Trigger: the song has ended, but the memory lingers on

Trigger opens with a series of brief clips from a rock and roll show: two women on stage, chugging through tunes, the guitar player all shaggy hair and finger-fumbling grace, the singer preening. They exchange licks, both figuratively and literally. These excerpts unfold in a staccato rhythm that suggests something of the visceral, choppy energy of the music we imagine they’re playing, though we can’t hear it. The images are bathed in a soft string-laden drone peppered with stray notes from a piano; they’re over-exposed, the women’s skin bleached out, masking age, bringing things closer to a feeling of timelessness.

The dissonance between the sound and images evokes the distance between an event and its oft-replayed memory. This wordless montage is one of the strongest sequences in the film, cutting to the heart of this story that’s rather less about the music life than it is about friendship, recovery and time. Trigger is a love story of sorts, between two old collaborator-antagonists who reunite uneasily in middle-age, years after they called it quits. It’s now available on DVD from Entertainment One.

Trigger is also the last screen performance from Tracy Wright, who died shortly after the production wrapped from pancreatic cancer. Her ghost looms heavily over the film, not only because she was such a wonderful, sadly under-used talent, but because she really is the heart and soul of this project. Molly Parker as Kat, the aforementioned preener, gives a performance that’s typically precise and even heartfelt, but Wright’s Vic is the more convincing as a veteran rock and roller struggling to stay clean. She comes across as someone who’s burned out more than once, or, as she puts it, someone who’s had mornings where she’s woken up disappointed to still be alive.

Director Bruce McDonald seems to be in his element here, a maker of feature films (among them Highway 61 and the mighty Hard Core Logo) who sometimes seems to long for movies that can skip that story stuff and just cut to the rock show parts (i.e.: This Movie is Broken). But Trigger has its awkward moments (the evil twin bits, the longer monologues), partly because the script from the great playwright, filmmaker and actor Daniel MacIvor is at times too eloquent, too theatrical-sounding, in the words it gives its actors to speak. It’s a cliché to think of rock and roll as inarticulate and crude, but I still think Trigger could have used a few rougher edges--though let it be said that I’ll take flowery MacIvor over the prose of most screenwriters any day.

Rolling sunder: Rubber on DVD

What reason does a tire need to quiver to life in the middle of the Mojave Desert and undertake a killing spree? What reason do a dozen spectators need to gather in that same desert with binoculars and sleeping bags and comment on the tire’s actions as though they were (like us) watching a movie? What reason does a pantless man need to share a cheap motel room with a wild turkey? Before we even have a chance to posit such queries to Rubber, one of its central characters, a Lieutenant Chad (Stephen Spinella), addresses the camera (and us) with questions of his own. “In the Steven Spielberg movie E.T., why is the alien brown?” Chad asks. “In The Pianist, by Polanski, how come this guy has to hide, and live like a bum, when he plays the piano so well?” The answer: “No reason.” (Unless of course you consider something like systematic Nazi antiSemitism to be a reason.) Every movie, Chad assures us, has an integral element of “no reason.” Which is perhaps another way of saying that the movie is the reason. So what’s the reason to see the movie—this movie? It certainly isn’t to ask more useless questions.

Rubber, out on DVD tomorrow from Mongrel Media (or on the 14th from Magnolia in the US), seems like a playful essay on artifice. (The audience-chorus, who at one point collectively launch into a feeding frenzy right out of a Living Dead movie, is reminiscent of devices seized by the American avant-garde theatre of the 1960s.) Thing is, there’s not much thesis (beyond, say, the notion that the things we discard will rise up from our collective anxiety and slaughter us in our ironic bewilderment), but there is a whole lot of playfulness. Recalling both Scanners (1981) and numerous Stephen King narratives, Rubber is a meta-horror about a telekinetic tire named Robert. His first victim is a plastic bottle, quickly followed by a scorpion, before moving on to larger and messier mammals. The tire’s got something on its mind, it seems. It’s got feelings. It’s infatuated with a lone traveler played by the pretty older sister from Fat Girl (2001). It even has memories: there is an allusion to some smoky tire genocide.

Quentin Dupieux, aka Mr. Oizo

Rubber is the second feature from French writer/director Quentin Dupieux, aka: Mr. Oizo, recording artist for Ed Banger Records, following the little seen Steak (2007). There’s much to recommend Rubber on a bit-by-bit basis, though it runs out of fuel long before the end of the road. Regardless, its audacity, resourcefulness and propulsive silliness convey an appealingly distinctive sensibility. You’re left with the impression that there’s plenty of tread left on Dupieux’s goofball imagination.

Herrmann, Welles, War, Time, Art(ifice)

Bernard Herrmann, the greatest of all film composers, died on Christmas Eve, 1975, expelling his final breath, as legend has it, shortly after completing the score for Taxi Driver, his final masterpiece. Were Herrmann still with us we'd be celebrating his 100th birthday this June. The coming of the Herrmann centenary was the first prompt for the Art of Time Ensemble's production of The War of The Worlds, which opened at Harbourfront Centre's Enwave Theatre in Toronto on Thursday and closes this afternoon. I attended last night, along with a packed house that included Micheal Ondaatje and Atom Egoyan. Yet, since the original Mercury Theatre/CBS Radio broadcast did not actually feature much in the way of original music from Herrmann, Art of Time decided to preface their man event with a marvellous surprise: a suite of Herrmann's film music inventively pastiched and arranged by Dan Parr, accompanied by a wonderful montage of images from the films referenced. Thus, as the music undulates with doomed romanticism, shrieks and bellows, whirlpools and crashes, the paths of Marion Crane and Travis Bickle, Max Cady and Charles Foster Kane, cross in dream-space; Cary Grant's drunk driving leads to Robert Ryan's wintry footprints which lead to Jimmy Stewart's endless descent; plumes of NYC steam merge with the smoke of burning books; and Klaatu disintegrates rifles gripped by baffled US troops over and over in a lulling apocalyptic rhythm.

