2000s: the decade in debuts

What follows was co-authored my friend and Vue Weekly colleague Brian Gibson, who's been hard at work since the start of 2009 on surveying the decade's movies in a variety of ways. Thanks to Brian for suggesting this piece... not to mention tracking down all those clips!

The Return

From the evidence of Andrei Zvyagintsev’s first film, The Return (2003), winner of the Golden Lion, there’s a lot to hope for. An astonishing debut with an ominousness as chilly as the lake the two boys and their father cross near the film’s end (tragically, one of the young actors in the film drowned in another lake nearby soon after the film was shot), The Return, shot by Mikhail Krichman, is a little like a small-scale Russian epic if it were made by Terrence Malick. From the beginning, Zvyagintsev manages to combine a curiously restrained visual flair (especially with nature shots) with a uniquely paced rhythm of seething psychological suspense, perhaps filtered from his own experience—his father disappeared when he was six. His next film, The Banishment (07), adapted from a novel by William Saroyan, received more mixed reviews, but has yet to appear here, even on disc, while a segment for New York, I Love You that he directed was cut but will appear on the DVD. Will the incredibly bright light of his debut become more dimly diffused in the coming years? (BG)

Syndromes and a Century

I still haven’t seen most of the work of prolific Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul, and very likely neither have you. But just speak these titles aloud: Mysterious Object at Noon (00), Blissfully Yours (02), Worldly Desires (04), Tropical Malady (04). The spell begins even before the lights go down—we are in the hands of one of those rare artists who recognize the movies as a medium perfectly fit for such things as sensuality, eros, fecundity, mystery, and, indeed, bliss. Syndromes and a Century (06), which Brian reviewed, rooted in the story of the director’s parents and their early careers as physicians in a semi-rural Thai hospital, seemed ripe for a breakthrough, but it seems we still need to wait for the right conditions to allow Apichatpong’s vision to reach a wider audience—Syndromes didn’t even play domestically in Thailand due to Apichatpong’s refusal to cut scenes for the national censors. (JB)

The Taste of Others

After working with co-writer and husband Jean-Pierre Bacri on scripts for others, Agnès Jaoui set them off on their own in 2000 with her directorial debut, The Taste of Others (clips and an interview with Jaoui can be found at 25:05 of this Charlie Rose episode). Apart from the awkwardly translated title, this is an utterly smooth, slow-building comedy of, well, not manners so much as discrimination—discriminating tastes and class assumptions. Jaoui and Bacri’s great skill lies in turning us away from the most obviously flawed and hypocritical characters to make us see how everyone in the film is unconsciously compromising themselves (including the characters she plays). Jaoui happens to reveal Woody Allen as a pale shadow of his former self in her light, yet unblinkingly honest, examinations of upper-middle-class self-absorption, as further proven by her second film, Look At Me. Her third, Let’s Talk About The Rain, has yet to be released over here, though it’s already screened in Europe. (BG)

Half-Nelson

On this side of the Atlantic, another partnership had a stunning debut in the 2000s. Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck wrote 2006’s Half Nelson, with Fleck directing the tale of an inner-city school teacher, Dan Dunne. Ryan Gosling anchored the film as Dunne, but Shareeka Epps was just as good as Drey. Next came the even more understated Sugar (08), carefully studying a Dominican ballplayer trying to make it to the big leagues. Boden and Fleck are ingenious at offering a kind of unassuming-ness in their films, simply slipping into small, everyday situations and then tweaking them ever so slightly for a taut dramatic narrative. Half Nelson was more carefully scripted, especially its tender playing with pairs throughout the film, and more viscerally grounded in one place. But between the two of them, and their two films, Fleck and Boden show all the makings of at least two more superb films in the next decade. (BG)

The Holy Girl

At the time of writing, I’ve seen one utterly mesmerizing, unforgettable movie and one pretentious, self-absorbed piece of twaddle from Lisandro Alonso—Los Muertos (04) and Fantasma (06), respectively—so I’m reluctant to comment on whether Argentina has two new filmmakers deserving of the title of the decade’s best new directors**, but I don’t hesitate for a moment to say she has at least one in Lucrecia Martel. Martel’s breakthrough was The Holy Girl (04), and this may still be her undisputed masterpiece—so far. That movie, which I wrote about upon its Canadian release, placed a mother and daughter in a hotel where a medical convention is being held and one of the guests is making advances on both. The daughter blurs normally separate notions of what constitutes a vocation, and her religious and sexual education fuse into a deliciously strange and often quirkily humorous drama. La Ciénaga (01) and The Headless Woman (08) are more overtly linked to one another in that both are immersed in the daily lives of upper-middle-class Argentine families and the gulf that exists between their lifestyles and perceptions and those of the indigenous people who often work as their appallingly underappreciated servants. These are stories characterized by humour and haunting dreamlike episodes, interrupted by death and prompting questions of responsibility. (JB)

