Clean (2004)
The initial suspense of Clean lies not in whether its protagonist, Emily (Maggie Cheung), a once promising rock something or another, will shake the grips of heroin addiction, but in the genre itself. One can’t help but wonder whether the picture will compromise its lean integrity and become another grim, purposeless, self-congratulatory slog like nearly every other picture that concerns drug addicts and the (on again off again) struggle they normally face trying to achieve the titular state. Clean is, remarkably though, the ideal title for Olivier Assayas’ picture, referring not only to Emily but to the filmmaker’s astoundingly matter of fact approach. Assayas stands outside and inside the junkie rehab genre at once, examining it like one might a caged bear, with both curiosity and a welcome generosity of spirit. Assayas would appear to view this genre as a puzzle: how do we find the actual humanity of a tragedy or hardship that countless folks face everyday? How do we clear the hurdle of cliché?
The solution is to snip the clichés out like dead branches; quickly, fearlessly, with no apology or self-consciousness. Clean is pointedly devoid of all the scenes one expects from the genre, devoid, in fact, of many of the scenes one expects from any drama. We’re spared tearful reunions or separations, we’re largely spared Emily’s physical torment, we’re spared the death of a pivotal character, an even more pivotal reconciliation is implied but never shown, etc.; scenes end mid-tempo, unfulfilled, the plot floating and wandering like the central character. Clean doesn’t assume the position of a removed, drunken third party telling someone a story at a bar, desperate to move or impress; the picture is Emily: playing its emotions close to its vest, shuffling from one day to the next with completion and maintenance of a basic pride being the hopeful, up-front goals.
Assayas boils everything down to the existential essential without compromising the gravity or pathos of the subject matter in the service of some art-house wank; he earns our trust, and this trust allows the moments to have an anxiety that isn’t real but relatable, the picture is both more universal and more specific at once. Clean manages to be both the most aesthetically beautiful junkie picture I’ve ever seen as well as possibly the most moving without that being a contradiction in terms. Make no mistake, Clean is a movie first and most, still about real problems in a way that only movies are, especially European movies, but the picture is a sublime balancing act, the best of every world.
Maggie Cheung, captivating in a number of Wong-Kar Wai pictures, is startling here as Emily, consciously playing her beauty and poise, normally the bridges that keep us from buying an actor in such a role (ask Charlize Theron or Halle Berry), against our expectations here. Her Emily is vibrant, stunning, self-absorbed, a creature of infinite shells of bullshit who may or may not have an actual, vested interest in finding her humanity. Emily eludes in her apparent lack of elusion, her “straight forwardness” just another device for self-explanation and rationalization, whether she consciously knows it or not. Emily, in an astute observation of behavior on the part of the film, never lies, but pay attention to how she never lies.
Nick Nolte, as Emily’s father-in-law and de facto guardian of her child, etches one of those subtle, volcanic portraits of normalcy and dignity on the brink of falling into the abyss that only a famous weirdo can with such committed lack of irony; the husk of that unmistakable voice, the creases and wrinkles in that deep, large head, the faded lion’s mane of hair, are all used to unforgettable effect; the machismo of Nolte’s past parts inform the role and lend it originality and texture, this is clearly a man used to victory and control learning how to face loss on the fly: he’s, and the film never does our work for us, much more like Emily than either he or Emily know. The picture takes a cue from these rich performances and never stokes the fires of melodrama, these characters never oppose one another as many other films have conditioned us to expect, they instead oppose themselves in front of one another, and discover a common bind that goes on to color the picture’s earned, open-ended final image.
Clean is an accomplishment, a mood film that’s deeper and more moving the further it slips into your memory, perhaps because it manages, so gracefully, to feel half-remembered already.
★★★★
The Orphanage (2007)
Of the various chambers that exist in the manor that is the horror genre, the haunted house picture may be the picture that’s most encouraging of that potentially exhilarating, disconcerting wedding of appealing cinematic surfaces (think of the smooth, deep, ironically beautiful cinematography that characterizes The Innocents) with the dank emotional textures that constitute our everyday fears. Of all the possibilities the horror genre offers, the haunted house picture is perhaps the ripest metaphorically, which is saying something. We know that haunted house pictures, or stories of the supernatural in general, deal with the fear of dying, with fear of the dark, of change and moving on, with deep buried skeletons in the closet, but they’re usually just as concerned with the breakdown of the family unit; the fear, not of the skeletons, but of the necessity to face the judgment and pent-up emotional heat of our family once said skeletons are revealed; the fear of discovering your relatives, not as your relatives, but as flawed beings with their own agendas and damage.
The Orphanage is clearly, undeniably, indebted to many of the usual suspects of the haunted house genre, particularly those that concern themselves with the fragile mental state of young-middle-aged women such as the aforementioned The Innocents or The Others; but this film has an emotional intensity that transcends the puzzle-box tropes (the red herrings, the bumps in the night, the doubts of sanity) that dominate some of the modern movies; this picture is beautiful, but it doesn’t have a vice directorial grip, there’s an empathy here. New director Juan Antonio Bayona and screenwriter Sergio G. Sanchez have invested an old genre (that I love) with a tang of real passion and undoing; you watch the picture less for the punch-line and more out of a legitimate, rare, fevered concern for the protagonist. Bayona has unavoidably been compared to Guillermo Del Toro (who serves as “presenter” here) and that’s partially valid, but it’s a mark of the picture’s generous, human appeal that Pedro Almodóvar just as easily came to mind. The Orphanage, like much of Almodóvar’s work, is concerned with women first and foremost: their fears, their burdens, their reservoirs of strength and pain.