What followed intermission was a condensed recreation of Orson Welles' (in)famous 30 October, 1938 alien invasion radio drama. The stage became a studio, occupied by the Ensemble, conducted, as was the Herrmann suite, by Art of Time Artistic Director Andrew Burashko, a trio of actors, including Don McKellar in the Welles roles, and Foley maestro John Gzowski, all of them in period dress, shirt sleeves rolled up, Luckys dangling from their lips, huddling around elegant chrome microphone stands under a suspended glowing sign announcing that we are ON THE AIR. I loved it when all the musicians joined in the vocal hubub to scream together in deathly agony the alien slaughter of earthlings commences, some of them cracking up while doing so. The Brechtian dissonance between the visual and aural experience made for superb entertainment: laughs when eyes were open, chills when shut. Gzowski was inevitably the star of the show, darting silently in stocking feet between a dozen or more bizarre devices, including, of course, a Theremin. It took a moment to adapt to McKellar, given that some degree of imitation is inevitable and he simply doesn't possess Welles' full-bodied resonance, but his cadences were nearly impeccable, his readings compelling, and the prankster's focus he conveyed while instructing his collaborators his impatient gesture and eye contact added to the sense of Halloween mischief.

The most captivating passage of The War of the Worlds however arrived with the broadcast's final section (the one I completely forgot about), in which the mock-live reportage falls away and is replaced by what is virtually a monologue, backed by eerie underscoring, from a lone survivor of the Martian attacks describing in past-tense his journey through the ruins of New York and New Jersey. This part was read by Nicholas Campbell, whose hair has turned white sometime in the past few years, and who settled in under spotlight and delivered a performance of engrossing intimacy, at once playing it for the microphone and, more subtly, the watching audience.

Marcellus Emants' Posthumous Confession: Notes on life as a dirty brown spot

Arresting from its first stark sentence (“My wife is dead and buried”), nearly relentless in its catch-all combo of misanthropy and self-loathing, yet consistently compelling and perversely insightful, A Posthumous Confession (NYRB Classics, $16), Dutch author Marcellus Emants’ 1894 novel, newly back in print, translated and with an introduction by J.M. Coetzee, with a perfectly chosen detail from Edvard Munch’s Self-portrait in Hell as its cover art, is as elegantly wrought as it is deeply repulsive. So, in other words, a must-read.

By the time he finally sets down to write about his life—to confess, as it were—Willem Termeer (a name that fittingly prompts images of termites) is 35, friendless, and, having been recently widowed, “free again.” But free to do what? He says he’s killed his wife, Anna, though the circumstances are unclear. By his own claims Termeer, a man without profession, whose biography is encrusted with botched attempts at hedonism, is hopelessly apathetic. How did he manage to become a murderer? Until we reach the final pages, all we’re given to speculate upon are cryptic summaries: “one thing followed from another far too gradually.”

Termeer’s chronically mistrustful, solipsistic, a compulsive liar. His sense of inferiority, even to those whom he despises, is paralyzing. In one especially memorable anecdote, he meets a student who he instantly dislikes, only to realize that they’re exactly alike, and Termeer befriends the younger man so as to enjoy feeling superior on account of his elder status. In another episode he develops a middling interest in a Swedish pianist (Anna also would play the piano) that becomes a blazing desire only with the appearance of a rival. He gradually resolves that the only way for him to function socially is to perform: “if it was impossible for me to become a good man I would at least aspire to live like a good man.”

Emants worked predominantly as a playwright, and part of what makes A Posthumous Confession so readable is the momentum and intimacy of its monologue. Termeer’s vulnerability sometimes yields emotional colours he might not even be cognizant of. His descriptions of fumbling teenage courtship are surprisingly tender, even sweet. Perhaps this sweetness helped to facilitate the profound sourness to come: “my love disappeared like a raindrop in hot sand: all that was left was a dirty brown spot.” Elsewhere, his wild pessimism is conveyed with such throttle that it actually becomes really funny: “O death, death—how frightened I have always been of it! Yet I have so often asked myself, ‘Were you unhappy before you were born?’”

Coetzee notes that A Posthumous Confession is a singularly pure example of the confessional genre, and Emants indeed invests an unusual degree of attention to developing Termeer’s distinctive literary voice and approach to self-analysis. His reasons for wanting to write become incrementally lucid and may even represent the most altruistic impulse Termeer is capable of feeling. “Who knows how many there are who are just like me,” he wonders, “yet will realize it only when they have seen themselves mirrored in me.” Yet there is also a sly bit of preternatural postmodernism emerging here. Termeer goes to see a play entitled Artist by one Marcellus Emants. It “made a deep impression on me because of the many features of resemblance between the artist and myself.” He even goes on to critique Emants’ play.

