Summer Hours (2009, dir. Olivier Assayas)

Published on InReviewOnline

It's the middle of the afternoon and I'm waiting in a theater sparsely populated with a dozen other strangers. Suddenly the lights dim, the curtains pull back, and the image of an old house partially concealed by a lush forest tentatively dances on the screen. As the opening credits roll, the house fades and flickers -- beautiful, ephemeral. Collectively, we try to will the shimmering mirage into existence, but it eludes us. Eventually the house fades into oblivion, replaced by a scene of children playing in the country. Did the image die of its own accord, or did we fail to sustain it, torn between our fascination with it and our expectations for narrative development?

Summer Hours, French writer/director Olivier Assayas' newest film, is a deceptively simple tale about the death of a matriarch that unexpectedly sends us into contemplative flights of fancy like the one I've described above. The matriarch Hélène, portrayed by veteran French actress Edith Scob, has spent the last third of her life devoting herself to the preservation of her uncle's art. Her small mansion in the country is a veritable shrine to his memory, filled with his own creations as well as the art he had loved and collected in his lifetime (much of it furniture). Yet unlike a museum, it's a living, breathing, organic space; when Hélène's children and grandchildren visit her in the beginning of the film, we discover the memories etched into the fabric of each piece. Priceless vases filled with flowers picked from the fields; rare art noveau furniture cluttered with knick-knacks and stuffed with toys.

Hélène's death early on in the film brings her three children and their families back together again, forcing the adults to decide on the fate of the house-as-shrine. While we might expect a Bergman-esque torrent of spiritual introspection, familial fighting, and personal revelation, we instead find an all too familiar acquiescence to life's incessant realities. A fractured narrative ensues, reinforcing the power of the banalities of existence over the larger questions of our lives.

Assayes tells his story without any obvious didacticism, and cinematographer Eric Gautier's camera captures the dynamic relationships in the family with a balletic grace. Weaving and spinning around larger gatherings, we sense the motion and movement of a family thrust forward, while he treats smaller confrontations with intimate closeups, revealing the depth and nuance of the relationships.

Summer Hours is the second film commissioned by Paris's Musée d'Orsay, the famous museum built inside of the former railway station Gare d'Orsay. The first was last year's art-house sensation Flight of the Red Balloon, and while the latter only nominally included the museum in the story, Summer Hours features it much more prominently, though not necessarily flatteringly. As much of the family's art ends up in the museum, we see it stripped bare for display. Crowds of onlookers pass it by with barely a glance; the art's significance fades, just like film's opening mirage.

Final Thought: A meditative tome on the relationship between life and art that offers abundant rewards, if few answers.

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Star Trek (2009, dir. J.J. Abrams)

Published at InReviewOnline

If the classic science fiction films of the 1950's largely mirrored the paranoia and fear of an America in the grips of a cold war, Star Trek's debut in 1966 signaled a new era of hope for the future, a vision of racial equality and multiculturalism that avoided the cultural relativism that so often goes hand in hand. Gene Roddenberry, the shows original creator, saw a future in which Americans, Russians, Asians, blacks, and whites work together without prejudice, a future in which humankind has conquered the scourges of hunger, poverty, war, and religion. His utopia unleashed humanity's collective curiosity on the universe, creating an endless chain of adventures that we enjoy as much for their thoughtful dilemmas as for their suspenseful action. Star Trek embodied progressive notions of justice, civility, and liberty, while embracing the best of its sci-fi predecessors: the contrast between man's limitless potential and his utter insignificance.

Director J.J. Abrams' second feature film, Star Trek, almost universally hailed as the "Star Trek reboot", is better thought of as Star Trek's assimilation. It's not the end of a franchise, and it's certainly not the end of Star-Trek-as-commercial-endeavor. It's the end of Roddenberry's narrative ideal, an attempt to challenge our accepted mores as much as to satisfy our entertainment needs. Star Trek had reached a dead end; it was an anachronism in an entertainment world ruled by form, not content. It's no secret that Hollywood's ability to create intellectually stimulating entertainment has fallen in inverse proportion to it's ability to create stunningly realized worlds with CGI.

You'd be wrong to assume in reading all of this that I'm a die-hard "trekkie," or that I'm a cinematic snob, or even that I didn't enjoy Abrams' Star Trek. I did enjoy it. After twenty or thirty minutes of dangerously clumsy exposition (including a car chase scene whose only apparent purpose was to find a way to plug "Nokia" phones in a story set 380 years from the present), we're treated to one of Hollywood's better action blockbusters. Writers (and admitted "trekkies") Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman have developed an alternate Star Trek universe. A black-hole enables a 130 year old Spock and some very angry Romulans to travel back in time to a point in space conveniently inhabited by James T. Kirk's father and mother (the latter of which is in the process of giving birth to James). The Romulans lay waste to the relatively tiny and ill equipped star ship, killing James' father and narrowly missing his mother.