The Orphanage has you from the title; it’s an uneasy word, signaling an uncomfortable reality of injustice and partial breakdown. We don’t like the word under the cheeriest of contexts (providing there are any) much less as the title of a horror picture. The film opens, as many of these pictures have a habit of opening, in the past. Children are playing a game outside of the orphanage, which is appropriately, diabolically grand, elaborate and beautiful; the ideal breeding ground for ill will and wrong doing. An adult watches the children play from inside, and informs a caller that Laura has not yet learned that she is to leave the orphanage.
The image fades and we are then introduced to the adult Laura (Belén Rueda), the implications of that past day left hanging as one of many question marks that soon follow. Laura has returned to reopen the orphanage, accompanied by her husband Carlos (Fernando Cayo) and child, Simón (Roger Príncep). Bayona has a young filmmaker’s fun (as well as a talented filmmaker’s flair for) taunting us with the various clicks and uh-ohs that traditionally comprise the first act of these pictures. A social worker with sad, bug-eyed glasses (Montserrat Carulla) appears, projecting all around strangeness as well as a disturbingly specific knowledge of Simón’s background; Simón, already socially troubled and drawn toward the imaginary, tells Laura of new invisible friends that bear a disturbing resemblance to Laura’s own childhood peers, they also have a disconcerting habit of leaving very real footprints behind. Simón, in one of the more unnerving bits in the film, even leaves seashells behind so his new friends can find their way back…
It would be unfair to discuss the picture’s plot any further, but I will say that these films hinge on their ending as much as any other genre in the business. The Others is a luscious, scary ghost story with a fine Nicole Kidman performance (perhaps her best) but the ending was disappointingly derivative of another recent scare picture, and I guessed it before the half-way mark. The Haunting’s implication that poor Eleanor would forever be among the house’s many tortured spirits is satisfyingly eerie and circular, and helped put that film (as well as the book) over to legendary status. The ultimate resolution of The Orphanage is far-flung, but it’s also a simple, ghastly doozy. Bayona almost squanders the force of it with an epilogue that’s leftover Pan’s Labyrinth, but that’s splitting hair.
Rueda (The Sea Inside) is a beautiful, expressive actress and she invests Laura with a survivor’s guilt and distance that deepens the themes of the genre without editorializing or killing their livelihood. Laura is a woman, a possibly failed, self-loathing protector, not another princess ripe for murder. Carulla is frightening in a bit that skirts cliché to lend the picture its quiet, admirably gray moral longing. Geraldine Chaplin appears, in a bit that resembles Poltergeist in conception but (thankfully) not execution (that picture relied on effect after effect for affect). The Orphanage sketches Chaplin in green light, and lets you do the rest, that haunted, piercing face another indelible portrait of the fade that powers all of these pictures and that eventually comes to consume everyone.
The Orphanage isn’t a classic, it’s ultimately more about past genre films than anything else, but it’s a visually magnificent, rewarding picture, and Bayona already, refreshingly, understands that the dark can’t rival what you’re faced with when you catch your reflection unexpectedly, whether it be during the day or at night.
★★★½
Mon oncle (1958)
Jacques Tati’s Mon oncle (the second in the Monsieur Hulot series) is one of those pictures that reaffirms how underutilized the comedy picture generally is, especially nowadays. The comedy (along with the horror film) seems to be seen as a genre to cut your teeth on before moving on to more “important” pictures, tossed off to the little guys when there should be room reserved for our masters. We should know by now that the comedy and the horror picture are two of the hardest genres to realize, as well as two of the richest and most malleable: the two genres most willing to lend themselves to subtexts that can be heavy, or maudlin or self-congratulatory in other genres.
Mon oncle is a tonal wonder, a film that appears to be light, airy and inconsequential, but slowly works its hooks into you without your knowing. The films all too often these days announce their effect from the outset, a program might as well appear in the lobby announcing the evening’s intentions; “tonight, ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Haggis wishes to present to you a story of racial strife and hope” or “tonight, ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Gondry wishes to present to you a story of incoherent whimsy and self-consciousness.” If you haven’t read or seen much of Tati’s Hulot series (I’m a novice myself), you can be forgiven for assuming you have Mon oncle figured out, particularly after the stylish/cute opening scene that follows a group of dogs from the cramped, cluttered, more rambunctiously alive city to the stylized, stiflingly chic home of the family of a higher-up in the plastics industry. One dog gets beyond the gates while the others don’t; a blunt but more succinct summation of the classes than Haggis has yet to offer.
The family is comprised of a puffy, proud wife, the puffier, prouder plastics executive, and a boy who appears to be over it all (he longs, as many people in these types of pictures have a habit of longing, for something more tangible and real, a bit of mischief to jar all that overwhelming pride in purposeless accomplishment). Left to their own devices, this family would be assured a place of tranquil suburban convenience that fosters a certain kind of new age modern lobotomy, chic ritual at the expense of anything messy or imaginative. But that is not to be, Monsieur Hulot, the uncle of the title (whom the director plays himself) occasionally drops by to shake the family out of their domestic stupor. Hulot is a stranded misfit, clad in coat and pipe, (suggesting Sherlock Holmes by way of Peter Sellers, though purposefully lacking the personality of either) that lives a life, like the Tramp, or even Boudu, totally devoid of any structure or self-consciousness. Hulot isn’t contemptuous of his surroundings as Boudu was; he, like the Tramp, projects an aura of mystification with the world around him, always one, two, a hundred steps behind.
Tati’s primary interest here would appear to be the character’s homes and how they contrast and comment on their inhabitants. Hulot’s apartment, established in a classic bit, appears to have been designed by a hyper, over-imaginative child: doors, stairs and ramps appear for their own dream sake divorced from any practical purpose. The exterior of Hulot’s home is a silent marvel, a design that (poignantly) reaffirms the beautiful, common textures and rituals of our lives. The family’s house is one of those 2001 competence at the expense of personality nightmares crossed with the board game “Mouse Trap”; the family spends as much time shifting from room to room (each of which having to be allowed to fulfill its maximum capacity for use) as Hulot does climbing his stairs, but they carry on with a joyless, sad manner of manufactured obligation that chokes the love of process away; this family’s having coffee before they’ve adequately set the dinner table for the dinner they barely remember eating.
