an unofficial member of the group, had already bowed out beforehand.) It's difficult to describe exactly what led to the falling-out between Q-Tip and Phife; even the two musicians seem to have trouble doing so throughout Beats Rhymes & Life. But the answer may be found in their respective personalities: throughout the documentary, Q-Tip is emphatic, charismatic, controlling, boastful, while Phife Dawg is quiet, modest, sensitive, and ailing. Increasingly resentful of Q-Tip's self-appointed rise to leader of the group, Phife nonetheless contributed verses to their ensuing albums and performed live with Q-Tip and Muhammad, but became angry with Q-Tip's rigorous perfectionism. Accusations were flung in the press, particularly by Q-Tip, though he continues to insist that his words were taken out of context. It all culminated in 2008's Rock the Bells tour, during which Q-Tip seems to call out a sickly Phife Dawg's lackluster performance onstage, leading to a near-physical altercation backstage.

Like 2004's Metallica: Some Kind of Monster, Beats Rhymes & Life vividly portrays the inflated egos and impassioned altercations that rage in the background of the creative process. To my admitted surprise, I liked the Metallica documentary—I've never considered myself even remotely enthusiastic about their music. I've been a fan of A Tribe Called Quest, on the other hand, basically since I started listening to hip-hop in high school, and Beats Rhymes & Life functions reasonably well as a commemoration of the group, and extraordinarily well as an exposé of their unfortunate fallout. The personalities of all four members of the group come across vividly, giving further vibrancy to the music they created (which in any case remains among the most creative and exciting ever made in the rap world).

The documentary form should conceivably excel at characterization, offering real-life figures the chance to shape their own narratives onscreen; more realistically, though, documentary filmmakers shape these narratives form them, and sometimes end up neglecting the personalities of their subjects with a dreary obedience to traditional narrative form and an overly literal pursuit of objectivity (provided, mundanely, by an assortment of talking heads or an over-reliance on archival footage). Beats Rhymes & Life avoids the pitfall that many documentaries succumb to, especially music documentaries—it does not always strive for an objective portrayal of the facts, instead relying upon its own electrifying cast of characters for a certain account of the facts. It's a human drama, and it never tries to pretend otherwise.

This becomes especially clear in the case of Ali Shaheed Muhammad, the group's DJ, who remains a cypher throughout the film. This could have been a drawback if it had been a deliberate attempt on Rapaport's part to foreground the two larger-than-life MCs. But Muhammad is given numerous chances to speak for himself and, instead of giving in to the vicious rivalry erupting between Q-Tip and Phife Dawg, remains neutral, peaceful, respectful and admiring of them both. He is, as Phife's wife notes at one point, a friend unfortunately caught in the middle; when Mary J. Blige showers praise upon Muhammad and A Tribe Called Quest at one point (he's helping to produce one of her albums), he simply smiles, somewhat sadly, aware that they've made incredible music and have degenerated into a squabbling family. The most powerful moment in the movie may be a candid shouting match between De La Soul's Posdnuos and Q-Tip in a backstage room at the Rock the Bells tour; while the two musicians lament what A Tribe Called Quest has come to, the camera happens to pan across Muhammad's face—then stays there. The two outspoken men remain off-camera as Muhammad stares at the ceiling, obviously frustrated but saying nothing. He appears oblivious to the fact that the camera is recording him, which, maybe, is why he offers such a humane and subtle expression of annoyance and sadness. Like Q-Tip and Phife Dawg, Muhammad exhibits a lived-in, vivid personality that remains unknowable, and it's a testament to the movie that it respects his privacy, never trying to pry from him a testimony he wouldn't otherwise give.

After all of this candor, this unflinching study of a group in dissolution (and from a diehard fan, no less), the ending of Beats Rhymes & Life seems to stumble a bit. The movie does not conclude with the disheartening Rock the Bells tour in 2008—an epilogue actually picks back up in 2010, when a seriously ailing Phife discovers that his wife happens to be a perfect match for the kidney transplant he needs to survive. An excellent (and surprisingly powerful) scene in the hospital shortly before Phife's operation reveals to us that Q-Tip sent a brief text message to Phife (which remains unseen to us)—nothing elaborate, just an amicable reaching-out, wishing him luck with the transplant. I wish the movie had ended here: on a note of optimism, with Phife realizing how blessed he is with a loving family and recovering health (and hinting towards the reconciliation that Phife and Q-Tip may still work at).

Instead, the documentary follows A Tribe Called Quest as they reconvene for one last tour (this time in Japan). As the group plays to sold-out stadiums and (somewhat absurdly) practices their choreography at rehearsals, Rapaport seems to suggest that the magic has been recaptured, that A Tribe Called Quest may be in the middle of their comeback. (An onscreen title even informs us hopefully that Tribe still has one record remaining on their original contract with Jive Records.) I understand (and sympathize with) Rapaport's desire to celebrate the group's reunion, but a lot of onscreen evidence in this last sequence simply doesn't support it. When Phife and Q-Tip initially meet again, for example, they nod tersely and embrace briefly; then Tip simply walks away to shake hands with Muhammad. Some canny editing tries to convince us that the group's Japanese tour is as electrifying as their original shows in the early 90s, but we're not fooled: the group obviously (and inevitably) just doesn't have the spark they once did.

But even if the end of the movie's rose-colored optimism is unconvincing (and too self-conscious), we are still reminded of the heights that hip-hop can rise to at its best, and we (arguably) also realize that no rap group since Tribe has come close to matching their playfulness, their eccentricity. Indeed, by trying to make Beats Rhymes & Life appeal to everyone imaginable, Rapaport may have made a documentary that's almost too streamlined for this one-of-a-kind group. (Imagine, for example, a film that would have played on the level of “Check the Rhime” for 100 minutes.) But, as mentioned before, Beats Rhymes & Life is trying to tell a larger-than-life human drama, not blow your mind with some Sun Ra-ish fantasia, so I suppose it doesn't make sense to criticize it for being overly conventional. Earlier masterpieces like Scratch and Style Wars—the two best movies about hip-hop ever made—strike an extraordinary balance between mass appeal and one-of-a-kind, mind-bending styles; Beats Rhymes & Life manages a feat that's nearly as impressive—fleshing out the human drama behind one of the most legendary groups in the history of rap.

New Releases: 'The Future'

2011-08-13T22:31:00.001-05:00

The release of Miranda July's The Future (her second feature film after 2005's Me and You and Everyone We Know) has re-instigated the common critique that the writer-director is too “twee,” too “precocious,” or too “quirky,” especially for the emotional sweep and the thematic heft that she's attempting. As in 2005, July's haters have come out of the woodwork, and there's a trace of sexism in many of the criticisms heaved her way. (David Edelstein's review in New York Magazine claims that July has a gift for going back in time and evoking the “helpless little girl she once was,” for example.) After all, July's style doesn't really seem much more precocious than Wes Anderson's, although the two directors get varying degrees of mileage out of their hermetic worldviews.

The quirkiness of The Future (like that in Me and You and Everyone We Know) is a double-edged sword: at times it comes off as too self-conscious, as its own form of empty showboating, but without this brand of daffy eccentricity neither movie would be as singularly effective. I still detest the scene in Me and You in which the adorable little boy and the frigid art curator meet on a park bench as the music swells, realizing that they've been exchanging bizarre scatological come-ons with each other in an online chat room. But this same little-boy character and his frizzy-haired precociousness also make for the movie's overwhelming final scene, which stems from a concept that could be deemed “cute” but which strikes us with its wide-eyed curiosity with the world and its subtle interconnectedness with what has come before it.

Similarly, much of The Future threatens to be unbearably quirky. Its two main characters are melancholy, awkward wannabe-artists (July's Sophie and Hamish Linklater's Jason) who speak in deadpan non-sequiturs. They are mortified by the prospect of adopting an aged cat with renal failure, though they've committed to adopting it and have about a month to fret about their mortality and impending responsibility before they can take the cat home with them. Said cat, named Paw Paw, sporadically narrates the film's proceedings in warbly monologues (delivered by July herself), accompanied by adorably DIY shots of enormous cat paws nudging their way across crumpled newspaper. This isn't even to mention the liberal sprinkling of melancholy surrealism spread throughout the film, such as a talking moon with the voice of a gentle old man offering sage life lessons, a cherished T-shirt crawling its way across Los Angeles to be with its former owner, or a little girl who buries herself up to her neck in her backyard simply, it seems, to dabble in some attention-craving performance art.

This last scene is probably the weakest in the movie: the little girl is so nonexistent as a character in the film that her stunt has no discernible emotional or thematic value. True, this little girl is the daughter of a middle-aged man with whom Sophie initiates a desperate affair, so the stunt can be rationalized: just as Sophie callously throws herself at a stranger in an attempt to escape her mundane life, so does the little girl submerge herself as a way to express her vague dissatisfaction with her home life. I guess. Thing is, we have no way of reading the daughter character, so this sequence comes off as nothing more than yet another off-kilter gimmick on July's part.

Most of the other set-pieces in the film are, thankfully, more effective. In particular, Jason's inexplicable ability to stop time—especially after he discovers Sophie's infidelity (in a way)—is a powerful illustration of his fear of aging and his debilitating emotional fragility (and makes for the most beautiful image in The Future, as Jason eventually must push and pull the ocean's tides back into motion in order to kickstart time). And the aforementioned crawling T-shirt, once it finally finds its way back to Sophie, emboldens her to finish the dance she's been trying to perform throughout the entire film—an idea which probably sounds insanely corny but which is actually hauntingly beautiful, as July gyrates and contorts herself painfully from inside the folds of the fleshy yellow shirt. The Future has its weak moments, to be sure, but it has many more strong points—strong because the absurdity is so attuned to the fears and delusions undergone by the two leads.

In many ways, Sophie and Jason are unlikeable, self-obsessed, immature idealists. They simply expect life to lead them in the right direction, and are so naively convinced of the beauty and creativity that they have to offer other people that they are baffled when they are unable to spontaneously create it. That sounds like the kind of creative block that artists in particular suffer from, but July suggests that it's really a problem shared by her (and my) generation: late-twentysomethings to forty-year-olds, who may be so overwhelmed with what's expected of them (find a job, start a family, make money) that, at some point, they give up and simply allow time to run its course. This isn't to excuse them: it's an irrational form of irresponsibility, and if Sophie and Jason stayed this way throughout the whole film, The Future would be unbearable. In some ways, though, July's film actually seems like a condemnation of people who are perpetually precocious, desperately whimsical, obliviously flighty—the very traits for which July is typically criticized. But both Sophie and Jason do genuinely seem to go through transformations, and while genuine character arcs seem increasingly hard to come by in modern (American) movies, it's something almost effortlessly (and indelibly) achieved by July in The Future. Sophie, desperate to give her life a violent jolt, does so recklessly, maybe self-destructively—afraid of complacency, she embraces the first impulse that comes to mind. Jason, meanwhile, is initially horrified at encountering the truth, at making discoveries about himself or the world around him—until he ultimately relents, submits to it, and gives in to hopeless defeatism. When both characters' overwhelming flaws re-intersect with the life of Paw Paw, that talking cat finally turns into something meaningful, genuine, and surprisingly heartbreaking—in other words, cutesiness shattering apart into a harsh, unavoidable truth. Finally, the end of the movie finds both characters at a turning point: aware of their own weaknesses, trying to decide whether they should remain imprisoned in their own insular worlds or actually try to change them through their own actions. Assuming July actually is as precocious or twee as everyone accuses her, we might read The Future as a self-reckoning (or, just as admirably, a direct and emphatic rebuttal to her critics): for those who think life is a wonderland full of affectation, time will prove you devastatingly wrong.

A Face in the Dark

2011-05-25T14:26:00.000-05:00

Below is the second chapter of a short story that I've been working on. The first chapter was published on this blog in early December.

Chapter two 'a certain logical conclusion'

His face was thin and sallow, with deep, cutting wrinkles on either side, running from underneath the eyes to just above the chin. His mouth was firmly set into a displeased, dour grimace, stretching pronouncedly downward at the corners, which seemed to elongate the skin that covered his face, pulling it tautly over the features of his skull. He was almost hairless, with only a shadow of gray hair running up to the edge of his bald scalp. Worst of all were his eyes. Eclipsed by the sharp features of his skull, they were buried deep within a pair of black-hole eye sockets. The glint of two beady pupils, barely visible within chasms of darkness. Because the overhead light was still on in Lena's office, it cast a sharp backlight upon the man; the oblong tip of his head gleamed brightly, but his facial features could only struggle through a murky fluorescent pall. Nevertheless, I saw him now with an almost supernatural vividness. He was four stories above me, his appearance partially obscured by the reflection of city lights on the glass in front of him, but he could have been two feet away. For those features that I could not quite make out in the darkness, my brain did the rest of the work, filling in the blanks in order to complete the hideous picture. I had never seen the man before, but I was certain that the vivid picture that now arose within my mind was absolutely correct. Not once did I doubt my fleeting apprehension of him standing there, across the street, in my dead wife's office.

It was not only that I did not question the cosmic coincidence of it, it was not only that the moment's cruel illogic did not even occur to me. More than that, I immediately recognized that there was, without a doubt, a connection between this man and my wife's death. I became convinced almost instantaneously when the thought first occurred to me, with the kind of steely positivity that accompanies only those immense truths of which you become certain far before there is any tangible, concrete evidence to assure you of its validity.

Vivified, shaken awake, I spun around violently and found the nearest stairway. No time for the machinery of the elevator. I bolted through the exit door, leaped down six stairs at a time, my hands clutching the rails on either side. I almost slipped, missing stairs completely, numerous times, but I was made agile by my sudden action, impelled into swiftness. I made it to the ground floor of the hospital and raced down two hallways, oblivious to the bewildered stares and disparaging glances cast in my direction. Made it to the automatic front doors and was momentarily detained while I waited for the doors to open, impatiently. Took three bounding strides forward until I came to the curb. Glanced frenetically down the street towards oncoming traffic, then bolted into the street anyway, fairly certain that there was enough room between me and the rush of steel vehicles. Horns blared and tires screeched, but I ran madly, and made it to the curb without incident. As my right foot pounded heavily down upon the concrete of the sidewalk, it occurred to me, with a lightning bolt of rage and helplessness, that I had narrowly avoided the fate that had befallen my wife only hours earlier. Being reminded of this, my legs pumped away even more violently, and I hurtled myself forward without hesitation. I knew only that I must come face to face with the man who had materialized in Lena's office; had to become absolutely certain that he was no horrible trick conjured by my bedeviled mind.

I flung open the heavy glass door at 92011 Lexington Avenue, abruptly disturbing the sleepy silence that filtered through the lobby. The security guard at the front desk raised his head with a jolt of alarm. I glanced at him, mostly in annoyance—I had not even considered the fact that there would be anyone to impede me—and, after realizing that I couldn't possibly explain myself in my current state, simply rushed past him with an awkward gait between a walk and a run. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw him stand up in a panic, then half-jog toward the bank of elevators at the far side of the lobby to cut me off. I still avoided looking at him. He extended his right arm towards me—hoping, I suppose, that I would politely respond to his gesture and offer an explanation. He had been shouting at me ever since I entered, but I didn't have the time or inclination to respond. I glanced at his belt; he had a walkie-talkie and a nightstick that I did not want to provoke him to use. He looked middle-aged, I had surmised from the split-second in which I had looked at him, and a layer of doughy fat surrounded his midsection, but I still hoped to avoid any altercation. I kept on moving forward towards the elevators, picking up my pace; the guard was only a few feet away. For a brief moment, I wondered whether I should explain to him that I was a detective who had been called out for some semi-plausible reason, but I then remembered that, in the disorienting rush of events that had confronted me that night, I had never even thought to bring my badge with me. I concluded that this security guard would be hard-pressed to believe that this frenzied character running through the lobby was, in fact, an officer who inconveniently had forgotten to carry his identification.

Finally, we met, he and I, less than ten feet from the row of elevators, and he placed his hand roughly on my right shoulder. I took half a step back and looked him in the eyes for the first time. First, I saw panic, then fear, then simple curiosity; he was ready to restrain me forcefully, if necessary, but at this point I did not yet pose a physical threat. Only an abrupt intrusion. I empathized with him, this man who had simply come to work and had expected yet another night of dull, uneventful surveillance; but I didn't forget the face of the man who had forced me to race here so single-mindedly, and I knew I needed to get to the eighth floor without delay.

“What do you want?,” the security guard asked.

I wondered whether I should try to explain what had actually happened as concisely and reasonably as I could, but immediately recognized that, even if he did happen to believe me, my hurried anecdote would cost me too much time. In any case, I severely doubted my ability at the time to speak cogently and sanely, and even questioned whether or not my mouth would be able to perform the physical actions required to voice the words conceived of by my brain. So after a moment of awkward and alarmed silence, a jumble of words, the first things that came to my mind, spilled out.

“My wife...Lena Davenport, she works here.”

I left it at that, and the guard continued to gape at me in bewilderment. Finally, he nodded slowly and exaggeratedly, as though he needed to slow down and emphasize everything he did in order for me to comprehend. Maybe he was right.

“Okay...is she here now? Do you need to see her?”

I didn't want to explain myself any further, so I jerked my head away from him and took one assertive step forward towards the elevators. He took two quick running steps after me and placed his hand on my shoulder again, tugging roughly, spinning me around towards him.

Before I knew what I was saying—before I thought about how mad I would sound—nonsensical words that approximated my insanity began to ooze from the space between my lips. “There's a man in her office. I've seen him. Just now.” I turned around, walked again towards the elevators, was close enough to lean over and press the button.

The man swore at me, his frustration growing by the second. “Listen, you're gonna have to explain.” He stepped after me; his black boots clicked loudly on the floor. The echoes reverberated.

I didn't turn around to face him, and in mid-step I responded, “I don't have time to explain.” I leaned over and pushed the button placed halfway between the two elevators before me. The circle with an up arrow emblazoned on it suddenly illuminated itself. A digital readout above the elevator began counting down from the twenty-first floor. I felt a rough hand on my shoulder again, as I heard the guard behind me unclasp his walkie-talkie from his belt and a burst of static erupted from it. The man said, “John, I may need you in the lobby, I think I have a situation here,” and the series of words sounded entirely abstract and ludicrous to me. I was, it now seemed, a “situation”; the revelation amused and infuriated me at the same time.

While I waited for the elevator to descend, I came to the conclusion that the man behind me did, in fact, deserve an explanation, or at least that a fumbling half-explanation of my frenzied state of mind would allow me to think through my discombobulation. So lethargically I planted my left foot and spun on my right heel, pivoting in the man's direction. I remember thinking, halfway through this movement, that I should have been tired, emotionally if not physically, and it's true that a dull throbbing ache was rapidly spreading throughout my legs and calves, but my mind was overworking itself into hyperactivity; it was as though I was coursing to the peak of a caffeine fix, my heart was racing and my arms and hands were twitching and moving of their own volition, and I felt idle and deadened if I didn't just force myself to do something.

I turned towards the guard and I'm sure he recognized my current state of anxiety. To my surprise—and, I can only assume, to his as well—we traded looks for a long, silent interval, as though we realized that verbal communication would accomplish nothing and tried to fathom each other through piercing observation. What would I have seen if I had been in his place? I'm unnerved by what that image may have been: desperate, pleading, beseeching him to trust the madman in front of him. He, meanwhile, remained at least as curious as he was alarmed, and although he still held the walkie talkie in his hand, ready for a response, and his other hand hovered over his nightstick, and his eyes flicked back and forth between mine kinetically, there seemed to be some compassion in his uncertainty. I may have been incomprehensible and frenetic, but he seemed to detect that that precarious state had been instigated by something tragic, awful, intense. Maybe the empathy that I saw in his eyes was only a product of my own imagination; maybe I convinced myself, within fleeting moments of meeting this stranger, of the sensitivity and rightness of his character, simply because I wanted to believe that this man would provide a humane counterbalance to the rest of the night.

Before realizing how unstable I would sound, I tried to reassure the man before me. “I'm not crazy. Something happened to my wife tonight. And I've just seen a man in her office, a stranger, someone who shouldn't be there.” The word that had swung towards me on the doors to the room where my wife's body currently lay came back to me, all of a sudden. “This is an emergency. Really. I need your help.”

Either through compassion or exasperation, the guard who stood before me seemed to accept my state of anxiety as a plea for help. His left hand, which had been hovering over the club hooked into his belt, slowly moved forward towards me, and the palm stretched itself out in a gesture of consolation. He half-opened his mouth, about to respond, when the walkie-talkie in his right hand erupted with a blip of static and a harsh alien voice. It must have been “John”—some agent of authority hovering above me somewhere in the building. In my irascibility, I assumed that John was only waiting for a transmission like this from my security guard, a transmission that would allow him to exert some unrestrained yet justified force. John said: “I read you, Henry. Some uniforms are on their way. I'll be right down, try to detain the situation. Over.” Despite my distress, I chuckled at his sign-off, at the pleasure I assumed he felt at uttering it so officiously.

No response from my brother Henry was necessary; he hooked the walkie-talkie back onto his thick black belt. Now, I was sure, panic mode had given way to overwhelming curiosity. Meanwhile, the elevator was on its way; it had just passed the tenth floor. Two more floors and, maybe, the cypher I was hunting for would board the elevator. I wondered if the hideous sharp face would greet me when the doors opened. Would he take the stairs? Would he simply wait for me in my wife's office, smirking cruelly, waiting for me to confront him desperately?

Henry spoke to me now sensitively, with a voice usually reserved for socially-challenged adolescents. “What happened to your wife? Is she okay?”

After a moment:

“No.” Shook my head.

“And there's a man in her office. A stranger.”

“Yes.”

I wondered how he was going to detain the situation.

He nodded, consolatory.

“Alright. What floor?”

“Eighth.” I thought that was unclear. “Eight.”

I looked back up at the digital readout. It had just switched from seven to six. I didn't turn around, but I assumed that Henry had noticed the same thing. I wondered what I wanted, what I hoped to see when the doors opened. To see that horrible skeletal face again, in such close proximity—the thought made me shudder, the idea chilled me inside; but, at the same time, nothing was of more crucial importance, to question that man, to alleviate my distress, my uncertainty. I felt confident in the power of my loss: to meet the awful hellish emptiness of his eyes with the pain of my own, I felt certain that he, whoever he was, would be unable to resist my frenzied plea for answers.

Henry and I remained locked in this curious dual pose: me, head arched upwards towards the digital readout, hands clasped within one another, skin rubbing against skin, restless; him, standing behind me, presumably in a similar pose, waiting in anticipation for the elevator to alight. The silence that drifted throughout the lobby was distinct and abrasive; hums of heaters and fluorescent lights commingled to create a devilish chord. Never before had a handful of brief moments seemed more like a taunting eternity.

Before the uniforms had a chance to arrive, the elevator finally counted its way down to three, then two, then L. Only a few seconds elapsed until the foreboding metallic doors churned open, but in these few seconds a whirlwind of doubts and anxieties flickered through my tortured head. What would I ask the man before me, if indeed he was waiting within the elevator when it opened? What basis did I have to suspect him of my wife's death, besides the taunting coincidence of his appearance in her office so soon afterwards? In those few haunting seconds, two images flitted back and forth before me like the pages of a flipbook, skipping kinetically: one, a face of pure evil and cruelty, glaring at me, haloed by the sickening glow of fluorescent office lights; the other, Lena's face as she smiled at me in her happiest moments, beaming carelessly. It sickened me to see these two faces intercut with one another, dissolving into one and the same creature; good, evil; until my mind could no longer distinguish one from the other, and I suddenly, in disorientation, forgot which face I expected to greet me when the doors of the elevator opened.

They opened, at last—more slowly than usual, I thought, as the metal doors lazily churned aside. Inside, the image that met me was deflating: nothing, a pocket of fluorescent light, no body, nothing. The spark of desperate outrage that had compelled me in the first place was now suddenly extinguished, crushed out by prolonged uncertainty, ignorance, helplessness. Anything—any altercation, inconceivable revelation—would have been better than this nothingness, any face better than the hollowness of that elevator.

I was snapped out of my dejection by a slight cough behind me; Henry cleared his throat, almost politely, I thought. His forced noise was inquisitive: inside the noise was an unasked question—was I crazy? Did the man I was looking for exist?

I placed my right hand against the elevator door to keep it from closing, and I pivoted back towards Henry, looking him in the eye. The skittish, desperate energy with which I had burst into the building was now gone; my exhaustion, and my encroaching doubt, had flattened it into meek and deluded hope. There was a shrug in my eyes as I turned to Henry, and he simply kept that pose of readiness, confusion, alarm, and sympathy.

“I need to see her office,” I said. The life was gone from my eyes but there was still an aching urgency in my voice. Henry nodded and walked past me into the waiting elevator car.

“Alright then,” he said.

The enormous door began shoving restlessly against my arm as I held it open, and I stepped inside after him. The doors closed behind us. We traveled the eight floors in silence. There was syrupy and absolutely hellish jazz music oozing out of the speakers. The floor under us was a thin blue-and-gray carpet that seemed to soak up the nauseating light like a sick sponge.

On the eighth floor, the doors spread open with a ding. Across the hallway was an elegant desk with a light-blue glass top, and behind it a series of cracked glass panels that obscured the dark offices within. On one of these panels was a board listing office numbers and employees' names, with the name and logo for Perpetua Financial Consulting etched across the top. I stepped wordlessly from the elevator and peered at this list of offices; Henry unhooked a flashlight from his belt and swept it down the hallways, illuminating only a dim and eerie intersection of drab office architecture. I squinted, and in the dim light that still filtered there, I could make out her name—Lena Davenport, #817D. It offered a small reassurance that I had remembered her office number correctly—at least this was a sign that I still had control of my mental faculties, I told myself. Then a cruel realization followed: if this was true, if I hadn't simply been the victim of illusion and warped hallucination, then that man had in fact been in my wife's office. May still be there now. I stepped off quickly to the right. Henry followed me. The floor was made of smooth white tile and the footsteps of our shoes clacked in echo of each other—loud high ominous reverberating clicks. We worked our way down half of another hallway when we both realized that a sharp fluorescent light was slanting towards us from the intersection of another hallway. The light was on in one of the offices. We walked hurriedly down the hallway, took a sharp turn into another, dread and urgency commingling. The office light was emanating from behind a thick glass door at the center of this hallway. I took a step forward until I felt Henry's hand on my shoulder; he gently held me back and stepped in front of me, flashlight extended and what looked like a taser gripped firmly in his other hand. Apparently he didn't doubt my story any more, and although, in any other situation, I may have resented his overeager vigilance, here I welcomed it. We neared the door to a bank of offices, one of which, we could now see, was harshly lit by a single overhead light. Its door gaped open forebodingly—a warning.

I glanced at the number stenciled next to the outer door as we approached it: 817. As Henry pushed against the door with his outstretched flashlight—unlocked, it swung easily open—I could squint into the yellow light and make out the smaller number next to the inner office. 817D. My wife's office. Her name was painted on the wall next to the open door.

Henry stood there for a moment, holding the door open with his body, his gaze still firmly locked on the open office door and the light that cut through it. I could tell he was scared. So was I. I wished I had brought my gun.

I slipped past the open door, past Henry, and took three long uncertain strides towards Lena's office. The sound of my footsteps disappeared into the thick carpet. Henry walked up beside me. I was close enough now to see inside the office, through the half-open door; but all I could make out was a thick old mahogany desk, the side of a bookcase, and diluted neon lights filtering in from the city outside. I reached my right hand out, pushed gently on the door, and opened it the rest of the way. I couldn't hear Henry breathe.

The door made no noise as it swung open until it tapped lightly against the wall. Lena's chair, behind the desk, its back to the row of windows, was empty. There were two dark red padded chairs on the other side of the desk, facing the windows. There was a man in one of them. He was not moving. He was sitting and looking out the window. I could only see the back of his head. He was almost bald and the tip of his head came to a sharp and ugly point. Thin, short black-gray hair ran up to his scalp. He was an ugly silhouette. There was a file open on the desk—Lena's desk.

Henry stepped up next to me. He saw what I saw. I heard him unable to suppress a gasp.

I took one more decisive step forward and rapped loudly on the door as I passed, wanting to make our presence known—as though the man before us was somehow not aware of it. He still didn't move. My eyes darted to the reflection of his face in the window; it was smudged and distorted, but it seemed to be the same hideous face that had returned my stare minutes earlier. I kept taking half-steps forward in trepidation, but his absolute stillness was beginning to make me shudder. It could have been a skeleton sitting before me.

“You,” I finally said, absurdly. Henry stood standing at the doorway. The figure didn't move. “Get up.”

No one moved for a long moment. Slow deep breathing and melodic city sounds were all that could be heard. Then finally the man placed both hands on the armrests. He stiffened his arms and pushed himself up. He stood facing the windows. He was incredibly tall, and the ceiling light, mere feet away from his bald sloping head, struck him harshly, and a horrible jagged shadow was cast across the office floor.

“Turn around,” I said.