The black-hole is essentially Hollywood's deus ex machina, freeing Abrams from the philosophical baggage that simultaneously bolstered Star Trek's narrative strength and sealed its commercial weakness. On top of this new canvas they've grafted a number of perfectly respectable formulas, including:

1. Rebel without a cause (James T. Kirk, played by newest celebrity heartthrob Chris Pine)
2. Freudian mother surrogate (Uhura, played by Guess Who co-star Zoe Saldana, who throws some surprising pity-sex at the young Spock)
3. Man of two three worlds (Spock, played by Heroes star Zachary Quinto)
4. Unrecognized genius (Montgomery "Scotty" Scott, hilariously played by British actor/comedian Simon Pegg)

If Abrams' Star Trek is anything, it's the deft combination of several tried and true narrative arcs. And if Star Trek is the death of Star Trek, it's also the birth of Hollywood's newest cash cow. $75 million dollars in the opening weekend... Roddenberry who?

Final Thought: Resistance is futile. Just enjoy the damn thing.

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X-Men Origins: Wolverine

Originally published at InReviewOnline

X-Men Origins: Wolverine, the opening salvo in 2009's battle for our expendable income, is both straightforward and efficient. Gone are the cunning stratagems and clever ambushes of yesterday's wars. Modern entertainment warfare, relying on technological superiority, is an all-out assault on our senses, hypnotizing us with an orgasmic array of carnage, sex, and spectacle. Our minds vainly struggle to process the avalanche of sensory data, leaving us few reserves for our intellectual and emotional counter-assaults.

The film begins with a short, confusing, overly melodramatic prelude, in which the young child Logan (that's Wolverine's real name for the uninitiated) impales his friend's father (who's actually his real father) in a fit of animal rage after realizing his real father (who's actually his fake father) died at his friend's father's hands. Confused? Don't worry, all that really matters is that we learn that his friend, Victor Creed (better known in the X-Men Universe as Sabretooth, Wolverine's arch-nemesis) is actually Logan's brother, thus paving the way for the familiar dialectic between sibling bonds and moral imperatives.

Immediately after the prelude, we witness the film's greatest cinematic achievement: the opening credits. No, I'm not joking. In the space of these credits, we watch the two brothers transform physically, emotionally, and psychologically as they fight their way through every major American war from the Civil War all the way to Vietnam. As each war grows more destructive, so do Victor's actions, culminating in an attempted rape scene in a Vietnamese village, with Logan torn between saving Victor from himself and protecting Victor from the criminal consequences of his actions. Few films have so efficiently charted a character's moral degradation, or so effectively set up the primary narrative dynamic.

Unfortunately, the film that follows fails to capitalize on this achievement; it proceeds more like a desperate race to the finish, and one that (perhaps intentionally) leaves us few chances for reflection. Characters rapidly grace the screen, slicing their way through the film, and exiting stage right just in time for the next characters to make their raucous entrance. We bounce back and forth between sets, locations. At the end, we're sweaty, out of breath, and a little light-headed (ironically, not unlike the film's protagonist). Even if we enjoyed the experience, we may not entirely remember it.

Though X-Men Origins: Wolverine can't measure up to some of the more admirable recent comic book adaptations like Spiderman, Iron Man, and Batman Begins, it also mercifully avoids any of the arrogant pretensions of one of it's more recent co-conspirators, Watchmen. And if its tragic, gritty tone may occasionally wobble, we can at least be thankful that the film never for a second pretends to be anything more than it is. Had it foolishly attempted to elevate itself from the ranks of frivolous diversion, we would have undoubtedly grown painfully aware of the lack of depth, narrative coherence, or witty repartee that a higher-caliber comic book film demands. We can endlessly debate the merits of escapist cinema, but there's no debating the inherent flaws of mindless entertainment that masquerades as real cinema.
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Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne (Robert Bresson)

Robert Bresson's second feature film, Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne, was for me at once both greater and lesser than his more celebrated (and less conventional) films. Made in 1945, it was the last of his films to feature a cast of all-professional actors, and though the emotions exhibited were noticeably muted compared to the overwrought Hollywood fare of the times, the overall effect is like that of a slow simmer, an undercurrent of tension, instead of the automaton approach he elicited from the "models" in his later works.