Mon oncle has a dreamy, slow start, but the jokes accumulate like a snowball down a hill, and soon you find yourself overwhelmed with Tati’s layered, restrained, seemingly free-form framing, his world falls apart with a smirk and a sure hand. A party sequence, near the middle of the picture, is one of the most impressively sustained bits of comic dementia I’ve ever seen, managing to turn a series of ridiculously elaborate walkways (all to protect the non-existent garden) into something elusive, unshakable and distinctly menacing. Hulot is to meet the family’s neighbor, in the hope that he settle down and stay out of everyone’s way, but he quickly gets distracted with the boy and a plant, while the rest of the family and guests find themselves grappling with an already troublesome fountain (the mother only keeps it on for guests, who slip in and out with maddening frequency) that has broken. Business transactions are had, banalities are exchanged, all as tables, snacks and chairs are moved from one end of the yard to another, and all in accordance with those damn walkways. Tati ratchets the tension, and you slowly realize that he’s effectively squeezed you from laughter to an authentic discomfort: the stifling, formal hypocrisy of the upper class has become a rounded, authentic, original vision of hell.
Mon oncle is overlong, and Tati’s technique here ultimately inspires more exhaustion than elation (though one imagines this is also purposeful) but the film is justifiably revered, and ends on an unexpectedly devastating implication. We’re conditioned by Chaplin to expect this type of picture to go for the tear ducts at the end, to mourn the little guy swallowed by society, but Tati sends his Hulot on his way toward another setting to fumble (the father’s plan finally taking hold) and the film, surprisingly, views this as a positive. The father, at odds with his little boy throughout much of the picture, is finally allowed a moment of grace and mischief that’s unobstructed by the inattentive, bumbling uncle. Hulot’s dreaminess ultimately revealed to be as insidious a form of self-delusion as the house and all its baffling gadgetry.
★★★★
Iron Man (2008)
The human element of a superhero film, particularly the human element of the initial entry in a prospective series (the “origin story”), usually represents the vegetables we have to rid our plate of before getting to the dessert. We watch our normally flat heroes go through the usual paces that sometimes wouldn’t look too out of place in Dawson’s Creek (or whatever the youth show de jour may be), all in the hope that the filmmaker, when he finally gets to why we’re all packed in the theatre to begin with, will wow us with a grand bit of what have you, or, if we’re really lucky, a sublime note of visual poetry.
Iron Man, oddly, and to a certain extent, blessedly, has the opposite problem; for about an hour, the picture, chronicling the normally tedious details of how our everyman becomes a superman, is alive and just a little eccentric; for awhile, the lead, Robert Downey, Jr., walks away with the picture in just the manner the trailer implied. Downey infects Iron Man’s wavelength, its editing even, and lends the picture an aura of drunk, self-loathing, screwball tea-time debauchery that feels practically revelatory for such a normally rigid, spontaneity-free genre. Downey’s Tony Stark, rich, handsome, confident, charismatic, intelligent, isn’t some softie with canned pathos; he’s a superman before being interfered with in a divine manner. The film’s initial wit lies in its reversal of our expectations of the usual mythos. Stark, to become a hero, must inherit a weakness, a humanity that brings him back to the realm of other humans, as opposed to a strength that shoots him up and above all others. Tony Stark couldn’t be a more fitting creation for our turn up the Ipod as the world goes to Hell times; Stark, to find his heart, must first nearly have it blown out of his chest.
It may sound like I’m pouring it on, but Iron Man isn’t too shy with its redemptive theme, the picture is a 1950s atomic paranoia fantasy (the villain even gets to proclaim that “no one’s gonna stand in my way”), crossed with an 1980s gee whiz kids film (Explorers perhaps) multiplied by a healthy dose of the current trend of smothering, impersonal action pictures. Iron Man, tellingly, details the development of the suit with more grace than the development of Stark’s conscience, which snaps on (like one of those lights we spoke of earlier in the week) abruptly at just the right moment, muting Stark’s personality in the process. The picture was directed by the gifted Jon Favreau, the actor who debuted as filmmaker with the small, human, very underrated Made, followed it with the overrated Elf, and then followed that with the also underrated Zathura, a gentle picture that had a memorably surreal storybook beauty about it, informed by a surprisingly convincing current of familial resentment and pain.
Favreau’s pictures are generous and lacking in ego, just the sort of thing the big summer movie business needs. Favreau, working with Downey, tries his best to shake things up in Iron Man, but, after a first hour that pumps us up for an anarchic, funny, reverent but not too reverent superhero picture, perhaps the MASH of the 200 million dollar product placement Happy Meal movies, he can’t help but succumb to the grinding repetition of the requirements of the genre. Favreau’s big robot beats aren’t lacking in awe (Favreau, even at his most audience conscious, is mercifully incapable of Michael Bay’s pornographic impersonality) but the scenes steal and distract from Favreau’s strengths; just as he and Downey convince you that Stark is worth giving a damn about, he goes and turns into a Transformer.
Iron Man has moments though, moments that take it beyond many of the pictures in the genre, and occasionally remind you why you truck out every year with your junk food and brave the lines and the heat for the newest “big thing.” The first action scene in the picture, when Iron Man is still scraps and must escape a cave in Afghanistan, is logical, personal, terrifying, and, for once in one of these pictures, has a bit of context. Iron Man, bent, leaking, screwed up, a walking discarded junk heap of the dead, personifies Stark’s bruised entitlement and startling naiveté. This metal creature is, at first, a haunting creation: he wastes the insurgents with a flame thrower and, for a few minutes, pumps the picture with melancholy, vengeance and relevance.