The man obeyed, pivoting towards me slowly. Though I tried to interpret some emotion from the features of his petrified face—I expected, I suppose, a look of gloating condescension or merciless self-satisfaction, something that would betray his guilt—the man's skeletal face told me nothing. He simply returned my inquisitive gaze, though his eyes were lifeless. His hands hung awkwardly at his sides as he stood there, absolutely rigid. The suit he wore was an elegant dark gray, well-tailored, but somehow it still seemed too small for him.

I didn't know what to ask him, what to say—too much was on my mind. I began with the most obvious question I could think of.

“Who are you?”

The man stood there blankly for a moment—either unwilling to answer or unsure how. I could sense Henry standing next to me.

Finally, the man responded. His voice was as guttural and monotone as I had presumed it would be.

“My name is Mark Voland. Who are you?”

Before I could answer, a harsh burst of static erupted from Henry's walkie-talkie, followed by the voice of the man that Henry had contacted earlier: “John,” the top-middle-level security officer who I had imagined cooling his heels in some dank room outfitted with a bank of television monitors. “Henry, I've got two officers in the lobby down here,” John said. “Where are you? Is the situation under control?”

Without peeling my eyes away from the man before me, I heard Henry unclip the radio from his belt and take four long strides out of the office. Henry's response came from the outer office a few feet away, muffled: “Not exactly. Come up to room 817D now. There's someone here.”

A moment later, John's response: “Copy. We'll be there as soon as we can.” Another blip of white noise and the radio became silent. I waited for Henry to return to the office until I addressed Mr. Voland. My confidence was slowly rejuvenating itself within me, and I could feel a hot white energy rising inside of me again—the same kind of wild anxiety that I had felt upon seeing that face less than twenty minutes beforehand. I wasn't crazy, I could now tell myself with certainty; the man before me was not a phantom. I took a step towards him. He did not react.

“What are you doing in my wife's office?”

I thought this question would affect him somehow; if he really didn't know who I was, and if he had had anything to do with Lena's death, surely he would not have been able to conceal some kind of surprise at discovering that I was her husband. But as I peered desperately at him, I realized with dismay that, again, I could not read any discernible reaction from his stone-set features. I had spent the last six years interrogating suspects, reading and interpreting their reactions and gesticulations, studying the physiological behavior of people who lie, and I believe I can claim, with no boastfulness, that I have become an expert on visible human behavior and the ways in which it reflects those psychological undercurrents we would rather keep concealed. I could read nothing on Mr. Voland's face, besides a haunting emptiness.

“Lena Davenport is your wife?”

I was going to say was—not is—but instead I just nodded. It was then that I believe I detected the first trace of an emotion on his face: a smile.

“What are you doing in her office?,” I repeated.

He sighed, then, as an answer, reached behind him and picked the manila file folder off of Lena's desk. It was an enormous file, overflowing with sheaths of paper and color-coded Post-It notes that were overloaded with my wife's frantic scribbling. I grabbed the file from him, with some reticence, and noticed the name written upon the blank tab: Consolidated Metropolitan Insurance. My eyes shot up to Mr. Voland's face once more.

“This is the case your wife has been working on. Have you heard of my company?”

“Your company?,” I asked, unable to suppress my astonishment. “You own Consolidated Metropolitan?”

He shook his head, though his eyes did not leave mine for a second. “No. I'm just mid-management. Low on the totem pole. But two of my colleagues and I have been meeting with Mrs. Davenport—with your wife—in a consulting capacity. Maybe she's told you...our company has been experiencing both legal and financial difficulties recently, and she's been helping us—well, you know, get ourselves out of the red.”

I glanced at a few of the papers that I currently held in my hand, but they were banking ledgers, accounting statistics, information regarding insurance policies and potential payouts versus foreseeable profits, and so on—they may as well have been written in a foreign language. I took another step forward, reached past Mr. Voland, and threw the file back onto Lena's desk.

“Okay, you're a client of my wife's. That still doesn't explain why you're here.”

“Well, we had a meeting this afternoon. Or yesterday afternoon, I guess. Maybe she told you?”

He seemed to expect an answer, but there was something impertinent, even mocking, in his question. He must have known about my wife's death; another fraction of a smile crept across his face, and I was sure that he was taunting me.

I didn't answer his question, so he continued: “The meeting went late, and we must have left around 5:30 or so. My two colleagues and I had a drink around the corner. It was a celebration, I suppose—things started to seem promising, you know? Mrs. Davenport is incredibly good at her job, I hope you know. So we had a few drinks and then were going our separate ways. I was walking home and was passing by—” (he turned his head around and arched it towards Lexington Avenue, eight flights down from us) “—right down there in front of the building, when something occurred to me. Mrs. Davenport had suggested a course of action involving subrogation of corporate entities who had been responsible for certain losses that had been incurred by our clients. Do you know insurance fairly well, Mr. Davenport?”

“No.”

“Well...I don't want to bore you with the specifics. To put it simply, Consolidated Metropolitan had compensated some of our individual clients for certain policies—health insurance, unemployment, liability, things of that nature—when in fact I thought we could prove that certain corporate parties could be held responsible for the losses that those individuals had incurred. Lena pointed out that we were within our rights to pursue legal action against these corporate entities, as long as we could document, in court, their culpability regarding our clients' payouts. About three hours ago, as I said, I was passing by across the street there, when certain policies came to mind—namely health insurance policies for construction workers who had experienced some respiratory problems after working at a job site just north of the city. We were unable, at the time, to prove that their employers had knowingly put them at risk, but we had always thought that the documentation supplied to us by those employers was somewhat specious, and Mrs. Davenport agreed with us after we showed her the risk assessments that the construction company had supplied us with.”

I was growing tired with his lengthy response, and I wondered if he wasn't trying to talk circles around me—impressing me with the minutiae of insurance coverage while avoiding an explanation of why he was actually in Lena's office. So I said, simply, “So?”

“So, I came back up to her office before going home, hoping to catch her at work and hopefully come up with another solution before calling it a night. I don't know if that makes sense, considering we had already been discussing possible solutions all afternoon, but I hope you understand that Consolidated Metropolitan is more than simply a job for me; I've been an employee since the company was founded four years ago, and I've been a witness as the company made some unforgivable mistakes and, in a way, dug its own hole. Anything I can do to help the company, to restore the potential we once had, I will do, and the opportunity to do so earlier tonight proved too propitious to resist.”

I balked at his wording; I wondered if someone in his position would actually explain himself so convolutedly, with such rehearsed precision. As I mentioned, I had had considerable experience in observing the gestures, the oversights, the slips of the tongue, of criminals and liars and people with something to hide; and I had encountered numerous people who had explained themselves with similarly ostentatious rhetoric. In almost every case, they had had plenty of time to rehearse their defense, and had made the mistake of scripting their own dialogue with overzealous exactitude. I distrusted him now more than ever; his defense was self-incriminating.

“What time did you come back up to my wife's office?”

“Uh...it must have been about ten.”

I turned to Henry, who was still standing next to me with a taser gripped in his right hand and a walkie-talkie in his left. He watched the man before us, Mr. Voland, with a similar combination of anxiety and distrust. I asked Henry, “Did you see him earlier tonight?”

Henry shook his head, but never took his eyes off of the stranger. “No, but my shift started at ten. If he came back earlier, the other guard might have seen him.”

I recounted the events of the night before, and for the first time the actuality of what had happened to me—not on an emotional level, but on a tangible, physical level—struck me with a vivid clarity, an almost cruel mundaneness. When had I fallen asleep on the couch, watching some idiotic cop show? When had that telephone call from the hospital shaken me awake? When did I start to walk across town, and when did I arrive at the hospital? I concluded that I must have gotten the call at about 10:30, eleven at the latest. My mind raced as the hypothetical timeline formulated itself: Lena could not have left her office later than ten o'clock. Conceiving of the previous night's events in such a methodical, exact fashion was both mercilessly mocking and a reassuringly tedious enterprise: reassuringly tedious, because I could conceive, at least momentarily, of Lena's death as mere happenstance, yet another natural (if horrific) occurrence removed of its sadistic metonymy; mercilessly mocking, because it forced me to re-experience the night of my wife's death with a cold practicality that now seemed vulgar, and because the insignificant and unbearable things that brought me to the hospital constituted (I was now sure) a rift in my life, before which my completeness was so uncomplicated that I took it for granted, and after which I could never be complete again. Abjectly hopeless, I now realized that there was a part of me (not only Lena's part, the part of me that Lena controlled exquisitely, but the part of me that thought it knew what life was and who I was) that was irrevocably lost.

My mind was pulsating, throbbing, trying (and failing) to process the man's words objectively. Without doubt, there was something suspicious in his story—his explanations were convenient, well-thought-out. And of course, there was the question of what he was still doing in Lena's office, so long after (what? how to say it?) the incident. But I tried to work through his sequence of events anyway, seeing if there was any way to corroborate his story. I looked at Mr. Voland silently, my mind overexerting itself. Henry was silent next to me, his right hand resting on the unclipped taser lodged in his belt. The silence in Lena's office was heavy, tense, even foreboding—the muffled sounds of city life far below us sounded harsh, alien. A moment later, Henry's words broke the grim atmosphere.

“I'll call the other guard—Tom. He was in before me. He'll remember if anyone came to see Mrs. Davenport.”

I nodded, half-glancing at Henry—appreciating his calmness, his intelligence. He was a man doing his job. He did it well, without any kind of self-congratulation. His understanding and his support on this night, though, amounted to selfless heroism, at least in my eyes.

“I'll keep an eye on him,” I said gruffly, without thinking.

“You'll be alright?,” Henry asked before he left, casting an anxious glance in Mr. Voland's direction.

I nodded yes. Henry took four steps away from us, back into the dimly-lit outer office. He took his cell phone out of his shirt pocket; I heard the plastic buttons clicking as he dialed. It was then that a tall, gangly man with balding hair and a dirty black goatee entered the outer door. He wore a plain white buttoned shirt with a cheap badge on it, and the belt he wore was equipped with the same gadgetry as Henry's: taser, radio, handcuffs, nightstick, even the outline of a 9-millimeter pistol in its holster. He must have been John—Henry's supervisor. He moved awkwardly, in long, emphatic strides that seemed unsure of their direction—a man on a mission who didn't know what the mission was. Behind him, two uniformed policemen followed, looking about the offices casually, if not with outright indifference—they seemed dubious that there was, in fact, a “situation” in progress. I half-hoped that I would know them; if they vouched for me and my history on the force, my suspicions, I believed, would carry greater weight, and they would respond to Mr. Voland with a similar sense of alarm. But I had never met them before.

John sidled up next to Henry, shooting a spiteful, distrustful stare in my direction. (Trying to assert his authority in this place? Territorial, aggressive—a bad combination of traits for a job like his.) One of the officers joined them, looked inquisitively at Henry, expecting an explanation. Henry held up one index finger to the two of them as he brought his phone to his ear.

The other officer walked slowly to the open door four feet to my left. He held back there, resting his hands on the doorframe and leaning his head into the office. He saw the grim, silent showdown between me and Mr. Voland—an exchange of unwavering stares, mine uncertain and desperate, Voland's cool and half-smirking, cruel. The officer stood there and looked between the two of us with rapidly increasing concern, even alarm; he may not have been aware of the night's events, but the heated, sinister tension flooding the office, temporarily dormant but ready to erupt, could not have been mistaken. His disinterest from only a minute ago had transformed into grim unease. He took three cautious steps towards me, his gaze volleying back and forth between me and the man in front of me, waiting uneasily for what would come next. A storm, a terror.

We heard Henry's voice. He asked someone on the other end of the line—presumably the security guard who had worked earlier that night—if he remembered someone coming to visit Lena Davenport. No, no, Henry said—later, late at night. Around ten, he thinks. Pause, for a moment. Then Henry leaned back towards the open doorway, arched his head around so he could look once more at Mr. Voland, who had since sat down in one of the chairs facing the glass windows—he had turned his back on me.

Henry looked intently at Mr. Voland's profile. What does he look like?, Henry said, seemingly repeating what the other man had asked him.

You'd remember if you saw him.

Tall.

Black eyes.

Almost bald.

Short black-white hair.

Thin, yeah. Emaciated.

Another pause, for a moment.

No? You sure?

Then another pause. Very long. I took my eyes off of Mr. Voland, moved them in Henry's direction. He listened for a long time. His eyes widened, then narrowed. Shock? Anger? He returned my stare. No—compassion.

No, I didn't know. What time did that happen?

Almost ten?

Yeah...what a hell of a way to end your day. Yeah.

Yeah...her husband.

Henry took his eyes off of mine. Looked at the floor.

He hung up a minute later. I was staring at the back of Mr. Voland's head. He had been silent for minutes now, since the other men had arrived.

Henry looked at me again. John and the other two officers looked at him expectantly. I stared at the pointed awful head of Mr. Voland until it became a blurry, senseless shape.

“Tom said he doesn't remember anyone coming to visit Lena after her meeting this afternoon. He said he doesn't remember seeing anyone checking in at the front desk who matches Mr. Voland's description—but he said to remember that we get almost a hundred visitors here each hour, if not more. He”—Henry's voice faltered here—“also said that he only saw Lena just before ten o'clock, when she left. She worked late. She walked out of the front doors and was crossing the street, when...she was hit. The car was white, and it was one of those big old ones, like a Buick or something. He said he only saw the color and the shape of it as it drove away; it ran the light and sped off. Luckily, Tom said, the hospital was across the street, and they got her into surgery in less than five minutes...he said.” Out of the corner of my eye, I could tell Henry was still watching me. I didn't look back in his direction. “That was at the very end of his shift; I saw him when I came in, but he looked a little shaken, and he didn't stop to mention it to me. He said he hopes she's okay.”

“She's dead,” I said. Water in eyes, too tired to cry though. The back of Mr. Voland's head, three feet in front of me. Wish I had brought my gun.

I stepped up to the red padded chair in front of Lena's desk, the one to the left of Mr. Voland's chair, gripped the right arm, pulled it right up close next to the other one, angled it towards Voland, stepped around the chair, and sat down. I leaned in close to the stranger we had found in my wife's office, my elbows resting on my knees. So close I could see where his skeletal face was pocked with abrasions from a razor; so close I could see small scars from old wounds. He looked at me with no emotion.

When I spoke, my voice was a shaky monotone. I tried to hide the fact that I needed to subdue myself, restrain myself from what I really wanted to do, but I couldn't hide it; my rage was painted on me.

“What are you doing in my wife's office?”

“I told you—,” he began calmly.

“You haven't told me anything. Why are you in my wife's office?”

“I wanted to see her about some old insurance policies—some payouts we could be compensated for. We're in hot water right now—”

“Cut the bullshit, why are you in her office?”

One of the officers—the one who had been standing next to me, the short and stocky one, whose muscle you would confuse for beer-bellied flab if you didn't know better—took a step up to me and put his hand on my shoulder. He knelt down next to me, spoke quietly.

“We should wait—put in a call, get a detective here. They'll question him, you can be present at the interrogation. And after, you can ask him anything you want—you'll just have to have an officer present.”

“I don't mind answering your questions,” Mr. Voland said, looking at me with feigned compassion. “It's fine.”

I didn't look at him, or at John or Henry or the other officer, who had all uneasily entered the office and were lingering by the doorway. I responded to the cautious advice offered by the man next to me, but my words were directed at no one in particular—all of them and none.

“Call 718-555-9898. That's the 184th Precinct in uptown. Ask for Detective Sean Ammond, he'll still be there now. Ask him about me, Michael Davenport. My badge number is 07464498276. I've been a detective for three years. I know the protocol. And I'm going to question this man now.”

The officer next to me shrugged and stood back up. “Alright, I'll call, but...you should know this isn't a good idea. Just...be careful.”

I knew what he meant—any information I might be able to glean then would be totally worthless in court (and I was increasingly unsure of my ability to keep from doing to the man before me what I really wanted to, fingernails digging into bloody palms)—but I was too heated, too stubborn, too proud to take the advice. The officer stepped back out into the outer office, picked up the phone on the receptionist's desk, asked John how to dial out, and punched in the number I had just given him. As he was calling, John asked Henry to go to the lobby for the sign-in sheet at the front security desk (though I was already convinced that Mark Voland's signature would be nowhere on it); Henry eyed me and Voland worriedly before leaving the office, but, unsure of what to say, exited without a word.

Only four of us now remained in the office: John and one of the two police officers, both of whom lingered at the doorway, watchful, ready to intervene if necessary; and Mr. Voland and myself, seated in the two leather chairs in front of my wife's desk, my face (eyes narrowed, teeth clenched) less than a few inches from his. He continued to stare straight ahead, out the window, though I'm sure I dominated his peripheral vision.

“What do you want to ask me?,” he said without moving. Without blinking.

“First, let me recount your story. I want to get this right. You had a meeting with my wife yesterday afternoon, you and your colleagues, and it ended around 5:30. You got drinks at a bar nearby, and you said before you went home you wanted to see her about one more thing—one last thing you thought of. You said you returned here, to my wife's office, around ten. Is that right?”

“I can't be sure of the exact times, but yes, that sounds about right.”

“You were drinking for four hours? How many did you have?”

A slight crooked smile crept onto his face—I think he was going for sheepish embarrassment, but he didn't know how to recreate the emotion. “Well, we went to a bar that was a bit of a walk away—a colleague of mine, Steve Bennetton, knew about it, it's his favorite, over at 82nd and 1st—my guess is it was about a twenty minute walk there. I suppose we were there for about three hours. I had three drinks. I think Steve and Kevin—that's our other colleague—might have had a few more. But we were wrapped up in conversation. You know, we were trying to save the company. We were optimistic, we were brainstorming. Time got away from us. Call the bar, they'll tell you. I even remember our server's name.”

“We will, don't worry. So you must have left at, what, 9:00? But you didn't come back to my wife's office until ten or so? How is that?”

“Like I said, I don't remember the timeline that precisely. Maybe we left about 9:15. They caught cabs back home. I went for a bit of a walk—I live a little north of Morningside, so I was going to walk home anyway. On the way, I thought of a few recent cases where I thought we could recoup our losses—you know, prove in court that corporate entities who held policies under us were actually responsible for losses incurred by individuals they employed. I wanted to talk to Lena about them, see if she thought we had a chance. So I walked back over here and I suppose I got here around 9:40 or so.”

“And you checked in at the front desk then?”

“Yes. How else could I have gotten up here?”

“How is it that the guard doesn't remember you? Especially if you came so late, so soon before my wife's...” (words failed me again) “...accident, and requested to see her? Seems strange, doesn't it?”

He shrugged defensively. “Yes, it does, but you're going to have to ask him about that. I can't speak for his state of mind. I signed it at the front desk, you'll see my signature.”

“Fine,” I said. “Finish your story.”

Mr. Voland returned my unwavering stare, finally averting his eyes from the windows in front of him. “There's nothing else to say, is there?,” he said. “The man at the front desk said your wife was still here, but when I got up to the office there—” (he nodded his head towards the outer office, past John and the two policemen) “—it was empty. The receptionist must have already left. I can only assume your wife and I crossed paths on my way in.”

“Quite a coincidence.”

“Maybe. But I don't have any other explanation.”

“How did you get into her office if no one was here?”

Once again, he averted his eyes from mine, and directed them squarely towards the pulsating electric lights of the city outside. He instantaneously seemed to adopt a look of apologetic shame, as his shoulders—which had previously been staunchly held in a posture of guiltless pride—drooped ever so slightly. “Well...that, I suppose, was somewhat dubious on my part. The cleaning man was just making his rounds on the floor, and he happened to be approaching this office shortly after I arrived. I knew where Mrs. Davenport kept our files—I had seen them earlier in the day, of course—and I desperately needed to check on those few cases. I honestly thought I had landed on a solution that might save us. So I persuaded him to open her office for me.”

He abruptly halted himself in the middle of his explanation, despite how unsatisfying and questionable was his recounting of events. His rigid stare did not falter, but I sensed he was waiting for me to respond—eager, even quietly giddy, to see whether or not I would buckle under the weight of his ridiculous story. And it was ridiculous: if his narrative didn't make me so intensely angry, so sure of his culpability, its sheer absurdity would have made me laugh. Too many coincidences, too many cover-ups—no outright cracks in his story, but plenty of tenuous perforations to make it completely porous, absolutely weightless. For a moment no one said anything; I noticed myself exhaling protractedly, my rage now affecting me physiologically. With some effort I subdued myself and arched my head back towards the three men standing at the doorway; I caught their glances and raised my eyebrows, indicating how unbelievable I found his explanation. John and one of the officers nodded slightly, apparently corroborating my disbelief; the other officer furrowed his brow and looked back towards Mr. Voland—certainly dubious, yet unable to come to a conclusion regarding the man before us.

I stood up. I had to move. My close proximity to Mr. Voland had started to make me feel queasy. I walked to the glass windows that he had been resolutely staring at throughout his account. His stare met mine, coldly, emotionlessly.

“And you've been here for the last three hours, is that right? Poring over files? A diligent employee of Consolidated Metropolitan Insurance?”

He smiled—antagonistically this time—and shrugged. “You don't believe me. But yes, I swear that's true. All of it.”

“You must realize how stupid that sounds. All of it.”

“Does it? I don't know. Check the sign-in sheet. Call the bar. Ask the cleaning man. Call CMI. My information can be verified.”

Another tense period of silence. I heard Henry enter the outer office and approach the three officers at the doorway. He handed John a clipboard. I walked over to them, leaving Mr. Voland momentarily.

Henry flipped over two sheets on the clipboard and pointed to a signature far down on the list. Under his breath, Henry remarked, “His signature is there. 9:42pm. And there were two other visitors since then—it doesn't look like this has been forged in any way. And look—” (he pointed at a series of initials on the right-hand side of the page) “—those are Tom's initials. He did check him in.”

John shook his head, bewildered. “Why didn't Tom remember him? He's been with us for years, there's never been a problem with him. I don't understand.”

One of the officers glanced up from the clipboard at me. “I talked to Captain Ammond a couple minutes ago. He vouched for you. He and another detective—Ciposetta—they're on their way. They'll be here soon. Ammond told me to tell you not to do anything stupid.”

I couldn't resist a tired smile. “He knows me too well.”

The other officer—the short, stocky one—interjected. “Mr. Davenport, I'm sorry about all of this. I'm sorry about your wife. But...I mean, there's definitely something wrong with this guy, his story doesn't make any sense, but...what could he have to do with your wife's accident? If it's true that he was up here when she was hit—well, how could they be related?”

I shook my head and glanced back at Mr. Voland. He hadn't moved from his position: motionless in a red padded leather chair, in the middle of Lena's office. “I don't know, but there's something. There are too many overlaps. He's lying about something.”

“So what now?,” Henry offered uneasily.

I shrugged. “Wait for Ammond and Ciposetta. We need as many opinions as we can get. In the meantime, check security cameras, take a look around the office—see if we see anything out of the ordinary. I'm gonna ask him a few more questions.”

Henry and John left the office a moment later, retreating to the security office in order to peruse the night's security videos. One of the officers began investigating the hallways, the offices, the stairways for anything—any sign of a struggle or forced entry—while the other (who professed to have some knowledge of the insurance industry) began combing through Lena's file on Consolidated Metropolitan Insurance. I appreciated their support, the unspoken camaraderie shared by those in our line of work, and I wondered what I would have done without them there. I looked at my palms, which were red and raw from my nails tearing into them for the last thirty minutes. I wondered what would have happened if I had been alone with Mr. Voland for that half hour—if it would have been him, instead, that would now be red and raw, if my rage and my staggered confusion would have physicalized themselves in such a direct manner. The human presence of Henry and John and the two officers had tempered me, had restrained me—I was unwilling to abandon myself when I knew I would be witnessed and judged by other people, when I knew it was not simply myself and God who would have to deal with the repercussions (moral and otherwise) of my actions. And I wondered if people only do good—act rightly—when they're concerned with the responses of other individuals. And if, left only to our own moral self-motivations, divorced from the inquisitions and reproaches of others, the world would be ruled by anarchy and cruelty and despair.

As we waited for Ammond and Ciposetta to arrive, I sat down in the chair across from Mr. Voland's—Lena's chair, a cheap black leather thing on wheels, less comfortable than the red padded seats she offered to her guests. I wheeled her chair in front of Mr. Voland's, about four feet away, confronting him directly. I leaned forward, resting my elbows on my knees, rubbing my chin and running my hands along the unshaven stubble, exhausted and hostile. I said nothing—scrutinized the features of Voland's face. He met my gaze directly.

“You're inspecting me?”

I said nothing.

“Tell me what you find.”

The guilt on his face was deepening, as I saw it—like the stubble of a five-o'-clock shadow as night progresses.

After a moment, he leaned in towards me, paralleling my own posture: elbows on knees, leaned in close.

“I heard what your colleague said before, and I have to ask you again: What could I possibly have to do with your wife's death? You don't believe me, fine, but...it's simply illogical to think I could have any kind of relation to a hit-and-run that happened eight floors below me.”

“Why don't you explain it to me?”

“Explain it to you?,” he asked incredulously. “Mr. Davenport, I don't want to sound callous, but what is there to explain? I am sorry, sincerely, for your wife's tragedy—for your tragedy—but there is no conspiracy here. No plot. You don't want to hear this, but there is no meaning here.”

“Maybe. But there is something going on.”

“If there is—and I'm saying this to you because you're a detective, and you will understand this—what is going on here is cause and effect. Something happens, and because of it, something else happens. I'm sure you've seen this many times before, so why can't you apply it to yourself? To this?”

“Now you're interrogating me? Judging me?”

“No, I'm not judging, I understand. You're human. It's natural to give things meaning when you think they need them. But it's also foolish.”

“I don't need you to tell me, Mr. Voland, about the meaning of things. About fatalism. I'm not looking for any kind of grand design here. I'm trying to get to the truth about what happened to my wife.”

“And if the truth is less meaningful than you hoped it would be? Or simpler? Will you supply your own truth then?”

“No. I never have.”

“Because the truth about things has never affected you personally. In your line of work, I mean.”

“How can you pretend to know about that?”

“I'm sorry, I'm just...hypothesizing. But there's no harm in that, right?”

I said nothing.

“My hypothesis is that your line of work allows you, even requires you, to judge human action, or even non-human action—simply happenstance—or even cosmic action, if you want to look at it that way—objectively. Scientifically, empirically. You can observe people and the things that they do, or the things that happen to them, as a series of cause-and-effect patterns that leave behind a trail of verifiable data. You see gestures and responses, and you hear inflections or promises or lies, and you don't see them as human behavior—I mean, you see them as evidence. Indicators of the truth, or of lies. And that's what makes you good at your job, am I right? Their lives—not just what happens to them, but the way they feel about those things, why they do the things that they do—they don't overlap with your life. You don't concern yourself with those things, that's not your job. I'm not blaming you—it makes sense. But if you've always been able to observe the people that you investigate with that kind of logic—that rationalism that has no room for...whatever you want to call it, cosmic motivation, a deeper meaning—why can't you apply these things to yourself?”

My anger and bewilderment had started to make room for trepidation; my uncertainty was propagating, spreading, within me.

I said, slowly, methodically, stressing each word: “Who the hell are you?”

He gave me a smile that was more malevolent than anything he had yet said or done. “You mean, do I work for Consolidated Metropolitan Insurance? Am I an insurance salesman? Is my name Mark Voland? Now, those questions you can answer absolutely. With facts. I'll leave that to you.”

“How did you know my wife? The truth, this time.” When I said it, even I was able to recognize the desperation and futility that went into uttering it—I knew already that his answer would be no different.

“Really, I only met her this afternoon. She seemed like a really good person. And I am really sorry for what happened to her, even if you don't believe me. But some things we just can't change.”

I leaned back in the chair; I could no longer stand to be so close to him. Fatigue and despair afflicted me. There was pain behind my wizened eyes, a deep abyss of pain.

“You were waiting for me, weren't you?,” I asked him. “When I was across the street, in the hospital. You were watching me. We were meant to have this meeting, is that right?”

“Meant to? Mr. Davenport, you have destiny on the brain tonight. I'm sorry, that's a cruel thing to say—I understand why you might.”

I shook my head at him. I still felt an unbridled rage towards him, but now, by this point, I would have no idea how to unleash it.

“Forget what I actually am for right now,” he whispered to me. The other two officers were single-mindedly inspecting the outer office, the hallway, a stack of files—most likely, they didn't hear a word of what was being said. “Tell me what you want me to be. Or what you're scared that I am. It seems you've already come to your own conclusion anyway.”

I couldn't answer. I believe I did actually ponder this question—I did ask myself those things—but I had no answers for them. I knew that I wanted him to be more than simply an insurance salesman whom I had found, coincidentally, in my wife's office.

“Well, I can tell you this,” he said finally. “I'm no...celestial accuser. I'm no great deceiver. How can I be, in my line of work?” He whispered these words in a thin rasp, uttered close to my left ear. Then he leaned back in his chair and a narrow serpentine smile stretched the skin taut against his face. “Now you're wondering where you've heard those words before. And now, again, you're asking yourself what I really am.”

2010: The Year in Film

2011-05-15T12:14:00.002-05:00

Most people who make movies (and those who distribute and market them) like to believe that bigger is better—that film is the art of bombast and overstatement, that subtlety and elusiveness and fine-tuned simplicity are better left to art forms less visceral (and expensive). This overgeneralization may seem unfair, but it especially rang true in 2010, a year that seemed uncommonly populated by Big Movies.