A Posthumous Confession’s most obvious antecedents are Dostoyevsky’s Notes From Underground and certain tales of psychological frailty by Poe. The novel also bears a certain likeness to early work by Emants’ Norwegian contemporary Knut Hamsun. But where do we find this underground figure in more recent decades? Perhaps in the work of Thomas Bernhard. Or perhaps we need to go to the movies. “I don’t believe that one should devote his life to morbid self-attention,” Travis Bickle confesses in Taxi Driver. “I believe that someone should become a person like other people.” If only becoming “a person” were that simple.

Fabric fantasies narrate ruinous love in Senso

The first sequence of Luchino Visconti’s Senso (1954) unravels like a long bolt of silk let loose from the vertiginous upper balconies of Venice’s Teatro La Fenice. A performance of Verdi’s Il trvovatore is underway, the aria climaxing with a near-riot breaking out amongst the Fenice’s patrons. It’s 1866, the Italians are getting restless, the Austrian occupation in its twilight. The War of Liberation is eminent. Nonetheless a romance ignites between the Italian Countess Livia Serpieri (Alida Valli) and the Austrian Lieutenant Franz Mahler (Farley Granger). You’ll note that their first exchanges are made with the opera being performed literally in the background of their two-shot, and it’s no accident. Visconti, scion of wealthy aristocrats with centuries of rule behind them, conflicted Communist, by then already a pretty major name in theatre and opera as well as cinema, unshakable in his vision and not to be rushed or compromised, uses this first sequence to lay the groundwork for what will be an absolute, go-for-broke, multilingual melodrama. So get ready.

The 1882 source novella by Camillo Boito, also entitled Senso, has Livia young, vain and inexperienced, but Visconti’s interpretation very smartly opts to make her older and more complex than Franz, with more to lose, and the brilliantly cast Valli, who was in fact four years older than Granger, actually seems over the course of the picture to look increasingly wrung dry by l’amour fou. Her naked shoulders, loose, waist-length hair and kittenish gaze in the early post-coital scene brim with fortifying eroticism, while the final scenes find her face strained and body seemingly unable to stay erect. Valli was still fresh from The Third Man (49), as was Granger from Strangers on a Train (50), so Senso was indeed something of a star-studded affair. Granger is even seductive at points, though the Italian version’s isn’t his voice, which makes an enormous difference. (Criterion’s new edition features the English version too, titled The Wanton Countess—with dialogue by Tennessee Williams and Paul Bowles!—as a supplementary feature.)

Yet, with all due respect to the story and performances, the most dynamic aspect of Senso however would arguably be its décors. Desire is the undoing of Livia, but it’s money that poisons Franz—but how could he not succumb to avarice when surrounded by such boundless luxury? Fabulous fabrics are endlessly flowing across the screen like a current of punch-drunk longing made tactile: veils, capes, bedclothes, night gowns, curtains, skirts that could provide shelter to entire families of very short people. The sets, the clothes, the furniture, the battlefields, the extras, those perfect patterns of grime on the doors of the Austrian officer’s dormitory: Visconti’s urge toward grandeur spared no expense. In fact, production ran three times longer than scheduled, went through three cinematographers (the first, Aldo Graziati, died), and finally bankrupted Lux Films. But watch how the look of everything in the film it what tells the story, from the morbid elegance and rich colours of Venice, to the final scenes in Verona, which looks like a sooty smudge, barren, used up, shadowy and blackened as an abandoned fireplace. It strikes me as apt that this story, which could be regarded as something of an adult, corrupted version of Romeo and Juliet, draws to its close in the very city where Shakespeare’s beloved teenage tragedy took place. More apt still that Visconti’s assistant director was none other Franco Zeffirelli (and if Granger’s memoir, excerpted in Criterion’s package, is to be trusted, Zeffirelli was also Visconti’s lover at the time), who would go on to helm the cinema’s most celebrated version of Romeo and Juliet (68). But then everything about Senso, maybe even the film’s failure to find international success, seems to conform to the dictates of destiny.

Done with mirrors: The Magician on DVD

In the carriage we find a troupe of traveling showmen: a mute mesmerist in a corny fake beard, a beautiful woman in drag, and a bespectacled, hunched-over crone who claims to be a 200 year-old witch. Call them mystics, entertainers, or businessmen like anyone else, they’re still fugitives the lot, wanted on charges of fraud and blasphemy, which makes you wonder just what it is their audiences were expecting. It’s the middle of the 19th century and all over Europe are towns not big enough for both science and the spirit.


The troupe offers a lift to a fellow thespian found starving in a wood, an alcoholic seemingly on his deathbed. His name is Spiegel, the Swedish word for mirror, so when Vogler (Max Von Sydow) hovers over him closely, smelling the despair on the man’s breath, there’s much to imply that he might as well be looking at himself, or what he’ll become just a few more miles down the road.