Two scenes involving Tony’s damaged heart also momentarily imbue the picture with something close to feeling. The first is a figurative love scene between Stark and his long suffering assistant Pepper Potts (a very beautiful, poignant Gwyneth Paltrow), the second is just the opposite: a moment of grand, closed door, pop betrayal that dissolves the minute we cut back to the big bad metal monsters. No robot could be scarier than the bizarre, unlikely sight of Jeff Bridges appearing as a poisonous surrogate father figure, but that doesn’t stop the filmmakers and special effects wizards from trying. Iron Man must, of course, have an evil antagonist, a twin sprung from the same well of dubious creation, and so he does, resulting in a fat, kind of goofy looking thing that could be said to be a joke on the Republican “more is better” philosophy but probably isn’t. In 1978, people were assured that they’d believe a man could fly, but would it hurt nowadays for us to be asked believe something besides, or at least in addition to, that? Iron Man needs less iron and more man.
★★★
His Kind of Woman (1951)
His Kind of Woman is one of those old-school nonsense pictures that Hollywood no longer seems capable of producing without an accompanying shot of self-congratulation; every light little thing now comes packaged with a twinkle in the stars’ eye to assure everyone that they know they’re above it and most assuredly don’t MEAN it, which diminishes the fun by half (an exact figure). That was my issue with the later Steven Soderbergh Danny Ocean pictures, Soderbergh’s fear of being mistaken for a mere entertainer was palpable, and led to the assumption that an incoherent trifle would be less of an offense to the Great Filmmakers’ Code of Conduct than an enjoyable one.
I’m not as far off track as it may appear, His Kind of Woman is, like the Danny Ocean movies (either past or present), an excuse to transport several stars and character actors to a beautiful setting and stage a series of flirtations, near death escapes and exchanges of sideways movie-star banter, all under the flimsiest pretense of some larger story, which, in this case, has something to do with a deported gangster’s efforts to get back into the States and enjoy his illegally gotten gains. The gangster sets up an on again/off again gambler, Dan Milner (Robert Mitchum, who should’ve just been called Robert Mitchum from picture to picture, no writer could invent a name more apt for that man) to take the fall so he can make off with Milner’s identity and get back on U.S. soil. That’s the plot, and it doesn’t kick in for real until about the ninetieth minute. Milner’s in the dark for the majority of the picture, knowing only that he’s to take a fat paycheck and hang out and absorb the pleasures of the island until someone steers him in the right, or any, direction. There has to be self-satire in there somewhere.
His Kind of Woman, produced by Howard Hughes, directed by Richard Fleischer (credited to John Farrow, though Fleischer evidently re-shot most of it) also boasts Vincent Price in a generous, charismatic, humorously unconvincing turn as a famous actor; Charles McGraw (memorable in Fleischer’s significantly tighter The Narrow Margin) as a baddie ; Jane Russell’s breasts as the chief love interest, Tim Holt as a supposedly drunk, late night bearer of exposition, and, why not?, Raymond Burr as the gangster pulling the strings.
The film rests on Mitchum’s no, I really, truly, don’t give a shit charisma (Otto Preminger exploited that apathy to effective, perverse extremes in the Hughes produced Angel Face) as well as the other stars’ game for anything spirit. The picture is never thrilling, rarely truly funny (though it has a few lines that snap) but everything taken together has an unruly appeal that is intensely pleasurable to experience and look back upon later. Films where stars are clearly having fun aren’t always fun themselves, but this is an exception. The chief appeal of His Kind of Woman lies in its determination to follow its characters’ whims with no regard to the constraints and requirements of the genre, allowing for human little moments of tenderness, cleverness, and sensuality. This picture has conviction in something more important, in this case, than story: a lolly-gagging, roundabout, distinctly Hollywood utopia of movie stars screwing around. This is a truly escapist picture, and you won’t find yourself whispering that word under your breath as if you’re in confession: the film wears it proud, and so should you.
★★★
Starting Out in the Evening (2007)
Coming of age stories can certainly be comforting, we’d all like to believe that a super lay or a chance meeting with someone older, established or famous (or a super lay with someone older, established or famous) will filter the confusion out of our lives and send us ready and willing toward whatever may be next. Coming of age pictures generally portray life as a light-switch that only requires a flicking from off to on, no wavering, nothing, when you’re on, you’re on, and everything’s a okay. The movies rarely acknowledge that our lives have a habit of going up and down, side to side, one day you’re winning, one day you’re losing, another day you’re winning again, another day you’re losing yet again. One day you’re over your young life crisis, while yet another day you find yourself racing straight into your mid-life crisis: drinking coffee and wondering why you watched all those coming of age movies. It has a disappointing third act, but The Graduate is a coming of age film that ends on a moving, and honestly unsettling note, sure, we’re here, but what the fuck now?
There’s all kinds of coming of age stories of course, the sexual experience with the older person, the infatuation with something (or someone) that (or who) turns out to be shit and representative of our childish delusions, the teacher who fights the system and imparts discipline in students everyone else has given up on, as well as the one about the strange, possibly sexually confused (if the genders are aligned correctly) relationship that can unexpectedly arise between an older, faded, past his prime writer and a young, precocious, energetic student who reveres the faded, past his prime writer. We know how these stories work: the student imparts a new sense of life to the teacher, while the teacher nurtures within the student a newfound discipline and sense of life’s fragility. I don’t remember much of Finding Forrester, but that was a recent example of this later type of coming of age picture. Wonder Boys would be another, but that was a wonderful movie because it had a sense of the genre’s necessities, and while it didn’t discard them, it admirably tweaked them and sent them scurrying in unexpectedly anarchic directions. Wonder Boys had a sense of humor, of play, and, most important, a sense of humanity.