This was predominantly true in Hollywood, as it often seems to be. Inception sought to astound us with its gravity-defying action sequences, its trippy conundrum of a plot, the obvious precision (and money) that went into the movie's set design, visual effects, and overall conception. (If it failed to awe, that was likely because half of the movie was wasted on mundane exposition.) The Social Network, meanwhile—one of the year's most critically acclaimed movies—is a good, solid, intelligently-made tragedy, but its marketers (and some critics) told us that it did nothing less than define our digitized generation, that it amounted to an instantaneous classic that encapsulates our era—overblown claims that make it all too easy to dismiss the movie's significant simpler pleasures and concentrate on what the movie doesn't achieve. This isn't even to mention the typical glut of sequels and remakes that substitute an overproduced style and predictably “cutting-edge” visual effects for anything approaching creativity.

This predilection for hugeness and self-aggrandizement at least makes more sense in the world of Hollywood—after all, America's movie factory does peddle flashy excess more reliably and consistently than any other movie industry in the world. Also, when it's done well, that larger-than-life splendor can admittedly make for more exciting, even more magnificent, cinema than some quieter, humbler movies. This year, the spectacular dream factory that is Hollywood pumped out a few amiably “big” movies—namely Shutter Island, Martin Scorsese's flippant but nonetheless immersive genre puzzle; True Grit, a solid remake that excels by not trying to be a Coen Brothers movie; Predators, an unnecessary but kinetic and surprisingly beautiful series reboot; and gorgeous, compelling animated movies like Toy Story 3 and How to Train Your Dragon.

Delusions of grandeur also afflicted smaller-scale American indie movies and foreign arthouse exercises, though here the sense of self-importance is more pedantic than juvenile. (Such movies, when they fail, know they're brilliant when they're not; bad Hollywood movies, on the other hand, usually don't pretend to be.) Again, the off-putting sense of condescension and pretense we get from such overreaching movies can be the result of overzealous marketers and self-conscious critics rather than bad filmmaking (though that's often to blame too). For example, we were told that Black Swan was the most insane, mind-bending horror-camp mashup of the year, when really it just uses a lot of tried-and-true aesthetic tricks to disguise its predictability and rampant cliché; we were told that The Kids Are All Right was a brave, honest, raw exploration of human sexuality, when it's actually just a dull, simplistic study of overprivileged characters; and we were told that The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and its sequels (or the Millennium trilogy or whatever it's called) were unflinchingly sordid, post-feminist indulgences in modern depravity, when in fact they're the braindead foreign equivalents to torture porn like the Saw movies. (For a foreign trilogy that really does immerse you in stylish yet horrific grime, check out the British Red Riding movies.) Meanwhile, in France, the predictably self-involved Gaspar Noé made probably the biggest, most overindulgent, most ridiculous experiment of the year: Enter the Void. Like his previous Irreversible, it's not actually good, but it's good that it exists, and it's worth watching if only to experience Noé's insane aesthetic gimmick (he basically places you in the head of a recently-deceased former drug dealer whose soul is floating over and throughout Tokyo) and to appreciate his almost stubbornly excessive ambition.

I say all of this because most of my favorite movies of the year did not pretend to be huge, groundbreaking achievements. They were, for the most part, focused, compact, and clever—stemming from a central concept or idea, and subtly branching out to encompass a plethora of unexpected tangents. Small-scale absurdity, subversive political commentary smuggled into a solid story via razor-sharp aesthetics, an astonishingly maintained atmosphere of encroaching dread, a sincere scrapbook of a turbulent relationship, an ironically-plotted murder mystery—these seemingly small achievements overshadowed the Inceptions and Social Networks of 2010. The best movies of the year demonstrated deceptive simplicity—they revealed the difference, in fact, between simplicity and simpleness. (The former can be an attribute, a dilution and magnification of compelling themes and ideas; the latter follows a single, uncomplicated course—namely, a plot—and does not concern itself with its own most fascinating nooks and crannies.)

On the other hand, some of my other favorite movies of the year included a five-and-a-half-hour epic miniseries about a notorious terrorist, an unabashedly opulent foray into “sensorial cinema” whose every sight and sound seems to pulsate electrically, a grandiose historical opera about Benito Mussolini, and a very long and very exciting crime drama set in a French prison. So maybe, sometimes, the people who make and market movies are right: bigger is (or can be) better. (We return to that common-sense, but often-overlooked, platitude of filmmaking and criticism: every movie must be made and responded to on its own terms.)
A final note: for a movie's “official” release date (meaning, official to me), I arbitrarily use the earliest date that that film had at least a limited release throughout the United States. While most critics use the movie's premiere date in New York or Los Angeles, I don't think it makes sense to abide by the moviegoing schedules that only a small handful of people on either coast are able to experience. This means that there are a few movies on this list—like numbers two and ten below—that were considered by many critics to be 2009 releases (and there are also several movies that were considered 2010 releases that I haven't seen because they haven't even had a limited release in the U.S. yet—movies like, say, The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceausescu or The Strange Case of Angelica).

1. Dogtooth (d. Yorgos Lanthimos, Greece)
Dogtooth is both the funniest movie of the year and the most disturbing—a seeming contradiction that attests to the movie's singular wavelength of traumatic absurdity. The dictatorial patriarch of a bourgeois family in Greece has apparently imprisoned his three children (one son, two daughters) in their closed-off family estate since birth. They are led to believe that the outer world is treacherous and impregnable—even airplanes that pass by overhead are re-presented to the children (now apparently in their late teens) as tiny model planes that have landed in their backyard.

The father in the film runs his family sternly, tyrannically. With his wife (who participates in the cruel game but apparently has no say in it), he orchestrates bizarre and pointless contests, peddling out an arbitrary number of stickers to the “winner” (the prizes mean nothing but a sense of accomplishment for the three siblings). The unnamed mother and father have also imposed their own mangled language system on their children, swapping definitions of words for others simply, it seems, to show that they can. When one daughter asks her parents the meaning of the word “pussy,” mother replies that it means “a bright light”; more significantly, father informs his children that they'll only be allowed to leave their home once their “dogtooth” falls out.

The patriarch's injustices against his family go further than pointless contests and the deconstruction of language. Incest is not only permitted in this closed-off world—it's mandated. Having become aware of his son's burgeoning sexuality (unsurprisingly, he's indifferent to the sexual awakening of his daughters), the patriarch initially enlists the help of one of his employees to provide sexual initiation for the boy (a partnership which, for the father, has all the gravity of a mundane business relationship). When that arrangement proves disastrous for the family (after the sexual liaison brings material goods from the outside world to one of the daughters, in exchange for sexual favors), the father forces his son to choose between his two sisters for a sexual partner. This results in one of the movie's queasiest scenes: a seemingly endless static medium shot of the three siblings packed into the family's bathtub, naked.

Sometimes the movie's absurdity is presented as a minimalist joke (such as a scene in which the son anxiously stalks a tiny kitten that has strayed into their backyard, mistaking the animal for a vicious predator); most of the time, however, the movie's premise (and its sense of humor) is haunting and unsettling. Two abrupt acts of violence (both committed by the father) rescue the movie from potential glibness: there are disturbing, unavoidable ramifications to the parents' tyrannical reign over their children's lives.

There is no overt allegory made in Dogtooth; the father, for example, is not meant to symbolize Greece's modern political state, nor is he a stand-in for some dictatorial capitalist overseer. Nonetheless, there are parallels that may be drawn, especially thanks to a few scenes that depict the father in a cold modern workplace defined by rigid, deadening geometric lines and drab pastel colors. (The fact that he rewards his children's competitive natures with meaningless compensation in the form of stickers furthers the capitalistic analogy.) But I think the movie works just as well as a disturbing satire of bourgeois insularity, removed of its sociopolitical undertones (this is why comparisons to Buñuel seem mostly appropriate).

The movie is brief and concise, but it sticks with you. Late in the film, after a frenetic dance-off performed by the sisters that perfectly encapsulates the movie's funny-frightening tone, one of them attempts to forcibly remove her “dogtooth”—thereby allowing her to leave the family home. (This brutal scene, like much of the movie, is shot in a static, direct medium shot, which makes Lanthimos' attitude towards his characters akin to that of a scientist studying specimens under a microscope.) We'll never know, however, if her attempt to escape her father (and her family) is successful—the movie cuts off at an agonizingly uncertain moment. Dogtooth, then, leaves us in an anxious state that approximates the one experienced by the three siblings: oppressed by uncertainty and helplessness, dominated by an omnipotent ruler (in the siblings' case, their father; in the audience's, the director). We hope for escape, desperately, and maybe futilely.

2. The Ghost Writer (d. Roman Polanski, France/Germany/UK)
Polanski may still be the best director in the world at infusing seemingly simple stories with dry, acerbic sociopolitical commentary, a skill that may reach its pinnacle in the half-silly, completely off-kilter The Ghost Writer. This isn't just a movie that's as funny as it is suspenseful (which isn't really all that rare in the movies); its bizarre achievement is that the forces of evil in this movie are so unexpected, so pervasive, so phantasmic, and at the same time so stolidly mundane that the overpowering sense of dread reaches levels of sinister farce.

Ewan McGregor's modestly successful writer is tasked with ghostwriting the memoirs of former UK Prime Minister Adam Lang (Pierce Brosnan—the casting is so obvious it's sublime). Lang has moved his family from the UK to the perpetually gray coasts of a New England island, allowing Polanski to frame a seemingly unending series of masterfully atmospheric widescreen compositions: a lone, baffled McGregor in the sharp foreground, and a whole morass of unknowable peril in the misty background. McGregor's writer seems to accept the assignment not because he believes in it (he seems, at least at the beginning of the movie, totally apolitical), nor because it will allow him to flex his intellectual muscles (he regards the assignment as hackwork); more than anything, his character seems capricious and aimless, and may be attracted to the mystique of an army of security guards and the suspicious circumstances of his predecessor's death (the corpse of Lang's first ghostwriter washes up on the New England coast at the beginning of the movie).

Polanski has, of course, always embraced the darkly comic, but what's surprising about The Ghost Writer is how willfully tongue-in-cheek it is. It sometimes resembles a workmanlike cable-TV political thriller, or an adaptation of a seedy paperback thriller: wives, mistresses, and menacing politicos recite crackling dialogue; Eli Wallach shows up as a grizzled old witness spouting conspiracy theories; late-night rendezvous at tiny seaside motels pulsate with spy-movie intrigue; there are secret files and cryptic messages, and everyone, at one point or another, seems absolutely villainous (besides our beleaguered hero). The grandest joke comes at the end of the movie, a brilliant gag that slyly treats the film's main character as its punchline.

The fact that the movie is not self-serious, and is sometimes indulgently cheesy, should be taken as a stroke of comedic genius. After all, the parallels to reality are obvious: a British PM whose zealous war on terror and close ties with the American government simultaneously makes him a political superstar and a travesty of modern diplomacy. The name Adam Lang even echoes that of Tony Blair, and Brosnan's Cheshire Cat-charm makes for a fascinatingly contradictory character. (He may be a villain, but we're attracted to him anyway.) Torture is a predominant theme, and one of the main villains is a noted American scholar from an Ivy League university. The Ghost Writer seems like a tawdry spy show (albeit an exceptionally intelligent one), and because of this it makes international politics of the last decade seem like a farcical potboiler. I like it when movies treat real-life intrigue with the zippy over-the-topness of pulp fiction, especially when their subject is international politics (which often seem so hollowly convoluted anyway).

Mostly, though, The Ghost Writer functions as Polanski's incredibly clever exercise in aesthetics-as-theme—the entire thing is staged, shot, and edited to evoke a litany of real-world parallels and satirical commentaries that otherwise may have been completely absent from the movie, in a lesser director's hands. Again, a perfect example is the final shot of the movie, an extremely complex snapshot of basically all of the movie's predominant themes that could function as a lesson plan in Film Studies classes: how to present an idea visually, solely through form, without relying on a didactic screenplay. This may well be the most cinematic movie of the year.

3. Let Me In (d. Matt Reeves, USA)
A remake (slash-adaptation) that's infinitely better than anyone could have expected it to be, Let Me In is a like-minded but subtly different sibling to the already-excellent 2008 Swedish film Let the Right One In. How to describe the small but significant differences in personality between the two movies? If the Swedish film resembles, in part, a grungy, rough, fiery punk mini-masterpiece (even its quieter moments have a burning hostility to them), Reeves' American remake is like its lonelier, more melancholy, more plaintive cousin. Imagine a lush symphony covering a Black Flag song; the sentiment is the same, it just affects you differently.

Casting is key in Let Me In, not only for the two young protagonists (Owen, an alienated young boy whose parents are divorced, played by Kodi Smit-McPhee; and Chloe Moretz as Abby, a world-weary centuries-old vampire trapped in the body of a young girl) but for the supporting characters as well. Richard Jenkins has never been better as her human father-figure-slash-lover: he has aged and watched her remain a young woman, and now simply provides fresh corpses for her to feed off of. (In one of the movie's most powerful unspoken moments, Owen—helplessly in love with Abby—learns the painful backstory between her and her pseudo-father, and he seems to wonder if, decades from now, he will meet the same lonely fate.) Elias Koteas plays a detective who has the misfortune of investigating the girl's victims; a peerless character actor, his mournful delivery and quiet dismay at the carnage that surrounds him provides a vital emotional entryway for the audience.

Just as importantly, though, Let Me In marks a triumph for director Matt Reeves: the meticulous style and flawless pacing of the movie mark him as an undeniable new American talent (and not only in the horror genre). After working in television, Reeves made 2008's gimmicky monster movie Cloverfield—a solid feature debut, but its stylistic conceit (the film is ostensibly all a first-person account shot on digital video of a catastrophic invasion in New York) told us little about Reeves' proficiency as a storyteller, stylist, or commentator. Let Me In nails all three categories. It's a wonder of digital video composition, with razor-sharp blacks, reds, and glowing yellows creating a gorgeous (and haunting) kaleidoscopic backdrop; Reeves and cinematographer Greig Fraser frame their actors more tightly than many filmmakers seem comfortable with, which emphasizes the emotional intensity of this story more than its grisly horror tropes. (The best and saddest example: Owen forces Abby to enter his house without explicitly inviting her in, dubious of her claim that she can't enter unless he directly asks her to. She enters, in an apparently extreme self-sacrifice, and in an unforgettable medium close-up begins bleeding from her scalp and her facial orifices. The boy begins to cry and hugs her in desperation. Horror has rarely seemed so poignant; this scene was effective in the original, but it's absolutely devastating here.)

Arguably the distinguishing feature of both Let the Right One In and Let Me In is its scary-sweet genre hybridization: they're essentially love stories, though the bonds forged between characters arise from extremely distressing, bleak situations. This may be even more subtly evoked in Reeves' film: Owen is severely disturbed before he even meets Abby, as he spies on his neighbors, dons a Hannibal Lecter-ish mask and poses with a butcher knife before the mirror, and withdraws anxiously from his school swimming team (he doesn't want to reveal the bruises on his back to other students—a brief and frightening touch that points to some kind of domestic abuse). Companionship in Let Me In is a vital escape from violence and ugliness, though the desperation of these relationships doesn't make them any less sincere.

Let Me In, if it is a genre movie (it is horrific, but there's more than horror going on), reveals how expertly-made films can transcend their genres, using the tropes and styles of their genealogies as a springboard and bursting forth into unexpected emotional and thematic territory. (An interesting undercurrent in Let Me In is its transplantation of the story from Sweden to late-Reagan era Midwestern America: Reagan's notorious Evil Empire speech even plays over an incredible early scene, suggesting that forces of evil in our world are more amorphous and ambiguous than we might assume them to be.) Passionate, intelligent, beautiful, and unshakeable, it almost makes up for the preponderance of abysmal American horror remakes that have been made over the last decade.

4. Carlos (d. Olivier Assayas, France/Germany)
The version of Carlos that I saw is 330 minutes long (that's the one that premiered at Cannes and showed on French television; there's also a 165-minute “roadshow” version that was distributed last year), but it still might be the most entertaining movie of 2010. This epic biography of Venezuelan-born terrorist Carlos “the Jackal”—who came to represent the Palestinian, anti-Zionist cause seemingly by happenstance—is kinetic, visceral, multilayered filmmaking. Early in the film (it seems most appropriate to call it a film, even though it was commissioned for television), Carlos tells a lover that he will deliver “with every bullet, an idea”; while we don't quite buy his claim in the context of the movie (Carlos regularly spouts revolutionary aphorisms that, usually, he does not follow through on), it seems apt to apply Carlos's quote to Olivier Assayas's filmmaking: this is action cinema at its best, but each scene comes loaded with its own set of contemporary socio-political parallels and divisive attitudes towards terrorist violence and counterterrorist retribution.

Assayas's filmmaking prowess shouldn't be too surprising: even when his movies fail to follow through on their extravagant premises (as in Demonlover, for example), they're never less than fascinating. (And when his movies do follow through on their ideas, as in Irma Vep, he makes the strangest, most electrifying cinematic concoctions imaginable.) What may be most surprising about Assayas's approach to Carlos is how heavily he tones down his own auteurist touches in bringing this story to life; aside from the use of a number of grimy, propulsive New Wave punk songs in the soundtrack, Assayas pre-dominantly allows the narrative to play out without obtrusion. The political interpretations are entirely up to the audience; Assayas doesn't impose his own morality upon us.

There's no way Carlos could be confused for a movie that glorifies terrorism: throughout the entire thing, Carlos is a narcissistic, pompous, self-made celebrity who uses revolutionary dogma to justify his bloodlust and his shallow carnality. Early in the movie, Carlos is ordered by “the armed branch of the Palestinian Liberation Struggle” to toss a bomb into a crowded streetside cafe; as he walks away from the ensuing blast, a shudder of remorse seems to pass over him, and we wonder how Carlos feels about the carnage he creates. But in the following scene, we see Carlos fondling himself, naked, in front a full-length mirror, and we recognize the primary concern that always motivates Carlos: himself, his own notoriety, his own celebrity.

This becomes unavoidably true by the end of the movie. The third part of the miniseries details Carlos' devolution into a bloated, power-hungry has-been who relies upon the unquestioning obedience of a few cronies. This last part of the movie is the least engrossing and the most repugnant, but this seems to be purposeful: by the end of Carlos, we can't really see the main character as anything but a desperate self-promoter. (Even this third act, though, comes with its own astonishing set-pieces, like a scene in which Germans from both the Eastern and Western parts of the country storm Stasi headquarters in liberation after the fall of the Berlin Wall, trashing its hallways and offices to the invigorating strains of an angry punk band. I need to get my hands on this soundtrack.)

Carlos isn't the only character to indulge in the hedonistic pleasures of a terrorist lifestyle; the compelling theory that underlines the often-slapdash carnage in Carlos is that, for audiences today, terrorism is rock and roll. (In a way, Carlos is like the cinematic manifestation of the theories elucidated in The Dream Life, J. Hoberman's fantastic book on how politics and the media have become inextricably intertwined over the last six decades.) Most obviously besides Carlos, there is his East German counterpart Johannes, both of whom supply arms to the East German government. Debilitatingly drunk most of the time, Johannes enjoys the sexual favors of two prostitutes obviously hired by the Stasi to act as spies on him and Carlos (the movie's ugliest scene: Carlos sexually manhandling one of these unwitting political courtesans), but he sporadically also seems to realize how fully he is betraying the well-being of his home country.

Just as tellingly, Carlos's cravings for notorious celebrity are reflected by his cohorts during the sprawling OPEC raid that comprises the movie's centerpiece. During this ninety-minute sequence, Carlos is tasked with leading a mission that would result in the kidnapping of OPEC ambassadors from Middle Eastern nations during a conference in Copenhagen, thus forcing the ambassadors' home nations to abide by the Palestinian Liberation Struggle's demands. Ultimately finding themselves in an unmanageable situation, Carlos gives in to the compromises offered by Algeria's moderate government (and accepts their hefty financial compensation) to the vociferous protests of his terrorist cohorts. But, almost inevitably, as they are driven to an airport in limousines, Carlos as well as his previously outraged compatriots smile and wave for the ubiquitous cameras of newspapers and TV stations, apparently unable to resist the fame that accompanies grandiose bloodshed carried out under the name of “liberation.”

Carlos is careful not to decry the Palestinian struggle itself—it prefers to withhold any explicit interjection regarding the validity of their mission (or of other contemporary armed revolutionaries). The movie is, instead, a criticism of murderers (or “executioners,” as Carlos is called at one point by his Palestinian superior) who use political slogans to justify their actions. By the end of the movie, even Carlos seems to realize this: after undergoing foolishly vain liposuction surgery and suffering from horrendously painful testicular cancer, he appears to breathe a sigh of relief as he's finally apprehended by the French police, seemingly happy that the entire charade has come to an end.

Carlos could have suffered from its central contradiction: how to ruthlessly condemn its main character for almost six hours and simultaneously make him irresistibly attractive? (The movie would fail if we weren't repulsed by and enamored with Carlos at the same time.) Much of the credit, of course, goes to Edgar Ramirez's lead performance, which is naturally magnetic but unafraid to take the character into extremely unpleasant depths of chauvinism and violence. And Assayas, too, orchestrating this sprawling firestorm, walks this tightrope with sublime dexterity: he conveys violence and terrorism with all of their necessary absurdity, revulsion, cruelty, romanticism, energy, sexiness, and evil; he makes us realize that real-world sociopolitical intrigue carries more weight and intensity than any fictional action movie, and reminds us that happy endings (in this context) are fabrications unavailable to us in reality.

5. I Am Love (d. Luca Guadagnino, Italy)
I Am Love has the best performance given by anybody in 2010 (by Tilda Swinton), the best musical score (comprised of snippets from Pulitzer Prize-winning composer John Adams' works), the best opening credits sequence, and the best sex scenes. (That last distinction may seem like a juvenile compliment, but Roger Ebert makes the point that Tilda Swinton, often called upon to portray sexually active women onscreen, embodies that sexuality differently with each character, realizing that carnality is as deeply personal as speech or gesticulation or subtle indicators of emotion. The sex in I Am Love is so overpowering because it makes us realize more about these characters, unlike the sex scenes in most movies.) If the movie's not higher on this list, that's mostly because it's the kind of film that is transfixing when you watch it but kind of silly in retrospect; your esteem for it will likely depend on how willing you are to forgive the filmmakers for their unabashed indulgence in cinematic sensationalism.

Parallels to earlier masterworks are unavoidable: most obvious, perhaps, is Luchino Visconti's The Leopard (also a movie about the collapse of traditional Italian bourgeois morality), but I Am Love also tips its hat towards the operatic melodramas of Douglas Sirk. At first, I thought this comparison was unflattering towards I Am Love; after all, beyond his candy-colored visuals and sweeping über-romantic tone, Sirk's real achievement was his passionate subversiveness, his ability to convey unspeakable sexual desires solely through form and elusive symbolism. I Am Love at first seems to contain little subversiveness (it is, essentially, the tale of a Russian-born matriarch of a wealthy Italian family who irresistibly gives in to an affair with a much younger, and much poorer, friend of her son's), but it may require a second look. Repressed homosexuality, xenophobia, incest, helpless lust towards something that one knows is unattainable: these things are hinted at, suggested through brief looks and certain inflections in dialogue readings, but rarely exposited clearly. Subversive, indeed.

What makes the movie silly (if it is)? Maybe, I thought initially, its complete emotional extravagance, its giddily dramatic evocations of lustful human relationships, the kind of grandiloquent symbolism that includes flowers waving and bees pollinating as two characters have sex on a field of grass. On the other hand, after all, the film's director, Luca Guadagnino, and Swinton had been intending to make what they deemed a “sensation film” for years (that intention is right there in the title), and that kind of hyperbolic sensationalism does evoke, quite nicely, the singleminded bliss that accompanies a new sexual relationship. Maybe, then, the movie isn't silly at all—maybe what's off-putting about it is the result of the audience (that is to say, me) and not the film. So few movies now are willing to convey love or sex unabashedly, without restraint, without some kind of ironic self-commentary; perhaps we've become inured to a postmodern cynicism that teaches us to respond to sincere proclamations of love skeptically (at least in cinema). I Am Love may be trying to rectify that, and even though its ending is too grandiose, too schematic, and too aggressively climactic for my tastes, it nonetheless has a point: love does make any kind of sacrifice worth it, even the kind of sacrifice that dissolves familial, financial, and social well-being. I realize how hokey that sounds, and I could try to contradict such an emphatically romantic conclusion with some cold-hearted postmodern rationale, but what's the point? The title is apt; the movie is love; I can't compete with that.

6. Blue Valentine (d. Derek Cianfrance, USA)
On paper, Blue Valentine may have read more like a blueprint than a movie: its achronological structure, which shuffles back and forth in time to relate to us the violent collapse of a relationship, is a little too schematic. These painful (or, sometimes, blissful) domestic scenes could have come off as little more than pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. So the fact that the finished product is overwhelmingly emotional—the whole thing teems with passionate sincerity—is a testament to the care, creativity, and dedication brought to the filmmaking process by everyone involved.

I remember seeing Scenes from a Marriage years ago at a time in my life when, personally, its sentiments and motivations resonated deeply with me. I'm not always the greatest Ingmar Bergman fan and, admittedly, Scenes from a Marriage displays some of the greatest faults I find in his filmmaking (like a stagebound theatricality, an overly-scripted nature that contradicts his attempted profound impressionism, and a redundant and didactic enunciation of themes that could be conveyed more succinctly through visuals). But no one watches movies with complete objectivity (nor should they)—especially not a movie as unabashedly emotional as Bergman's. The flaws I detected meant nothing to me when I watched the film; what really mattered was that Bergman, it seemed, empathized with a very recent and very difficult experience of my own, and Scenes from a Marriage constituted a compassionate and humane form of reassurance. The movie is raw, passionate, turbulent (at least in Bergman's own highbrow way); it felt like it was made to console viewers who were dealing with their own recent emotional wounds, to let them know that they were not alone.

Blue Valentine represented almost the same exact experience for me when I watched it last November: I can complain of its overly scripted nature, but that means nothing in comparison to the semi-cathartic experience I had while watching it. I've never been married, and no relationship I've been in has disintegrated as violently as the one between Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams' characters; but a recent breakup after a long relationship meant that I could relate, with almost uncanny and painful intimacy, to much of what happened onscreen. This is a difficult, and ultimately a bravely sincere, endeavor for a filmmaker to undertake: the cinematic equivalent of tough love. You may not enjoy watching it, but when it's over, the scars it inflicts feel liberating.

Much of the credit goes to Gosling and Williams, two of the best actors working today, who embody these characters with a lived-in subtlety that allows their relationship to avoid grungy sentimentality. And while I usually don't like the kind of shaky handheld 16mm camerawork employed here (by cinematographer Andrij Parekh)—it sometimes feels like a too-lazy substitution for gritty naturalism—it must be admitted that it's the perfect visual manifestation for these characters' states of mind. (It also turns the lengthy sequence set in an outer-space-themed suite at a fantasy hotel into the most hellish embodiment of despair and anger seen in any movie from 2010.) So even viewers who don't have any recent emotional traumas to reflect back onto the film have much to appreciate: a rawness and a sincerity that are uncommon for movies of any kind (but especially for American indie dramas, which are too often defined by cutesiness and predictability).

The end of the movie is more than simply ambiguous: it barely seems to be an ending at all, as it leaves these characters in an almost-cruel state of suspended animation. But, if the ending is at first disappointing (either because of or despite the fact that it's so tragically sad), its brutal open-endedness ultimately seems appropriate: whatever happens to them after the movie is over, they will suffer, they will recover, and the cycle will repeat itself again.

7. Vincere (d. Marco Bellocchio, Italy/France)
The second great Italian movie of the year is veteran filmmaker Marco Bellocchio's opulent historical biography of Ida Dalser—a passionate, proud woman who (nobly and foolishly) dedicates herself singlemindedly to those whom she loves. Her tragedy was to fall hopelessly in love with Benito Mussollini in the years before the first World War, when he was dark and handsome and politically idealistic. She bears him a son; Mussollini goes off to fight for the army, then returns to lead Italy into turmoil and tyranny. They are reunited years later, after he has become a political demigod and (more tragically in Ida's view) after he has married someone else and started a family. Ida—still enamored with the dictator despite his loathsome transformation—is not content to part ways, nor simply to be his mistress. She demands recognition for herself and for their son; before long, with the powers of Italy's fascist state behind him, Mussollini has her locked up in an insane asylum, and has their son shipped off to an orphanage.

Bellocchio's sympathy is entirely with Ida: she may be self-destructively in love, but she's also resourceful, proud, carrying herself with dignity even through suffering. (I've never seen another performance that so closely resembles Maria Falconetti's in The Passion of Joan of Arc—as Ida Dalser, Giovanna Mezzogiorno owns every single close-up she's given.) When, during a dreamlike snowfall, she climbs the gates of the mental institution that has imprisoned her, disseminating pamphlets that declaim her true identity as Mussollini's lover, Bellocchio treats it as her own (small) personal victory: a triumphant declaration of the truth that is a testament to both her love and her ferocity. Her greatest self-sacrifice comes later in the film, though, when she realizes that she must behave timidly in the insane asylum in order to be released and reunite with her son—a sacrifice she makes in the name of familial love.