'Les Dames,' taken from Diderot's Jacques le fataliste, weaves a cautionary tale about a woman's scorn. Rich, decadent, and beautiful Hélène learns that her cynical boyfriend Jean no longer loves her. Early on in the film, she opens up to him, pretending to have lost her feelings for him and pleading for deliverance from her guilt, thereby coaxing his own admission. Agreeing to remain friends, Hélène winds an elaborate trap, enticing him to first fall in love with and then to try to marry a women who, unbeknownst to him, has a notorious past.

Bresson's adaptation (co-written with Jean Cocteau) feels perfectly at home in his spiritual universe, a universe filled with pain and suffering - and redemption. When it was released, many critics received it poorly, unable to believe in a story set in the present yet predicated on century-old mores. Within a matter of years, however, the film obtained cult-status, and is still shown to this day in art-house theaters around the world.

Working with professional actors, I felt like I was witnessing the missing half of Bresson's vision, the passionate yin to his austere yang. But slowly I realized that I was also standing on the edge of an unbridged abyss. On this side stood a world with potential for visible connections, for emotional outbursts of love, hate. But Bresson left this world, crossing the abyss and occasionally radioing back bizarre new picture-scapes, lands where dispassionate decapitations, rape, donkey beatings, and other spiritual non-sequiter were the norm. Neither world makes sense without the other - yet neither can these worlds be bridged.

Last Word: Fascinating, engaging, though at times decidedly un-Bresson, 'Les Dames' merits appreciation for all that the auteur was able to accomplish within the studio system.
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People on Sunday

Last night, a friend tipped me off to a one-night screening of People on Sunday at the Anthology Film Archives in Manhattan's lower east side. It's a rare 1929 German silent film principally written by wunderkind Billy Wilder in the period just prior to the Nazi reign of terror.

People is an example of early avante-garde cinema, featuring a host of non-professional actors whose day jobs mirrored the jobs they portrayed in the film. They all belonged to a budding collective of young artists making films as group-efforts with minuscule budgets; People on Sunday had as many as 4 directors, with at least 3 of those directors doubling in other capacities like writing and cinematography. Their eventual fate leads us to contemplate one of the great what-ifs of history; before the Nazi's, German artists were at the forefront of international cinema, pushing boundaries, experimenting with just the right mix of innocence and naivety that seems to facilitate all the great artistic breakthroughs in history. But of course it didn't last, with many perishing under the Nazi regime and others fleeing Europe in the largest artistic and intellectual diaspora in human history. A few found success in their new environment; Wilder eventually made his way to Hollywood and went on to write and direct some of the world's most cherished films. Others slipped into obscurity, unable to adapt to new languages and customs.

Though I've had to accept that I will always have some hesitations about the artistic value of silent films, I have to admit that People on Sunday has more than any other come the closest to approaching the ecstatic emotions and wonder I've experienced watching some of my favorite films. Yes, there were the overwrought emotional outbursts and pantomiming, and yes, the cinematography at times reminded me of a starving child let loose in a candy store.

But at the same time, People on Sunday transcended these limitations and shortcomings, crafting a story that touches on the ineffability of love and the alienation of modern life with the grace of a poet. We watch as four young Berliners - two men and two woman - make their way out to the countryside on Sunday, their day off. The day is filled with adventure, love, pain, and redemption, and sold without gimmick and with a moral ambiguity we might not necessarily expect from an old film. And though I still can't imagine a silent ever equaling the artistic power of a modern film, I am impressed by a film - as much as it's filmmakers - that's shot on a dime, populated by amateurs, crippled without a soundtrack, yet still capable of surpassing the quality of the majority of films spewed from Hollywood's factories today.

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Silent Light (dir. Carlos Reygadas, 2007)

From time to time, I'm at a complete loss to understand a film's critical appeal. Silent Light, a 2007 film by Mexican director Carlos Reygadas recently released here in the US, dazzled the international film circuit, culminating with the Jury Prize at Cannes. Martin Scorsese exclaimed "I was amazed by Silent Light – the setting, the language, the delicacy of the interactions between the people on screen, the drama of redemption. And most of all by Carlos Reygadas’s extraordinarily rich sense of cinema, evident in every frame." NY Times film critic Manohla Dargis loved it so much that she saw it three times, and her colleague A.O. Scott listed it as his second favorite film of 2008. The accolades go on and on....

Silent Light examines the effects of an extra-marital affair on a secluded German Mennonite community in the heart of Mexico. Or at least it pretends to. Johan, a blond-haired, blue-eyed farmer, husband, and father of 5, falls in love with the young, spindly, Roman-nosed Marianne, who works as a waitress at a local diner. The mix of religious fundamentalism, sinful immorality, and cultural isolation spells the ingredients for a delicious existential epic, and in the hands of, say, Bergman, we might have feasted on just that. But Reygadas proves to be a less experienced chef, and instead of a meaty tome, we're left with a bland disaster - an immature exercise that places form over content, brushes its potential for spiritual crisis in only the most tangential ways, and ends with what I can only think of as an outright ripoff of Dreyer's Ordet masquerading as homage.

