Micro-reviews
The White Ribbon (w/d. Michael Haneke, 2009)
Technically faultless. Often arrestingly beautiful. Superlative performances.
Sound design, structure and mise en scene recall Hidden, The Piano Teacher and Benny’s Video, so The White Ribbon is arguably the apotheosis of an auteur mastering his language. The disturbance the film arouses is redolent of that turbulence coursing beneath Resnais’s Night and Fog, but without its explicit surface.
Haneke plays a few games in imitation of Ingmar Bergman – mirroring both images, plotted power dynamics, stylistic and dramatic aspects of dialogue. The Lutheran pastor is an expansion on that sinister figure of Fanny and Alexander. The doctor is an explicit rendition of the doctor in Cries and Whispers, or so many other Bergman men who have skeletons in their cupboards and violently abusive exchanges with the women they crush. Wintry black and white crime scenes recall the suicide of Winter Light.
Haneke clearly intends, and was quite right to mention so in recent interviews, his films to lurk in your thoughts once you’ve left the cinema. Nobody sits to discuss the film after, and it worries you in the core. Plotting, despite the ubiquitous inconclusiveness, is essential to his method and ends. The stories remain open both to leave one questioning events, and thereby to return one to the world presented. We aren’t to wonder ‘who done it’. That is irrelevant, and a MacGuffin to draw us into pondering this world’s “malice”, “envy”, “brutality”, “apathy” and “perverse revenge”.
One can hardly help but place the little boy in the white band, his lips pursed as though a lie is trying to force its way out, in his presumed future as camp commandant; his omnipresent sister as a prototype Eva Braun; the flayed whistle-thief as jackbooted storm-trooper. This is context specific, but the film’s world isn’t, and Haneke wants it to be read easily into any scenario where an authoritarian and absolutist value system is forced down throats until it is internalized and returned with vengeful fury to those who hypocritically and inconsistently inseminated it. Where Hidden made the vague gnawing of collective cultural responsibility for distant suffering highly acute, personal and present inside our lives (rather like a terrorist attack), The White Ribbon plays a similar tune to those vices quoted above. Here is where its lingering, troublesome affect has bite, and why I draw the Night and Fog analogy. Each of us is still culpable, in the same dimensions as those condemned, for contemporary manifestations of those same horrors.
Bright Star ****
Bright Star is Jane Campion and Andrew Motion’s story of Fanny Brawne and her love for Keats. Like his poetry, it prizes the senses – experience before concept: in colour – rich coordinations of costume and foliage in purples, pinks, blues and earthier tones; in texture – softness of velvet or cotton on treetop brush and hardwood skirting; in sound – vocal and natural harmonies. Love is regarded in its tactile qualities – what more can art aspire to articulate? Each movement – first encounter, discovery, pursuit, withdrawal, physical contact, separation, correspondence, loss, rediscovery, isolation, consummation, twilight, conclusion – is treated briskly with plot, yet spun into luxurious tapestry of emotion and affect.
Her advances are as ambivalent, coy or beguiling, as the jokes of her nemesis, Charles Brown. They are measured in expressions and silence. Keats’ defeated desire hides beneath furrowed brow and protean enthusiasm. Campion summons susurrant notes at each ecstatic touch, when hands first meet, when lips embrace and when hands burrow through hair. Keats worries he may catch alight. Abbie Cornish grasps and claws at the void as Brawne receives nothing from her distant love. Murmurs speak to her joy at a beautiful letter, as do kisses for Toots. The world changes colour and season with her mood, which in turn stems from these gestures. She kneels, her hands roam across the fabrics of his robes as he silently pleads forgiveness. As he summons the verse of bright star, his head rests on her breast, rising and falling, her kiss on the crown of his head. Trapped beyond reach, his sickbed mere inches through the wall, she rests a cheek against cold boards.
Thirst ****
Since the Cannes premiere of Oldboy, the international acclaim that brought Chan-wook Park (박찬욱) into the Western lexicon has typically characterised his work as edgy, hip, graphic and violent. Finding a feature which doesn’t name-drop Tarantino is a tall order. Serious analysis has been sparse and in some quarters sweeping generalisations have been made, opinions reversed. A simple fact: in content, Park’s oeuvre denies characterisation. This truism does not extend to form. Across Joint Security Area, Sympathy, Oldboy and Lady Vengeance, Cut and I’m A Cyborg, Park has demonstrated a wide ranging appeal and mastery of storytelling. He has also presented himself as an auteur who is defined by stylistic methodology and aesthetic habit, rather than by mise en scène and theme. Chan-Wook Park spins stories by showing, rather than telling.