Normally these pictures’ rigid devotion to formula causes them to forsake common sense. Starting Out in the Evening is the most joyless kind of formula picture, a self-conscious, self-righteous formula picture that knows the clichés, tries to transcend them, but has no idea what else to offer in place of the predictable pleasures. The director, Andrew Wagner, doesn’t supply the usual bombast, there’s no grand fight the system climax, and the conversations between the teacher/writer (Frank Langella) and the student (Lauren Ambrose) have a refreshingly true ring, they talk like two people who may have actually read a few books as opposed to watching movies about people who read books. This picture, no doubt, begins promisingly, but it’s dry and lifeless, and a subplot with the teacher’s daughter (Lili Taylor), meant to, in case we miss it, further highlight his self-absorption and emotional cowardice, goes nowhere; it’s dead weight in a picture that’s already perilously close to sinking. You may also find the film’s one note, pro-life, seize the day hammering exhausting, and perhaps even a little offensive.
Starting Out in the Evening is a failure of empathy as well as imagination, uncomfortably judgmental of its protagonist, the teacher, here called Leonard Schiller (the name is appropriate, pictures featured of Langella in his youth recall a young Leonard Cohen). The student, here called Heather Wolfe (more appropriate than the film apparently knows) repeatedly harangues Schiller for abandoning the passion of his earlier novels in favor of something colder, more considered and political. Schiller explains to Wolfe that those early books were written in one part of his life, the later books in another. That, God forbid, made sense to me.
We call it change, but these kinds of movies are usually only interested in promoting a change that leaves a thoughtless, shallow smile on your face as you leave the theatre, a true consideration of the ramifications of life’s choices is rarely on the menu. Later in the picture, the teacher’s daughter’s boyfriend (Adrian Lester) tells the daughter that he loves Schiller’s later work, it’s brilliant, “about something” (a sentiment that’s usually mocked as the height of deluded pretension in these kinds of pictures) and I perked up. Would Starting Out in the Evening dare imagine a scenario in which the young, green, bullying, faintly psychotic student isn’t armed with the most valid opinion? (Keep in mind the word opinion, the film doesn’t, her appraisal of Schiller’s work is to be accepted no questions asked, while everyone surrounding her, all older, all possibly more knowledgeable, are elitist fatheads. The girl’s own elitism, which she boasts of at one point, is never contested.) The answer is no, the Lester character is meant to be a jerk, another testament to Schiller’s head-up-his-own-assedness.
Starting Out in the Evening is well-performed, particularly by Langella, who brings an unsentimental humanity to his role that is quite endearing (he does wonders with the line “you’ve brought an old man some excitement”), and the final image (implying that change is something that, refreshingly, arrives bit by bit) works, but it’s not enough, the film is youth pandering claptrap, encouraging the newer generation’s (of which I’m a part) egotistical belief that they are of the most value, and that the old guys need to duck out of the way of their all encompassing brilliance. The picture is also probably critic pandering claptrap as well, one of those formula pictures dressed up in just enough literacy to be taken as “indy.” Don’t feel guilty if you find yourself bored watching Starting Out in the Evening, it is, in fact, boring.
★★
Two-Lane Blacktop (1971)
Or director Monte Hellman attempts to elevate the cross-country film to the level of existential art. Two-Lane Blacktop is a 1970s race picture paced like an Antonioni film: every scene drawn out to the point of surreality, every line of dialogue punctuated with pregnant longing, doubt, and despair. Two-Lane Blacktop is more about movies than Antonioni’s work, it would certainly appear to be about Easy Rider, it’s about drinking Coca-Cola out of a glass bottle outside in the most photographically macho way imaginable, it’s about the myths of the old west and self-discovery (or lack thereof). The picture is also about ennui and the erosion of confidence in your native country. Hellman skirts absurdity, but ultimately gets away with stuffing all that into his race picture because he doesn’t ever play the part of outraged schoolmarm. Two-Lane Blacktop has a more original, less judgmental, blitzed humane one thing after another sense of humor about it. It wouldn’t surprise me if Terrence Malick and David Gordon Green were admirers.
The picture, because it is so casual, is really the movie Easy Rider tried so hard to be: a document of fade, of pent up rootlessness channeled into a distracting obsession. Easy Rider, despite moments (particularly with Jack Nicholson), was never the picture so many made it out to be at the time; it’s too full of itself, too pandering and sloppy. Two-Lane Blacktop is dryer, less accommodating, more elusive and probably just as stupid, but you won’t care: it’s a have your cake and eat it too picture: a question and reaffirmation of the American myth in equal measures. The film is, unquestionably, more for the guys; a man’s idea of how remaining unfulfilled and unrealized should hopefully look should you find yourself unfulfilled and unrealized. Two-Lane Blacktop, sadly, also represents something else entirely to the contemporary viewer: a fantasy of driving cross country with only a few dollars to your name; such an activity would max out even fat credit cards these days, providing you haven’t maxed out your fat credit cards already.
The picture is spacey, tranquil and loose, and as such it may take a few minutes to get into its headspace. It took me about twenty before the slow, emotionally textured groove began to captivate me, though the picture gets better and better as it proceeds along anyway. We initially meet three characters: symbolically referred to in the credits as Driver (James Taylor), Mechanic (Dennis Wilson) and Girl (Laurie Bird) and in the film itself pointedly not referred to at all. They race their 55 Chevy, and in between they flirt and eat and drink and look for other races. The connective tissue that we’ve come to expect between scenes has been removed here, events arrive with little to no build: the girl, for instance, first appears (in a wonderful shot) in a window in the background of a cafe where the boys are eating. She slips into their Chevy and sits in the back waiting for them, the boys get in the car with her and drive away, no one seeming to have too many questions, except the girl, once, wondering why she always has to sit in the back.
