Bowen’s Cinematic

Goodbye Solo opens promisingly abruptly: our odd couple heroes: the younger African optimist Solo (Souleymane Sy Savane) and the older white old-school American cowboy William (Red West) are bickering in Solo’s taxi. Aspiring screenwriters could learn from this picture’s initial shorthand: in seconds, we understand that Solo and William have been in a client/driver relationship for at least a bit, and we see, without overbearing meddling, that William means for Solo to take him on one last drive, that grand final drive, in a few days, and that Solo, a curious, eternal do-gooder, means to talk him out of it; the rest of the picture, of course, being Solo’s efforts to thaw the withdrawn man out.

The reduction is intentional; and the meddling interferes soon after. We learn no more, really, of these two after this opening, which has the immediate, on the fly, found power of alternative POVs pinballing off one other; a current that writer-director Ramin Bahrani managed for the entirety of his previous movie, Chop Shop. In that picture Bahrani had a lead, Alejandro Polanco, with a sense of depth and not-quite-spelled-out intentions that transcended the familiar earnestness of the “indie” social-strife movie – Bahrani had found a hustler searching for the clichéd American dream that affirmed and questioned that dream at once – this kid had no time for platitudes, he didn’t have the middle-class privilege of self-doubt, this kid was more than an illustration of poverty: he was too damn simply alive to be minimized. In Goodbye Solo there isn’t any such mystery, and the good intentions suffocate us. We know Solo and William will forge some tenuous bond despite their cultural differences, we know most of the movie will hinge on whether William sees to finish his end, we know Solo, despite the outcome, will take something lasting from the experience. If the picture had a bigger production budget and stars, it would look a lot like a more self-conscious Scent of a Woman.

I hunger for a movie that tweaks our do-gooder fantasies of the downtrodden. Bahrani, at least, reverses the traditional formula – the black man is the hero (though he’s only a stone’s skip off from the dreaded “magic negro”), helping the white along, but even that reeks of “principle”. Everything in Goodbye Solo is principled to death, even the ending, which in itself is beautiful and a bit difficult to dislike, but it’s too neat. The roommate scenario is too neat (and absurd). The road trip is too neat. An embarrassing scene with a diary that tells all is too neat. The precocious super-intelligent girl is too neat. Solo’s domestic squabbles are too neat (he, of course, never loses his composure; his wife, of course, is the ideal embodiment of another ethnicity – this picture is practically a recruiting video for the YMCA). Hell, even the title is too neat. There is no incidental detail (even William’s movie-love is explained). You wait for someone to do something messy, for something, anything, to take hold that feels the least bit spontaneous, out of sync with all the “humanity” humming in your ear. There is one thing: long-time character actor Red West, his delivery, his innate physical language of hurt, brings home everything that Bahrani otherwise tries too hard to get at, and he legitimizes the director’s aim: you see why a talented young man would look at this guy and dream stereotypical dreams of salvation.

I have never taught school, but right out of college I worked in a social services office, and was responsible for a program required of people receiving benefits that encouraged seeking and landing employment. I was a young college-educated white guy working primarily with uneducated, low-income black and white families, many even younger than me, who in many cases looked considerably older: more kids, more experience, more drink, more drugs – prematurely worn down. Their contempt for me was palpable, and every day we’d go through the familiar dance of those forced by a larger structure to feign getting along, we were both in it for the money. It was occasionally funny and excruciating, and never, though you’d think odds would occasionally dictate, inspirational. The pull is familiar to anyone who has worked in the public arena in any capacity, there are rules meant to provide stability, reason, but there are also so many ifs and ands and postscripts that nothing is truly enforced or truly moves in any definite direction, and the people on the other side of the desk know that as well as anyone, and so the hypocritical futility of the situation, compounded with mutual dislike rooted in equal parts truth, stereotype, and contrivance, has to occasionally rupture, and it did once for me with my most openly hostile case, a young black mother of three; she called me everything you’d expect her to call me, while I kept control and collected what I needed to finally close her case for noncompliance. An if or an and kept her open though, but not for long, as she was soon again pregnant and redirected to another more appropriate avenue of counseling and faux-progress. She would be my case again once the child was born, but by that point, after eventually behaving as the cliché she had assumed me to be from the beginning, I had quit.

And compared to most, I had it very, very good. Laurent Cantet’s extraordinary The Class, based on teacher François Bégaudeau’s book of his experiences in a low-income, multi-nationality Paris school, catches that battle of egos and system architecture, and the potentially warping impotence that many in many countries face everyday, and that most movies sentimentalize or outright ignore. And battle isn’t overstatement. The François of the movie, played by Bégaudeau himself with a variety of other non-actors in the roles of students and other teachers, must strap on armor every day – a poker-face of hopefully encouraging and nurturing discipline, openness and intellectual rigor – and battle; or, to mix metaphors, walk a tightrope while juggling a dozen fireballs. François, more idealistic, less hardened than many of his colleagues, strives to keep the momentum of the class going, keep the mousy few engaged as the more prominent, mouthy, enraged students try their damnedest to derail the entire enterprise, which they see, perhaps sometimes rightfully, as racially/socially rigged. François, slight, somewhat effeminate (a few of the kids ask if he’s gay) with a worn charisma that fits the screen, shows us the interior war between ideals based on a placement in society he has perhaps taken for granted and the daily wear and tear of what largely comes to be babysitting (the systems existing not for progress, but for more practical prevention of anarchy): the temptation, simply, that it just might not be worth it.