Bellocchio treats Mussollini with palpable disdain; he's not at all concerned with this character, with the insecurities and delusions that led him to play second fiddle to Hitler. This could have been a shortcoming in other, more historically-minded dramas, but Bellocchio isn't exactly concerned with the sociohistorical circumstances of Italian fascism per se. He's more fascinated by emotional and sexual fascism, and by political chauvinism in general: Mussollini is portrayed predominantly as a self-involved bully, whose callous treatment of Ida points towards his desire to inflate his own self-importance in any way possible (politically and sexually most of all). This is firmly established in the movie's opening scene: during a political meeting early in his career, Mussollini gives God three minutes to strike him dead; his survival is presumably proof of God's nonexistence, or of Mussollini's self-perceived superiority over Him. Bellocchio's underlying theme is actually pretty ballsy, especially for a political state that continues to be mired in corruption and nepotism: men in positions of political power may use their authority merely as extensions of their personal and social egoism.

Cleverly, in the second half of the film, we only see Mussollini in newsreels and film footage, as the actor portraying him, Filippo Timi, vanishes from the film for a while. (He returns towards the end as Mussollini and Ida's full-grown son, Benito Albino—which is itself a canny reflection of how tragically and how completely the son has transformed into a warped byproduct of his father's cruelties and dementias.) By portraying Mussollini only as a black-and-white mediated image, Bellocchio not only gets around the problematic issue of portraying an older, bloated, more rabid incarnation of Mussolini's earlier self; he also indicates the significant role that the cinema plays in the personal and political lives of Italian citizens post-World War II (or for any modern society since the early twentieth century). Early in the movie, a propaganda short at a small theater in Rome instigates a violent riot between Mussollini's supporters and opponents; later in the film, a screening of Chaplin's The Kid at Ida's mental institution brings her to tears. Other snippets of early silent cinema make their way into Vincere. This isn't even to mention how unabashedly Bellocchio models this movie after the opulent, larger-than-life qualities of silent cinema (including long dialogue-free stretches, booming orchestral music, titles and icons splayed across the screen—only slightly distracting in their obvious computer-generated origins—and, again, Mezzogiorno's iconic performance, delivered through an uncommonly high number of close-ups). The cinematic audiences in Vincere, to a large extent, base their opinions on contemporary Italian politics on the portrayals and images they see in newsreels and movies. Cinema also constitutes the only link between Ida and Mussollini for the second half of their lives—it's her way to see and hear him, to “be with him”—and, as Rob Nelson points out in his Village Voice review, the cinema may mark Ida's real victory at the end of the film, as she finally is able to tell her story via the attention of a film camera. Vincere acts as an unexpected corollary to Inglourious Basterds, then—another pseudo-historical movie about the extent to which we fashion ourselves and our societies' pasts (and presents) based on things we see on movie screens. But while both movies are equally bombastic, Tarantino's sincerity towards his characters (scant though it may be, he does identify with the character of Shosanna) can't compare to Bellocchio's idolizing commemoration of Ida Dalser.

8. Mother (d. Bong Joon-ho, South Korea)
If a classicist of dramatic irony—say, O. Henry or Guy de Maupassant—wrote violent crime stories, they may have resembled Bong Joon-ho's Mother, a movie that seems like a typical (though stylish) genre exercise until its painfully ironic final half-hour. The celebrated director of Memories of Murder (which I haven't seen, sadly) and The Host (a gleefully subversive monster movie) takes us to a sordid small town where a neighborhood girl has recently been murdered. All evidence points to a mentally-challenged young man who responds to the mocking taunts of neighborhood kids with sudden spurts of violence. But the movie is really about the attempts by the man's severely-devoted mother to prove his innocence, especially after the local police force and a surreally smarmy defense lawyer prove unwilling to seriously investigate the case.

Incest is suggested between mother and son (they sleep in the same twin-sized bed on the floor), and her devotion towards him borders on the maniacal: in the opening scene, for example, she nearly slices off her finger while cutting up some roots because she's so concerned with her son crossing the street safely. But she's never really vilified: we see her primarily as a single mother doing what she can to protect her child, who has been dealt a difficult life. Hence the ironic twist at the end of the movie, which I wouldn't dream of giving away: an unforgivable act of violence, a torrent of shame and confusion and self-victimization. The preponderance of idiotic twist endings over the last decade can make you forget how powerful they can be when they're done well: everything you thought you knew about the characters and their relationships for 90 minutes is overturned by the ensuing thirty.

More than anything else, Mother is a stylistic achievement for Bong: he veers from off-kilter surrealism to gritty naturalism to poetic despair sometimes within a single scene, and he handles the movie's suspenseful setpieces with flawless precision. (A scene in which the mother hides in the closet of her son's best friend while he and a lover sleep on the floor might make you forget to breathe; a flashback to the murder of the young girl that instigates this story is at once fantastically gorgeous and absolutely horrific.) It's style over substance, at times to its detriment: the opening and closing scenes, which act as bookends, are beautiful and strange but don't really say very much about what the titular character has gone through. Most of the time, though, Bong's film is ingenious, unique, clever, and haunting—thrilling as much for its sheer entertainment as for its audacious manipulations of form and narrative.

9. Restrepo (d. Tim Hetherington & Sebastian Junger, USA)
The scariest movie of the year? Restrepo addresses the War in Afghanistan through distanced observation, following a single company of the American military stationed in Afghanistan's Korangal Valley (described by a number of authoritative voices as the scariest place on earth) throughout its fifteen-month assignment. We bear witness to firefights, although the Taliban fighters remain almost entirely unseen throughout the movie (as they do, in fact, for the American soldiers themselves); we observe the Americans biding time, tensely venturing through the arid valley, bonding, talking about the war and their families, going through daily routines; we watch the captain of the regiment try to relate to a group of local farmers (who themselves are caught in a tug-of-war between the American military and the omnipresent Taliban) and we are shocked and dismayed by the seemingly unbridgeable rift between the captain and the beleaguered Afghans.

These observations are assembled into seemingly chronological order, aside from a series of first-person interviews conducted with the American soldiers at an Italian base after the end of their service. Things happen—at times traumatic, hopeless things—and in the very next scene the soldiers are simply moving on, doing what they have to do. What other choice do they have? There is no narrative arc to the movie, no convenient logic (rising action, climax, denouement, etc.) to systematize the order of events. This is mostly a benefit rather than a drawback: while the movie is not structured like most narrative films (and the majority of documentaries, it must be said, do act as narrative films), this somewhat disorganized feel, this most basic compounding of events, places us in an aimless swath of time that parallels the uncertainty experienced by the soldiers onscreen.

This organizing structure, along with Tim Hetherington's and Sebastian Junger's unwillingness to impose their own editorial voices into the film, also means that Restrepo is not political in nature. It doesn't rationalize or condemn the things that the soldiers have to do; conservatives and liberals could watch the movie and presumably walk away from it with their opinions unchanged (although the opposite response is certainly also feasible). The approach taken by Hetherington and Junger is more sympathetic: they identify with the soldiers being placed in this drastic situation, having no choice but to survive and defend themselves. Political motivations have little credence for them; even the captain of their outfit motivates them not by convincing them of the justness of their cause, but by reminding them that they are surrounded by enemies who want to kill them, and that they simply have to survive.

The movie almost automatically carries with it immense sociological and historical value. I can think of few war documentaries that simply hope to place us alongside the soldiers, to make us experience their anxieties without explaining or editorializing them; most documentarians approaching a project like this would develop their thematic talking points and organize their movies around them. (Even a movie as great as No End in Sight adopts this technique.) Restrepo is even trickier because it tackles the War in Afghanistan, an issue that seems more abstract—less fathomable—among the American populace than the War in Iraq. The War in Iraq may be defended by conservatives or lambasted by liberals for its vague motives (preemptive strike? war on tyranny? terror?) and neo-imperialism; the War in Afghanistan, though, seems to have arisen out of clear and verifiable facts, yet simultaneously seems unresolvable. Again, these opinions are neither voiced nor refuted by Restrepo; it simply hopes to provide us with empirical evidence, and (perhaps) to encourage political debate once the movie is over.

It seems tacky to lionize the efforts of the filmmakers when the entire movie is about the valor and courage of the soldiers—and, of course, our admiration and respect should go predominantly to the men and women onscreen, and thereafter to those behind the camera—but it still should be said that journalistic photographer Hetherington and author Junger undertook this project at great personal risk, and furthermore completely eliminate themselves as explicit authorial voices from the movie itself. (Unlike, say, Michael Moore, Bill Maher, or even Sacha Baron Cohen, all of whom would call emphatic attention to the dangerous and confrontational situations in which they place themselves.) The risks undergone by Hetherington and Junger for the sake of objective journalistic reporting are sadly reified by Hetherington's recent death while covering the rebellion in Misrata, Libya (in an attack that also killed photographer Chris Hondros). At a time when most documentaries feel compelled to offer self-involved opinions on divisive issues, Restrepo's main achievement may be its resolute desire to remain objective, to observe and convey—to provide photojournalism of the most vital and respectful sort.

10. A Prophet (d. Jacques Audiard, France/Italy)
I don't know if we really need more gritty crime stories about small-time hoods who rise to gangster stardom in microcosmic prisons, but if such stories are done as well as A Prophet, I guess we can't complain. Jacques Audiard—the propulsive, stylish, intuitive director of The Beat That My Heart Skipped and Read My Lips—helms A Prophet as though it were his Mean Streets: in every scene, with every shot, it's as though Audiard is trying to make a name for himself. He's directed six movies, but he treats A Prophet like it's his breakthrough—and, given the moderate stateside success of the movie, maybe it is (in a monetary sense, anyway).

Tahar Rahim gives an incredible performance as Malik El Djebena, a poor Parisian Muslim of Arab descent who is sentenced to six years in prison for, it seems, scuffling with some cops (a petty offense he nonetheless claims he did not commit). In The Shawshank Redemption, Tim Robbins's character claims it took going to prison to actually turn him into a criminal; too bad there's not a single believable moment in that entire movie. A Prophet, though, gives actualization to that idea (as have numerous other prison movies and TV shows): an insecure loser outside of the joint, Malik is approached by a group of menacing Corsican thugs almost as soon as he's imprisoned, and is forced to do their bidding by a terrifyingly unpredictable crimelord named César (who simultaneously serves as the movie's supervillain and father figure). At first a gutless errand boy who is manipulated due to his inexperience and his desperation to survive, Malik quickly ascends to the top of this prison hierarchy, thanks to the movie's most grueling scene: the assassination of a fellow Muslim inmate, carried out by a razor blade concealed in Malik's mouth.

In epic fashion, A Prophet details Malik's transformation from ordinary street kid to indomitable gangster. Beyond this compelling story and Audiard's incredible stylistic verve, there's actually little going on in A Prophet: if the movie is going for an allegorical portrayal of ethnic strife in modern Paris, it doesn't achieve it, and it doesn't really say anything about the allure or capitalistic motivation of violence, aside from the fact that you do what you have to do to survive. (One late scene, in which Malik solidifies his super-criminal status, actually seems to unequivocally glorify violence.) Thematically speaking, A Prophet is most interesting when it establishes how completely criminals are made by societal and economic forces, not by inherent personality: there's no doubt, by the end of the movie, that Malik is pressured into drug-dealing, assassination, and coldhearted brutality simply because the economic and ethnic stratification of modern Paris have led him into a situation where no other recourses are available to him.

If the movie is somewhat simple conceptually, it is endlessly compelling on a narrative and aesthetic level. At times, we may accuse Audiard (perhaps unfairly) of trying too hard: some of his stylistic flourishes (such as surreal visitations by the ghost of a man he's killed, or dreamlike visions of wild deer) come off as hokey and distracting instead of powerful. (At the same time, such sporadic surrealism distinguishes A Prophet from the glut of prison-set films and television shows that are already available to us.) But most often, this is a story told as powerfully and viscerally as powerful, observing characters' actions with a claustrophobic intensity (the cells that comprise the movie's setting are fully felt) yet hesitant to vilify or glamorize them. When César—who commits hideous acts of brutality throughout much of the movie—realizes that his reign over this prison kingdom has come to an end, we are surprised to find ourselves suddenly sympathizing with him; and when Malik kills his fellow prisoner (who is at first vilified, in predictably homophobic fashion, because of his predilection for screwing young male inmates), this victim reveals a shy, tender side that makes Malik's messy attempted throat-slitting that much more unbearable. The characterizations are almost too convenient, too heavily mapped-out to come off as realistic; but in the larger-than-life, bombastic style of A Prophet, they seem to work nonetheless.

In retrospect, A Prophet seems to work so well almost in spite of itself. It makes numerous mistakes, it missteps too often, and its moralism is almost adolescently pat. So why do I still remember it as such a powerful experience? The main reason, I think, is Tahar Rahim's lead performance, which is awkward, timid, shy, internalized—the exact opposite of what we would expect from such a violent and visceral character study. We watch him and we're willing to overlook the flaws that Audiard commits behind the camera: we believe that we're watching a genuine character's transformation, almost against our better judgment. It may not be an exaggeration to claim that Rahim singlehandedly turns a mediocre movie into an almost-great one, and if he doesn't experience a long and stellar career, it will be a travesty. (I was going to say a crime; then thought better about ending this short response with such a hideous pun...)

The Next Ten:

Winter's Bone walks the difficult tightrope of offering us access into a gritty, poverty-stricken, violent world without indulging in sordid slum glamour. It excels particularly as an unflinching character study, elevated by a knockout performance by Jennifer Lawrence.

It feels almost routine by now to place Toy Story 3 so high on this list: the reliably solid craftsmanship and heartfelt emotion of Pixar's films continue at an impressive level, even if this sequel feels less ambitious or influential than Wall-E or Up. But it's nonetheless a perfect conclusion to the trilogy, with an appropriately wistful finale and a melancholy world-weariness that would be affecting in any film (but especially so in one that centers around an ensemble of plastic figurines).

White Material may be a subpar Claire Denis movie (in my opinion), but a lesser film made by her is still better than most other movies out there. She and Isabelle Huppert, incredible as always, make an ideal pair: they turn the central character in White Material, a French heiress to a wealthy coffee plantation in an unnamed African country, into a fascinating, enigmatic contradiction. As Civil War erupts around her plantation, Huppert's headstrong businesswoman remains behind to rescue the floundering company: she's naïve and brilliant at the same time, manipulative and sensitive, a Frenchwoman and an expatriate deeply in love with her adopted land. The spell that Denis casts here may be less transfixing (perhaps because it's more direct) than in L'Intrus or 35 Shots of Rum, but it's still a haunting, gorgeous dreamscape of a movie.

The King's Speech may have won Best Picture at the Oscars this year—an achievement that would usually inspire severe skepticism on my behalf—but what's pleasantly surprising about the movie is how small and tightly focused it is. It may turn a momentous and destructive period of modern history into the inspiring story of one man's self-actualization, but it also intelligently comprehends the vital role that mediation plays in modern politics, and admirably allows its central character to remain difficult and unapproachable for much of its running time. Also, a rousing and inspirational climax is usually not a selling point with me, but this king's speech, when it finally arrives, is a flawless lesson in how to use aural and visual cinematic form in order to evoke an emotional response in an audience.

David O. Russell's The Fighter should be nothing more than a cliched biopic about a boxer who struggles against the odds; its storyline and screenplay suggest a rote, rousing sports movie that offers its cast a number of meaty showboating performances. But Russell and his crew are too sensitive, and his cast is too attuned to the subtleties of this story, to let the movie lapse into mindless predictability. At its best it portrays a complex and ambitious intersection of themes—athleticism, visual self-mediation, drug addiction, the self-destructive (and potentially redemptive) nature of family, class stratification, the elusive nature of memory—with a visceral force that makes it into the year's most rousing hybridization of genre entertainment and self-proclaimed ideas.

The best parts of Exit Through the Gift Shop are the least self-consciously clever ones: moments that simply allow us to observe the practice, appreciation, and precarious nature of street art, made by somebody who should know these topics better than anyone else (the notorious and ingenious street artist Banksy, who appears in this movie's interviews as a shadowy, voice-manipulated cypher). But even the less exciting parts of Exit Through the Gift Shop are intellectually stimulating, as this pseudo-documentary turns into a pranksterish commentary on the facile nature of artistic celebrity. Of all the documentaries this year that pondered the fact-and-fiction dichotomy, this may be the only one that has a clear, thought-provoking motivation for its sly manipulation of the truth.

Shutter Island basically amounts to Martin Scorsese dicking around in the stylistic sandbox that Hollywood has to offer: despite its artsy (and viscerally invigorating) flashbacks to the traumas of World War II, the movie is really just an excuse for Scorsese to deconstruct the editing and narrative structures that American movies are so accustomed to. As such, it's incredibly exciting—a trippy indulgence in formal insanity that's most successful only if it's never taken remotely seriously. In other words, the Rubik's-cube apex of style over substance, and maybe only Scorsese could make this tomfoolery so effective.

I'm not buying what the critics have told us: The Social Network is not an age-defining encapsulation of what it means to be a young person born in the digital generation. I'm not even entirely sure the movie tells us anything that any regular Facebook user couldn't already acknowledge intuitively. But the movie is a stylish, intense, perfectly-acted tragedy of self-destructive hubris and capitalistic competition. Aaron Sorkin's script sometimes seems a little too clever (in real life, I don't think anyone ever recites one-liners that conveniently summarize their characters' emotional mindstates and psychological motivations, snappy though those one-liners may be), but even that indulgent cleverness may have a purpose: only on social networking sites can people formulate their own snappy dialogue for hours before they recite it.

Marwencol doesn't do anything new with the documentary format, but its story is enough to make it immensely powerful: it's about Mark Hogancamp, a man who suffered a brutal beating from five assailants outside of a bar, and (after months of recovering from severe brain damage) creates an alternate world named “Marwencol” in his backyard. Marwencol is a one-sixth-scale recreation of a (wholly fabricated) small French town during World War II, populated by dolls and plastic toys (most of whom are modeled after Mark's loved ones and acquaintances) who enact a fantasy story involving villainous S.S. agents and voluptuous Belgian witches, dreamy love stories and violent, torturous treachery. To the movie's credit, it never tries to psychologize Mark's artistic “second life,” as he terms it: it simply observes Mark after this recovery, trying to deal with the anger and fear that have afflicted him since the attack, and it quietly appreciates the redemptive power of art. It may be formally unspectacular, but it does what more documentaries should do: it makes us fully experience the complex and overwhelming mysteries of human life, without trying to simplistically explain them away.

Finally, Splice distinguishes itself as the best cheesy idea-driven horror movie of the year: fans of Black Swan should watch this movie to discover what trippy psychosexual monstrosities actually look like. Adrien Brody and Sarah Polley play two genetic scientists, an unmarried couple who successfully infuse human DNA with that of other organisms in order to make an entirely new creature. The movie's ideas about parenthood, incest, human ingenuity and divine retribution are only half-formulated, but they're fascinating nonetheless. The director, Vincenzo Natali, also made 1997's Cube, another film marked by a fantastic idea that was only partly realized; Splice at least marks a maturation in the director's career, though he has yet to make a movie in which the execution equals the potential of its premise.

Confessing to the Camera: Ulrich Seidl's 'Jesus, You Know'

2011-03-21T13:55:00.038-05:00

While recently perusing some past papers, I came across this essay, which I delivered at a conference at Columbia University in March 2010. I decided to post it here, mostly since Seidl's film continues to fascinate me, though it's been at least a year since I've seen it.

Lord, I want to thank you for this film. I want to thank you for the shoot. Everything went so well. I want to thank you for all the happiness involved. We all made this film in honor of you. Let me pray for every single person who watches this film, may they be willing to encounter you in a new way. May they gain a new vision of you.

– Elfriede Ahmad, Jesus, You Know

Lord, I dedicate this project to your cross, the cross of victory... I profess that you, Jesus Christ, you are our Lord and our living God, that are you are the master of this film, the master of Austria. I profess that you want to do something completely new with this film, something that no one can foresee or predict. Lord, you can do it.

– Hans-Jurgen Eder, Jesus, You Know

Ulrich Seidl's 2003 documentary (or docudrama, or docu-something) Jesus, You Know begins with these words, intoned by two supplicants addressing the camera. In both instances, the speakers are viewed in a static shot from a frontal perspective, forming a rigidly symmetrical composition that places each individual in the midst of a network of vanishing parallel lines (pews stretching into the distance in the first case, two sets of votive candles in the second). This is an overarching aesthetic stricture that will reappear often in Jesus, You Know—a stylistic motif suggesting, perhaps, that a rigorous and coldly composed graphic network is the clearest way to denote the presence of a divine being.

But what divine being is this? If one detects a certain narcissism in the conflation between omniscient auteur and omniscient God in the film's opening lines, this, too, is a theme that will reappear often in Jesus, You Know (albeit implicitly). While the film is ostensibly a somber look at increasing secularization in Austrian Catholic churches in the modern age—it observes the prayers of devout individuals in an age that increasingly devalues religious morality—there is also the sense that Seidl smuggles editorial subversion of these themes into the film, positing traditional religious icons and rituals as empty objects offering nothing but emptiness and false hope. Indeed, the minimalist, spare aesthetic of the film—entirely static shots filming individuals from a close frontal perspective as they offer prayers to Jesus (or more accurately, to the audience; or even more accurately, to the camera)—would seem to suppress Seidl's authorial intervention entirely, allowing viewers to come to their own conclusions about his sincerity (or lack thereof) regarding his religious subjects. But as we will see, Jesus, You Know offers an extraordinary play with spectatorial identification, the act of visual mediation, and the role of the cinematic author, all of which serve to form an incredibly multivalent view of modern religion.

The sociohistorical context of Jesus, You Know is a continuing and accelerating trend of secularization in Austria. In 2001, a census report listed 11.5 percent of Austria's population (approximately 915,000 citizens) as regularly attending Sunday mass. As of the end of 2005, according to a report released by the Catholic Church of Austria itself, that number had fallen to nine percent of the total population, or approximately 750,000 citizens, a number that has continued to decline over the last five years.

Ulrich Seidl, the director of Jesus, You Know, is himself the product of a traditional Catholic upbringing, yet he's also a controversial maverick on the European art cinema scene. His 2007 fiction film Import/Export concerns two Ukrainian emigrants who experience brutal sexual degradation during their life-changing journeys; his 2001 fiction debut Dog Days was described by the Village Voice as a shining example of sadomiserablism; and his 1995 documentary Animal Love was described by fellow provocateur Werner Herzog as “looking directly into hell in the cinema.” In addition to his willful wallowing in sadistic and shocking human behavior, Seidl is controversial for his aggressive blurring of the boundaries between fiction and documentary. “I don't make any difference between feature films and documentaries,” Seidl said in an interview printed in taz magazine. “That's why the term 'staged reality' was coined. That means the people in my film are non-actors, but sometimes don't act that way. And that irritates some people. They want to think and see in tidy categories.”

Jesus, You Know as a whole will likely also irritate people who want to conceive of film in tidy categories. Although this “staged reality” offers no direct judgment upon its subjects as nobly devout or as foolishly naïve, Seidl's rigorous aesthetic and editing structures do convey subtle subversions of the characters' beliefs in an omnipresent and attentive deity. Seidl's editorial evasion is made doubly discomforting because we are offered access to such disturbingly personal information. The film is almost entirely a series of prayers delivered directly to the camera by real-life churchgoers (that is, as “real-life” as we may expect from a Seidl film). For them, during the act of filming, the presence of the camera has miraculously substituted itself for the presence of God. One woman tells the camera—tells us—about the crisis of faith experienced by her and her Muslim husband, a religious antagonism that is destroying their marriage; another distraughtly discusses her husband's infidelity and confesses that she has considered administering a lethal dose of poison to him; a man regrets how infrequently he saw his daughter after he and his wife divorced; and so on. The obvious emotional charge these prayers have for their speakers (and undoubtedly for the audience as well) makes it especially troubling when Seidl develops a sly exegetic counterpoint to his subjects' faith-based proclamations.

The primary way in which he achieves this subversion is by intercutting static (indeed, the camera never moves in Jesus, You Know) medium shots or close-ups of statues, altars, sculptures, murals, and other religious iconography into the subjects' prayers. Now, even such cut-ins could be interpreted as either affirmations of a benevolent divine force (represented through crucifixes, portraits of Jesus Christ and the Virgin Mary, etc.) or as evidence that modern organized religion (or at least the Roman Catholic Church in Austria) amounts to no more than empty signs and objects, mediated constructs, simulacra of religious forces that are meant to simplistically stand in for the real thing. We want to believe in the presence of a divine listener because the plight of these individuals is so palpably real. During one man's discussion of the collapse of his family after he and his wife divorce, for example, Seidl cuts to a portrait of the Virgin Mary cradling the baby Jesus, and we can hear church bells reverberating on the soundtrack; we want to believe that someone is listening to this man's supplication (staged or no, there's nothing phony about it). We want to believe that those church bells are some kind of divine rejoinder to this man's prayer. Maybe they are.

But more often Seidl juxtaposes these onscreen prayers with ironic editorial counterpoints. For example, after one woman voices her desire to call her cheating husband and pose as her own imaginary paramour, Seidl cuts to an image of a man carefully unrolling a plush red carpet before a church's pulpit, suggesting that the operations of this church amount to no more than a meticulous performance, a show of religious ceremony. This idea is similarly, though more enigmatically, represented in several scenes that act as “interludes” between subjects' prayers: performances by church choirs staged (like almost every shot in the film) in a static, frontally direct, rigidly symmetrical composition. Though the performances of these hymns and chants are beautiful and sincerely performed—on their own, we would have no reason to question their sense of religious affirmation—within the context of the film they serve as simply more performances, staged in front of grandiose altars and reredos. But the clearest example of Seidl's veiled religion-as-performance subtext arrives when one of the onscreen supplicants, who also serves as caretaker at her church, begins scrubbing a large crucifix with a rag. At this moment, the divine import of religious imagery and the more pragmatic concerns that keep religious institutions functioning smoothly could not be more distantly separated. Furthermore, the existence of the crucifix here as an object, a construct, an adornment in need of constant upkeep, reminds us of the film itself as a mediated construct. While Jesus, You Know is concerned with increasing secularization in Austria, with the emotional and ethical value of prayer, and with the very real hardships experienced by the individuals onscreen, it too ultimately cannot amount to more than an object—a thing—pieced together into a very specific arrangement by a sole overriding author. It cannot be a religious film, then; indeed, taken most purely, no film can be a religious film, since the transplantation of religious subjects into mediated objects necessitates an elimination of the theological ambiguity that must define every spiritual relic or experience.

This theological ambiguity may also be termed the “aura,” a concept that has been discussed by Walter Benjamin and Andre Bazin, among others. In “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Benjamin warns us of the loss of the artistic aura necessitated by the cinematic form. Since film, at both the level of production (the recording function) and of exhibition (the function of the projector), operates through an automatic mechanism rather than through human reproduction (or its context in a culturally validated gallery space), it loses the “aura” that had once been attained by painting, by sculpture, even by theatrical performance, with its actual presence of flesh-and-blood thespians. This aura that is conveyed by art (or, in Benjamin's estimation, used to be) is akin to the aura that surrounds the religious icon: an awe in the presence of a symbolically-weighted artifact—in the first case, an awe for the transcendental skill of the painter or the sculptor; in the second case, an awe for the divine and intangible force the exists beyond or is represented by the religious icon. Benjamin would likely agree with the interpretation that I have drawn from Jesus, You Know: that no film can truly be a religious film, since the one necessarily dissipates the aura, while the other relies upon it for its existence.

Bazin would disagree, however. In “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” he correlates the relatively young art form of cinema to the ancient Egyptian practice of “mummification”—not only as a literal practice, but also a figurative one, through painting and sculpture. In his theory, both cinema and ancient Egyptian art forms serve to immortalize the human body through art, to preserve one's physical presence through a visual likeness. Indeed, Bazin argues that in the fifteenth century, Western painting sought to achieve its fullest spiritual expression by imitating as closely as possible the outside world. Given this philosophy, cinema was not the loss of the aura in art but the fullest achievement of it, the manner in which artists could most closely correlate their spiritual (creative) expression with an imitative likeness of reality. So, we have another contradiction which does not help us to resolve the ambivalence in Jesus, You Know: the visual representation of religious iconography in the film could either be a Benjaminesque condemnation of the loss of the aura through reproduction, or a Bazinesque respect for the transcendental power that can be attained through reproduction. (It is my interpretation, however, that Seidl aligns himself more closely to Benjamin, undercutting the potential “aura” these icons and supplicants could have by juxtaposing them editorially.)