The troupe arrives in Stockholm, where they’re to perform for a small, elite audience, among them the chief of police and the royal medical advisor (Gunnar Björnstrand), a righteous rationalist determined to prove irrefutably that their magic show is a sham. Though his more intimate struggles would be dramatized numerous times over the coarse of his long career, The Magician (1958), newly available from Criterion, is probably Ingmar Bergman’s most unabashedly autobiographical film about his professional life, pitting artists and critics against each another to see who can out-humiliate who. Björnstrand’s debunker was based on the critic Harry Schein, who Bergman felt persecuted by. Schein was the husband of actress Ingrid Thulin, and this knowledge injects a delicious audacity into a scene where Björnstrand simultaneously iterates his distaste for the troupe’s hocus-pocus and confesses his attraction to Thulin, who plays Von Sydow’s wife. Björnstrand has a line here that’s terribly on-the-nose yet somehow more potent for it, as though he himself were mesmerized and felt compelled to utter some naked truth: “You represent what I despise most of all: the inexplicable.”


The Magician was made during a transitional point in Bergman’s career: between The Seventh Seal and The Virgin Spring; between anxiety about death and anxiety about godlessness; between collaborations with cinematographers Gunnar Fischer and Sven Nykvist; between staging his films as, to some degree, extensions of his theatre practice, and transforming his aesthetic into something more wholly cinematic, driven as much by the characters’ internal states as their external dramas. It’s never been an especially beloved installment in Bergman’s oeuvre, and critics fret every now and then about whether it successfully adopts one genre or another, since some sections are comic, while the climax borrows conventions from horror. I can’t get too worked up about regarding any Bergman film’s genre status, but I find it tremendously interesting to see how The Magician so casually dismantles the obligatory narrative conventions used in every genre. It starts out focused on the troupe and implies that Von Sydow’s the hero. Yet we gradually become more invested in Thulin, who’s character and performance are more sympathetic and dynamic. (Von Sydow, usually so very good in Bergman, is a little hammy here, his character’s silence prompting him to overact with his face and hands. This overcompensation for silence would be memorably corrected some years later by another Vogler: Liv Ullmann in Bergman’s Persona [66].) Regardless, a third of the way into the film we abandon these characters and their adversaries both and pass an extensive digression with two younger, minor characters hungry to bring excitement to their lives: the troupe’s coachman and a servant girl, played by a very sexy yet subtly sad Bibi Andersson, who each drink from an ostensible love potion and await the results with a certain desperation. It’s as though Bergman conceived The Magician not as a propulsive drama or even a character study, but rather a sort of ensemble-driven essay on precarious ambitions under constant threat of having the rug pulled out from under.


We gradually come to the troupe’s performance, thoroughly pulled apart and laughed at, as promised, and to a series of deaths or seeming deaths, one being that of a man we already thought dead, another being a man we can’t quite believe is dead, and still another being a death already foretold by the crone, who may be the film’s one genuine mystic. These deaths set the stage for a carefully devised haunting meant to shake up Björnstrand. It’s a wonderful display of trickery, much of it dependent on mirrors, shadow and imagination, none of it ultimately capable of persuading Björnstrand that he was wrong in his initial assertions. Not that it matters. The troupe comes and goes and want only to amuse us, and perhaps move us, for the short duration of their stopover. As Bergman himself writes in his memoir Images: My Life in Film, which is excerpted in the booklet that accompanies Criterion’s disc, “I had often felt that I was involved in a continuous, rather joyous prostitution. My job was to beguile the audience.”

"By walking and walking and walking, everything stands still": Werner Herzog on My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done

There once was a man named Brad, who even in his mid-30s still lived with his mother, but Brad went a little mad somewhere along the rapids in deepest Peru, and when he came back he was talking about inner voices, about how god lives in his house, about basketball. He was to play Orestes in a Los Angeles-based production, but was dismissed for erratic behaviour. Unable to kill his mother on stage he wound up doing it in real life, with a sword, at the neighbour’s house one sunny suburban San Diego morning. All this has already transpired by the time we tune in to My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done, which plays out mainly through flashbacks prompted by Brad’s girlfriend and former director, who arrive on the scene to discover Brad’s holed up inside his bungalow with a pair of flamingos for hostages, while baffled police surround the house, order pizza, and ponder Brad’s cryptic declarations and offerings of oatmeal and old gospel tunes.

Ostensibly based on a true story, the movie was scripted by Werner Herzog and longtime collaborator Herbert Golder, directed by Herzog, and granted an executive producer’s blessing by David Lynch, who otherwise had nothing to do with the picture, though its particular brand of quirks seem at times almost an homage to the director of Blue Velvet, and Brad’s irritation with his hippy friend’s meditation practice reads as a friendly jab at Lynch’s outspoken advocacy for TM. Songs from Chavela Vargas, Washington Phillips and Caetano Veloso, as well as a haunting score for strings, piano and accordion from Herzog regular Ernst Reijseger provide haunting accompaniment to this strange study of untreated schizophrenia and unbridled eccentricity. Michael Shannon imbues Brad with tremendous conviction, this Aguirre returned from his Amazonian raft to transform into Woyzeck. Grace Zabriskie plays the over-attentive mom, Chloë Sevigny the worried girlfriend, Udo Kier the thespian and father figure. Willem Dafoe and Michael Peña play the homicide cops too fascinated by the enigma of Brad to attend to their duties with due rigour, the latter especially seeming eager to do whatever it takes to get close to the raving murderer. Brad Dourif turns up as a bigoted rancher uncle. There are ostriches, tiny horses, and a well-dressed dwarf. There are inexplicable sojourns to Tijuana and Central Asia. It’s hard to shake the suspicion that Herzog is simply cramming the movie with truckloads of weird items he likes having around. It’s equally hard to resist the movie’s magisterial control of atmosphere, its charismatic performances, and brilliant bits of humour.