The Class is one of the best acted non-professionally cast pictures I’ve seen (you won’t regard anything here as “performance”), and it shames showier movies that make a big tap dance of “real life”, and of vérité camera angles that add up to nothing. Cantet worked with Bégaudeau, and the cast, and shot in a multi-camera, free doc manner, and the picture is mostly confined to the single set of the classroom (with periodic sidelines to teacher meetings and the playground, we never leave the school); but we never think of Cantet’s picture as a “one set” movie, or as a “semi-improvised” movie, or as a movie “based on a true story” (has there been a more obvious signifier of un-truth in recent years?) because all of these devices are of a piece – they put us in François’ head, we see his frazzled desperation, but, and this is the picture’s coup, we never, with one possible exception, see these children as one-dimensional monsters or stereotypes ripe for redemption. We somehow see François’ temptation to see the children one-dimensionally, as violations of his own values, or of even common courtesy, as well as the inner wrinkles that compel them to overturn the apple cart. Cantet’s staging is un-showy, but electric – his camera truly appears to be everywhere at once, and the children have been worked with and brought out in rare, masterful ways, we see spontaneous bits of life that never obviously inform the picture but that mean the world to the overall effect – we see shards of vulnerability in the most vicious cut-ups, and we see the danger of their intelligence, which, particularly in the young, as we know, can come at the expense of empathy. We see the more withdrawn, scared children, most prominently represented by a boy named Wei, and we see what François is fighting for, and what he, and they, loses. We see the bullies and the clowns, most prominently Esmeralda and Souleymane, and we feel the miscommunication that fuels even their most barely forgivable acts of cruelty and self-righteousness, and we see how they underrate the extent of their damage. (Esmeralda, the possible exception, is one of the smuggest creatures I’ve seen in a movie, she tests your tolerance in a way that’s authentically daring, but we still see her sharpness and her own despair and confusion – she’s testing François and he ultimately fails.)

Cantet’s picture is so merciless and exhausting that you may find yourself wishing for some of those clichés you’ve laughed off in more conventional pictures: such as the scene of the teacher having dinner with one of the student’s families, or the moment when the teacher convinces the drop-out to re-enroll, all so the student can congratulate the teacher for holding him to the fire; or maybe a romance with a co-worker who admires his dedication. You expect, and eventually want, a little pap, a little sugar that sells that “brotherhood of man” stuff that tells us that we can all get along under an umbrella. This rattling picture, Cantet’s best (and you would do well to find his Time Out, and, to a lesser extent, Heading South) shows the “brotherhood” business as unattainable illusion too sentimental, too blanket-assumptive, too damn misunderstanding of intimate human difference: of race, belief, education, age, perception, intelligence, maturity; as something we sell ourselves to keep standing up in the morning. But what else is there? The bitter conclusion, which follows a dispute the children will most likely never entirely get over, is a self-lacerating defeat that, with the actual subject as star, offers no escape; we see the madness of the inability to weigh your successes against your failures: personal responsibility versus inevitability versus unattainable perception. In The Class we see, without flinch, a birth of disillusion, one that promises not awakening, but a different sleep. Yet the picture, oddly, isn’t a downer, it’s too accomplished, too wiry, too skeptical of bullshit, too damn good. You walk away feeling as if the picture’s very existence is a possible flicker of hope; the gnawing contradiction being that that idealism, even at a glimmer, might be the problem: rooted in a naiveté springing from unquestioned “that’s how things should be”.

I’ve never been much for taking pictures, which may seem contradictory to my interests here; I find people constantly occupied with posing and snapping everything a tad off-putting (my mother scolds me, her house is dotted with pictures of all her children except me). But in Everlasting Moments, Jan Troell’s latest picture, set in Sweden over the course of several years in the early 1900s, photography is imbued with the magic it must have once had, stripped of the instant, frivolous, self-absorption that compels the techno-junkies these days to document their dogs eating breakfast. For Maria (Maria Heiskanen), photography is an accidental savior, an acknowledgement of possibility that gives her life of uncountable jobs and child-rearing and strained patience with her husband Sig (Mikael Persbrandt) a definition she didn’t realize she was missing. And, watching this picture, it may come to you that you didn’t know what you were missing either.