The question of the loss of the aura in visual reproduction is even further complicated by the fact that Jesus, You Know is shot on digital video. In a way, this stylistic choice is necessitated by the shooting conditions of the film: recording extremely long takes in the low-light levels of church interiors (often at night), shooting on celluloid would have required elaborate lighting setups and cuts between reel changes that are counterintuitive to Seidl's spare aesthetic. But shooting on video achieves an added, some would say deleterious, effect. Cinematic purists have proclaimed, since the rise of videography especially in the 1990s but as early as the late 1970s, that only on celluloid can the “aura” of cinema actually be achieved. This art form was conceived and developed as the rapid movement of still frames imbued with a physical and chemical thickness struck by the interplay of light and matter itself; the projection of light through this physically thick, tangible substance miraculously embodied the movement of reality. It was (and is), then, an art form not only striking in its closeness to the physical world but powerful in its deviations from reality, in its graphic interplay of light and shadow and motion. Digital video, celluloid purists would say, removes cinema of its painterly aura by flattening its physical thickness (no longer chemicals reacting within a strip of celluloid, we now have only pixels logging binary information) and, unless the video is transferred back onto celluloid in postproduction, by removing it of its very tangibility and physicality during projection. Of course, a digital video when recorded or projected would still exist on a disc, a mini-cassette, etc., but this physicality is obviously different from a strip of celluloid several thousand feet in length. If my sympathies with the celluloid purists are noticeable here, so be it: even supporters of the digital revolution would likely concede that viewing celluloid through a film projector is a more “transcendental,” more oneiric, experience than seeing an image recorded and projected digitally. What's striking in Jesus, You Know is that Seidl seems to use the flatness and the muted colors of digital video as an essential component of the movie's bleak, spare aesthetic. Aided by his tyrannically symmetrical compositions, Seidl and his cameramen, Wolfgang Thaler and Jerzy Palacz, achieve a world that is oppressive, unexciting, and alienating. We may want a certain aura to manifest itself for the subjects who pray onscreen, but we must admit that, even with its close-up cutaways to religious icons, this never happens throughout the course of Jesus, You Know.

Indeed, the gap between visual mediation and traditional religious morality is a recurring theme in the movie. If its opening words, quoted above, seem somewhat absurd in attributing authorship of this decidedly problematic film to Jesus, this unsettling disjunction, this disharmonious cohabitation, of religion and mediation is constantly reiterated by Seidl and by the supplicants onscreen. One woman claims that her husband “simply does not have the gift” for choosing the right television program while channel-surfing; he often turns to titillating talk shows that act as a “legitimization of sins and redemption” (she says). “The aura on those shows is just plain negative,” concludes this woman in a serendipitous coincidence. Later, a young man confesses that he watches television solely for the “pretty actresses” on the programs; these shows instill in him immoral thoughts that further make him question his purity and his faith, especially since these television-fueled fantasies inspire him to find sexual gratification in many biblical stories. The suggestion implicit within these prayers is that television—or the visual media more generally, given that the young man later claims that he envisions himself as a vengeful and absurdly virile hero from a Hollywood action movie—has replaced the church as the modern discourse for questions of morality, sexuality, and other existential crises. “Problems don't get discussed anymore,” says the woman whose husband watches those tawdry exposès, “but watched on TV.”

Perhaps one reason that visual mediation and traditional religious morality cannot coexist is the conflation of an omniscient auteur with an omniscient deity. It is a commonplace that the cinematic auteur reigns over his or her set with an all-powerful omnipotence, and in orchestrating a world that commonly dismantles the real-world “rules” of spatiotemporal linearity, it must be said that the filmmaker does act something like a microcosmic God, deciding for the audience what we will see (and hear), when, and in what manner. Seidl constantly troubles this notion throughout Jesus, You Know, most simply through the ambiguous address of the prayers themselves. To whom are they addressed? Jesus, or a divine being, most directly—this is the basic mode of address in any prayer. Yet the supplicants in Jesus, You Know also direct their prayers towards the camera; although most of them look slightly offscreen while speaking (only one churchgoer directly, and unnervingly, returns the camera's gaze), the camera is nonetheless the only “presence” in the church during all of these individuals' monologues. So the camera and a divine presence are equated, but of course the audience and the camera are equated in any act of cinematic spectatorship; this is what Christian Metz termed “primary identification” in The Imaginary Signifier, the idea that the cinematic spectator regularly identifies with the disembodied camera as a distinct and sensing entity in itself. Yet if the spectator in the case of Jesus, You Know identifies with the disembodied camera through primary identification, we also identify with the “character” of Jesus Himself, whose perspective as addressee we inhabit during the onscreen supplications. This form of identification—our alliance with the perspective of not only the disembodied camera apparatus but with a distinct character's point of view—is termed by Metz “secondary identification.” The simultaneous coexistence of a primary and secondary mode of identification in Jesus, You Know—a coexistence which is usually considered incredibly improbable in the cinema (a character as the camera)—further refutes our unshakeable faith in the presence of a distinct and omnipotent receptive deity.

The prayers, then, are directed not only to a divine presence, not only to the camera, but resultantly to the cinematic audience as well, asserting us as a divine and omniscient force. The supplicants' mode of address collapses into a spectatorial triumvirate of identification. Yet we must add one more overarching addressee to this already-complex system: Ulrich Seidl himself, who controls and observes their prayers, who (given his penchant for “staging” documentary material) perhaps had a hand in articulating the prayers themselves. It is he who, in editing these prayers together and infusing them with cutaways, truncating them, extending them, forming juxtapositional commentaries, receives and responds to their prayers. Regardless of the opening words with which I began this presentation, Jesus Christ is not the master of this film; Ulrich Seidl is.

The most definite manner in which we may notice Seidl's authorial predominance is, of course, through the rigid, unchanging, almost dogmatic aesthetic of the film. The camera does not move once during the entire documentary. Almost every composition observes the supplicants, choirs, or religious iconography from a frontally direct perspective, meticulously creating a symmetrical design that suffocates, dwarfs, and oppresses the onscreen subject. Most takes are very lengthy, with some single-shot supplications taking up over five minutes of screen time.

Why this draconic self-imposed aesthetic stricture? This kind of slow, cold, resolutely balanced style has often been equated with an inquiry into human despair or spiritual doubt in the history of the so-called “art cinema”; we may think of Carl Theodor Dreyer's austere philosophical penetration in Gertrud (1964), Stanley Kubrick's bemused observations of societies going to hell in A Clockwork Orange (1971) or Eyes Wide Shut (1999), or Carlos Reygadas' compassionate yet distanced analyses of individuals tormented by a lack of faith in Japon (2002) or Silent Light (2007). (Indeed, Reygadas is likely the most spiritually rigorous filmmaker working today.) Such aesthetics equate the magisterial control of the auteur with the omniscient bird's-eye perspective of a divine being; they embody, to be overly aphoristic, symmetry-as-spirituality.

The equation of such an aesthetic with cinematic spirituality is somewhat ironic, given Jean-Louis Baudry's assertion that it was precisely the cinema's multi-perspectivalism that inaugurated, for the first time, a transcendental spectator in the visual arts. In “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus,” Baudry argues that, following the Cartesian perspectivalism that dominated the paintings of the Italian Renaissance—a perspective that grants a linear viewpoint of a closed-off insular compositional space, in which the dominant objects or subjects in the painting are placed most conspicuously in the center of the canvas (or frame)—the cinema made possible a shattering of the rules of spatiotemporal cohesiveness within which traditional human vision operates. This sudden ability to jump through time and space through a mere edit—to flash back decades through a dissolve, to leap to a different continent through a jump cut—established a spectator who could see “through” the supreme omniscience of a divine being. Bazin similarly cites the cinema's “new” three-dimensional perspective as the fullest articulation of more traditional spiritual expression in the visual arts. It would seem, then, that a truly transcendental spectator is achieved through a seamless interrelation of disparate perspectives and temporal sequences.

Strange, then, that Jesus, You Know—which consists entirely of lengthy static shots, conveyed in absolute temporal linearity—equates the cinematic spectator with Jesus Himself, a direct result of equating the spectator with the camera. The film constantly and disturbingly questions whatever faith we may have had in a divine presence, yet it simultaneously posits us, the audience, as that divine presence in listening to, addressing, and responding to its subjects' onscreen prayers. Though our perspective is unrelentingly confined to a bleak, static aesthetic, we are nonetheless offered the opportunity (by the videocamera directly, and by Seidl indirectly) to unwaveringly confront individuals' religious, moral, and existential angst. If we are unsettled by our inability to mollify their unease, we are consequently reminded of the inability for any omniscient divine entity (should one exist) to directly affect the lives of human individuals, and perhaps we are similarly reminded of the essential distance between the cinematic spectator and the filmic text. Indeed, the disjunction between presence and absence that is so often conceived as the crux of the cinema's effect on its audience—the seemingly incontrovertible visual reality of the images we see, juxtaposed with our unflagging awareness that we are simply watching three-dimensional images splayed upon a two-dimensional plane—is likewise the duality that leads one to question his or her religious faith. One may be convinced of a transcendental force, or at least wholly committed to believing in the possibility of such a presence, but the complete lack of tangible and visual evidence of such a deity may lead to severe doubt and existential alienation—the predominating themes, in fact, of Jesus, You Know.

Given all of this, it may seem like Jesus, You Know is a cold, inhumane, condescending, postmodern conundrum that does not take the prayers of its subjects seriously. Such accusations are not off-base, but ultimately, despite its agnosticism, I think the documentary exhibits a compassionate empathy for its subjects' crises. I would like to close my paper with an example of this reserved, melancholy compassion. The last individual we see onscreen in an elderly woman who has voiced her fears regarding an irregular heartbeat and an overwhelming lethargy; she tells Jesus, the camera, and the audience that she feels that her time is near at hand. In the second last scene, she addresses this emotionally devastating prayer to a deceased uncle:

When I die, maybe there will be somebody with me. It helps when someone is with you. Just being by yourself, that's hard—though you have to pass away by yourself, anyway. Maybe you are already waiting for me. Maybe I really will go to some pleasant, eternal world when I die. I wonder if my father has a pleasant life now. I don't know. But I hope so and pray for him.

Our sympathies, of course, lie entirely with this individual during her prayer, and we desire more adamantly than we have throughout the entire preceding film that Seidl give us some proof that these prayers are not in vain, that some divine being is listening. We suspect, perhaps, that the film will end on a bleak note of despair and doubt, since these are the emotional wavelengths of Seidl's aesthetic and of the bewildering conflux of spectatorial modes within which we've been operating. But Seidl does offer us an allegorical alleviation of our fears, albeit an enigmatic one open to polarized interpretation. For one of the few moments in the movie, the camera journeys outside of a church, to the home of the woman we've just observed with such aggrieved concern. This leap from the film's typical religious space to the private domicile makes us aware of the staginess of this reenactment, of the fact that (characteristic of Seidl's genre-bending deconstructionism) we are no longer in the realm of the documentary. In a static long shot, this woman—Waltraute Bartel is her name—slowly approaches her open screen door from within her apartment, as we observe her distantly from outside. A dog barks and passes across the frame. Waltraute swiftly brushes aside a flowing white curtain drifting in the breeze. She steps outside, halts, and stares directly at the camera, only for a moment. And we cut, immediately, jarringly, to another performance by a church choir—tellingly, the hymn they perform is “Hallelujah.” We are asked to draw the implicit correlations between these three cinematic spaces and surmise that Waltraute has indeed passed on.

This ending—a symbolic and fictional conclusion fabricated by Seidl (indeed, Miss Bartel is, in reality, still quite alive)—is undoubtedly problematic. Most troublesome to me is Seidl's sudden intrusion as a distinct authorial agent, the belated introduction of an entirely new cinematic plane of fiction, allegory, and ambiguous visual symbolism (although, again, such blurring of boundaries is typical of Seidl). And of course we may draw from this conclusion a brutally hopeless interpretation: that Waltraute's prayers have not been answered, that her death was sudden and solitary. Yet the tranquility of this scene, its brevity and its swiftness, and Waltraute's sudden perspectival agency in confronting the camera's gaze (which she had not done in her previous monologues)—not to mention the decision to end the film with a performance of “Hallelujah”—suggests to me that her prayers have been answered (either by Jesus or by Seidl—in any case, by some omniscient force). I believe, perhaps because I so firmly want to believe, that an attentive deity has indeed allowed her a swift and painless passing into a new world. The uncertainty that lingers over this interpretation echoes the uncertainty we feel over Jesus, You Know as a whole—an agnosticism over the presence of a divine force, over the mode of spectatorial identification we inhabit, over the effects achieved by Seidl's rigid, symmetrical, yet still somehow transcendental aesthetic. The movie confronts, embraces, and maintains that overwhelming doubt. That may have been its benevolent mission all along.

Mother. Somewhere.

2011-01-14T15:04:00.000-06:00

Quick thoughts about two 2010 releases that I was eagerly anticipating (although I missed the first one when it was initially released in theaters, way back in March):

The delirious South Korean crime thriller/comedy/psychodrama Mother, directed by Bong Joon-ho (The Host, Memories of Murder), is striking in its genre-bending unpredictability, but unfortunately it's less successful at evoking audience sympathy for its two main characters. The movie is about the murder of a young girl in a seemingly tranquil small town (you know, the kind of place where murder is unimaginable yet, when it happens, is latched on to with scandal-hungry sordidness). The main suspect is a mentally-challenged twenty-something man who was last seen drunkenly pursuing the soon-to-be-victim; a golf ball was even found next to her corpse with his name written upon it. Following his imprisonment and the mishandling of the case by a detective and a defense attorney (the first man is sincere and kindly, but has no choice but to close the case; the lawyer is surreally self-indulgent and sleazy, advising his clients in the Lynchian VIP-room of a restaurant), the man's eerily dedicated mother decides to pursue her own investigation. Convinced of her son's innocence, she uncovers what appears to be a torrid plot revolving around the victim's sexual promiscuity and incriminating photos on a missing cell phone.

Repeatedly, we are reminded that mother and son literally slept together—though he's an adult, they continue to share a twin-sized mattress on the floor of their home. They may figuratively sleep together as well: incest is suggested, but never clearly exposited. Broadly, the movie is about the horrific lengths that a mother will go to to protect her son, ultimately (perhaps) deluding and damning herself in the process. Thus, without giving anything away, the movie's most shocking scene: denying the obvious, committing unspeakable acts in order to protect a lie.

Although I haven't seen Bong's critically-acclaimed Memories of Murder, I found his monster movie The Host (2007) to be one of the cleverest takeoffs on Hollywood cliché over the last decade. In a year that also included 28 Weeks Later and Hot Fuzz, The Host may have been the best of all three at smuggling an embittered mockery of American brashness and bombast into the trappings of a rote genre picture. (In The Host, the American military steps in to help destroy the river monster that they created in the first place, by dumping some toxic chemicals into Seoul's waterways; predictably, in trying to eradicate the beast, the US Army ends up destroying the city and killing much of the civilian populace in the process.) The Host never really asks us to take its premise all that seriously, which is maybe why I find its political outrage so subversive and amusing.

But we really should take Mother seriously: the movie features characters who are meant to resemble real people, and the lengths that they go to to protect themselves and one another instill irrevocable psychological damage. At times, the movie is successful at evoking the fraught relationship between mother and son, and at making us fully experience the trauma undergone by the titular character—the reappearance of a small case for acupuncture needles towards the end of the film, for example, speaks volumes about what has been lost by and discovered about both mother and son. But at other times, Bong's deftness at manipulating genre and creating gorgeous stylistic tricks (the flashback to one character's perception of the murder is astoundingly, nightmarishly beautiful) obscure what is at stake emotionally. The images of dancing which open and close the film are meant to convey the main character's desperate attempt to free her soul of the violent burdens with which it is now laden, but they come off as little more than clever bookends. Also, some of the small-town characters embroiled in the central web of sex and lies receive a level of absurd mockery that's a little too close to the Coen Brothers. But these are slight detractors from a unique, beautiful, and striking film that abounds in intriguing manipulations of style, genre, narrative, and theme.

Meanwhile, Sofia Coppola's recently-released Somewhere, which won the Golden Lion at last year's Venice Film Festival, fares a little less well. I absolutely consider myself a fan of the director's: I was put off a bit by Lost in Translation's shades of condescension and insularity, but both The Virgin Suicides and Marie Antoinette are sublime, painful immersions in longing and uncertainty. Somewhere is as gorgeous as any of her films to date (it's filmed by Harris Savides, one of the best cinematographers working today), but its expressions of aimlessness and emptiness often reflect negatively upon the movie itself. The story of a successful (but, one senses, quickly-fading) movie star who involuntarily becomes reacquainted with his young daughter, Somewhere follows a very distinct narrative pattern: a first act of almost-silent, dreary wandering; a sweet middle portion observing the growing intimacy between father and daughter; and a surprisingly overt final portion in which the main character realizes his hollowness and tries to rediscover himself.

Somewhere is worth watching for the naturalistic performances of Stephen Dorff (perfectly cast) and Elle Fanning, in particular their interaction with each other. With seeming effortlessness, they portray a precise relationship: there is fondness, closeness, to begin with, but as the movie progresses the familial bond becomes stronger, more unbreakable, in shaded ways. Coppola has often excelled at conveying these little moments between human beings, hinting at their intimacy but hesitant to spell it out for us, apparently respecting her characters too much to intrude upon their most private moments. It's especially impressive here, maybe because, for almost the entire movie, we are immersed in the private sphere that only these two characters share with each other.

But the insularity and condescension that I sensed in Lost in Translation resurface here (to an extent), and for the first time I think the label of “aimless” is a detractor for a Sofia Coppola movie. I have to give away a slight spoiler here: essentially, the last third of the movie consists of this world-famous movie star realizing that the glitz and glamour of Hollywood are suffocating a shell of a man who doesn't know himself. In order to find himself again, he simply begins driving, as far away as possible, and the movie ends hopefully (but ambiguously) with him parking at the side of the road, the cornfields of some Midwestern state in the distance, and simply walking. The idea, of course, is that this despondent movie star finds himself by abandoning his celebrity and becoming, again, one of the “common folk.” Beyond how cliched and naïve this idea is, it also seems downright pandering—that one can find solace in the folksy rolling plains of flyover country, where people are good and down-to-earth and have their shit together. This is especially weird since, for some of the film, Coppola's point is that these idolized movie stars experience the mundaneness and glum routine and slight identity crises that we all go through—that we're not so different after all. This itself is an obvious point, but well-conveyed by the half-seedy, half-privileged hotel in which the main character and other Hollywood celebs reside. (A cameo by Benicio del Toro would seem unbearably pretentious if it didn't take place in an elevator that was covered in a layer of its own fluorescent filth.) That Somewhere tries to convey this we-are-all-the-same idea, then negates it by marking the main character's epiphany by abandoning one lifestyle and fleeing for another, betrays the movie's (and maybe Coppola's) ideological confusion. All of her movies so far are about privileged people, and one shouldn't fault her for making movies about her own upbringing and the lifestyle she has experienced; but only Lost in Translation and Somewhere, in my opinion, foolishly suggest an innate rift between a life of privilege and the lives of the “common folk.”

In addition to this questionable attitude towards celebrity and normalcy, Somewhere is often adrift in its own uncertainty and aimlessness, to a detriment. Again, all of Coppola's movies are about this aimlessness to an extent, but before Somewhere they had still seemed centered around a fairly consistent central theme or unifying idea (sexual longing and repression, geographical displacement, conjunctions between disparate historical eras, and so on). In Somewhere, we know so little about the relationship between father and daughter as it had existed before the movie started that sometimes we simply have to take the movie's word that they need an emotional reconciliation. Briefly, during a (temporary?) farewell late in the movie, the main character of Johnny Marco apologizes to his daughter for not having been around during her childhood; without this line of dialogue, we would have had no inkling of the role that he had played earlier in her life. This evasive approach is, of course, intentional, but Coppola could have included some snippets of dialogue, some telling actions, some tiny behaviors and allusions which could have alluded to Johnny's earlier absence—especially since Coppola has often conveyed these slight, suggestive moments so perfectly.

This is true, too, of Johnny's emotional breakdown late in the film, which culminates in a drunken, tearful telephone call to his ex-wife (and his daughter's mother). During this call, he claims that he is not even a person—that he's nothing. Of course we infer that these feelings of insignificance stem from his awareness of his failure as a father, but the extent of this emotional collapse had been dismissed throughout almost the entire movie up to this point. At worst, we conclude that it's a sudden third-act gimmick in order to make possible the movie's ambiguous ending; at best, we assume that Coppola's intended approach of subtlety, evasion, suggestion, and implicitness has backfired, to the point where we suddenly realize we don't know the main character at all. (Maybe that's the point, but it doesn't work for such a focused character study.) I love movies that coast along on suggestion and allusion, but they must still offer something (in character, in theme, in style) to latch on to. Somewhere offers this to a certain extent, but maybe, unfortunately, less successfully than The Virgin Suicides or Marie Antoinette.

Three New Films (And a Tragedy)

2010-12-26T17:49:00.000-06:00

Over the last week or so, the fact that I suddenly had a small amount of disposable income to my name, as well as a few days off, meant that I got to catch up on three recent theatrical releases which are all top contenders on “best film of the year” lists. None of them, in my opinion, come close to actually being the best film of the year. I know I have a hefty amount of catching-up to do in terms of seeing the year's most critically-heralded films (I haven't yet seen White Material, Carlos, Dogtooth, or Mother, all of which I imagine could skyrocket to the top of my list), and a number of the prospective bests have yet to receive a wide or limited release, at least in Minneapolis (Blue Valentine, The Illusionist, and Another Year among them). But a number of titans on critics' best-of lists in 2010 have left me uniformly lukewarm (or worse). The Social Network is solid and intelligent, but I wonder if it's telling us anything that any astute individual with a Facebook page didn't already know. Inception raises the bar pretty high for what summer entertainment can offer, but beyond its kinetic style and high-concept gimmickry, there's nothing there, and the movie's emotional center is almost completely hollow (save for a few scenes between Leonardio DiCaprio's and Marion Cotillard's characters). And The Kids Are All Right is the worst of the lot, an astonishingly dull melodrama of entitlement that offers absolutely nothing of visual or cinematic interest to alleviate the characters' fatuous, self-involved crises.

All of this is to say that, as it currently stands, my tentative “best of” list would be seriously unimpressive. Winter's Bone stands head-and-shoulders above the rest, an immersive and intense study of a young woman's violent thrust into an insular world that never approaches condescension or slum glamour. A Prophet and The Ghost Writer would follow—two movies that could also be considered 2009 releases, depending on the specific date of release you're using. And the fourth, Shutter Island, would already be a movie that I've defended vociferously but that I still never expected would stand so high on a best-of-the-year-list—it's about as exciting and playful as you can make a rote genre picture, but it is still a rote genre picture. A few notches down from there would be The Human Centipede: First Sequence, and although I do have some kind of masochistic respect for this Euro-horror shock movie, I'd still feel uncomfortable commending it so enthusiastically.

All of this is not to say that 2010 has been a weak year for movies: as always seems to happen, the best movies of the year—the most exciting and original, the ones that come in underneath the radar and that really stand out during awards season—usually seem to pop up after the calendar year has already ended. What this does mean is that the most popular candidates you've seen on best-of lists don't actually, really, seem to offer that much ingenuity, generally speaking. Does this hold true, too, for three recent heralded movies—Darren Aronofsky's Black Swan, David O. Russell's The Fighter, and Danny Boyle's 127 Hours?

I was most disappointed by Black Swan, to my own admitted surprise—it was probably also the movie I was looking forward to most eagerly this winter. There are definitely things to recommend in the movie, most notably Natalie Portman's performance, which takes the plot's cliched character typologies and imbues them with real emotion, pathos, and pain. And a few of Aronofsky's jump cuts are effective shockers, and there's a hallucinogenic scene in which one character repeatedly stabs herself in the face that lives up to the movie's nightmarish premise. But for the most part, that premise is wholly unfulfilled. Black Swan is supposed to be a totally insane hallucination rising out of the main character's psychosexual desires, self-destructive ambition, and severe mental instability. So why does the whole thing seem so one-note, so predictable? It's not some stubborn sense of critical arrogance that makes me say I knew what was going to happen in practically every scene of the movie (or, not just that, anyway). The movie's pseudo-shocking sequences of bodily mutilation, its metaphorical doubling of Swan Lake's plot with Black Swan's own (Portman is the white swan! Kunis is the black swan, get it?!), the numerous scenes overloaded with reflections off of glass and mirrors behaving in unusual ways—the heavy-handedness of these stunts are worse than merely unsurprising, they seem to give the impression that Aronofsky has no faith in his audience to pick up on his themes, and therefore bludgeons us with them, without creativity or sophistication. Black Swan is able to achieve an air of the epic and the macabre, but even during its grandiose finale, the trajectory seems more schematic and self-congratulatory than inspired. The entire thing is spelled out for you in one line of dialogue, during which the ballet company's smarmy director, Thomas Leroy (Vincent Cassel), summarizes the storyline of Swan Lake; that synopsis, transplanted into the world of Black Swan, is about all the movie has going on conceptually.

Over the last several weeks, bloggers and Internet critics have been writing about what may be Aronofsky's most celebrated movie, Requiem for a Dream, in a series of 102 posts commemorating the movie's tenth anniversary. Not all of the posts have been positive, though. John Lingan, for example, on his blog Busy Being Born, writes about how shaken and awestruck he was when he first saw the movie at 15 years old. Now, seeing the movie again ten years later, Lingan writes that he's “embarrassed because Requiem for a Dream is such an overwrought, self-satisfied, and juvenile film, and it appealed to me precisely because I shared all those qualities when I saw it... Requiem for a Dream, with its easy cynicism...and unremitting bleakness, is just the thing to make a person feel like they've lived a little and hardened in the process, particularly if that person hasn't really lived at all.” These are pretty harsh words—there are good things about Requiem for a Dream, and I don't think it's only identified with by bored suburbanite teenagers who want to feel badass—but in a way I think the general idea also applies to Black Swan. The movie, we're supposed to feel, is demented and phantasmagoric and nightmarishly lustful; if Black Swan is all of these things, it is so only in the most juvenile, simplistic, and self-satisfied ways. And if it's trying to be a horror movie (you know, one of those high-pedigree award-garnering horror movies), Black Swan absolutely needs to abandon the fathomable and comprehensible for at least some of its running time—but it never does, in an attempt to remain palatable to the crowd that wants to tiptoe towards the edge of their comfort zone but never really step past it.

Black Swan, at first glance, is a non-generic head trip that actually abides by the narrative and thematic patterns that we're used to; David O. Russell's The Fighter, on the other hand, is at first glance a totally generic underdog boxing story, but much of it is distinguished by aesthetic ingenuity and tricks of audience address that make the movie anything but stale. This is remarkable, considering how much the movie has in it that really should seem dreadfully cliché: it's the underdog story of Micky Ward, a boxer born and raised in Lowell, Massachusetts, who has to contend not only with a mostly-indifferent sports media but also with a larger-than-life mother and brother who care more about remaining in the spotlight than about young Micky's success. His brother Dickie was an aspiring boxer at one point in his life, whose main claim to fame was knocking down Sugar Ray Leonard in 1978 (many boxing fans say Leonard merely slipped). Now, Dickie is a bug-eyed crack addict living vicariously through his younger brother—he's the subject of an HBO documentary (a thought-provoking film-within-the-film) about the dangers of drug addiction. Micky's mother, meanwhile, is an overbearing matriarch still grasping at Dickie's one-time success, apparently unaware that her younger son has a greater chance at attaining the welterweight title.

It's telling that Mark Wahlberg is forced to underplay in this movie; Christian Bale and Melissa Leo, as Dickie and his mother, give such grandiose, showboating performances that no one else is really given the chance for speechy, Oscar-baiting thespian moments. These are the kinds of performances I usually detest: the kind that equate tears and the wordiness of speeches and the sordidness of the character with immersive personification. Here, though, Leo and Bale really do inhabit these characters, and the actorly moments remain integrated to what is going on in the characters' heads and lives. For example, during the scene in which Dickie, now imprisoned for a plethora of charges, bombastically hosts a showing of the HBO documentary about his crack addiction in the prison cafeteria, Bale's wildly hyperbolic performance gives way to shame and rueful anger, and we realize that the overacting he offers throughout much of the film parallels Dickie Ward's efforts to convince himself and the world that he is still relevant. Later, when Leo's character intervenes between Micky and Dickie as they fight (verbally and physically) on the day of Dickie's release, Leo's embodiment of the crass Boston-matriarch stereotype softens into a portrayal of a mother torn between two sons—one cyclonic and narcissistic, who uses his personal troubles as an avenue for public performance; one timid and sensitive, who channels his feelings of aggression, inferiority, and neglect into his performance in the ring. There are better and quieter performances than both Bale's and Leo's this year, even though the two of them (or at least one) will almost certainly win an Oscar, but at least they are indeed portrayals rather than opulent shams.