This is not a literal claim – along the clichéd dichotomy of representation and exposition – but a figurative one. Park is in the game of articulating immanent experience, of showing precisely what he means in every detail, rather than constructing a referential whole, pointing to abstract notions. His meaning is to be felt under the skin of the film, not to be read from its images. Thirst (박쥐), a timely vampiric adaptation of Thérèse Raquin, illustrates this perfectly.
The Thing
I already knew The Thing quite well, having screened it for my college film society, as part of a body-horror double bill. But some stimulating retrospective pieces in national papers whetted my appetite, and when I found it was showing at my local multiplex I couldn’t resist. It was the prospect of seeing that masterpiece on an enormous screen, with a presumably thin audience and all the privacy in the world that made it so, frankly, irresistible. One thing failed to disappoint – the film.
To my ambivalent surprise, I arrived to an officially sold-out screening. 10 left out of several hundred seats. This is fine, I thought – quite pleasing to see so great a turn out for a left-field rerun – perhaps a serious crowd of cult fanatics. Maybe we will see more of this sort of thing. Of course, I could no longer expect a comfortable space with aural insulation – but having seen The Thing before, surely I won’t be so tetchy about getting under the skin of the film – becoming immersed in the experience so I don’t miss a thing, so I respond in good tune.
I enter the theatre, having missed the opening shots of that remarkable first scene – a husky in flight from two helicopter-mounted Norwegians, letting rip with assault rifle and grenade. I stood aside and let the action subside before interrupting other virtuous filmgoers. Ah-hah! A perfect seat nestles half way up the stairs, at the middle of a row. Not too bad, I think, as I politely slip past the seated and sink into my chair. Then it begins to sink into me.
Fish Tank *****
Mia (the mesmerizing Katie Jarvis) is a typical 15 year-old girl who lives with her single mother Joanne (Kierston Wareing), little sister Tyler (the extraordinarily authentic Rebecca Griffiths) and their innocuous dog, Tennents. These girls, to borrow from Peter Bradshaw, “have learned from their mother mannerisms of pre-emptive scorn and rage to cover up perennially hurt feelings”. But Mia has dreams, fulfillable desires which afford her an optimism that shines out of this bleak suburban London landscape. She dreams of freeing a beautiful, gaunt mare chained to breeze-block by her owners, two intimidating and obnoxious young men and their more benign brother; of escaping her body, her emotions and her life through modern dance, the compulsion through which she bares her soul; of intimacy, fatherly or sexual, to free deep untapped reserves of passion. Yet all measures to these ends are misdirected, falter or come to nought.
Fish Tank is an extraordinary, touching, melancholic film in which Andrea Arnold manages to execute some of the harder tropes of social-realism with a tone of honest optimism, yet without resorting to a hint of sentimentality or cliché. There is beautifully choreographed photography, playing heavily on stark contrasts (though I would contend that the vast openness of the outdoors, set against often claustrophobic interior, manifests just as threatened and crumbling a beauty as in the life and soul of Mia). The city is never-ending, as we follow over Mia’s shoulder along broken sidewalks, across flyovers, the towers always behind and cars in the foreground. The only real escape from the sprawl comes in the form of a trip to the countryside with mum’s boyfriend, Connor (Michael Fassbender, whose tremendous performance appears so effortless as to become invisible).
Adventureland ****
Expectations can be a real bummer. The way a public accesses film now depends almost entirely on marketing, on names attached, on distribution channel. Those who walk in expecting a repeat of past directorial success will be often be sorely disappointed. And such disappointment is no valid basis for criticism. In the case of the inimitable Adventureland, inappropriate expectations were set up by Greg Mottola’s last film, that Apatow behemoth, Superbad. But it has more in common with the low-highbrow indie comedy of The Squid and the Whale, star Jesse Eisenberg’s last picture (yet without the distance and seriousness to temper occasional dalliance with smarmy pseudo-intellectuality; although thankfully, it keeps on the right side of the line). It has even drawn comparison to Richard Linklater’s Dazed & Confused, and Before Sunrise, for its intimate and sensitive exploration of the trouble with finding oneself before embarking on a career and life.