Just as we assume we have the entirety of Two-Lane Blacktop figured out, and sink into our couches and savor the photography, particularly Hellman’s master shots (the images of the cars moving restlessly across the screen are especially majestic) and accept that nothing will be allowed to rupture the picture’s chic 1970s thing, along comes the Warren Oates character, referred to in the credits as G.T.O, because, well, he drives a beautiful G.T.O. We discover that the boys have been following him across at least two states, and that G.T.O. has had about enough. He picks up a hitchhiker and pulls into a gas station a few moments later. The boys catch up and, in an extended roundelay between boys, the girl, and G.T.O, that comprises possibly the picture’s best scene, a bet is finally made. They are to mail their pink slips to D.C.; first one there waits for the other one to catch up with their other newly acquired car.
The bits and pieces of Two-Lane Blacktop slowly stack up on top of one another (the hard boiled eggs, the stealing of the plates, the charge of a new challenge) and eventually we come to realize that we’re watching a great movie: a funny-flakey-haunting creation, a work of loss and disillusionment that sticks because it doesn’t seem to be sticking at all. That is the key to the picture’s subjective/objective mastery of tone: it emulates, glorifies but ultimately pities the numbing passivity of its characters. Wilson and Taylor (both the people you’re thinking they are) are surprisingly rich presences: similar looking, confident and broken: playing the musicians’ mystique to their advantage.
Oates is the true performance of the picture though, and its emotional wallop. Seemingly blessed with a differently colored V-neck sweater for every occasion, Oates is initially established as the intimidating opponent, an older man schooled in the ways of the nomad lifestyle, only to be revealed as the loneliest and most eager to impress: he’s the boys’ ghost of Christmas future, a man eaten and chattering away, continually picking up increasingly disinterested hitchhikers in a quest to slow the dissipation of his soul. His last line is a heartbreaker: “those satisfactions are permanent”. There’s someone in the car with him at the time but it’s clear that he’s, as always, talking to himself. G.T.O.’s at least partially right though, as the satisfactions of Two-Lane Blacktop are unlikely to fade anytime soon. To take a cue from the film’s abrupt, chilling ending, I think it appropriate that I don’t continue on much longer about it. See Two-Lane Blacktop, if you haven’t already.
★★★★
Inside (2007)
Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury’s Inside is a beautiful junk painting of your worst nightmares, probably the most potent exploitation of unyielding, inexplicable violation that I’ve seen since Takashi Miike’s Audition. Like Miike at his more unhinged (and Audition isn’t it) Bustillo and Maury announce their total lack of regard for all notions of good taste and restraint with their opening image: a severe car accident as seen and experienced by an unborn child. One moment the child is soothed by his mother’s loving (if still somewhat alarming) words, the next he’s jolted and throttled, blood rising and floating from the inside.
The pregnant Sarah (Alysson Paradis) and her unborn child do manage to survive, but Sarah’s husband isn’t as fortunate. Sarah, her face plastered in distinctly French movie blood, looks over at her husband and wails. Four months later, it’s Christmas Eve and Sarah’s doctor informs her that she’s to give birth the following day and advises that she go home and relax in that cool, condescending manner with which doctors, or people who know you’ve recently lost someone, speak so fluently. Sarah’s employer and mother separately beg her to spend Christmas with them, but Sarah, confused, bitter, lonely, demurs and returns to her home to spend Christmas Eve alone. Sarah, inevitably of course, comes to regret that decision when a strange woman (Béatrice Dall, unforgettable), referred to simply in the credits as “la femme”, knocks on Sarah’s door in the black of the night and asks to be let in. Sarah, seeing only a dark shadow, and not as stupid as many in these types of pictures, tells the woman to scram, but this femme isn’t so easily dissuaded. Soon it’s unavoidably evident that the woman has come for Sarah’s child, and she doesn’t intend to leave without it.
Inside’s opening act is superb; a stylish, slow-burn emotional penetration that seemingly plays every one of your primal campfire fears against you: the inexplicable stranger, the dark, dank lonely night, the policemen who come and go to little avail, the dreams of your child revolting inside you. Sarah’s home is distinctly stylish; a movie place of dread; of unspoken, hellish domestic resentment, lit in such pale dusky yellows as to suggest a warm, humid womb itself. The title is, needless to say, multi-tiered in meaning. La femme wants to get inside, inside, inside, and nothing will stop her multiple invasions of Sarah’s taken for granted boundaries: her peace, her house, and ultimately her pregnant body. Bustillo and Maury exploit and extend Sarah’s sudden, burning revulsion and panic with masterful craftsmanship: la femme is equal parts specter (of guilt and bourgeoisie complacency and entitlement), butcher, psychotic and unstoppable culmination of every mother, or human’s worst nightmare. Bustillo and Maury, unlike virtually everyone else working the genre these days, aren’t afraid of being labeled tasteless or psychotic, they want to hammer your pressure points, and they don’t intend to play fair.
The film is surreally, shockingly, grandly, unbelievably, absurdly violent. Inside, because it’s horror and French, has been likened to Alexandre Aja’s High Tension, but that picture blew its load on gory pyrotechnics that had nothing to do with theme or atmosphere. That film was an unintentionally laughable, boring cartoon, with a twist ending that only further highlighted its pointlessness. Inside is, and this is the confusion of it, subjective and exploitive in equal measures. As accomplished as the picture is, it still exudes a problematic carny freak show “look at that!” vibe that borders on inhuman. The film is more original than many slasher pictures, but it’s still rooted in movies above all else. Rear Window? Check. Blood Simple? Check. Wait Until Dark? Check. Every gross horror movie ever made? Check. Woman finally saying fuck it and going all Ripley on us whether it makes sense or not? Check.