Russell, the director of I Heart Huckabees and Three Kings, here tones down most of his auteurist touches, taking a backseat to the gigantic performances and the by-the-numbers script by Scott Silver, Paul Tamasy, and Eric Johnson. But Russell still visualizes the story intelligently, stylishly, and excitingly. The oft-mobile camera is as athletic as the fighters onscreen, and the seemingly effortless blend of production design, set design, costuming, and cinematography evokes a naturalistically seedy, rundown setting. Russell uses the filming of the HBO documentary within the film as a comment on his own film's fictionalization of reality, and even as a self-criticism of his crew's intrusion into and evocation of Lowell, Massachusetts. And a brutal scene of Dickie's delusional withdrawal in prison superimposes multimedia imagery of Dickie's win against Sugar Ray Leonard as well as him sparring with younger Micky in their front yard as a way of emphasizing how our conceptions of ourselves are essentially montages of filmed scenes (and how self-visualization is a sort of addiction in itself).

Aside from these more attention-grabbing moments, Russell is surprisingly skillful at getting the most out of this cliched underdog story. So much of this should reek with mustiness, especially Amy Adams's character (a bartender—or “MTV girl,” as Micky's sisters call her—perceived as haughty because she went to college for a couple years) and the climactic boxing match in which Micky puts all of his aggression towards his brother into the ring, fights for Lowell, and goes several unimpressive rounds before knocking out his opponent for the title. (The first two of these ideas are explicitly voiced by Dickie in the film—you know, just in case we didn't get it.) But amazingly, Adams's character remains sweet and effective, and that final match is incredibly exciting (the audience I saw it with responded viscerally). It's unfortunate that The Fighter still abides by cliché so much of the time, but the fact that it manages its cliches so well and is still so invigorating is some kind of compliment for the filmmaking prowess going on here.

In between Black Swan's hollowness and The Fighter's sense of excitement lies Danny Boyle's 127 Hours, a film that's frustrating because half of it is so intense and sophisticated, and the other half is totally self-defeating and counterintuitive. First, the good things: James Franco's performance, first of all, is just the right mixture of shallow self-absorption and ingratiating cavalierness. It's essential to the movie that we identify with the main character, Aron Ralston's, desire to abandon modern society and venture into the canyons near Moab, Utah, but we also need to realize that his deluded self-satisfaction and callousness are what lead him into his dire situation in the first place. (For those who don't know the plot: that situation entails Ralston being pinned between a massive boulder and a canyon wall for more than four days, eventually extricating himself only by cutting off his right arm with a pair of mountaineering pliers.) Boyle has often sought to speak to and for the younger generation (Trainspotting, The Beach), and it's obvious that he intends 127 Hours to be the broad story of an impetuous youthful generation whose steely self-reliance may ultimately leave it stranded, emotionally as well as physically. Franco perfectly embodies that generation here; he's a charming asshole throughout most of the film, even when he's immobilized.

More problematic is Boyle's typically relentless style. The kinetic whiplash aesthetic that we've grown accustomed to through Slumdog Millionaire, Millions, The Beach, and so on is still present in 127 Hours, which may seem ironic given that the movie is largely about stasis, claustrophobia, abandonment, and helpless desperation. Half of the time, this aesthetic is appropriate: the movie nails the euphoric rush of escaping society and immersing oneself in pure nature, for example. Some of its split-second intercuts of the inner workings of digital camcorders, too, make clear the importance that self-mediation and digital technology hold in the lives of young people (and subtly criticize the main character by revealing that, even when he abandons modern society, he never really abandons modern society). In addition, the increasingly surreal overlays of Ralston's memories, premonitions, and hallucinations sometimes seem to burrow in to the very root of this character—in particular, flashbacks to a traumatic breakup and Ralston's apparent indifferent to a girl who loves him work surprisingly well.

But the movie often seems to be working against its central concept. The idea is right there in the title: the movie is supposed to be about the 127 agonizing, grueling, desperate hours Ralston spent anticipating his own death. We should be stranded in that canyon with him; we should feel the cruel march of time with him, and we should be equally hopeless about his chances to survive (even if we know the outcome of this story, Boyle could have at least temporarily persuaded us through style and plotting that Ralston may not survive this experience after all). The main flaw of the movie is ironic: it's simply too entertaining. The movie is only an hour and a half, and it feels like it: it flies by in a kinetic rush, and those 127 hours spent trapped in the canyon feel like little more than a really extreme sport.

The scene in which Ralston amputates his own arm is actually quite successful: Boyle doesn't spare us the grisly, sinew-snapping brutality of the self-mutilation. We are made quite aware of the horrific extremes that Ralston had to go to to save himself, which is only fair. The rest of the movie, though, lets us off easy, as Boyle's naturally invigorating style holds our hand through what should be a grueling experience. An example is the inclusion of Scooby-Doo in the film, thrown in because two girls that Ralston happens to meet in the canyons invite him to a party the following night with a huge inflatable Scooby-Doo: the first time the animated character appears in 127 Hours, it makes sense as a nagging vision of life's fleeting pleasures that are now unavailable to Ralston; the second time Scooby-Doo appears, it turns a horrific, demented sequence into a jokey prank, deflating the scene of the very real idea that Ralston is now facing his own mortality.

There's another huge, overarching problem in 127 Hours: it seems like the movie is supposed to be about how man's arrogant sense of his own superiority over nature can ruthlessly backfire on him. I haven't read the book on which the movie is based—Between a Rock and a Hard Place, written by Ralston himself—but it seems to entail a recognition that his foolhardy tackling of the extremes of nature, his cocky jaunt through a landscape that remains treacherous and indifferent to humanity, could have very easily killed him. The movie acknowledges this at times, too; it beautifully evokes the 15 minutes of sunlight that Ralston is granted each morning, as he stretches his left leg out into the light that cuts through the jagged canyon, his foot and shin basking in the warmth for a mockingly short period of time. It's as though nature is laughing at him for his arrogance: offering him a scant fraction of the light and warmth he could have experienced so easily, had he not thrust himself into this situation. It seems like the frenetic montages that open and close the movie, with modern businessmen and stockbrokers hustling down metropolitan streets in contrast to the solitude that Ralston will soon experience, is meant as a comment on our naïve assumption that humans can master everything that they come in contact with. (These montages are not at all infused into the fabric of the film, though, so they may just be two examples of Boyle's hollow restlessness.)

This criticism of man “dominating” nature is part of what the movie is about; but how does the film end? Of course Ralston survives, amid a victorious musical score (by A.R. Rahman) and swift editing (by Jon Harris) that turns Ralston into a triumphant victim. (That he may be, but by making the climax in this way, the film totally defuses any criticism it may have posed against its main character or against modern people in general.) Furthermore, after this climax, onscreen titles tell us that Ralston continues to climb mountains and explore canyons and now tells all of his loved ones where he is off to, which is a legitimate, true-to-life, and inspiring ending; but by emphasizing the inspirational aspects (the real-life Ralston also appears at the end with his wife and daughter) and eliminating the self-criticizing aspects, the movie leaves us with the idea that human beings really can conquer anything they confront, including nature, despite the billions of years that is has on us. This is totally antithetical to what the movie is at least partially about. 127 Hours tries to tell us that, by stubbornly believing we can trump any harsh landscape around us and, in fact, proving it, humans are practically invincible.

These problems aside, 127 Hours is still intense, exciting (to a fault), and complex. It is certainly better than Boyle's previous film, Slumdog Millionaire, although I'm one of the few people who thinks that most movies made over the last two years are better than Slumdog Millionaire.

Neither Black Swan, The Fighter, nor 127 Hours are great; I would be disappointed to see any of them on my top ten list at the end of the year. Here's hoping that the upcoming end-of-the-year releases will indeed be some of the best of the year, and that some of the highlights that I've missed will trump most of these award-garnering critics'-best-of candidates in terms of creativity, sophistication, complexity, and beauty.

A final note: you may already know about the recent court decision in Tehran that has imprisoned one of international cinema's foremost modern directors. Jafar Panahi—the director of The Circle, Crimson Gold, and Offside, three of the most beautiful, humane, and passionate films made anywhere over the last decade—has been jailed (along with many other Iranian filmmakers, writers, and artists who have commented upon the current state of affairs in their home country) for purported sentiments against the state. (This, despite the fact that Panahi's newest project is only 30 percent shot, and has not yet been edited.) Panahi has been sentenced to six years of imprisonment, accompanied by a ban of twenty years from writing and making films, giving interviews for the press, leaving Iran, or communicating with foreign cultural organizations. For any artist, such a harsh ruling meant to suppress one's personal creative voice would be a travesty; it is especially tragic in the case of Panahi, for it will deprive us of one of modern movies' most sincere and powerful voices.

If you'd like to sign a petition calling for the release of Panahi, here is a link to an online petition that has just been posted by almost twenty international cultural organizations in tandem: http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/solidarite-jafar-panahi/. Watching Offside again certainly isn't a poor form of tribute either.

A Face in the Dark

2010-12-16T17:31:00.000-06:00

Below is the first chapter of some new fiction I'm working on. It may end up being a long short story or a short novel or something in between—not quite sure yet. Subsequent chapter(s) will be posted before too long.

Chapter one 'an uptown linoleum box'

In the waiting room I stood, stretching my legs after ninety minutes of crooking them up underneath me at jagged angles. The tiled floor was a paisley green, and it clacked with an unsettling echo any time someone's shoe flitted across it. It smelled like a hospital. Like chemicals and like sterilized death. My nostrils puckered from the stench. You could hear oppressive buzzes and hums from every direction: the fatigued breathing of an overworked air conditioner; the muffled broadcasting of a news program on the television suspended, hovering, from the corner of the ceiling, that no one was watching; the steady cyclical movement of wheels of carts being guided through the hallways; the flickerings of fluorescent lights casting a strobe-light illumination onto ailing bodies; distant conversations, hushed worries, solemn and dire diagnoses. Waiting rooms facilitate exactly that: waiting, worrying, mindless prolongation. No respite. Orange plastic folding chairs. The thick air of intense sadness. It's hard to move through it. It feels like a muddy haze.

I paced back and forth, slowly but anxiously. That made it worse. I glanced at the three other people waiting there, careful to avoid their glance. I did not want to connect with them, didn't want to convey a look of pity, a look that said I'm here for you, I know what you're going through. That sympathy would not have alleviated my distress. It would have amplified it, solidified it. If I had seen the same look of pain in their eyes, I would have become aware that my plight was not a cruel affliction meant for me alone, but was a simple and merciless fact of humanity. That pain, that cruelty—I wanted to feel like it was directed at me for some unknown and overwhelming wrong that I had done. To know that it was, in reality, directed at many people at many times as a simple derivation of their being on this earth—that would have been too much to handle. Too cold, too harsh. So I did not look at them with any sort of interest or compassion, I only knew they were there. They did the same thing for me—benevolent antipathy.

It was night, late. Almost midnight. The waiting room was on the fourth floor of the hospital, and the dim yellow glow of streetlights was filtering through the smudgy windows. The hospital was located in a decent part of town, in the business district, protruding from a thicket of towering skyscrapers that housed banking firms, advertising agencies, real estate companies, conglomerates and oligopolies. Near the corner of 92nd and Lexington, far from where we lived. The walk across town had been torturous, each step thudded in my brain, punctuating uncertainty and dread. But the hospital was across the street from where my wife worked, at a consulting firm that served as a last resort for floundering businesses not yet willing to declare bankruptcy. She—Lena—my wife—would leaf through ledgers and profit reports and performance charts, endless sheaths of business minutiae provided by executives and accountants with worry painted on their faces. She would review the information and provide advice for the slow and painful return to financial stability. Sometimes there was no hope of recovery. Ruin was inevitable for some; some of them had no hope of pulling themselves out of debt and failure, and my wife would have the unpleasant obligation of telling anxious businessmen that, yes, perhaps it would be better to declare bankruptcy after all. That there are second chances. Failure is not permanent. She worked late that night. Her eyes were strained and her fingers numb from clutching writing instruments all night. She knew I was at home, probably asleep on the couch already, and that cold, sticky leftover Chinese food was waiting for her in the fridge. She was in the hospital before the end of the night.

The windows in the fourth floor waiting room of the hospital did not look onto a glittering nighttime view of the city, shimmering in the dark. I, we, were surrounded by the nocturnal vibrancy of the city, but out of the windows we could see no headlights swooping down busy streets, no grid-like patterns of fluorescent lights still on in the offices of diligent workers high above, no neon signs or streetlights reflected on black pavement. Instead our view was of a brick wall across a narrow alleyway. Shabby and sickly and depressing, just like the rest of the place. I surmised that the layout of the hospital must have been planned meticulously so that the waiting room would offer us this disheartening view. So I continued to pace and kept my glance down towards my feet, which were now moving of their own accord.

I had, in fact, been asleep on the couch when I got the call. Above the low muttering of the forgettable cop show that I had disinterestedly left on the television, the shrill scream of the phone snapped me awake. I answered groggily, expecting it to be Lena, telling me not to wait up, that it would be another late night. Even when I processed the frenetic sounds of the emergency room filtering over the phone, I still didn't shift into panic mode—half-asleep, I listened but didn't really hear. They said my name, inquiringly, the soft voice of a woman who sounded businesslike but compassionate. “Michael Davenport?” I grunted yes. “We're sorry to say your wife's had an accident.” Half a second later I shook my head vigorously as the words seeped in. All other noise dropped out, my brain hit some selective mute button. I said nothing, waited for her, my bearer of bad news, to continue. She didn't, and I felt obligated to respond. “Yes?,” I said. “She's at Mercer Hospital. Please come right away.” Her words were hurried, and I wondered, much later, how many times she had had to say the same words to people like me that night, and on similar nights beforehand. And innumerable nights afterward. The gravity of what she was saying was starting to take effect on me. Her words came in through the ear, hovered somewhere in my brain for a moment, then plummeted sickeningly to the deepest recesses of my gut as though I swallowed them with a gulp. And there they stayed, expanding, nauseating.

“What happened?,” I said finally, dreading the answer.

“A car accident. Hit and run. I'm very sorry, Mr. Davenport.”

I exhaled somberly, a mix between a sigh and a grunt. I stared off into space but saw nothing. Things seemed at once unreal and viciously hyperreal; I knew I was not dreaming, but everything at once took on an alien and awful demeanor. The quiet sounds of the cop show emanated from the television, but they may as well have been a mysterious transmission from another world, buried in static and emitting a diabolical message. I moved at once, my legs stiffened and I rose from the couch. I could feel my body move but I felt as though I was not controlling it—as though I was on the end of a puppeteer's strings. I mechanically threw on some shoes and a hooded sweatshirt, ratty and unwashed, that I had thrown on our bedroom floor earlier that day. I left.

The night air was cold and bitter, but I welcomed it as soon as I stepped outside. It dulled my sensations. It allowed my terrible dread and horror to commingle with more immediate, physical thoughts—walking briskly, exhaling condensation, shivering with my hands in my pockets. I wondered for a second if I should take the subway to 92nd and Lexington, since the walk would take at least twenty minutes, probably thirty. But the thought of confining myself to that steel coffin of a subway car, with nothing to do but imagine my wife's agony, was too much for me to bear. Besides, in my present state of mind I felt that I could superhumanly outpace a subway car, that my sheer desperation would impel me to cross the city in half the time I normally would. So I picked up the pace and walked uptown. I got to the hospital in a little over twenty minutes. I walked up to the reception desk. The attendant there had the phone crooked between her cheek and her shoulder, and was flipping through a binder briskly. I rudely ignored her current task and said—declaratively, not inquisitively—“Lena Davenport.” She raised her eyes towards me, bore a 'not now' stare directly into my eyes for a half second, then returned her glance to the papers before her. I dug my fingernails into my palms in my pockets. From behind her, another attendant approached the counter and leaned his head towards me. “Who are you looking for?,” he asked. I answered. He said she was still in the emergency room, they were doing all they could, I would have to wait, they would let me know. He told me that she was on the fourth floor; I could take the elevator up, exit and take a right, the waiting room was at the end of the hallway. His eyes were empathetic, but his voice was cold.

Last night was a rare thing: a night when Lena got home before me. At half past five her final consultation was finished—she had finished giving hope to a group of executives whose passions had disintegrated despite all of their diligence. She had reviewed the ledgers and was sincere in her reassurances: with some shrewd financial maneuverings and some corporate backpedaling, there was hope for Consolidated Metropolitan Insurance after all. Consolidated Metropolitan had ascended to a problematic middle plateau in the insurance industry. What had begun as an operation ran out of an escrowed three-story Colonial-style house just north of the city, attended to by six agents who predicated themselves on a neighborly sense of trust and decency, had meteorically grown to become one of the most profitable insurance companies in the northeastern United States. It had become so profitable, in fact, that increasingly, foreign parties who dealt a considerable hand in the New York Stock Exchange had approached CMI with dubious intimations of partnerships that might behoove the company financially—to be more precise, well-dressed and well-mannered stockbrokers, idly discussing the ease with which stock bids may be disguised (or, perhaps, smothered) within the complex logistics of insurance accounting. The six agents who had built Consolidated Metropolitan into a mid-level empire were also wise; they knew the internecine nature of modern finance well, and in addition were astute judges of character (an apt quality for insurers). They knew, then, that the powerful gentlemen from the Morrow & Hemmings Company who ushered them into the city's most prestigious penthouse bars, nonchalantly sliding crystal glasses of expensive aged brandy across red oak tables, were proposing financial felonies that could not only place CMI's investors and clients in destitution (of more than a merely monetary sort), but could also misrepresent the company's financial holdings so irreparably that there could eventually be, in place of actual money, only a gaping scribbled-upon ledger page of distorted numbers and meaningless dollar signs. So CMI initially resisted the advances of Morrow & Hemmings, and even operated under the stubborn and outdated assumption that its obligations were to the people who had purchased policies under them. But inevitably the wisdom of CMI's board members commingled with a clear-eyed and realistic truth: the company was failing, primarily because, unlike the majority of equally powerful insurance companies who dominated the Eastern metropolises, CMI could not rely upon its allegiances with federal banking institutions and top-level financiers to bolster its earnings through misappropriation and “creative” investments. And as often happens, wisdom ultimately leans in favor of self-preservation; the end—survival—is shrewdly ascertained to justify the means; and the arrival of a clever financial panacea, deus ex machina like, is grasped in favor of impending ruin. But CMI's temporary solution to its dire financial straits caught up with itself less than a year later. The snake had coiled around itself and was chomping feverishly at its own tail. The company's year-end reports listed premium revenues from the previous three quarters which, any perspicacious accountant could tell you, were actually loans extended by CMI's pecuniary bedfellows—loans that now needed repayment. Furthermore, stockbroking advice proffered by Morrow & Hemmings as doubtlessly profitable (for some at Morrow & Hemmings claimed to have an uncanny prescience in regard to certain economic developments) turned out to be remarkably foolhardy, deepening the hole that Consolidated Metropolitan Insurance had flung itself into. The symbiotic relationship between CMI and Morrow & Hemmings had morphed into a parasitic one; the latter made a small killing on investment fees. Lena Davenport of Perpetua Financial Consulting waited upon the board members of CMI patiently and with open ears. She heard their story of victimization (and slight, intermittent, yet shameful self-reproach) sympathetically, and her sympathy was sincere. This same story had been told, with hardly any variation, throughout the year by several other similarly exploited corporations—its pattern of meteoric success, tragic overconfidence, and weary resignation had taken on the vagaries of cliche—but every time it was told to Lena by the people who had found themselves immersed in it, it assumed a new sense of tragedy, and struck her with a whole new wave of ghastly horror. Their meeting was supposed to have ended at 4:30. It was extended an hour. The level of desperate but impassioned diligence among them all steamrolled until it was too intense to be interrupted.

It was winter, so the sky was a dark gray by the time Lena stepped outside—the dourest moments before dusk. She got coffee from the Starbucks next door—her habit that I loved, she never drank coffee in the morning, only at night, never decaf. She was energized by the meeting she had just had, and the burgeoning optimism of the six board members was infectious. She called me, expecting me to be home, hoping to tell me that we were going out for dinner tonight, for once we would have time for a long, lazy night, glasses of wine drunk as slowly as we wanted, a long drunken walk afterwards, not sleeping til two in the morning, clothes left on the floor. But I wasn't home. It had been a long day for me, too. There had recently been a rash of burglaries on the Upper East Side. The targets were remarkable only in their mundaneness: no jewelry stores or bank vaults, mostly department stores and pawn shops and convenience stores. But this glut of seemingly spontaneous robberies appeared to be the work of the same individual, judging from the fact that, in each instance, the poor soul stuck behind the cash register was found dead, felled by a point-blank gunshot to the head. Same weapon, judging from the bullets' striations. The murders struck me more deeply than I had anticipated they would, especially since I had handled about a half-dozen similar robberies-gone-wrong during my three years as a plainclothesman. But these were different. Security videos at two of the sites (the only two, out of five, that had functioning security cameras that actually detailed a comprehensive view of the location) displayed that, in fact, nothing had gone wrong with these particular robberies. A man of average height, in each of these two instances, had apparently targeted locations that were clear of all customers: at 8:48pm, mere minutes before closing, a trendy clothing store whose walls were lined with full-length mirrors had been struck; and, four days later, a pawnshop fortified with rusty metallic grating and dusty black walls witnessed its owner's death at 10:10am, barely after the front doors had been unlocked. The culprit wore a dark ski mask and thick winter gloves. The cashiers were compliant in each case, wasting no time, handing over the cash instantaneously; yet each time, this man unhesitatingly fired at them only a moment after receiving the money, then brusquely stormed out the front door, thrusting the cash impatiently into his pocket. The amount of money was insubstantial in each case, particularly with the pawnshop, which had not yet made a single sale. One could only conclude, then, that money was not the motivation; burglary may have been a secondary boon, it may even have been carried out from a sense of grim and absurd obligation, but the real impetus here, it seemed clear, was to take lives. This is what haunted me. Robbery was a rational crime—tragic, foolish, but rational, a means to an end, a shortcut to survival. Human. Explicable. But petty amounts of cash accompanying cold brutality could not be explained by human necessity, by cause-and-effect patterns. It made no sense. Something more evasive, more troubling, was at play.

I was wholly wrapped up in the investigation until 10:30 last night. I didn't even listen to Lena's message until half past eight; when I called her, she had already had pizza delivered and was reading a trashy thriller. She said she understood, that there would be half of a cold leftover pizza waiting for me at home, and that she would struggle to stay awake until I came back. Her voice sounded soothing, tired, tender, and painfully sweet. I ached to be home. “I love you, Mike. See you soon,” she said. “Love you. I'll be home as soon I can,” I promised. I hung up; I went back to poring over a list of every Springfield .45 ACP pistol that had been purchased in the city over the last two years. I felt schizophrenic, my head ached. An outdated map was crumpled at the corner of my desk, scribbled with notations where the murders had taken place. I rubbed my eyes, pushing roughly, forcing myself to feel a tinge of pain. I concentrated on the patterns, trying to discern some sinister method, until a pulsating ache directly between my eyes became debilitating.

I did not return home until almost midnight. Lena hadn't been able to stay awake; her head was arched backwards over the edge of the couch, her mouth formed a small open ring and she snored gently, the paperback she had been reading was still resting lightly between the thumb and index finger of her left hand. For a moment I hated myself for being unable to come home at a reasonable time, unable to be with her that night. But she looked so calm, so untroubled, lying there that I was also comforted by the sight. Seeing her sleeping on the couch singlehandedly upturned the foul, morbid mood that the night's work had put me in, and I smiled wearily. I kissed her lightly but didn't wake her. I knew she liked sleeping on the couch every once in a while, and as much as I wanted to talk to her—say anything to her, even a single thing—it felt inhumane to rouse her awake. I sat on the other end of the couch, resting her feet in my lap. I fell asleep there too, in what felt like less than a minute. Two hours later I felt her hand on my shoulder, shaking me awake; half-asleep, I felt her lips on mine and I smiled. I was sweaty and my neck was sore, but mostly I felt a disoriented, dreamy happiness. Wordlessly, we stumbled to the bedroom and collapsed on top of the covers. My tie had been loosened but it still sagged, disheveled, around my neck. Her arm rested lightly across my back, and I quietly relished the feeling of it rising and falling with each breath. We fell asleep again, quickly, after eyeing each other for a few quiet minutes.

I always awoke earlier than Lena, usually around five-thirty. I liked to stop at a diner halfway to the precinct, around 70th and Virginia, sip two cups of coffee and pick at a greasy pile of eggs while I read the Times. (Newspapers give you such a comforting and misleading sense of certainty; they contain no ambiguity—the world, it seems, is explained within.) I was hurrying out of the front door a little after six, when Lena was still stretching herself awake, having been awoken by the pounding of steaming shower water. I leaned over her as I tightened my tie, she was spread out lazily on the bed. Kissed the back of her neck and leaned my lips close to her ear. “Bye. Have a good day.” She smiled and arched her head backwards, towards mine. “You too. Love you.” I kissed her then on the lips for the last time, first briefly, then a long and surreptitious kiss, as though I knew I had to make it count. “Me too. Let's go out tonight.” She mumbled an assent and collapsed back into her pillow. I left.

In the hospital eighteen hours later, I was dragging my shoes roughly over the tile floor of the waiting room. At first I didn't realize how despondently I was shuffling my feet as I walked; then it became an experiment, seeing how little I could raise my step as I moved. I lifted my glance towards the view out of the fingerprint-smeared window, but the scene that greeted me was the same as before—a wall of brick, black rusted fire escapes, unlit windows. Five minutes later I heard steps approaching and then coming to a halt a few feet behind me, but I still didn't turn around. It wasn't until a husky, tired voice said “Mr. Davenport?” that I did an about-face and stepped wearily towards a short woman draped in a white coat with frizzy, unkempt hair, banded together hastily into a ponytail.

“Yes?”

I came up close to her, and then she took a few steps towards an empty hallway, distancing us from the other people in the waiting room. She gently touched my arm as she stepped away, gesturing that I should walk with her. A few steps into the drab, pale hallway, she continued, lowering her voice to an ached whisper.

“Did the reception desk tell you at all what happened?”

“Kind of. Not really. They said it was a car accident, a hit and run.”

She nodded. “Your wife was struck by a car directly outside of the hospital. She was rushed in immediately. Lena”—she said her name as she exhaled protractedly—“unfortunately sustained severe internal damage during the accident. We've been operating for hours to relieve the bleeding. Mr. Davenport, we've done all we could, but her injuries were simply too severe. She passed a few minutes ago. I'm so sorry.”

She said some other things, reassurances, mouth open and sounds emitted they fluttered past my ear. I became aware of myself standing rigid unmoving. My bones had become petrified. I looked at her and through her at a pale wall of whiteblue tile. Her fiftyeight words from a moment ago replayed overandover again endlessly on a broken loop in my brain. The needle was skipping and the crackle was painful, fiftyeight words telling me my wife was dead the doctor touched my arm fingernails through fabric saying maybe I should have a seat was I okay?. No images of Lena were projected by the flicker of my brain, light on the inside of my eyelids. No montage of memories, only fiftyeight words on a loop and the visual accompaniment of nauseating carcinogenic electric lights in a hospital hallway that was pale whiteblue smudged insulated with death. I didn't want a seat but my knees bent and my legs moved backwards. My back touched the wall and I leant against it. I didn't cry but I wanted to. There was too much pain in and behind my eyes for the saltwater to formulate. Let's go out tonight. The marionette pulling my strings must have been furious because he jerked all of them at the same time with one fistclenched tug, so rough and unexpected that I really think my skin should have soared upwards and my innards should have suspended there confused just because they didn't want to flop upon the dirty floor. The doctor said something again, not once but a couple times I don't know how many. Eventually the words became sequential and made a certain bland sense. “Is there anything you'd like to say to her? You can have a moment.”

After I nodded yes, I didn't know what I wanted to say to Lena or what my goodbye would sound like because there were too many jagged words tumbling around upstairs. The doctor ushered me through three hallways, all pale whiteblue, until we came to two thick-swinging grayish doors that declared emergency and that word seemed more alien yet somehow more appropriate to me now than it ever had before. The room was empty when we entered. It was saturated with a sick, dense, and noxious green color that I had never seen before, I suppose because no one so close to me had ever died before, so unexpectedly. I hope you have never seen that color before. It manifests itself only at such times. A body was lying prostrate on the emergency room table. A sheet covered it now as we entered but I could clearly make out the contours of my wife lying underneath it, and I could barely stand to look at it. The white of the linen sheet draped over her was astoundingly bright, contrasted with the sickening and muggy green that hovered throughout the rest of the room. The actuality of her death started to come to me now, the physicality of it, its tangibility. I had to cover my mouth with the back of my sweaty arm, whether to keep myself from exclaiming painfully or from throwing up, I don't know. The doctor looked from Lena to me, and back again, and shuffled carefully backwards towards the door. “I'll give you a minute,” she said, and stepped outside of the room. I was somehow able to lift my left foot, move it forward a couple of feet, and set it down again, even though something immense and inextricable suddenly seemed chained to my legs. I repeated the same motion with my right foot, then the left again, until I was standing next to Lena's body. I couldn't take my eyes from the peaks and valleys where her face came up to the sheet underneath; I still, out of stubborn desperation, expected it to stir slightly, to move somehow. I waited for minutes, but it didn't. I said some words to her quietly, within myself—I don't know what the words were now, and maybe I didn't know then. They just uttered themselves instead of me conceiving of them. She heard them. I held out my hand towards her and left it hovering over her right arm. I wondered if I should feel her skin, through the fabric, one last time, simply as a parting touch, but after debating this for long and painful moments I harshly told myself that she wasn't here anymore, that this body before me, shrouded in white, was not where my wife was now. I pulled back my hand decisively. My last touch of her, I reminded myself, would be the kiss I had given her the previous morning, when she was still mostly asleep; and this thought comforted me slightly, slightly.