I haven’t seen Troell’s other pictures, most famously The Emigrants and The New Land, so I wasn’t quite prepared for the radiant, specific, tactile beauty of Everlasting Moments. The picture opens with a bit of narration, spoken by Maria’s most prominent child, and fades into the sort of stylized cinematography that we associate with pictures set in the past, pictures that approximate the browns and sharp whites of early, fledgling photographs. You can be forgiven for feeling, at first, that you’ve seen this picture before, and for dreading a thick wax-coat of nostalgia. The lighting of many of these types of pictures, particularly the contemporary American movies usually rumored to be Oscar-worthy (Cinderella Man comes readily to mind) divorce you from the heat of the moment, they bracket themselves off in a quaint, containable past tense – they’re consciously “old-timey” movies with values so digested they’re ready made for home spun triviality, the kinds of pictures the grandmother who didn’t like movies much to begin with says they don’t make anymore. Everlasting Moments uses similar light for the opposite effect – underneath these century-old pictures is passion, desperation, longing, bleeding, farting, everything we tend to think we invented thirty or forty years ago – and there isn’t one “off” moment in the picture – Troell makes the ordinary poetic without exaggerating, and shortchanging, its ordinariness. There are dozens of images in this picture that you will be hard-pressed to forget: the refraction of a butterfly’s shadow onto an amazed hand, the turning of a mill’s gears, a girl’s solitary walk into oblivion, a crippled boy’s casually fleeting/empowering underwater exploration, a first kiss dwarfed by a larger betrayal, a portrait of a dead girl, a horse’s fresh wounds, etc, etc. In pictures like American Beauty, we are told to appreciate everyday life while wallowing in contradictory, chic cynicism – Everlasting Moments, which lives up to its title, fulfills and transcends that kind of reduction.

Photography is the containing passion, but there are others running rampant, hiding in the corners – this picture is ultimately concerned, as the title suggests, with the incidental, fleeting pleasures that come to define our lives. We get from Troell’s film something that had never quite this explicitly occurred to me before – that we all treasure our own stories, regardless of their universal similarity to others’, because they contain the little nits and ticks, the little fibers that allow life, if we’re lucky, to seem ok. You’ve seen every incident in Everlasting Moments before, but not this way: there’s an amazing moment, about an hour and a half in, between Sig and the narrating daughter Maj, in which the family discovers her first kiss with a boy while she hints to her father that she knows of his infidelities. We see everything: in Sig’s face the trembling power and fear and bafflement (at a family that he loves, but resents, because he’s come to feel excluded and inferior – a working class man amongst budding thinkers and artists); and in Maj’s face we see a girl’s first cautious stand as a young woman, a young woman, like many young people, feeling a confused obligation to punch the domestic hypocrisy that’s quietly broken her heart most of her life. None of this is heavy or telegraphed; these people – these faces – are inescapably alive. Even Sig, who beats his children and wife, rapes her as punishment for perceived adultery, drinks, is routinely jailed, is denied “bad guy” stature, we see how, and this is increasingly rare, his perceived inner defeats distort his outer relationships, he’s the embodiment of that advice friends always give us when we reach a peak of self-pity: he’s his own worst enemy, a self-fulfilling prophecy. In his most monstrous moment, Sig puts a razor to Maria’s throat, and Troell allows us to see him as the outmatched one, the weaker being. The strength on Maria’s face is more than admirable, that’s a word that borders on the condescending; its ineffable, miraculous – extraordinary. Maria needs photography as something she can grasp in her hands, a talent that is resolutely separate from her drudgery – but, and this is why this picture is so wonderful, she doesn’t need it to transform her, as many lesser movies, anxious to gratify themselves as pro-artist, would imply; because Maria is beautiful scrubbing floors, making dresses, asking for loans. And Sig is beautiful tending to his horses, as he’s strangely beautiful when he’s drunk making a spectacle of himself. And as their polio-inflicted son is beautiful in his underwater reverie, and as Maj is beautiful as she glows under her teacher’s admiration, or as she flushes with that stolen kiss. And as Pedersen (Jesper Christensen), Maria’s would-be suitor, is beautiful as he steals a few filmed images of Maria for himself at a political rally, as fresh as he’d ever permit himself to be.

Everlasting Moments is so deeply onto the little things of this family’s life that we get larger implications seemingly without effort. Mentions of the war, of British men shipped in as strike-breakers, of elections, sneak in and we see how the larger influences the view of the smaller and vice-versa. We see how a Sig or a Maria could tune out; enthralled to their private obsessions (Sig sums the war, of which he sees no action, as the best food he’s had in years). We see the casual class divide, the sexual presumptions, the flattery, the myths of the educated vs. working class, without the picture ever turning into a mighty pity the poor party. (You can sense the Jacuzzi that awaits a Zelwegger or a Crowe.) The difference here is Troell’s interest in the specific, the micro, and that understanding colors every other larger tenet of life. Troell is a poet, undistracted by perceptions of his genius or legacy. He doesn’t need to convince himself and you of his intentions because they are so clear and pure they speak for themselves.

I have an idea of what at least a few of you are thinking: “Swedish poverty picture, he, to keep his hopefully pending-critic membership in promising standing, must praise this movie. I work all day, and I don’t need to be told that other people have it rough too.” I understand, because everyday it seems that movies, including many of the art ones, are getting more condescending and the critics more self-righteous in their lashing for skipping something that was too obvious ten reiterations ago. Which is why an Everlasting Moments is so frustrating, you want to scream: I know! But this one is different! It’s gorgeous! It’s human! It’s more than I’m conveying! Please. Trust. Me.