My Son, My Son had its world premiere at Venice 2009, alongside Herzog’s Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call: New Orleans. Though unsavoury and ill-behaved in its own right, the latter got a decent theatrical release while My Son, My Son, perhaps considered the more difficult of these spastic cinematic siblings on account of its countless knee-jerk non-sequiturs, has been ushered directly from the festival circuit to home video. I posted part of my TIFF 2009 roundtable interview with Herzog earlier this year when Bad Lieutenant turned up on video store shelves, and now offer up the remaining exchanges that deal specifically with My Son, My Son.

As we settle down and surround our captive subject with a battalion of recording devices, a bespectacled young fellow launches right in and asks Herzog about collaborating with Lynch on My Son, My Son, pointing out numerous elements that strike him as being especially Lynchian.

“There was no collaboration,” Herzog replies.

“Really? None whatsoever?”
“He read the screenplay,” says Herzog, signaling for the next question.

Another writer asks Herzog if he could describe the movie’s reportedly long genesis.
“There was an early phase of the project at least a dozen years back,” Herzog explains, “when I wrote the screenplay together with a friend of mine, Herb Golder, who has been my assistant director. He collected materials from a murder case which took place around a staging of The Oresteia. Herb Golder had translated The Oresteia into English. He kept a huge pile of homicide detective reports, psychiatric evaluations and these sorts of things. He always wanted to write a screenplay yet could never come up with one. I told him to give it to me and I will write the screenplay. It will take me a week, not three years! So we sat together and in five days we wrote the screenplay. Then it fell dormant. It couldn’t be produced. Now to answer the earlier question in a way, I like David Lynch’s work. We have great respect for each other. I was with him and I kept saying in this financial crisis the budgets of big movies are still skyrocketing. 100 million, 180 million dollars: this is not sustainable. Almost like a manifesto I suggested that we should make films that cost no more than two million dollars, but with the best of the best of actors, and with a great story. David Lynch and the producer Eric Bassett founded a company which is some sort of offspring of David Lynch’s production company. So David Lynch said, ‘Yeah, we should do it! Do you have a project?’ I said sure, we have a project. He said, ‘When can you start?’ I said tomorrow. He said, ‘Then borrow my name and you can probably sell it better to France. Canal Plus has always bought my stuff.’ So I said fine, yes, put your name as executive producer. Otherwise, if we see any points of comparison in the film to Lynch’s work than he must certainly have learned from me!”
Everyone laughs. Herzog smiles, reconsiders.
“However, yeah, there’s a small homage to him. You will see in one scene there’s a man on a treadmill running and he has an oxygen mask. I put that in to say hello to David Lynch. Otherwise he has nothing to do with it. We are very, very different in character, and in our personal lives we couldn’t be more different.”

A bossy woman asks Herzog what it is about The Oresteia that endures.

“I can’t really discuss it,” Herzog replies. “It’s going to be too deep plowing. The fact is that it has been alive for more than two and a half thousand years now, and rightly so. It’s a very beautiful text. However, what you hear in the staging of the film was actually taken from a variety of ancient Greek tragedies. We concocted some sort of a text which is not just The Oresteia. But that doesn’t really matter. We improved it!”
Everyone laughs.

I ask about the moments of stillness in My Son, My Son, when the actors suddenly fall silent and create tableaus. These scenes made me think about the Russian tradition alluded to in Incident at Loch Ness of sitting silently for a minute before embarking on a significant journey.
“It’s good that you refer to those because they are somehow pivotal moments in the film,” Herzog replies. “There’s a standstill. Quite often the leading character is puzzled by the tunnel of time. By walking and walking and walking, everything stands still. During the rehearsals of the ancient Greek drama he speaks about basketball and how he was a three-point man and he gets the ball and jumps and in mid-air and realizes he’s 70 feet away from the basket, just shy of mid-court, and then he freezes, and everything else freezes, and he contemplates, and he’s suspended in mid-air, and then he shoots, and the director says, ‘And then in swished in?’ And he says, ‘No, it kind of rattled. It hit the rim hard and rattled in.’ And he speaks of the pivot of time. It’s a motif which is very important in the film, this stand-still of time, of persons who all of a sudden turn toward the camera and look and look and look until the song is over. I love these central moments. For example, the tree stump with the midget on it and the tiniest horse in the world. It’s at the exact centre of the movie, like the pivoting point of the movie.”
I ask what made him choose the Vargas and Veloso songs.
“They’re very beautiful,” he says with a shrug. “That’s it. Yes. I immediately knew I had to do that. There was not one second of deliberation.”
And suddenly there was not one second left for more questions. I asked Herzog to sing my copy of Conquest of the Useless, which he did with pleasure, repeating his belief that his books will outlast his movies, and the lot of us collected our things and shuffled out.