How did I see her now, my wife? No distinct memories came flooding back to me. I saw a vivid still image of her instead, a snapshot that came to me from some unknown repository of images. In this fantasy that came to me now, she was walking through a path in the forest that had recently experienced its first snowfall of the year. There was a white and crisp dusting of wetness and coldness on the ground, though the messily forged trail was mixed with gray slush and dark mud from the feet of unknown hikers. The black skeletal spires of the trees poked through the thin snow and reached upwards into the gray sky; they had lost their leaves already, so it was only the black limbs of bark that spread out, weblike, in all directions. This was an image of winter that I loved and found beautiful, though it was gray and cold and wet; this was the quiet scenery that comforted me when I was young. In the scene that played out now in my mind, Lena was walking about twenty feet in front of me, and I was happy simply to trail behind her, to take in her movements and relish them. I knew she was smiling though I could only see her black hair swinging rhythmically behind her. I didn't know where these woods were, and I know I never could have been there with Lena (we had found it increasingly difficult to leave the city over the last several years), so this scene came to me like a hallucination, or better yet, a flash-forward—I was somehow convinced that this very image was one I had yet to experience in an impossible future. At the same time that this wistful certainty comforted me, it also struck me with a wretched immediacy that Lena was no longer available to me. We couldn't whisk ourselves away to some hidden refuge now, if we wanted. My refuge now would be solitary. It was a strange comfort that this blissful illusion came to me now instead of a memory or, even worse, overwhelming blackness, a void; but the image also seemed to mock me, as though reminding me that every time I would see Lena from now on, it would be an illusion.

I don't know how long I stood by Lena's body in the emergency room, hands clammy at my sides, wanting to touch her but being unable to bring myself to do so, and walking behind her on a snowy trail that didn't exist. It felt like half an eternity, but it couldn't have been very long. The doctor came back in as quietly as possible, and it sounded like she tiptoed up to me in a few swift steps. She lightly placed her hand on my shoulder and asked if I needed anything, I suppose as a way of suggesting that it was time for me to leave Lena. I told her no, I didn't need anything. She ushered me to a desk that was down two hallways on the fourth floor, where I was given a small sheath of paperwork to fill out. I was given a blue plastic Bic pen and it was suggested that I fill out the papers in a nearby waiting room. The papers were affixed to a clipboard that sat heavily on my lap. A smattering of black lines and characters stared back at me from the whiteness. It took me an inordinately long time to complete the paperwork that had been given to me, since I had to struggle with each new shape to decipher what the characters were supposed to mean. They were wholly abstract, they meant nothing to me—the curves of an S, the right angles of an E, I couldn't care less what the designs were supposed to denote. But somehow eventually I filled out the forms. The insurance policy. Death certificate. Pamphlets about funeral services, cemeteries and graves. Even now it seemed ludicrous to me that these papers were being held in my hands—what did I have to do with them?

I completed the forms and returned them to the nurse at the desk, who was typing away frantically. She raised her eyes disinterestedly to me, and then, remembering who I was, and what had happened, her harried demeanor softened and she gave me one of those sympathetic half-smiles that I had already received several times that night. She cursorily checked over the information on the paperwork, thanked me and said there was nothing else I needed to do, I could go home if I wished. I nodded and smiled, it was all I could bring myself to do. But I didn't want to go home, and even though the heavy pale greenness of the hospital was beginning to suffocate and sicken me, I didn't particularly want to go anywhere. My feet moved of their own accord, but I simply did an about-face and roamed aimlessly down a nearby hallway. What was one to do? Where was one to go upon departing from a hospital in which one's wife has just died? Any answer seemed paltry and ridiculous. I just walked.

Eventually I found myself at a bank of windows that looked out over Lexington Avenue. It had gotten late, about half past one in the morning, without me even realizing it; time, for a bizarre interval, had both dragged on interminably and rushed past me in a blur. The sidewalk four stories below, however, had begun to take on renewed life with the barhoppers and drinkers who were stumbling through swinging glass doors as closing time approached. Taxis began to congregate at curbsides, blocks of yellow that seemed to organize themselves according to some pre-arranged plan, like automatons. I stared at the life below, blankly. I wondered whether I should simply wander around outside, busy my thoughts with the immediate and physical task of moving my legs, just to do something. The cold air would do me good; I could quite conceivably simply walk the time away for several hours, start work early, five in the morning, occupy my time and my thoughts. I was about to turn away and stumble down the staircase to the exit doors. I raised my head and took in the towering building that was directly across the street from the hospital. It was now mostly dark, save for a few rectangles of dim light emanating from the offices of overachieving workers. I glanced at these few remaining occupied offices and wondered about the people inside—did they care about the job that had them working until the early hours of the morning, did they have someone at home who was either struggling to stay awake for them or had given in to sleep and would see them tomorrow? It was only then that I realized, with a mixture of self-reproach and painful longing, that it was the office building in which Lena had worked—Perpetua Financial Consulting was located on the eighth floor. I counted eight rows up from the revolving doors at street level, and tried to determine which darkened office was Lena's. I thought back, with stinging preciseness, to the times that I had visited her at work, and seemed to remember that her office was located approximately halfway down the hallway that faced Lexington Avenue. I remembered her office number: 817D. I skimmed over the row of dark windows until I landed upon where I thought her office was.

I felt a slight and confused surprise when I realized that the lights were still on in this office approximately in the middle of the bank of windows. Lena's office. Surprise, then astonishment.

There was a man in the office. He was standing as I was: only inches away from the window, facing outward, hands in pockets, legs spread slightly. He was casting his gaze out at the world, and it seemed to me he was overseeing it tyrannically. In that moment, it didn't even occur to me to question his being in Lena's office so late—the illogic didn't occur to me. I was struck only by the power of the sight, by the harshness of his presence.

Only a few seconds after taking in this dark vision did I realize, with a debilitating shudder, that he was returning my stare. As my head was inclined upwards, taking him in, his was arched downwards, his stare penetrating through the two banks of windows and burrowing directly into my eyes. Did I imagine this? This cruelest of coincidences? The longer I questioned this occurrence and realized the absurdity of it, the longer I took in the vision across the street from me, and the more incontrovertible was its actuality, the more irrefutable was its presence. And worst of all—worse than his being in Lena's office, worse than his inextricable stare returning mine, worse than this image following my wife's death like the cruelest questionmark—was the man's face, which I now could not avert my glance from.

I saw this face. A horrible face. Like nothing I had ever seen before.

One Twenty Fourth: An Affair to Remember

2010-12-08T14:56:00.000-06:00

I finally saw Leo McCarey's half-silly, half-sophisticated An Affair to Remember (1957) last night, and aside from the troupe of plucky multicultural youths who regale a bedridden Deborah Kerr with shrill holiday songs, the thing that stands out most is the movie's use of offscreen space. Examples abound throughout the film. Significantly, the artworks painted by Cary Grant's character, impetuous lothario Nickie Ferrante, are never seen directly onscreen: we receive only glimpses of them cut off by the edge of the frame, and even when we catch sight of the most narratively crucial painting (which finally reveals to Ferrante how the titular affair was impeded), we only see it reflected in a mirror as the camera pans slightly, subtly to the right. The death of a major character takes place entirely offscreen, and the accident that cruelly injures Deborah Kerr's character is suggested only by Kerr racing offscreen to the right, followed by a screech of tires and a plethora of screams on the soundtrack. There are actually several considerable pleasures that the movie offers—among them Kerr's and Grant's heavily-improvised rapport, which does seem remarkably different from the scripted banter that characters in romantic comedies from the 1950s were too often forced to recite—but this suggestive use of offscreen space may be McCarey's and cinematographer Milton Krasner's finest achievement with An Affair to Remember.

While the canny use of offscreen space could simply be passed off as a concession to censors at the time (the more carnal aspects of the affair of course could not be depicted onscreen, nor could the movie's most violent moments), it in fact ties in closely to the emotional states of the two main characters. For them—or, at least, for Kerr's character, an aspiring singer engaged to a prominent businessman—tact and a sense of domestic obligation are primary concerns. Though both characters are engaged to other people when they first meet, it is Kerr's singer, Terry McKay, who initially resists Ferrante's advances, unwilling to betray her fiance's trust. And although Ferrante is a notorious playboy who, though engaged to one of the richest heiresses in the United States, flirts unabashedly with beautiful women, he tries to keep these romantic conquests out of the public eye, maintaining a show of marital fidelity that practically everyone knows is a sham. So both characters, unable to resist their attraction to each other, still hope to keep their relationship “offscreen”—hidden away from the voyeurs around them, the public audience.

Which brings us to the still on which I'd like to focus (placed above): the moment at which Ferrante and McKay consummate their affair (sweetly, innocently), with a kiss. We don't see this kiss: on the deck of a cruise ship, the two characters begin to descend a staircase, only to retreat a few steps and pose mid-embrace. Ferrante's left leg hovers diagonally as he leans in; McKay's right arm rests at the same angle on the railing; the beams and angles of the ship provide an almost-abstract backdrop, and the lightbulb burns behind them suggestively; a lifeboat is suspended behind them, suggesting both the refuge that their affair currently offers them and foreshadowing the extent to which their affair will capsize. Throughout their kiss, the camera—which, throughout much of the movie, tracks and pans gracefully through the scene to accommodate the movements of characters (practically any shot set at the Italian villa of Ferrante's grandmother is a perfect example of this)—is here resolutely static. Even within the context of the film, then, the moment is a still image: the romance between Ferrante and McKay, which beforehand had been rushing forward so swooningly and irresistibly, now halts itself in mid-motion for that sublime first kiss.

Aside from its narrative and symbolic significance—or, to refer to the Barthes article which inspired this series of analyses of stills, the first and second meanings—this image strikes me for several reasons (“obtuse” reasons, Barthes might say). I briefly mentioned a few of them above: the architecture of the ship, which looks fairly artificial but somehow more beautiful because of it, in that distinct Golden Age of Hollywood way; the sweet and intimate way that both Kerr's and Grant's bodies are angled parallel to each other; the contrast of the single lit bulb against a void of blackness.

But this still may be especially striking in the way that it is placed along An Affair to Remember's “diegetic horizon,” reflecting, playing off of, and foreshadowing what has come before it/will come after it. For example, immediately after this moment in the film, Ferrante and McKay decide to act completely platonically aboard the ship, greeting each other as they pass by in the manner of aloof, cold acquaintances, in order to keep their affair from the other passengers on the ship and conceal their infidelity. One such exchange takes place on this very same stairway (or one exactly like it). McKay stands in the middle of the stairway, slightly below her position in the above still, as Ferrante dizzyingly wanders around the stairway below her, wanting to talk to her but unwilling to get too close while other passengers are around. While the above still is about stasis, about time standing still while lovers embrace, this subsequent scene is all about movement, anxiety, desire, uncertainty. The first is romantic, darkly (but evenly) lit, and takes place primarily offscreen; the second is farcical, bright, and plays out in full view before us. Both scenes take on added effect when we compare them to each other, and while the effect of the second scene could not really be approximated in a still image, the effect of the first is neatly encapsulated by the still I have included above.

In “The Third Meaning,” Barthes claims that the obtuse or third meaning of film stills is, to an extent, counter-narrative: “disseminated, reversible, set to its own temporality, it inevitably determines (if one follows it) a quite different analytical segmentation to that in shots, sequences, and syntagms (technical or narrative)—an extraordinary segmentation: counter-logical and yet 'true.'” What does this mean for the still above? How is its temporality different from that of the image as it is placed within the context of An Affair to Remember, as a moving film? In some ways, the temporalities are similar—stasis, stillness—but in some ways, it is true, they are different. As we see this still now, here, outside of the movie, we have bodies that are placed in a pleasing graphic alignment; the emotion of the interaction as it exists in the still may be confrontational or intimate or awkward. The power of the image is really only discernible when placed within the context of the film, when it is suspended or “stilled” in the midst of many other rapidly moving images. But in this particular case, it is powerful precisely because of its stillness. This, in fact, would (it seems) entirely correspond to Barthes' claim that the still is “a fragment of a second text whose existence never exceeds the fragment; film and still find themselves in a palimpsest relationship without it being possible to say that one is on top of the other or that one is extracted from the other” (his emphasis).

But maybe the still is most powerful because it disrupts the phenomenon of cinematic time so completely. The temporality of cinematic images is incorruptible: they are projected at twenty-four frames per second (in most theaters, anyway; I'm going to brush off the existence of 16fps or 32fps projection speeds for now) in order to maintain persistence of vision, so whether or not the images are in slow-, fast-, or “real-time” motion, they operate according to their own rules. Not so of the still, which operates at one frame per...minute? Hour? Eternity? So the still above somewhat benevolently allows Ferrante and McKay to indulge in their kiss without any obstacle or interruption, basically forever. If, however, we wanted to cruelly overtake their lives, we could capture a film still at the moment later in the film in which Ferrante and McKay meet in the audience after a show, wanting to speak volumes but able only to utter “hello,” still burning from desire, but also now from anger and confusion and desperation. Now forced to live out these combustible emotions for an eternity, Ferrante and McKay would be imprisoned in a film still that would not benefit (nor would it suffer) from the sweetness that preceded it nor the reconciliation that followed.

One Twenty Fourth: The Third Meaning

2010-12-02T14:29:00.000-06:00

In his essay “The Third Meaning,” cultural theorist Roland Barthes—maybe the man who has written most compellingly about the ways in which we receive visual media—conceives of three levels of signification shared by all film images. The first two of these meanings make logical sense: they encompass the predominant ways in which audiences usually process the flow of images projected before them. According to Barthes, the first meaning represents an informational or communicational level: the image(s) offer information about the setting in which we're currently situated, about the characters within that setting, about the situation or series of events that is currently playing out onscreen, and so forth. This first meaning is narratively significant, then, but it's also sensorial: the images tell us what's going on, but they also signify simply where we are, how things look, observing scenes and scenery as they pass before the camera. The second level in Barthes' schema is a metaphorical or symbolic level, in which distinct images may represent larger, theoretical ideas with which the film is preoccupied. In his essay, Barthes is analyzing a series of still images from Sergei Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible; as an example of his second meaning, he cites an image from that film in which a shower of gold rains down upon a character, conveying not only a narrative event within the setting, but also one of the film's broader metaphorical conceits—that greed can literally overwhelm and suffocate human beings. The second meaning still communicates information, then, but of an implied, symbolic sort. When we watch, process, respond to, and evaluate cinema, it is usually according to these first two meanings that we operate—narrative, aesthetic beauty, metaphorical meaning and theme.

But Barthes' third meaning may be his most fascinating, and it's the category with which his essay is predominantly concerned (as the title makes clear). We watch the images within a film, flowing before us, and something strikes us, something uncanny, whose meaning cannot be so easily discerned. These are small but significant visual features that do not convey narrative or symbolic information, but still do contribute to the overall visual fabric of the film. A flicker of light reflected off of water; the contrast of a red shirt against a pale blue wall; a bizarre-looking extra who happens to stroll through the background of a street scene; the worn texture of a wooden table, a blatantly artificial prop, the toothpick that dangles precariously from Bogie's mouth—these are things that add to your movie-watching experience, but on a level of signification, they don't really mean anything.

This third meaning—which Barthes also, importantly, labels the “obtuse meaning”—is something that seems to extend outside of culture or knowledge or information. It is what it is: it's pleasing quite purely in the way that it looks. It is something that can only be achieved by the visual media—in other words, by something non-real—but its appeal is broader than mere artifice; these cinematic images are real, in the sense that we see them, respond to them, love them. In the fissures and cracks of the filmic image, when we realize that pictures on film are indeed unique in a limitless number of ways, the transfixing real-unreal rift by which cinema operates becomes quite clear. This is what the third meaning is about: realizing that these images are illusions, and becoming simultaneously enraptured by how immersive, striking, and real they are.

Barthes then arrives at a paradox of sorts, which is the heart of the matter, as far as I'm concerned: this third meaning is so alluring, Barthes writes, because it is purely cinematic, a pleasure that can only be derived from the act of watching film. In other words, we can adequately relate in words what a film's story is or why it is told well or how it conveys its themes intelligently, but we can not really explain the third meaning in words; it is entirely visual. At the same time, however, Barthes declares outright that the “third meaning” can really only be gleaned from a film still, not from motion pictures—only when we halt the ceaseless flow of celluloid, breaking down persistence of vision into its fragments of one-twenty-fourths of a second, can the third meaning be discovered. The “specific filmic,” Barthes writes, lies in this third meaning “that neither the simple photograph nor figurative painting can assume since they lack the diegetic horizon.” What he seems to suggest here is that the essence of the film is not in visual movement but in suddenly arresting that movement, defining a still image by its context within the diegesis—what comes before and after it. By revealing the machinery by which cinema operates, we can parse out its essence.

This does indeed run counter to what most theorists claimed at the birth of cinema, and even what many critics and theorists continue to believe (and which I've always believed): that film is distinct because it's the only art form that catalyzes visual media into motion. (Digital moviemaking is thus included in the broad rubric of “film,” even though that categorization is of course totally incorrect. Film and video are different art forms. But for our intents and purposes, they do operate according to similar processes of mediation and vision.) In the 1910s especially, theorists like Hugo Münsterberg and Jean Epstein claimed that projecting a rapid succession of still images onto a flat two-dimensional plane—thus animating still photographs into movement—encompassed an entirely new mode of vision, not only of viewing art. They thought that the simultaneous artifice and apparent actuality of cinematic images allowed for manipulations of visual form that made film the most beautiful art form they had yet witnessed. It's hard (for me, anyway) to disagree with this theory; the obvious artifice of cinema combined with its totally immersive and convincing visuality is what makes both its realism and non-realism so potent. But Barthes disagrees that the convincing illusion of cinematic movement is what defines the art form; as he himself writes, “the 'movement' regarded as the essence of film is not animation, flux, mobility, 'life,' copy, but simply the framework of a permutational unfolding and a theory of the still becomes necessary.”

But even since the writing of this essay (Barthes originally wrote it in 1970), a theory of the cinematic still has rarely been satisfactorily achieved, or even attempted. Most viewers do indeed still perceive of film as a moving art form, which is totally understandable and seems justified: they are, after all, “motion pictures.” The transfixing nature of cinema means that we usually don't think of the hundreds of thousands of still images that make up the flow of life before us. But should we? Is Barthes correct that the essence of cinema can only be ascertained by suspending or halting this motion?

Ergo, I'd like to start a series of articles that does indeed posit a “theory of the still,” which I will (somewhat self-indulgently) label One Twenty Fourth. These articles will take a single film still, one-twenty-fourth of a second, from a single film as a jumping-off point for theorizing about cinematic sight, movement, the nature of narrative, the rift between realism and non-realism, the mechanics of filmmaking and projection, how the similarities or differences between cinematic sensation and real life unsettle or astound us, and so on. I have no idea what conclusions these articles will lead to, and have no preconceived theory about the cinematic still that I'd like to arrive at. I'd simply like to further explore the anomaly, the almost-oxymoron, of the cinematic still. What happens when we take these images out of their movement?

A few additional points in Barthes' article that I'd like to keep in mind while writing these articles: What does he mean when he writes about film's “diegetic horizon” or its “permutational unfolding”? Or when he claims that the cinematic still “offers us the inside of a fragment”—how does this temporality differ from that of real life or other art forms? What does he mean when he claims that analyzing a filmic still requires a “syntagmatic disjunction of images” and for a vertical rather than horizontal reading of cinema? When he says that the still is not a sample of a film but a quotation? These thoughts and others are points that I hope will take on further depth when applied to specific film stills in this series.

If you'd like to read the entirety of Barthes' article—which I recommend, since it remains one of the most thought-provoking and complex articles on cinema I've ever read—here's a link to it:

http://thethirdmeaning.blogspot.com/2007/10/roland-barthes-third-meaning.html

Faat Kiné

2010-11-21T17:39:00.000-06:00

The Senegalese director Ousmane Sembène is probably the most well-known African director outside of his home continent. Beginning to work in the early 1960s—the decade in which some African countries began declaring independence from their colonial occupiers, and in which African artists could now comment upon their countries' own turbulent colonial histories with greater freedom—Sembène made the first feature film released by a sub-Saharan African director, Black Girl (La noire de...), in 1966. Two years later, in 1968, Sembène would release Mandabi, the first movie that was entirely spoken in Wolof, one of Senegal's major dialects (and Sembène's mother tongue). Throughout his career, he made provocative, didactic, progressive, proudly Senegalese works that criticized the new African bourgeoisie, grappled with the polyvalent and troubling colonial history of Senegal (and numerous northern African nations), and commented upon social woes such as the oppression of women and religious intolerance in a society well-known for the oft-contentious cohabitation of Christianity and Islam.

There are many reasons for Sembène's comparative prominence among African directors. Some of these reasons are controversial and are common among some African directors, such as the co-funding of some projects by European production companies (which provides films with a more pervasive distribution outlet in Europe and overseas) and Sembène's progressive critiques of some facets of Senegalese culture, which would likely be sympathized with by the majority of Western viewers who would be interested in exploring African film. More importantly, though, Sembène is probably the best-known African filmmaker internationally because he is one of the best, at least at what he is trying to accomplish. Among African directors who repeatedly comment upon the sociocultural states and political histories of their countries, Sembène is likely the most impassioned, creative, unique, and compassionate. It would be foolish to claim that his forward-thinking social commentaries are pandering to liberal Western audiences who support the films' critiques of traditional Senegalese culture, for it is obvious through Sembène's use of numerous Senegalese cultural and artistic traditions (among them the employment of a griot character to comment upon the events in his stories, or evocative observations of modern Dakar's vibrant and eclectic cultural community, or the use of Senegalese dialects rather than French) that the director deeply embraces his homeland and employs a uniquely Senegalese cinema to criticize the country's injustices.

Following Sembène's death in June 2007 at the age of eighty-four (he completed his final film, Mooladé, only three years prior), there was a mild growth in interest in the director's filmography. In the United States since then, retrospectives of Sembène have been popping up at film festivals and specialty movie houses. And while many African directors' films have yet to be released on DVD in this country in any fashion, six of Sembène's films are fairly readily available (although what I see as his greatest film—Ceddo (1977)—still is not).

A few days ago in Minneapolis, as part of their eight-film series paying tribute to Ousmane Sembène, the Walker Art Center played his 2000 film Faat Kiné (which is available on DVD). It is the eighth film that I've seen by him, and I would count it as one of his three masterpieces (along with Ceddo and Xala [1975]). It is most remarkable, perhaps, for its general air of joy and optimism, although there are considerable amounts of pain and tragedy to be had as well. The emotional climax of Faat Kiné features a rousing speech by a young high-school graduate who has already been preemptively elected as President of the Society of West African Nations by a Senegalese youth club; hearing him speak, and uninhibitedly ridicule the Senegalese bourgeoisie who drastically mishandled the country's newfound independence in the 1960s, we leave the theater feeling that, in the hands of a politician like this, the future for Senegal (and other African nations) may not be destined to flounder like so many people seem to think.

Lest we conclude that Sembène offers us a false sense of hope in Faat Kiné, though, the director makes sure to remind us that a system of restrictive patriarchy and religious intolerance is still very much in place in Senegal. The movie concerns a woman named Faat Kiné, a single mother of two who owns her own gas station in Dakar. Her first child, Aby, was conceived during a fling with a high school professor who subsequently refused to provide for their daughter and, furthermore, denied Faat Kiné her high school baccalaureate (a feat which is basically necessary in modern Senegal in order to land a self-sustaining job). The father of her second child, a son named Djip, was a petty gambler who stole Faat Kiné's life savings only to be imprisoned in France. Faat Kiné's father, shamed that his daughter has become an unwed mother, tries to burn his daughter (quite possibly to kill her), but, in a surreal and nightmarish scene, inadvertently torches his wife instead. (A grisly close-up in the following scene shows us Faat Kiné's mother's still-scarred flesh. Rather than seeming self-consciously shocking, this jump cut from a flashback to the present day fully makes us recognize the sacrifices made for Faat Kiné by her mother, and correlatively by Faat Kiné for her own children—perhaps the movie's predominant theme.)

Amongst so much tragedy and heartache, Faat Kiné has persevered and has managed to provide a solid future for her children. Having been lucky enough to land her gas station job in high school, she has climbed to the top of the ladder there, earning derisive stares from male customers but the respect and admiration of her friends and employees. (In one amusing scene, as Faat Kiné and a former lover argue in her office, her assistant manager eavesdrops nearby as he meticulously restocks the office—ready to protect his boss, though he is well aware that she can protect herself quite sufficiently.) In one surprisingly frank scene, Faat Kiné's mother confesses that, although she would protect her to the death, she wished for a time that Faat Kiné would die, so that she would not have to experience the pain and oppression to which she would certainly be subjected. But immediately after this confession, her mother commends Faat Kiné for doing what she herself could not do—providing her children with a promising future and teaching them that individualism and self-reliance are more valuable assets than depending on others to survive. Implicit within this interaction—and voiced explicitly later in the film—is the suggestion that this life lesson of self-reliance is something that was not widely accepted in the first decade of Senegal's independence, and that it has taken new generations of younger Senegalese people to recognize their own patriotism and independence. One of Sembène's most hopeful themes here is that the youth of Senegal's urban areas may be able to remedy the mistakes made by the country's first two generations during independence, a theme which is all the more remarkable considering that Sembène was 67 when he made the film, and that old age is traditionally revered in Senegalese society. (The young politician that I brought up before—who, not coincidentally, is Faat Kiné's son Djip—reminds us that this reverence is only appropriate if it is deserved.)

Individualism and selfhood are two of the recurring themes in Faat Kiné, then, but one of Sembène's most impressive feats is in wedding these ideals to a sweet portrayal of intimacy and budding romance. While the movie is subversive and clever, it is also cheerfully generic and didactic, which should not be perceived as criticisms here. In an attempt to reach as wide an audience as possible, many sociopolitical filmmakers in northern African countries inject their themes into light and breezy romantic comedies. They hope to entertain and instruct. Sembène has often eschewed straightforward generic elements from his films; though often funny, movies like Mandabi (1968), Xala, Ceddo, and Camp de Thiaroye (1987) disregard romantic subplots and zippy dialogue in order to deliver their social commentaries as forcefully as possible. Faat Kiné, then, may be Sembène's most entertaining and fast-moving film, a movie that provides vibrant romantic comedy while addressing pertinent issues in modern Senegalese life. Understandably, Faat Kiné has discarded the notion that she needs a man in her life; after having been horribly abused, on two different occasions, by the father of her children, she has decided that she can be happier, more successful, and a better mother without the companionship of a husband. Not that she hasn't been sexually active; one altercation is between Faat Kiné and a male gigolo that she used to pay for sex, and several dialogue scenes between her and her female friends offer frank discussions of condom usage and the threat of AIDS. The gender roles, which are so extensively reversed in Faat Kiné, are subverted here as well: Faat Kiné uses men to satisfy herself sexually but then shuns their companionship, in a manner all too often practiced by the men in her society.

But the end of the movie—one of the best endings to any movie I can think of in recent memory—shows us that Faat Kiné is still looking for love and, only after considerable reticence, is willing to give in to it. Having been hardened by life for so long and forced to depend only on herself, Faat Kiné is ultimately reminded that intimacy and companionship are possible. Her own children, self-reliant and progressive though they are, struggle to find Faat Kiné a man throughout the film—they believe, despite all of her declarations to the opposite, that a husband will make her happier. The end of the movie wisely offers no guarantee of marriage or even a lasting monogamous relationship, but it does have Faat Kiné ultimately relinquishing herself to desire, letting her armor down just momentarily for the companionship that she's been resisting. This allows for a laugh-out-loud moment towards the end of the movie: after her girlfriends try to convince Faat Kiné to take an eligible suitor home with her, she proudly says, “You're too late, I already screwed him at the toilet.” But the final image, coyly sexual, is more sweet than vulgar: Faat Kiné reclines and beckons smilingly to the man before her; in close-up, her toes begin to wiggle as their affair consummates itself offscreen. Remarkable for portraying a group of women who are proudly, independently, and intelligently sexual (even one married woman, who mocks her husband for losing his erection immediately after she suggests using a condom), Faat Kiné is both wise and joyful, pragmatic and romantic; it may be a more agile balancing act than Sembène has ever accomplished (or, perhaps, attempted).

