Posts Tagged ‘DVD’
Reversible
Irréversible, Gaspar Noé’s second feature, made a significant impact on me. I felt strong in my conviction that it was doing something meaningful, that it succinctly expressed something worth saying about time, causality and experience. This view held up under repeated viewing, whether alone, with family or friends – testing the impact through a range of different viewing environments and partnerships. What best supported this view was the stunned reaction of a friend, and the lengthy discussion of Kant and Hume which it provoked. There was something to be said on the intersection of ethics and aesthetics; trauma and memory; on morality and violence, and on what it is to be human.
It seems only fair to consider what a film has to say in terms of the thing itself – to let the object or artwork speak without prejudice in light of context, circumstance or exegesis. On those terms there would seem to be a fascinating puzzle to unravel in the constellation of the film’s three riddles – its reversed structure, its title, and the epigram, “Les temps détruit touts“. In the space between these lurks not only a commentary on the philosophical issues, but also a minefield of potential offense. I wouldn’t fail to understand a disgusted reading of the film: an outrageous affront to the homosexual community, a panegyric to heterosexual purity and hierarchical-masculine rage. But I felt there was enough there, and placed enough faith in Noé (a first crucial misstep in reading the film per se) to take such accusations with a pinch of salt. And equally, it seemed that there was a lot to be found out about how we relate to film in examining the diverse responses to and corresponding experiences of this provocative work.
In The Loop ****
In The Loop is the feature adaptation of the BBC television series The Thick of It, and is a searing satire with its sights set on all that is venal and crass (!) in contemporary Anglo-American politics. As if you didn’t know that already. Simon Foster, Secretary of State for International Development (played as charmingly bumbling by Tom Hollander, though I suspect that my sympathy for the character may not chime with a public braying for the blood of real MPs) finds himself embroiled in intrigue when his loose tongue publicly ties itself up in several choice pieces of fatally ambiguous spin shrapnel, foremost of which are the claims that war is “unforseeable” and that when the time comes, we must “climb the mountain of conflict”. The first lands him in hot water with the PM’s enforcer (the searing Malcolm Tucker of Peter Capaldi), quite obviously a close-to-the-bone riff on Alastair Campbell, whilst endearing the hapless Foster to Americans on the warpath. The second statement becomes their bumper sticker, quite literally.
Technically, this is a film of rare composition – flowing in a moderate rhythm yet tearing through seething material at break-neck tempo. There is consistent plot-developing action, submerged completely in a dialogue-heavy script, whose execution on screen is magnificent – rich with detail, but not simply descriptive, expedient to the story. The audience is kept on its toes, while the film develops a seductive, multi-dimensional melody at tremendously high frequency, soaring above those tempered narrative beats.
Rope
His first work in colour, and one of his most experimental, Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope received a mixed critical reception upon release. And yet it seems to be not only a groundbreaking piece of work, technically and conceptually, but also a great film. It’s riddled with many brilliant little self-references and in-jokes. It’s clearly stagey, a play on screen and in words, and intentionally so. While it does not exploit the potential of the cinematic medium in terms of its traditions, instead Hitchcock pioneers all sorts of wonderful new things. He once told his daughter that he wanted to put a play on screen, and this was his chance. Rather than being bound in gallery or circle seats, the audience is brought within the action, becoming the lens as it dances about the cast (who, unbeknownst to us, must dance around the gigantic colour camera in turn). The making-of documentary is compulsory viewing to fully appreciate the degree of choreography required, and the phenomenal de- and reconstruction of the set that took place. Indeed, this demanded a sharpening of the already acute micromanaging tendencies of Hitchcock, to the chagrin of actors (directed by order, down to the minutae of facial expression). Every detail, before and behind the camera, lived in the director’s mind.