The deliciously cinematic perpetual storytelling of a transplanted thespian: Presenting Sacha Guitry on DVD

I hadn’t heard of him either, yet the writer, director and star of everything in Eclipse’s Presenting Sacha Guitry was Paris’ most popular and prolific playwright of the 1920s. Guitry’s reluctant turn toward the cinema—which seemed to him an inferior and technically fussy medium, one attempting to pickle the ephemeral vivacity of theatre—was initially done only as a method of reaching a larger audience. Yet the story of Sacha Guitry is as compelling a piece of evidence as I’ve seen that great things can arise when an artist is coerced to work in a form other than the one in which he or she feels most comfortable. I can imagine Guitry’s stage work as very fleet-footed, pithy and entertaining, but I’d be surprised if it had anything on the playful innovation or unbridled narrative accumulation or sense of quiet spaces within a noisy world that one finds in the quartet of movies collected here.

Far from stage-bound—it was actually based on Guitry’s only novel—The Story of a Cheat (1936) could only have been conveyed through Guitry’s rigorous, sometimes audacious embracing of montage, voice-over, and an audiovisual dissonance unique to movies. The Cahiers crowd would dub it “pure cinema.” As Guitry’s titular grifter writes his memoirs his words summon up images from the past, or in any case his own no doubt fabulous version of it—no one in these flashbacks speaks, so no one can contradict the narrator or subvert his total control. He was born to provincial grocers and had a litter of siblings, all of them killed by a poisonous fungus dinner the child cheat was denied because he swiped change from the register. So he learned very early that crime pays, and as his biography unfolds at absurd, breakneck speed, he moves between France and Monaco, becomes a card shark, a soldier, a master of disguise and a croupier. He tries to go straight now and then, but he’s always dragged back, perhaps because the particular rules of Guitry’s universe insist that anything that happens once will happen again and again.

A chronicle of crossed destinies that traverses continents and centuries in its attempt to follow the movement of small precious objects as they’re passed between royals and thieves, The Pearls of the Crown (37) seems ripe material for an Italo Calvino novel, but Guitry rendered it instead as a dizzying historical-apocryphal-completely made-up cinema spectacle, one incorporating over 80 locations and some 200 characters, many of them famous monarchs, three of which are played by Guitry, and another three by his spouse and regular costar Jacqueline Delubac, so witty and lovely and possessing of a smile that would later grace the visage of Brooke Adams. The Pearls of the Crown is in part a cosmic-comic study in simultaneity. The dialogue is divided between three languages—four if you count Guitry’s “Abyssinian,” which is actually French played backwards—though you need only understand one of them to get the gist of any given scene. Language lessons become grounds for seduction, half an entire conversation consists solely of adverbs, a statue comes to life—twice, lovely heads are chopped off, wars are fought, revolutions erupt, men scour the globe on wild goose chases, and those milky pearls are bequeathed from one generation to another. You feel like Guitry could keep telling the story forever, yet when it ends it ends at precisely the only place it could have.

A twisty comedy of complicated love, Quadrille (38) is chronologically the last movie in Presenting Sacha Guitry. It’s perfectly delightful, utterly engrossing, and most obviously based on a play. I’d rather end by describing Désiré (37), which seems much more modest than its predecessors yet might be my favourite. Guitry plays the dapper and meticulous titular valet who arrives very late one night in the hope of finding work with Delubac’s Odette Cléry, a retired and obviously wealthy actress currently involved with a starchy politician. From the start Désiré’s new gig is unnervingly tenuous—Odette telephones Désiré’s previous employer and discovers that his position was terminated only on account of certain romantic tensions that arose between the two—and you get the sense that Désiré’s gift for suddenly improvising monologues that feel like resolved conversations is the only thing keeping him off the streets.

Guitry’s age and portly figure—he resembles a cross between Jean Gabin and the elderly Fritz Lang—make his assuming the role of the haplessly seductive Désiré seem comical or simply the whim of a director’s vanity, yet this bit of counter-intuitive casting makes the protagonist only more interesting, and his situation far more desperate. Meanwhile, the off-screen action and dearth of locations feel less like canned theatre than an exploration of the cloistered world of servants, and the story’s focus on erotic dreams and private conversations provide a sense of intimacy and nocturnal quietude. It all ends as simply and strangely as it began, and for all its talk there’s so much left unsaid, leaving us strangely moved. Guitry is customarily compared to Noël Coward, but something in Désiré at least reminded me of Robert Walser. Here’s hoping that we can continue to discover more from this forgotten master.

When You're Strange: Waiting for the substance

Death was both the best and worst thing that Jim Morrison ever did to the Doors. His demise at 27 in a Parisian bathtub felt like some morbidly natural conclusion to a wildly dynamic narrative sparked on Venice beach only six years earlier, when Morrison first met and wooed keyboardist Ray Manzarek with the words to ‘Moonlight Drive.’ It also confined this band’s singular blend of baroque psychodrama and bluesy swagger to a time capsule and completed the total eclipse of the singer’s enigma over the richer, more intricate designs of the music to which he made such a vital, yet nonetheless only partial, contribution.

To ensure history that the Doors were so much more than just another ’60s psychedelic freak show, as well as more than just Jim Morrison, forms the ostensible raison d’être of Tom DiCillo’s When You’re Strange: A Film About the Doors. Yet this deeply orthodox rock-doc nearly sabotages itself with narration—voiced by Johnny Depp—riddled with token generalizations about youth culture ideology, and numerous montages that seemingly go out of their way to forever link the Doors’ music exclusively with the greatest hits of the period’s headlines, however incongruous, such the assassinations of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King. Setting ‘Riders on the Storm’ to a series of clips of atrocities in Vietnam at once domesticates images that should never be treated lightly and severely limits the more mysterious and evocative qualities of that spectral late career hit.