The male (probably young) filmmakers get these women, and portray their insecurity, rage, and psychosis with surprisingly fluid ease (until the end, where the Ripley factor kicks in, and we suffer the obligatory “someone’s dead, no they’re not” fake out) but the very male filmmakers also seem to be at a distance that might be inevitable with such a loaded, unavoidably female subject. These guys think this is gross, a woman would think it’s tragic (and gross). The references to the French riots of 2005 hint at a subtext of class resentment that the picture doesn’t seem too interested in capitalizing on, it’s a red herring, a sketch of the boogeyman’s origin that doesn’t really inform the film much one way or the other (though it does season the ultimate punch line). The body invasion of Inside lacks the self body-bewildering kick of an early Cronenberg film because the second and third acts are too indulgently disgusting: Bustillo and Maury don’t have enough faith in their final assault; they threaten to turn it into yet another exhibit in the Grand Guignol theatre of well lit cruelty.
Inside is still a notable, stunning piece of genre filmmaking. (There’s a brilliant, non-violent moment near the beginning where Sarah discovers, via just developed photographs, that la femme has known her for some time.) The violence, before it goes haywire, is ghastly and remarkably apt thematically. The tides of blood flow and spurt and explode, and hauntingly confirm and underline a terrified young woman’s mental implosions. The worst has finally arrived. The film treads uneasily towards High Tension farce near the end but reins it in for a devastating final image that threatens to sink into moral quicksand. Perversion and chaos have stolen life and motherhood and then just as strangely handed them right back, in a Grimm’s fairy tale finale that the filmmakers, in their audacity, seem to believe is a happy one. The ending reveals the filmmakers to possibly be more in touch with their inner woman than we initially assumed, though the horror lies in which woman they appear to be in touch with.
★★★½
On Dangerous Ground (1952)
Director Nicholas Ray was known for imbuing his thrillers with an almost naive, sad-eyed desperation, and that suits his romantic chase noir, On Dangerous Ground, to a tee. The picture depends upon clichés that were old hat before the talkies, but it transcends them, primarily because we’re more accustomed to encountering them in a romantic melodrama that might more closely resemble Marty than a nastier thriller centering on the hunt for a young girl’s killer. The policeman on the hunt, Jim Wilson (Robert Ryan) sees himself through the killer’s sister’s (Ida Lupino) blind eyes and calls himself out on a life that’s been dominated by cynicism and recklessness. We don’t roll our eyes at the second act pathos, nor the Lupino martyr, we’re instead thrown for a loop, wondering what the hell is going on.
It helps that Ray and Ryan are nearly unrivaled in this sort of business. Ray’s pictures aren’t calculated, but raw, almost uncomfortably melancholy and self-conscious. In a Lonely Place is another picture that starts down a familiar path (Hollywood screenwriter, murder, etc.) only to end on a devastating note of miscommunication and un-purged rage. There’s also, of course, Rebel without a Cause, a picture that never annoys from overexposure, if only because it’s authentically unforgettable, a nightmare exploration of the chasm between the generations (just as In a Lonely Place was exploring the un-crossable differences between the genders). On Dangerous Ground has similar conviction in itself, and Wilson ranks as another refreshingly understated, poignant Ray creation. The first three scenes tell us all: one cop hugs his wife, one cop watches TV with his family, Wilson examines pictures of suspects at the dinner table alone. Too bad the picture feels the need, in the first act, to repeatedly remind us of Wilson’s disillusion with needless dialogue, but even this doesn’t irritate, it contributes to the broad, dreamy vibe of the picture, to its big, broken, bleeding heart.
Ray could’ve gotten all of that out of a mediocre actor (and has) but Robert Ryan appears, in all of the pictures I’ve seen at least, to be incapable of giving of a false or boring performance. Ryan can be terrifying even in pictures that aren’t in his league (check his work in the otherwise just ok Crossfire or Clash by Night, both of which can be found in TCM Noirs Vol.2) but when the film manages to be even somewhat up to him the results can be extraordinary, such as The Set-Up, The Naked Spur, the iconic The Wild Bunch, or even here. Ryan, like many of my favorite leading men, has a fascinating, flexible contradiction about himself, he’s scary, badass, childish, noble, buffoonish all, possibly, at once, and can adjust the ingredients seemingly without effort depending upon the part. Wilson is, like the Bogart character in Place, of the not entirely sane school of broken idealists, needing a saint, someone who can in good faith just plain shut up for a while and deal with it, to purify his potentially lethal spiritual toxicity.
On Dangerous Ground follows a traditional three act structure, but the proportions are unusual and further contribute to the surreal discombobulation of the film, while also managing to further dry out the sentimentality. The film is approximately eighty minutes long, thirty of those are devoted to act one, a chase that has little bearing on the official plot (though it organically fleshes out the Wilson character). By minute thirty-five, Wilson has been summoned to another town (to escape problems sprung from his violent practices) to solve a murder. At this point we settle in, expecting twenty minutes or so of fish out of water plotting, the usual no bullshit cop in strange town burlesque, only to have a townsperson spring into a building in the middle of Wilson’s introduction to the prominent townspeople to announce that he’s seen the killer fleeing. Wilson teams up with the father (Ward Bond, very effective) and the remaining forty-five minutes largely constitute this second chase, with the accelerated romance with Lupino, who isn’t, despite first billing, introduced until about minute forty, as a sideline. The film toys with the formula admirably, and embodies what screenwriters preach of underlining character with action.
My only real regret of On Dangerous Ground is that it doesn’t take full advantage of the possible explosions that could be savored from a Robert Ryan-Ida Lupino collaboration. Lupino has proved herself in other roles to be very much Ryan’s equal, but here she’s saddled with an uninteresting male fantasy. Ray exhausts his imagination with the strange pacing, and his empathy with the Wilson character. It’s hard to fault On Dangerous Ground too much though, it’s an original picture with a fantastic lead performance, a clear, hard, amazing visual style, a haunting Bernard Herrman score, and a good as can be expected secondary performance. You don’t roll your eyes at the final kiss, it’s, despite the shortcuts, earned.