Silent Light

Amores Perros (00) launched the Mexican decade with an adrenaline shot of urban desperation, a tripartite weave of neo-pulp fictions that imposed poetic unity on the disparate socioeconomic subsections of the country’s teeming capital. Yet a decade and two features later, Alejandro González Iñárritu’s debut now looks far less significant either historically or artistically than Carlos Reygadas’ Japón (02), in which a middle-aged man leaves Mexico City behind in search of some remote place to end his life, a journey that finds him communing with the elderly and magnetic lady of the mountains, Magdalena Flores. It says a lot about Reygadas’ peculiar vision that, even while wearing his influences on his sleeve—the overall approach to narrative and mise en scène in Japón leans heavily on both Tarkovsky and Kiarostami, while Reygadas’ use of actors is clearly indebted to Bresson—his films remain absolutely singular, mysterious, and beguilingly incomplete, each leaving the viewer with numerous puzzling questions. Teetering on the edge of the thriller genre with its story of high-class prostitutes and child kidnapping, the very strangely erotic, image-laden and politically charged Battle in Heaven (05) was an even more provocative and adventurous follow-up, while Silent Light (07), which sensitively chronicled a love triangle set amidst Chihuahua’s Mennonite community, found Reygadas already producing work of the sort of maturity we associate with artists entering the autumnal phase of their careers. (JB)

George Washington

There’s still a case to be made for David Gordon Green as the American decade’s most funky, distinctive, and resolutely innocent, indigenous new voice. If you have a hard time figuring out how to place the sweetly sublime rural reveries of George Washington (00) with the stoner bromance hi-jinx of Pineapple Express (08), you probably haven’t spent enough time with either movie. Green’s voice, however employed, is pretty unmistakable. Green’s career—the previously mentioned titles were bridged by youthful romance in All the Real Girls (02), “Deliverance for kids” in Undertow (03), and wintry small town despair in Snow Angels (08)—consistently encircles commercial viability while never quite embracing unabashed populism. With George Washington—still his most personal and wondrous film—critics had pegged Green as the wide-eyed inheritor of ’70s transcendentalist Terrence Malick’s always almost-aborted career, but the real question now seems to be whether Green is going to settle instead for being the new Michael Ritchie. There was always something of The Bad News Bears (76) imbuing Green’s strongly regionalist sensibility—which isn’t necessarily bad news at all. (JB)

Shotgun Stories

Arkansas native Jeff Nichols showed his own remarkable maturity, developed through six short films, with his feature debut. Just 26 when he wrote and directed Shotgun Stories, in 2004, it was produced by none other than David Gordon Green and released in 2007. The film reinvents the cliché of Southern revenge, sliding into the pickup’s passenger seat alongside a small town’s working class before retribution skids out. The South’s a place of almost self-suffocating, low-level tension here, its folk struggling to get on in spots and corners stripped of much opportunity. Nichols looks to continue his run of talent with Goat, from a script by Green. (BG)

Down in the Valley

Californian David Jacobson hit the Midwest in 2002 with his second film, Dahmer, effectively his debut after the little-seen Criminal (94). A remarkably unsensational look at the notorious serial killer, the film entered the creepy ordinariness of the man’s job and city (Milwaukee) and featured Jeremy Renner as Dahmer, slipping away from all sense of himself with every murder. It’s a film that soars beyond its seamy subgenre. Edward Norton then starred for Jacobson in Down in the Valley, a fascinating Western take on Taxi Driver that reworks the American-rebel film, even in this scene, where ingénue meets cowboy. This new take on old tropes mirrors the mix of freshness and revisionism that infuse Jacobson’s work, tinged as they are with loss and hope, nostalgia and anger, with looking back but trying to always get ahead. (BG)

** Okay, the night after I wrote this I saw Liverpool (08), Alonso's most recent film. It's absolutely beautiful, and that makes two points for Argentina!

TIFF '08: Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden on Sugar, faith, language, ambition and collaboration

Half Nelson was among the most preternaturally assured indie debuts of the past decade, perhaps more so given that its singularity was the product of two fully engaged writer/directors, a rare phenomena without significant counterparts in contemporary American movies outside of the brothers Coen. It no doubt of some significance that Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden are a couple—and I can’t decide if that makes collaboration easier or more difficult. But Sugar, their follow-up to Half Nelson, is in some regards even more stylistically and tonally distinctive than its predecessor. It follows the titular Dominican pitcher (vividly embodied by first-timer Algenis Perez Soto) as he journeys from Boca Chica to play in the minors in an Indiana town. It eschews the customary ascent-to-triumph tactics of the sports genre for something far richer and more attuned to the vagaries of immigrant experience. I spoke with Fleck and Boden after Sugar’s premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival.

JB: Where the idea for Sugar came from?