I said the film nearly sabotages itself. What helps to rescue it from merely trading in tired clichés are the often mesmerizing performance clips, both on stage and in studio, that finds a quartet of musicians highly sensitizes to each other’s nuances, and, perhaps ironically, the leather-panted Lizard King himself. Archival footage, some never before seen, of Morrison as a teenager or some of the more off-the-cuff, backstage bits help to penetrate the Morrison mystique, which always threatened to drape the band in pretentiousness. Some of the more extensive clips allow us to glimpse a young, confused, awkwardly shy, gorgeous alcoholic, one given to faux inarticulateness and affected rowdiness, one always negotiating the conflicting impulses that prevented him from fully giving himself either to forging a larger, more demanding musical project or retreating into poetry and quietude. The Morrison we see, especially when still relatively untainted by celebrity, is at times genuinely spontaneous, deliciously mischievous, a man-child with an infectious grin and undiagnosed behavioral issues that when harnessed could yield some truly inspired performances, lyrics, and, yes, stunts.

A hard-working filmmaker who, having shot Jim Jarmusch’s early features, emerged from the 1980s independent scene to make cult films like Johnny Suede and Living in Oblivion, it’s not obvious what led to DiCillo’s helming of When You’re Strange, or to his pedestrian approach. The absence of talking head interviews with the surviving Doors or any other form of fresh commentary might seem like a virtue or some sort of rigour, an attempt to immerse us in the era. But I couldn’t help but gradually start to miss something else to balance this approach, something, again, to make the Doors about more than the 1960s, to offer something fresh about this band that for all its excesses deserves some serious reconsideration. Thankfully, the best documents of what the Doors were all about are still readily available—they’re called records.

What Ophüls wants...: Lola Montès on DVD

It is perhaps too easy to dismiss the celebrity whose ascent is fueled by dubious artistic talent and “mere” sex appeal. Is the cultivation of celebrity not a talent in itself? We never actually see the eponymous heroine of Lola Montès (1955) exhibit her ostensible skills as dancer or singer. While her story is framed by a dazzlingly baroque circus act of which she is both star and subject, she barely addresses her public, leaving the extolling of her legacy to Peter Ustinov’s wonderfully cynical ringmaster, who introduces her as “a bloodthirsty monster with the eyes of an angel.”

The real Lola, née Eliza Rosanna Gilbert, Irish-born, Spanish by shtick, dancer and actress by trade, mistress to powerful men by vocation, never toured the world in quite such spectacularly self-objectifying fashion as is depicted in this, Max Ophüls’ final masterpiece, mangled upon its initial release, newly restored in all its unspeakable gorgeousness, and now available from the Criterion Collection. The movie, which can be called a bio-pic in only the loosest sense, plays jazz over the very foggy historical facts of Montès’ life, yet Ophüls evokes truths that more fact-based accounts could never hope to grasp. The project was originally meant to be more modest, but as the producers insisted on hoisting such intrusions as Technicolor, Cinemascope and sex goddess Martine Carol upon Ophüls—who utilized each of these items masterfully—Lola Montès increasingly became a kind of critique of itself. As Marcel Ophüls, the director’s son, said, the more they tried to turn the project into a grandiose commercial spectacle, the more Lola Montès became a movie about grandiose commercial spectacle. See Lola being serenaded by Franz Liszt in a horse-drawn carriage the size of a Winnebago as they glide through rural Italy; see Lola bid farewell to Anton Walbrook’s King Ludwig and escape a Bavarian uprising by being ushered through a labyrinth of catacombs by a lovesick young Oskar Werner; see Lola dive from the peak of the big top way down onto a little mattress placed by an army of acrobatic multi-colored midgets…

We see Lola whisked through numerous opulent settings, always beautiful, sumptuously costumed, and a little melancholy, always captured by Ophüls’ relentlessly mobile cameras, their fluid movements emphasizing the transitory nature of being and the sweep of memory and theatre. But we never see inside Lola’s heart and mind. Two hours after being regaled of her feats of seduction we hardly know a thing about her, hardly penetrate her exquisite exterior. If this feels uncomfortably like vacuous pageantry, well, that’s kind of the idea. This is biography as high wire act, with Ophüls concocting one breathtaking, elaborately staged episode after another, and the sadness of it all accumulates only in the margins. It’s a bizarre cinematic experience, audacious, enthralling, and frustrating. There’s nothing like Lola Montès. It cries out for the big screen, but Criterion’s package is the best possible substitute, and the extras are terrific. It’s their fourth such packaging of Ophüls’ French output. I’m now crossing my fingers that they’ll start dipping into his underrated Hollywood films.

"To disappear into something greater than you...": a conversation with Willem Dafoe

It’s 2019. The citizenry of our unnamed setting are pale, listless, and seem perpetually hung-over, garbed in Prada undertaker. You can smoke again on subway platforms, where you can also grab a coffee that’s 20% blood. A devastating pandemic has rendered nearly everyone a vampire. The non-vampire population, whose fluids are essential to vampire survival, is rapidly dwindling. Social commentary abounds in Daybreakers: sustainability, the erosion of civil rights, drug addiction, and health care are all carefully woven as key metaphors into what’s otherwise a pretty familiar narrative that fuses horror movie tropes with science-fiction’s grandiose scope and goofy expository dialogue.