★★★½
Masculin Feminin (1966)
A portrait of confusion and aimless wannabe existential despair masked as a battle of the sexes tragicomedy, Jean-Luc Godard’s justifiably adored Masculin Féminin is a picture from 1960s France that 2000s U.S. could sorely use. Sadly, none of us seem to have the nerve or curiosity to pull it off. Godard had already made several legendary pictures (Breathless, Contempt and Le Petit soldat among them) but Masculin Féminin, while not necessarily better, feels more inclusive, Godard seemingly just as willing to question himself as everything else around him. This picture stars Jean-Pierre Léaud, of Truffaut’s Antoine Doinel series, and Léaud appears to bring with him a bit of that feisty but more genteel spirit that characterizes the Truffaut collaborations. This picture has the vibe of Truffaut and Godard bringing out the best in one another, though with Godard that could be tongue in cheek, I don’t pretend to know (hence the chicken shit qualifiers). Masculin Féminin is a humane, bitter, contradictory, full picture, which is appropriate considering the subject: a group of undefined twenty-somethings, flitting from one interest, pursuit, or life defining quest to another.
The children of Godard’s film are looking for something or anything that feels sound and lacks in condescension, bitterness, falsehood; something tangible that hopefully safely avoids the hypocrisy of their parents. These children, most immediately and prevailingly, find the opposite sex, a mystery they can conveniently prescribe all of their other mysteries onto. Paul (Léaud), a would be revolutionary who chafes at organized government and work, and all the other ways society controls the common man, finds that his true concern is getting the beautiful, aloof, Madeleine (Chantal Goya), who couldn’t be more his opposite, and who doesn’t care enough about his wannabe politics to even feign interest, into the sack.
As most people of that age terrified of intimacy have a habit of doing, the characters of Masculin Féminin favor talk above all else, turning sex into verbal gunplay, cross-examining one another for astoundingly long, unbroken shots that reveal the friction between young people of differing genders as strongly as any picture I’ve ever seen. The girls tease and elude and hide behind words with dimensions they don’t entirely understand, the guys crouch behind bravado borrowed from American and French pulp films (Paul continually tries to perfect Belmondo’s cigarette lighting technique). Paul talks to Madeleine, about love, existence, pop culture (of which he tries to be contemptuous) and science (there’s a wonderful episode late in the picture that somehow manages to illustrate the mysteries of life with mashed potatoes). Paul talks to his friend Robert (Michel Debord) about Madeleine and sex in general. Madeleine talks to her friends about Paul, sex, and music as she strives to be a pop singer. One of the girls may be in love with Paul. Robert may be in love with that same girl.
Masculin Féminin lends itself structurally to its confused heroes, repeating words and images over and over in only slightly differing contexts, underlining the often rootless one thing after another, entirely self-contained, episodes of their lives. The film is divided into fifteen chapters, punctuated with numbers, prose and gunshots, but that doesn’t feel as deliberately intrusive as devices in other Godard films; it’s perfectly, naturally of a piece, every sketch a little life that begins and dies in and of itself, that fuels these characters’ gotta know and feel everything right now urgency.
This picture probably contributed more than a bit to the variety of youth in headlights films that would be made in America later, but most of those pictures stole the wrong things or missed the point, buying into their protagonists too much or not enough, becoming exercises in cool that celebrated ennui or sentimentality above all else. Godard’s triumph is that this picture is everything equally, simultaneously: naïve, insincere, cynical, starry-eyed, fatalistic, all possibly within seconds of one another. Godard’s syntax and capturing in amber a particular society would be enough to qualify it as a masterpiece alone, but it’s his surprising empathy and compassion (again, I think) that elevates the film to absolute, can’t miss classic. Paul, Madeleine and the gang are more than placeholders for Godard’s grand points: they hurt, ache and reach out in scenes of unforgettable connection.
A moment between Paul and Madeleine in bed, touching one another’s faces skittishly, is vulnerable and deliriously romantic, as is the scene where they watch a film (supposedly, according to Criterion, a parody of Bergman’s The Silence) leaning into one another. These moments set the stakes for Godard’s condemnation of checking out, and the filmmaker seems to understand here that the heartstrings are the best entry point for change. Godard’s youths are flowing with ambition and yearning, but they don’t MEAN anything, and this acknowledgment is the picture’s ultimate poignance, a portrait of young folks struggling and striving to bob their heads above the waves of consumerism that are drowning them, but really wanting to take part and benefit from said consumerism themselves. Godard’s infatuation with hot young things of little intellectual curiosity is at its most honest here, a candid reveal that a man can want to mean something and still fall for a wonderful body.
The characters’ endless self-comment and absorption play perfectly into Godard’s gifts for games and hall of mirrors symbolism and refraction, even his beloved American noirs are employed to startling effect here: lurid episodes that occasionally, inexplicably intrude upon the characters’ pontificating with shocking, hilarious ease, before going out again like a match: the unease of the youth personified as their cinematic addictions and getaways.
I needed this picture. You need this picture and, if you’ve already seen it, see it again. Masculin Féminin may have been about the children of Marx and Coca-Cola, a reaction to France at the time, but it could just as easily be about the children of MySpace and Youtube. Sadly, though, the children of today may be more in line with Madeleine than Paul, leaving out the Marx entirely in favor of the Coca-Cola, only wanting to be the next Carrie Underwood instead of the Beatles or Bob Dylan. Masculin Féminin captures something that is more urgent than ever: a generation lost and numbed into submission by everything and nothing. The ending is typically Godardian in its perversion: a major character dies off screen, flippantly, after recognizing his/her own self-righteousness. The police question the remaining characters, whose final words are “I don’t know.” Admitting that is a start.
★★★★
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