In that sense, it called to mind the themes of The Graduate, and with similar indirectness, it penetrates to the heart of the feelings and the half-chance commitments that define this stage of life. And like The Graduate, it deals with loss of virginity, rediscovery of identity and nihilism, but with an up-to-date candor and sense of humour. Yet oddly, it is set half-way between here and there, in 1987’s Pittsburgh.
The Hurt Locker ****½
The Hurt Locker is apparently military slang for the contemporary phenomenal equivalent of shell shock (physical trauma associated with repeated aural exposure to explosions), the locker itself being that envelope of time where the force moving through air affords a compressed silence to precede obscene rupture. A fitting title for one of the greatest films set at war – an easy peer to Full Metal Jacket and The Thin Red Line. It describes the experiences of a bomb-disposal unit in Baghdad, approaching the end of their current deployment; its world represents the middle stages of American deployment in Iraq.
As a war film in both form and substance, it has an exclusively masculine superficial appeal, but as a study of masculinity – of war and trauma (of division) – it is of transgender concern. To suggest that it is less interesting for women is both to assign gender and to claim women are insubstantial and superficial – while it may have more appeal to the baser instincts of male audiences (much as the certain chick flicks appeal to those of female audiences) it has substance that goes beyond genre target markets.
Afterthoughts on Tarantino
Jonathan Rosenbaum has written more on what troubles him about Inglourious Basterds. He makes, much more articulately, the point I wished to make about how it fails to convey any meaning: how its talk is idle. My response, one that JR claims to be waiting for (though it is not possible to reply directly as his blog is closed for comment), is that there will be no such reply: no one will be able to perspicaciously point us to anything Tarantino is saying about his subject or his medium (or persuasively argue that Inglourious Basterds is an experience worth having). What we might get, however, is analysis of the film as a phenomenon (a symptom): in the vein of K. Longworth’s post on Tarantino’s little omelette. She felt that I.B. seemed to be more symptomatic of the world of September 2009 than of the 2008 which threw it up. And when I watched the film, Slavoj Zizek’s preoccupation with the obscene fantastical popped into my mind (a similar connection was made by KL). Yet this film is the obscene fantasy of QT, and a select few peers. I am glad not to count myself among them, but also glad not to merely dismiss it as simple self-indulgence. It is, after all, quite obscene.
News of the week
My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done
My vote for most conventionally subversive trailer this year. This is SO exciting – directed by Werner Herzog, produced by David Lynch, starring Michael Shannon (of Revolutionary Road, and whose performance in The Missing person was awe-inspiring). Loosely based around the story of a chap who stabbed his mother with a saber, having recently been cast in a Sophocles tragedy. Read what you will into this video:
Inglourious Basterds **
An extremely sensitive debate has unfolded around Inglourious Basterds (and rightly so). One opening salvo came from Daniel Mendelsohn at Newsweek, whose deep concerns with the film have peculiar resonance. Quentin Tarantino’s film is concerned with inversion – principally, the subversion of the violent 1950s and 1960s action films set in the theatres of the Second World War (within the mould of a classic spaghetti western). Put succinctly, Inglourious Basterds is about Jewish revenge. Obsessively drawing upon conventions from War and Western genres, then turning inward on the traditional auteurist subject of the cinema itself, Tarantino ultimately has the raw power of cinema defeat the Nazis (having already tortured, butchered, burnt and explicitly annihilated the Germans, as effigies of nemesis). Mendelsohn contends that this genre-mashing postmodern omelette leaves a bad taste in the mouth, and broke too many eggs in the process. “Using the Holocaust, even tangentially, as a vehicle for a playful, postmodern movie that so feverishly celebrates little more than film itself” is the first sin. I would happily defend a director’s choice to reject historicity, but by toying with several key symbolic aspects of Nazi terror and violence (mass burning, symbols carved into flesh, etc), Tarantino leaves himself open to hard criticism. By turning these acts against the Nazis, and moreover, by having Jews perpetrate the atrocity, his inversion amounts to either an exploitative leveling (that brings the victim into the fold of the condemned) or a vicious misreading of Jewish philosophy (an eye for an eye, ad absurdum).