If the movie portrays a harshly patriarchal society yet ends by relishing the sight of a group of empowered women, it also laments the religious intolerance of modern Dakar, yet ends by offering a hopeful reconciliation between Christians and Muslims. Implicit references towards religious intolerance pop up frequently throughout the film—for example, when a Muslim customer at Faat Kiné's gas station asks an attendant if they have a prayer area, then glowers at the helpful employee because he's wearing a crucifix around his neck. The conflict between the two religions is a common theme in Sembène's cinema, particularly in Ceddo, which was heavily censored in Senegal due to its purported anti-Muslim sentiment. (That movie features a bizarre and fascinating interlude that suddenly flashes forward centuries to modern Dakar—it may be the most abstract and metaphorical moment in any of the director's films.) This antagonism is also referenced in Faat Kiné, when several of her possible suitors are deemed unworthy because they are Muslim while Faat Kiné is Christian. But at the end of the movie, as Djip and one of his friends smilingly observe Faat Kiné and her newfound paramour dancing intimately, they plot to reconcile their union by providing a marriage for them. Djip, a Christian, claims that he won't allow Faat Kiné's marriage to take place in a mosque; his friend, a Muslim, says he can't have the marriage take place in a church. There's a moment of awkward silence. Then they smile at each other, and say, simultaneously, “At City Hall!,” and shake on it blithely. The moment is didactic, even cheesy, but shamelessly so; Sembène poses troublesome questions but offers possible and inspiring answers, which is arguably a more effective tool for social activism than simply providing embittered social commentary and leaving it at that.

Speaking of didacticism: Faat Kiné may be Sembène's most straightforwardly didactic film. This is coming from a director who ended Mandabi with a series of superimpositions of relevant dialogue from the entire film, and has a postman say, quite literally, to the main character, “You are the future of Senegal!” But this brand of didacticism is not, in my opinion, a detractor. Sembène has said quite explicitly in interviews that he wants his movies to be a form of night school for his viewers; he wants to leave absolutely no ambiguity as to what he's trying to say and he wants to suggest possible avenues that audiences may take after the movie is over. So while I do appreciate movies that are mired in ambiguity, mysteriousness, abstraction, and are open to interpretation, I just as equally respect movies that work towards political and social activism in as direct and emphatic a way as possible. With Faat Kiné, we always know exactly what Sembène is trying to tell us: the Senegalese bourgeoisie and its country's leaders mishandled the first decades of independence by disregarding self-reliance and depending upon their colonial occupiers (who continued to occupy); this political oversight can be reflected in modern Senegal's patriarchal system, which suggests that single women must find a man to provide for them instead of relying upon themselves; but in order to thrive, Senegal must, in the future, rely upon its youth and its women to provide eclectic democratic voices to their society, and it must find a way for Christians and Muslims to coexist peacefully in urban areas. It's impossible to walk away from Faat Kiné without recognizing these ideas, some of which are voiced directly. It's not the only kind of socially-commited filmmaking (a more cryptic movie can inspire outrage and change—say, the Dardennes' Rosetta, for example), but it is an effective style that Sembène has mastered throughout his decades of impassioned filmmaking. So while it's a shame that so many excellent African filmmakers remain mostly unnoticed in this country and overseas, Sembène's prominence cannot possibly be viewed as unfortunate, especially when it makes available a film as funny, powerful, unique, and humane as Faat Kiné.

The 50 Best Films of the 2000s: Numbers 10-1

2010-11-14T17:47:00.000-06:00

10. When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts (d. Spike Lee, USA, 2006) Whether viewed as a process of fact-checking and historical investigation, an outlet that allows the victims and survivors of Hurricane Katrina to speak their minds, an impressionistic exploration of what New Orleans represents and the images it conjures, and/or a striking ethnography of American cities' problematic yet electrifying melting-pot populations, When the Levees Broke is among the most valuable films made in this country since the new millennium. The movie is actually all of these things and many more, which helps to explain the documentary's four-hour running time (it was originally released as a miniseries on HBO). While some topics that the film attempts to uncover are exposited less successfully than others (many have criticized, for example, the film's disturbing but convincing claim that the shoddy craftsmanship and possibly intentional destruction of New Orleans' levees represented a far-reaching governmental conspiracy), that exhaustive breadth is also what makes When the Levees Broke so valuable. More than a document of an overwhelming tragedy in American history, it is a document of a specific place and time and the people who came together (whether violently or peacefully) within that setting.

Seeing the entire film not on television but at a premiere screening at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, I realized the overwhelming social power of the movie—with all of the pain and tragedy that the documentary evokes, it ultimately seems to be an act of cultural unification, asking that we not forget about the significance of New Orleans and really explore the context in which Katrina struck. When the Levees Broke manages to do what countless news media outlets couldn't in the aftermath of either Katrina or 9/11: simultaneously commemorate the victims of these tragedies and investigate what they meant sociohistorically. Among the brutal images of Lee's film—bloated victims floating through flooded streets, dilapidated houses marked with foreboding X's—audiences can band together in outrage. Look at what our government has done, how drastically they failed; look at this country's myths so incontrovertibly proven wrong.

Lee, a director often prone to grand stylistic tricks and a blatant authorial hand, here suppresses his own voice. Certainly, he makes his points through canny editing, through allusion and through suggested historical parallels, but this is no Michael Moore diatribe. Consisting primarily of talking-head interviews and unaired news footage, the embittered power of the movie emerges through montage. Contradictions and lies are exposed when the claims of FEMA, Michael Brown, George W. Bush, are placed adjacent to footage of people suffering without aid—treated like outcasts, aliens, refuse. Lee's most remarkable feat here is in taking himself out of the picture (at least explicitly), allowing the people of New Orleans to tell their own story. I've always been a fan of the director's work, but When the Levees Broke is on a level all its own—more powerful, in its own way, than even Do the Right Thing, and evoking an even greater level of impassioned outrage.

9. The Seeds (d. Wojciech Kaspierski, Poland, 2006) The limited theatrical exhibition outlets for short films in this country have led to the assumption that films' running times are somehow in direct proportion to their value, or at least that a movie less than an hour may be worth watching as a television interlude but not as a self-contained film in itself. Because this pattern of film viewing has much to do with the high price of renting celluloid film for theatrical exhibition, and the high number of tickets that need to be sold to recoup this price, and the desire for people who are going out to catch a movie to be provided with several hours of entertainment, the general dismissal of short films will probably continue. But if somehow, at some point, you get the chance to see The Seeds, don't waste the opportunity; it packs a wallop rare for a film of any length.

I saw Kasperki's film at the Milwaukee Film Festival in 2006, where I happened to be volunteering as an intern for the short film viewing committee. After watching a handful of good-not-great shorts that were being considered for inclusion in the festival, I was unprepared for the haunting power of The Seeds; even without the benefit of comparison, it would have been clear that this film was in a league of its own.

Set in a secluded village in southern Siberia, the movie observes an agrarian family struggling with their intense love and hatred for each other. There is a violent tragedy in this family's past that is not ever entirely exposited for us; a daughter in the family also seems afflicted by some mental illness. Resistant to explain anything to us clearly, The Seeds simply observes and suggests, portraying a turbulent family life that probably could not be elucidated for us anyway, even if we did know exactly what was happening. The family's interaction with each other is rough, their pain apparent, but this is because of the fact that they love each other rather than despite that fact. A scene suggesting the family's cruel indifference towards one daughter can be followed by a painfully tender scene between the patriarch and that same daughter; we realize that familial love and anger may sometimes go hand-in-hand.

It may seem hyperbolic to compare the movie to Tarkovsky and Bergman simultaneously, but that was my honest reaction when I first saw the movie; never before have I seen a film that combines so intensely the almost cosmic sense of alienation that defines Tarkovsky with Bergman's harrowingly magnified evocations of pain and passion. In thirty minutes, we bear witness to a family struggling with life on the other side of the world, isolated both geographically and emotionally. Out of something so common and relatable as familial woes, The Seeds manages to create a majestic and troubling sense of wonder.

8. The Wind Will Carry Us (d. Abbas Kiarostami, Iran/France, 2000) Among the most unique movies I've ever seen, Kiarostami's sublime dark comedy is both absurd and modestly realistic, documentary and fiction. An engineer (known only as The Engineer) and his two assistants travel from Tehran to a remote Kurdish village; throughout the movie, we don't know exactly why they have traveled here, only that they have come to visit a remarkably old woman (also never seen) and perhaps to work on completing a film that, seemingly, gets no nearer to completion. Rather than explain these mysteries to us, The Wind Will Carry Us coasts by on observing the daily lives of the residents of Siah Dareh (hence its documentary aspects) or crafting sublimely subtle sight gags out of deft manipulations of sight and sound, relying especially on the edge of the frame and offscreen happenings. J. Hoberman likens Kiarostami's stylistic punnery to the films of Jacques Tati, which helps to explain why I love this movie so much; its wonderfully stilted, almost-absurd dialogue also reminded me of Jim Jarmusch.

Themes regarding the rift between modern technology and Iran's or Kurdistan's traditional societies seem almost to rise to the surface (the main character keeps on having to run up the village's highest hill in order to receive a cell-phone call from Tehran—this is also where the village's graveyard is situated), but, in a bemused style that I tend to favor, these themes are only hinted at rather than voiced explicitly. We can ponder such ideas if we want, or we can laugh at Kiarostami's sly sense of humor, or (just as satisfyingly) we can look at the countryside. The director's style is democratic: the viewer decides what he or she will concentrate on, what he or she will enjoy. And here, there's much to enjoy.

Detractors may claim that this blithely oblique style, this evasion of any specific plot or thematic concept, can lead to inconsequentiality—that we may walk away from The Wind Will Carry Us with our curiosities piqued, but unenlightened. Assuming that “enlightenment” is actually something that movies should be expected to offer, I would counter that confusion can, in fact, lead to enlightenment. Lacking a specific narrative or thematic guide to usher us through a film, we are left to our own devices, and fumbling with our own bewilderment, we may personally arrive at something far grander within ourselves than what any filmmaker can suggest to us. Films that at first seem to be about nothing sometimes seem, by their end, to be about everything.

7. Kabala (d. Assane Kouyaté, Mali/France, 2005) I've always enjoyed African film (despite the fact that an entire continent's cinema cannot and should not be grouped together into a single subset), but the complete uniqueness and striking narrative styles that define so many of the films from Mali and Nigeria and Senegal and elsewhere are also what make them largely unsuccessful in this country. Because distributors and exhibitors in the States are often unwilling to give African films even a limited release (Bamako and Tsotsi—otherwise known as Crash in Africa—are two of the few that I can think of over the last couple years) most American audiences have to rely on film festivals and online DVD companies to get their hands on African movies. Which is a shame, since many of them are so beautiful, majestic, and (to use a problematic and potentially condescending word) exotic that they really should be seen on the big screen.

Kabala is the best example from the last decade, a Malian-French co-production that has a story and a primary theme that are actually quite familiar from numerous recent international productions, but that still seems totally different than anything else you've seen. It's about a sacred well in a Malian village that has recently become contaminated. The elders decide that a traditional fire dance is required to rid the well of its impurities. When one young man's torch doesn't light during the ceremony, he is suddenly accused of illegitimacy and cast out of the village. Years later, he returns home to provide further assistance to the still-plagued village, only to find that much has changed since his departure.

Like numerous other recent films from Mali, Senegal, Burkina Faso, and other Northern African countries, Kabala is about the rift between traditional religion and modern resources; about the coexistence of contemporary business and economics and a more mystical form of ancient spirituality; and about the dangers and benefits that may be gained from depending upon outside sources. The movie is faced with a difficult enigma: it may simultaneously seem to pander to Western audiences (in its criticisms of established conservative traditions and insularity) and to indulge in a brazen form of traditional African folklore that seems totally alien to most Western viewers.

But this enigma is really what the movie is about—coming to terms with the difficult decision of whether or not to depend on outside resources to “modernize” some African regions. Since this is what the movie is concerned with, its simultaneous indulgence in and subversion of traditional religious tenets makes sense, and contributes to a bewildering style that encapsulates the movie's difficult sociocultural quandary.

It also makes Kabala astonishingly beautiful. The Malian settings are gorgeous to begin with, but they are filmed so lushly—and Andrée Davanture's editing transitions so smoothly between powerful close-ups and majestic long shots—that this terrain takes on a mythical quality. Just as ably, though, Kabala can intensify its human relationships into the stuff of grand melodrama—the movie is as striking in its drama as in its scenery.

6. Hero (d. Zhang Yimou, Hong Kong/China, 2004) As a middle-schooler just beginning to embrace my love for film, I would rewatch kinetic (but undeniably silly) kung-fu films like Fist of Legend and Twin Warriors over and over again, transfixed by the propulsive acrobatics they offered (and, perhaps, also by their cartoonish plots). I still think these films have value in an almost-abstract, motion-and-light kind of way—the graceful movements of bodies in these films may be favorably compared to the lights and shapes flitting about the screen in animated works by Len Lye and Norman McLaren, for example—but I can just as easily recognize that the majority of kung-fu films have as little interest in innovative storytelling, aesthetic ingenuity, or thematic heft as they have great passion for their action sequences. (This is to disregard peculiarities like Wong Kar-wai's hybrid Ashes of Time or some obscure and magical Shaw Brothers nuggets from the '70s.) I've never denied that I love these movies, but sometimes they are a bit of a guilty pleasure—hypnotic, dizzying, electrifying, but hardly groundbreaking.

Hero is something else entirely—a kung-fu film about pacifism. In it, the warrior Nameless (Jet Li) arrives at the court of the King of Qin claiming to have killed three of the most deadly assassins in the kingdom, all of whom had been trying to kill the King. Flashbacks are employed, but all of them are equally untrustworthy—nothing is as it seems to be, as every epic battle and meticulously choreographed duel may or may not be a ruse undertaken for a larger political purpose. Its fight scenes are gorgeous—shot by Christopher Doyle (Wong Kar-wai's frequent cinematographer), they embellish their color-coded pageantry, as crimson leaves flutter around warriors and drops of water cascade through the screen while fighters skip blithely over the surface of a lake—but the movie is just as much about political machination as fight scenes. In its own bombastic way, Hero is about politics as much as some of Zhang Yimou's previous works (such as Ju Dou or Raise the Red Lantern).

If the movie indulges in martial arts operatics but is still, essentially, about the power of peaceful resistance, that contradiction never really seems hypocritical. The violence here almost always takes on a plaintive, tragic tone; transcending action-movie filler, the martial arts in Hero are likened to traditional Chinese music, calligraphy, and theater, and thus are posited as an essential aspect of China's cultural history. The real coup is not in suggesting that the martial arts are an integral component of Chinese culture, or portraying them as a ballet—numerous kung-fu films have done this, including, most famously, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon—but in theorizing about how this history and this art form can be used in order to prevent further political tyranny and violence. (J. Hoberman claims that Hero is a Leni Riefenstahl-esque indulgence in the aesthetics of fascism—that the movie condones the actions of a despot killing in the name of eventual unification—but it seems that Hero's admittedly overblown pageantry is meant as an indictment of shallow political theatricality, not a celebration of it.)

Zhang's best film is probably still the quietly enraged Ju Dou (1991), but it undeniably belongs to a different career timeframe than Hero. In some ways, we may lament Zhang's move towards incredibly expensive kung-fu epics (Hero had, at the time of its release, the highest budget of any Chinese movie ever made), especially since it seems Hero was put into production partially as an attempt to one-up Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. While Zhang would make the equally impressive (yet less complex) House of Flying Daggers immediately after Hero, he would also go on to make the ugly, empty Curse of the Golden Flower. (I haven't seen his latest feature, A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop, but the majority of reviews suggest that it's similarly garish.) Whatever Hero means in the context of Zhang's career, though, it does seem remarkably unique within the martial arts genre—a deft and exciting action picture that uses the tropes of its predecessors to question the political repercussions of violent force.

5. The Holy Girl (d. Lucrecia Martel, Argentina/Italy/ Netherlands/Spain, 2005) The subversive power of Martel's incredibly sly dark comedy is so reserved that it takes a while to sneak up on you; when it does, though, you realize that Martel's half-blasphemous/half-reverent take on sin, pleasure, redemption, and Catholicism is worthy of Luis Buñuel (only Martel's humor is a little sprier than Buñuel's atheist absurdity).

Following a Catholic-school lecture on faith and vocation, 14-year-old Amalia (María Alche, whose face always appears half angelic and half devilish) is lured by the heavenly sounds of a theremin being played during a street performance. While she and a small crowd observes this theremin player, Amalia suddenly finds herself being groped by a tall, middle-aged doctor standing directly behind her. She soon discovers that this doctor is attending a medical conference being held at the hotel owned by her mother. Deducing that the lustful Dr. Jano—who somehow seems more despondent than lecherous, despite the fact that he's feeling up a teenager—has been sent to her for the salvation of his soul, Amalia undertakes her newfound, heaven-sent vocation.

With The Holy Girl and its predecessor, La Ciénaga (2001), Martel has forged a totally unique style in modern cinema. It's tempting to compare her deadpan, formally-based humor to Jim Jarmusch or Aki Kaurismäki, but Martel's comedy somehow seems even more devious than theirs. Deploying off-kilter perspectives and disorienting editing structures to bizarre effect, Martel and her crew attempt to create a world that always seems alien, mythical, disorienting in its perpetually hazy humidity. (Martel's films are set in the small northwest Argentinian town of Salta, where she also grew up.) We usually don't know what's happening within a given scene, or even in the movie as a whole, until we're well beyond the establishing point. (This is actually somewhat of a flaw, I think, in Martel's 2008 film The Headless Woman, but in her first two features, it's sublime.) This is why it feels we've made a discovery whenever we detect one of Martel's clever in-jokes, and why we may identify so fully with the characters' sense of detachment and profound confusion.

The Holy Girl ends on a high note, almost effervescently, making it clear that Martel's aim is not to mock her characters but to identify with their ethical confusion. With astonishing formal exactness, she lets these prickly webs of human interaction play out; we are bemused by the irony and the unexpectedness of these interactions, but at the same time we identify with the sexual confusion and religious doubt that plagues the main characters. That numerous reviewers read the film in almost diametrically opposite ways (some saw it as liberating, dexterous comedy; some as a haunting and bleak cautionary tale) is a testament to how ambiguous and non-judgmental the movie is.

4. Beau Travail (d. Claire Denis, France, 2000) What the hell happens in Beau Travail? It should come as no surprise to fans of Denis that that question can't really be answered. It's a loose adaptation of Herman Melville's Billy Budd, set amongst the French Foreign Legion in Djibouti, but beyond that—as in L'Intrus, 35 Shots of Rum, I Can't Sleep, and some other Denis films—the movie is mostly about observation and atmosphere. Denis seems to recognize that she is a perpetual outsider to this isolated cadre of militaristic men in eastern Africa, the most stereotypically masculine subculture you can imagine; so instead of offering any moral interpretations or narrative motivations, she (and her cinematographer, the great Agnés Godard) simply watch the men interact with each other. Small hints at their characters may be gleaned through looks, gestures, fleeting actions, but none of these men can be “explained” in their entirety.

Beyond some of the most beautifully photographed scenery you'll ever see in a movie, Beau Travail is notable for adapting Melville's incredibly cryptic and metaphorical prose to the cinematic form. Of course films can be elusive and cryptic, but seeing images play out before us lends things a concrete, actualized nature—the transformative power of movies makes us believe that these things are actually happening (even if we don't always know exactly what these things are). Denis's sublime skill with Beau Travail is to transpose Melville's ruminations to a visual form that ponders the nature of good and evil, camaraderie, repressed homosexuality, and other intangible notions solely through observation. Although we can't specifically put a name on the heated emotions and moods that Beau Travail puts us through, it does undoubtedly work us into a frenzy; we are transported to an unnamable and overwhelming mindstate.

The half-naked bodies of the soldiers exercising in the blazing sun are a common visual motif in the movie; Denis and Godard do aestheticize the men, and such scenes do take on an air of eroticism (which makes sense given the homoeroticism Melville included in his story), but most of the men are never exactly explored as flesh-and-blood individuals with real inner states. The men, like the movie itself, are mostly about immediacy, corporeality, physicality, the things we can see on the surface that suggest something deeper (but only suggest it). The final scene of the movie is a bewildering summation of liberation and chaos, but it's only the breaking point of what the movie is trying to do all along, only in more restrained ways—tear out of its shell and flail at us, mystifyingly.

3. Kings and Queen (d. Arnaud Desplechin, France, 2005) Kings and Queen has, at one point, one of the most purely bizarre and unexpected interludes I've ever seen in a movie (it involves Mathieu Amalric's character, a neurotic charmer named Ismaël, bursting into a breakdancing routine in a sanitarium); shortly thereafter, it offers us a madcap, hilarious scene in which Ismaël and his smarmy attorney try to steal drugs from the sanitarium's pharmacy, a sequence almost unparalleled in its unbridled energy; and finally, at the end of the movie, it offers us a sweetly awkward interaction between Ismaël and his surrogate son, Elias, that is among the most tender and affecting portraits of familial love that you'll ever see in a movie. The greatness of these scenes lies partially in the performance by Amalric, France's best actor working today, but it's mostly the result of Arnaud Desplechin. The director is more than a brilliant dramatist or comedian or postmodernist or innovator; he's all of these things at once. Desplechin manages a deft balancing act that is most impressive because none of these various styles or conceits seem pranksterish or disingenuous.

As impressive as Mathieu Amalric's performance is Emmanuelle Devos's as Nora, the queen of the title. Her kings include four men with whom she's been in love: her son, Elias; Elias's deceased father; Nora's own father; and Ismaël, an impulsive musician with whom Nora lived for a time. The relationship between Nora and Ismaël is now more platonic than sexual, though no less genuine; this is why Nora asks Ismaël to act as Elias's father.

Like A Christmas Tale, this basic storyline, reminiscent of a number of family melodramas, is merely a jumping-off point for Desplechin's numerous tangents and ruminations—on love, on French history and classical art, on hatred, on the difficulties of communication. Even when the movie focuses on advancing its plot, its aesthetic ingenuity continues to overwhelm even as its narrative captivates us—for example, during the sequence in which we discover how Elias's father died, an unsettling scene portrayed in the style of modernist theatre, with abstract lighting and evocatively spare sets. Miraculously, the movie's experimentation with style and narrative never serves to undermine or weaken its emotional aspects. An unexpected insert of Nora's father reading to her a vitriolic letter—as he's framed in an almost direct frontal composition and the film stock takes on an extremely grainy, blue-gray quality—could have been an indulgent misstep in another director's hands, but here, her father's words become even more passionate, more obliterating, thanks to the scene's aesthetic excess.

Simplistically, one could claim that Nora's storyline in Kings and Queen represents the style of grand melodrama, that Ismaël's takes on the traits of screwball comedy, and that the movie itself is about the overwhelming highs and lows that everyone experiences, and how the movies as an art form, throughout their entire history, have helped us persevere through them. Parts of this appraisal would be accurate, but it also seems too easy, too schematic, which Kings and Queen definitely is not. It may be more apt to say that the movie is about how happiness necessarily carries with it a twinge of sadness and vice versa, and that love, true love, is so passionate and unrestrained that it cannot survive without madness and anger and desperation. This is why the tumult of emotions and styles in Desplechin's movies never seem parodic or insincere; his movies are about how real life is closer to this maddening whirlwind than to the convenient genres and emotions we usually find in films. While Kings and Queen is resolutely cinematic, then, it is also closer to bewildering (and wondrous) reality than almost any movie you will see.

2. Head-On (d. Fatih Akin, Germany/Turkey, 2005) The title is appropriate; so is its original German title, Gegen die Wand, which translates as “Against the Wall.” The movie rushes at you without restraint, angrily, ferociously, passionately. It's raw and aggressive, which befits a movie about lust, the alienation of immigrants in their adopted country, the conservatism of religious and cultural tradition. It will likely turn you off, and only a scene later seduce you again with its intensity and bravado. It's that kind of movie.

The movie is about two Turkish immigrants living in Hamburg: Sibel, a beautiful 22-year-old woman desperate to escape her restrictive home life with her parents; and Cahit, an aimless drunk perhaps twice her age who she asks to marry her so she can leave home. Both characters are suicidal—they meet in a mental institution after she tries to slit her wrists and he drives full-speed into a brick wall. (Only one of the many ways in which the movie's American and German titles are manifested.) Initially, their marriage is completely emotionless, an act of desperation. Even as their compassion for each other deepens, their sincerity is always tinged with a sense of desperation and futility.

As you may be able to surmise, this is not a pleasant movie. It has moments of levity, even sweetness, but for the most part we are reminded of how much these characters hate themselves. While Head-On is in part a movie about the alienation and loneliness felt by immigrants in a foreign land (and the genuine sense of community that may nonetheless be achieved there), it is more generally about reaching a point in your life when everything seems hopeless, and trying to find a way in which that bleakness may be alleviated. To criticize this movie for its overwhelming unpleasantness is to miss the point; it's one of the few films I've seen recently that wants to portray lives at their bleakest, darkest, lowest points, not in an attempt at shock value, but to reach out to viewers who have felt this way and may still feel this way.

Funded by both German and Turkish production companies, the movie was heralded by audiences and critics in both countries as either a German or a Turkish triumph, respectively—an irony that points towards both the economic co-dependence and implicit contentiousness between the two countries, especially in Germany. This, too, is partially what the movie is about. The power of Head-On's implicit sociocultural commentary is epitomized by repeated shots of a traditional Turkish band performing on a carpeted stage in Istanbul—a reminder that Fatih Akin is not decrying traditional Turkish culture, but lamenting how that culture may not transplant to a new land so easily, and also how that traditionalism may stifle younger generations more than it unifies them. Even more broadly, the film may be about how, in the modern world, distinct ethnic cultures must be increasingly assimilated into other ways of life, forcing all of us to establish new identities and moralities without depending upon traditional national codes and mores.

Head-On is not remarkable simply because it is so bleak; it evokes, instead, a desperate passion that most lives must deal with at some point. Raw and volatile, hauntingly beautiful, and acted by two performers (Birol Ünel and Sibel Kekilli) who appear immersed in the act of baring their souls, it is one of the most emotionally turbulent movies you will ever see. Afterwards, you won't be uplifted, but you will feel like you've lived through, and rebounded from, immense tragedy.

1. Yi Yi (A One and a Two) (d. Edward Yang, Taiwan/Japan, 2000) Jean-Luc Godard once famously said that Au hasard Balthazar is “the world in an hour and a half”; I find it more accurate, if less impressive, to claim that Yi Yi (A One and a Two) is the world in three hours. Edward Yang's majestic, light-footed, sublime, funny movie spends about a year with three generations of an affluent family in Taipei. Nothing momentous happens, but at the same time, everything that happens is momentous: characters ponder infidelity, the meaning of their lives, choices they've made, lost opportunities and shattered dreams. Most broadly, Yi Yi is about the unexpected turns that our lives take and the fact that, for years, decades, lifetimes afterwards, we wonder if the choices we've made are right. How would our lives have been different if we had done this differently, if we had chosen to do this instead of this?

The movie goes about these questions in unassuming, clever ways. Successful businessman NJ, the patriarch of the central family, bumps into his first love on an elevator; realizing that his workaday lifestyle is so hurried that he has neglected his own happiness, he regrets standing her up a long time ago, confessing these doubts and concerns to a Japanese business partner. (The Taiwanese man and his Japanese friend must speak English to each other; it's the only language they both understand.) NJ's son, eight-year-old Yang-Yang, ponders what he sees and wonders if he can really trust his vision all the time. He also experiences his first love with a classmate; in sweet, fumbling fashion, he tries to drop a water balloon on his crush, and accidentally hits the principal of his school instead. In a miraculous scene shortly thereafter, during a school fieldtrip, Yang-Yang observes his classmate in a planetarium with a vista of sparkling stars in the background, and you begin to fall in love yourself. Meanwhile, NJ's wife speaks to her mother-in-law (who is in a coma) and realized how flat and unfulfilling her life is. Their daughter, Ting-Ting, wonders whether or not she should start a fling with her best friend's boyfriend. Death, birth, and marriage also happen. A checklist of what happens in the movie can't do justice to how sprawling and affecting it is. Each tiny happenstance, no matter how slight, takes on epic proportions, because we realize how differently things may turn out if only one other thing had happened instead.

More ably than any other movie I've ever seen, Yi Yi evokes the difficulties and joys of living in the modern metropolis. Scenes are often filmed via reflections on the windows of stores and automobiles; other scenes play out in extreme long shot, as intimate relationships take place amongst thousands of passersby. Modern life here is seen as electrifying and overwhelming; technology and consumerism are ubiquitous, but so is a sense of community and possibility. This depiction of modern life and technology bears specifically upon Taiwanese culture, as NJ's generation finds themselves immersed in a booming industry of computer products and a globalized electronics industry. As economics and technologies change drastically around us, so do families and personal lives; Yi Yi eloquently empathizes with these unsettling changes at the same time that it embraces them.

The director, Edward Yang, who passed away in 2007, achieved his masterpiece with Yi Yi (almost as good is Yang's sprawling 1991 film A Brighter Summer Day). It has its moments of tragedy and lamentation, but mostly, we are filled with a great sense of elation, a reassurance that the doubts, regrets, and difficulties that we deal with in our own lives are in fact shared by people throughout the world. Yang can achieve this grand sympathy because he loves his characters, and, despite the turmoil through which it puts us, he loves life.