Lost Highway
Lost Highway is great. A lot of critics didn’t think it was so hot. I like it a lot. The ideas it contains are less obfuscated than in some of David Lynch’s films, or they are more transparent, less incisive. The execution of these ideas is sometimes less than perfect (exhibiting some of the least effective uses of sound, dissonant and tonal, in any part of Lynch’s oeuvre). But it is structurally delightful, never misses a beat, folds in on itself in a magnificent conceit (I disagree with those who think this is clumsy; at least it’s not a trite resolution to the deliberate ambiguities of a television pilot-turned movie). If Pullman isn’t the most convincing jazzer, everything else seems to be in the right place. His impotence is searing, and his fantasy perfectly foreshadowed. Check out Loggia, who is a terrifying villain in the mould of Hopper and Freeman. The symbolism ties together a few Lynch tropes – I thought the red curtain, the use of deep blacks, and the usual slow fire and explosion motifs potent. Some of the anxieties that sweat out toward the end elicit great empathy, and some of the image/sound composition toward the beginning is affectively distressing – look out for one or two moments, particularly the face merge, which have as significant a physiological impact as any jolts in Wild at Heart, Inland Empire, and that revelatory episode of Twin Peaks. There is disequilibrium reminiscent of the sound balancing in Wild at Heart too, so I’d expect it to be quite a visceral experience in the cinema. If you appreciate the aesthetic choices of Mulholland Drive, and the best ideas of Twin Peaks, this is the ideal middle ground. If you aren’t a devotee to Lynch, then you might wonder why it matters, and drift off. So let yourself – he still knows what’s cool, intuitively grasps atmosphere. It’s quite a wild ride.
Harold and Maude
The psychiatrist, feigning prescience, asks “What activity gives you a different sense of enjoyment from the others…what gives you that special satisfaction?” His patient, gazing fixedly into space, replies, “I go to funerals.”
Harold (Bud Cort, then a rising star and recent alumnus of MASH) is a laconic, morbid nineteen-year-old with no friends, an endless array of fine coats, his own hearse and several overbearing authority figures to corral him. He receives therapy at the behest of his mother, the glib Mrs. Chasen (Vivian Pickles, the English actress best known then for the poetic physicality of her performance in Ken Russell’s Isadora Duncan), following a particularly graphic example of Harold’s first hobby: performing his suicide. We do not gain any insight into what motivates these macabre theatrics, or his general disposition, through black-and-white psychoanalysis on the therapist’s couch (where Harold lies in state). What it takes for Harold to open up (to smile, to speak) is a series of encounters with a vivacious seventy-nine-year-old who also crashes funerals, though for opposite reasons. Maude (in an sonorous turn by Ruth Gordon) is recklessly insouciant, driven by her love for life and sense of connection to the world.
Before Harold can confess “that I enjoyed being dead”, Maude has already understood (with that acute sensibility of experience) the passive nihilism that ails him, and prescribed the best medicine: “try something new each day, Harold”. And with Maude, he must. Following an extended encounter that springs from Maude’s theft of his car, an affair ensues, over the course of which Harold is saturated with references to the leitmotif of organic growth and of joy at life in all its finitude. He continues to play dead throughout, whether converting his new Jaguar into a hearse, or demolishing one of several arranged dates by staging self-immolation, but all with renewed joie de vivre. This culminates in a touching miniature melodrama, when Harold feigns seppuku before his final date, only to discover her joining in the performance. To his chagrin, he is not taken for dead, but for what he is: the player turning away from life. It takes nothing less than the tragic experience of the death of love for Harold to turn himself around fully.
L’Humanité
Too much can be made of Bruno Dumont as philosopher, but along with film-maker, it seems to be the most suitable label. If he is anything, he is not a cinephile, and so the man claims himself. And it therefore seems the moderate (verging upon medicinal) pace of L’Humanité is more likely down to his own genuflections to ontology than any purported influence from Tarkovsky, et cetera. The combination of astounding realist performances from non-actors, commensurate to the oddity of Dumont’s characters, written half-formed and surreal, has the somnambulistic effect of bringing us closer to their reflection on horror and its relation to care (and being in relation to one another), than to their factual predicament. The plot is sparse and quite realist, while the technique is formalist and quite fine. L’Humanité is probably a film better enjoyed in the cinema for this reason. Pharaon’s bicycle ride is breathtaking. The film demands a meditative stance from the viewer, and it needs to wash over you, rather than be interrogated hermeneutically. It demands patience and an openness to experience. It probably helps to have, or to have known someone who has, witnessed death, particularly of such graphic horror, in order to understand how effectively the film does capture humanity. Dumont does not make films to entertain, but to provoke. This is a suitable goal, because I don’t think he has it in him to entertain. The man spent ten years filming charts and graphs, CEO speeches, production lines, factory machines. He has a great formal skill, and has exercised his ontological muscles enough to find the emotion in the experience of seeing a mechanical operation. Good art? Yes: a provocative, if slightly puzzling experience. Not fun though.