In the entire film, there were only two scenes that actually worked for me: the very first, and the very last. And neither of these scenes contain any human actors, or any narrative whatsoever. These scenes are beautiful, even haunting, time-lapse single-takes of sunrise and sunset, respectively. The slow pan and steady zoom, the enveloping sounds of night, the growing (or diminishing) photographic clarity - for all their transcendent glory, neither of these scenes actually add anything to the film's "story," such as it is. They might as well have been scenes from a high-def Nat Geo nature documentary.

Between these two scenes are two and half-hours of sheer torture. Somewhere along the way, Reygadas must have forgotten that a film like this needs a script, dialogue, tension. Without this, it's an empty exercise in form - and an immature one at that. We're bounced between various photographic techniques, which on their own might make for a short, interesting study in perspective, but which together simply deny a unifying aesthetic to what little story remains.

Perhaps I simply lack the appropriate film education to appreciate Silent Light, which in J. Hoberman's words, is "distinguished by its formal rigor." But then, isn't film (or art in general) supposed to transcend technique - isn't art a creative expression of the soul? Or is it simply a formal exercise?
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Further Proof that Joaquin's rap career is a joke

If my first post didn't convince you, then check out his recent "appearance" on Letterman:


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Platform (Jia Zhangke)

"The long and empty platform,
Lonely we can only wait.
All my love is outbound,
Nothing on the inbound train..."

This trite Chinese pop song from the 1980's serves as metaphor for the artistically castrated inhabitants of Platform, Jia Zhangke's second underground film. It's a three-hour tome on the tragedy of art both under Mao's authoritarian communist regime and under the rapid capitalist transformation that followed. Mixing a meditative narrative style with disorienting time cuts, we experience the upheavals and inertia of the times through a band of young actors, musicians, and dancers.

Platform opens with a performance of "The Train to Shaoshan" by the Fenyang Peasant Culture Group. In terms of artistic quality, imagine a children's propaganda musical written by Dick Cheney and performed by Texas A&M's Young Republicans for the West Bumblefuck elementary school. What could only come to fruition here in a deranged SNL skit was an everyday reality under Mao's China. Making the performance even more surreal to these western eyes, the Peasant Culture Group's audience wasn't school children - it was a large gathering of adult male farmers.

After the performance, we get to know the young troupe of artists. Jia paints a picture of perpetual children mentally stunted by the Party's black-and-white demarcation between "mental workers" and "manual workers." Time and time again, they're miraculously, even cruelly, oblivious to the suffering and injustice surrounding them, especially in their own families; aloof and self-obsessed, they're the communist equivalent of an American trust fund brat.

As Deng Xiaoping's market reforms transformed the Chinese economy, the Peasant Culture Groups underwent privatization. But instead of finding artistic liberation, they mutated from celebrated propaganda machines into vapid pop-culture reflections: traveling sideshows of jiggling girls and monstrous cover bands. A pivotal moment for art was wasted by a lingering ideological tyranny and a brainwashed generation of artistic parodies.

Cinematographer Yu Lik-Wai films this jaded epic with commensurate photographic detachment. I'm strained to recall even one principle closeup in the film's entirety. Yu also experiments with a panning approach that matures 6 years later in Jia's Still Life . It's a technique I've come to think of as a sort of cinematic "lazy eye": the unexpected, gradual drift of the camera's frame from action to the inert.

Jia Zhangke was forced to make his first three films - Xiao Wu (1997), Platform (2000), and Unknown Pleasures (2002) - outside of the Chinese state-run film bureaucracy. Underground filmmakers in China play a risky game; there films are by definition illegal. Even if they find distribution abroad, they're still forbidden screening in China's cineplexes. To get their films in front of Chinese eyes, filmmakers pirate their DVDs on the black market. If they publicly screen their films in China, the government bans them from ever working under government approval.

Jia Zhangke is something of an exception; he successfully played the international film festival circuit against the Chinese authorities, making it hard for them to continue to deny state approval to an internationally celebrated auteur. Now that I've seen both his underground films and his "approved" films, I can honestly say that the state-seal has not blunted his commitment to "show Chinese Reality without distortion."

Check out Kevin B. Lee's slightly-out-of-date-but-still-illuminating article on Jia Zhangke's works over at Senses of Cinema.


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