Ryan Fleck: I’d read an article somewhere about a baseball academy in the Dominican Republic and eventually discovered that every major league baseball team has an academy there, where they sign players for a fraction of what they sign them for when graduating high school or college in the US. We became very interested in the kids who go through these programs, especially the ones you don’t hear about. We started our research up in the Bronx at that field that ends the movie where there’s this whole community of guys who’ve been through these programs and eventually, when they’re let go or decide to leave early, head to New York to start over.

Anna Boden: Then we went down the Dominican Republic, interviewing guys, tooling around, going to as many academies as possible, going into towns and finding players who’d been released or had gone to the US. The character of Sugar and his journey is a composite of all the different stories we heard and people we met during that time.

JB: Do either of you have friends or family with analogous experiences as immigrants?

RF: Not in our lifetimes. Maybe three generations ago.

AB: This didn’t come from that sort of personal place. We just saw this story as a vessel to explore themes we were interested in: what it means to have an American dream, then have that dream shift, to rediscover who you are, how you might fit within this system.

JB: The film handles its politics in a lovely, understated way. One subject that I thought was dealt with especially elegantly was heartland religion. There’s seems to be strong undercurrent in this Indiana town where Sugar finds himself of people wanting to wed every part of their lives to their sense of belonging to a religious community. I wonder if you felt at all anxious about dealing with this subject.


RF: We’re both very non-religious, so we kind of surprised ourselves with this gentle portrayal of these religious families. I guess it’s just that when you’re trying to tell an honest story you have to listen to what’s happening around you. All through our research we kept encountering religion—most players thank God numerous times when talking about their talent—so we knew we had to work it into our movie in a way that felt organic.

AB: We were as surprised as anyone at just how much of a spiritual journey we were telling.

JB: I actually found myself wondering if there wasn’t some spiritual, or rather mythic corollary to Sugar’s story. I understand Spanish, and found it interesting that you subtitle virtually all the Spanish dialogue in the movie with one notable exception, this Icarus-like story Sugar shares about how he got his scar as a baby, trying to grasp something beyond his reach. And of course he has this considerable hubris, this arrogance to match his talent, so the story naturally assumes allegorical dimensions.

RF: That scene was written later in the process, simply because we realized we cast somebody who has a scar. That’s Algenis telling the actual story of how he got it. What you’re saying is really interesting. Honestly, I never made that connection.

AB: I did.

RF: Really?

AB: I thought it was really important. And for me the decision to not translate it was about not necessarily having the audience make that connection—though I think it’s really lovely that you did—but rather letting this guy who’s been stuck in this place where he can’t communicate for so long finally be able to speak his own language, seeing how that changes who he is, how the process of coming to this place has changed him.

RF: Plus, it puts you in his shoes for a second, giving you some idea of what it’s like to have all these people talking and understanding almost nothing.

JB: I love how this story of self-actualization coincides with one of language acquisition—so much of how we identify ourselves has to do with the minutia of how self-expression. I also thought that Algenis, who I guess spoke more English than the character, did a knockout job of playing a guy who understands very little.

AB: I think Algenis shared a lot with the character. He understood this feeling of having to smile and nod your head a lot to get through uncomfortable scenarios.

JB: Your films possess such a distinctive style considering your sharing of writing and directing duties. Do you have a process in which you have to delegate certain elements of the work?

RF: We’ve used the same key crew both times, and when you’re working with the same people they contribute to the same part of that vision. But between us it’s actually pretty fluid. We pretty much do everything together.

JB: So often in movies the more voices you have competing for control the more fights that arise and the more diluted a distinctive voice can become.

AB: Yet it’s so much easier to fight those fights when you have a partner fighting alongside you. Making Sugar we actually felt pretty supported by our team and our producers, but with Half Nelson we hadn’t worked with any of these people before and they didn’t have the confidence in us they have now. So I found it incredibly helpful to have someone there who I knew trusted me and who could give unwavering support and who could help to decide which fights are worth having.

JB: Were there films you guys used as models of some sort or that you could use as a shorthand with others when trying to pitch the film or get your team on board?

AB: I remember we showed Algenis Taxi Driver and Raging Bull.

JB: Not for a sense of the style of your filmmaking, I presume.

RF: Mostly just because they’re good movies and we wanted to share some of our favourites with him.

AB: And some of the best acting ever.

RF: There wasn’t really any one film that guided us, though, really, We watched all the baseball movies ever made, just to see how they shot it, as sort of a technical exercise.

JB: You were speaking at the screening last night about how one of the things that attracted you to Sugar was that it was a story you’d never heard, so I wonder if you have plans for a next project with a similar appeal.

RF: We’re been adapting a book called Special Topics in Calamity Physics, by Marisha Pessi, which has some similar twists. But having these sorts of twists originate in someone else's material will be a good way of keeping us on our toes.