Daybreakers (2009)

Our hero, a vampire hematologist played by Ethan Hawke, is captured by renegade humans, led by the charismatic Lionel, who’ve devised a cure for the vampire disease. Dressed in baseball jacket, T-shirt and jeans, comfortably scarred and ready to kick undead ass, Lionel’s entrance literally breathes life into Daybreakers. It should come as no surprise that Lionel, who greatly helps to ensure this sophomore effort from the brothers Michael and Peter Spierig becomes something pretty fun, is played by Willem Dafoe. Both a character actor and an occasional leading man, Dafoe has one of the most interesting faces in movies, though those familiar with his extensive background in theatre, his long-time association with New York’s Wooster Group especially, or those who’ve seen his more flamboyantly physical performances in films like The Last Temptation of Christ, Wild at Heart, Body of Evidence, Shadow of the Vampire or Antichrist, know that Dafoe also inhabits one of the movies’ most extraordinary bodies, which at the age of 54 still seems capable of just about anything.

I had the great honour, and pleasure, of speaking with Dafoe about his work on Daybreakers and much more. An inspiring, unusually articulate and thoughtful yet utterly unpretentious actor, he was delightfully engaged and generous, making the most of the short time we had.

Shadow of the Vampire (00)

JB: What drew you to Daybreakers?

Willem Dafoe: It seemed like it would be fun. I was in the mood to do something like it. It’s always a combination of things that make you want to do something. I was very struck by the Spierigs. I saw their first film, Undead, and while I wouldn’t call it a masterpiece it certainly had some stuff in it. It was very inventive. I admired how they made it, practically self-financing it, doing all the effects in-house, by themselves. While the results aren’t always of the highest level technically, sometimes that homemade feeling has an immediacy I can really appreciate.

JB: Resourcefulness seems an especially attractive quality in your choice of collaborators.

WD: That’s true. A script or a character is not enough. Those are things you can only anticipate—I have more faith in people. I like being around people that are excited and passionate about what they do, and who are very clear about how I collaborate with them. With a horror movie, traditionally at least, the performances aren’t that important. You scratch your head and say you could get anybody to do this. But they way the Spierigs talked about the material was very specific and they wanted me to have some input, so it seemed like a creative proposal.

The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou (04)

JB: Your character, Lionel “Elvis” Cormac, has gone from being human to vampire and back again, he’s survived being roasted alive—nothing seems to get him too worked up. He’s about as cool as they come. Is it more fun to play these cocky, confident characters, or do you prefer playing someone more vulnerable, like Klaus Daimler from The Life Aquatic, for example?

WD: Klaus is pretty cocky in his own way; it’s just he caves in every once in a while. Basically, with Lionel, I liked the idea of this blue-collar custom car modification guy who’s working with a scientist and a woman to save the human race. That’s pretty good!

The Last Temptation of Christ (88)

JB: I’ve been watching your work since I was a kid, and I’ve been trying to decide which performances or collaborations have kept me the most engaged, and I find myself coming back to your work with Paul Schrader. If we count The Last Temptation of Christ you’ve worked with on six projects now. Would you describe your experiences with him as unique?

WD: Each one is very specific. You’re right that he’s the guy that I’ve worked with probably more than anyone else outside of the theatre. He always proposes something interesting to do. I like his writing. His approach is very pragmatic. He deals with very hot things in a very composed, clear way. That’s an interesting aesthetic.

JB: Do you have a sense as what it is he especially likes about you?

WD: I don’t. And I never pressed him on it. As I say, each time I’ve functioned differently. Three of the things that I did with him were quite small, because we’re friends and he knows I like to support his work and to be around him. With Affliction, I knew Russell Banks very well, the novelist. I liked the story very much. I liked the cast. That one I didn’t do so much for Paul but because of the whole project. With Adam Resurrected, he really needed me to do that to help get it financed. The Walker was just a quick thing, and I thought it was interesting. The more expansive ones, Light Sleeper and Auto-Focus, those were just flat-out good roles.

Light Sleeper (92), Auto-Focus (02), Adam Resurrected (08)

JB: I always felt like Light Sleeper was a sort of turning point in your career.

WD: It was important to me because it was a role that was very thinly veiled. I could have been that guy if my life was different.

JB: There seemed to be less of a mask.

WD: Yes, less of a mask. I enjoy working with a mask, but that was very sincere. As far as it being a turning point, it’s hard to say. It had its admirers, but it wasn’t widely seen.

Wild at Heart (90)

JB: I imagine Schrader as very clear. Do you find you’re able to respond to direction that’s more abstract? I recall another interview you did where you said that while working on Wild at Heart David Lynch once asked that a scene go from “a maroon to a deep brown.”

WD: [Laughs] I figure that’s the most interesting part of my job. Every time I do something, I adapt to the dominant way of working. I almost don’t have a preference. I know I have certain tendencies, but I like to fight those tendencies. The truth is every time you approach something you reinvent your process. I think of myself less as an actor sometimes than as a person who makes things. In order to do that I usually attach myself to a director with a very strong vision of what they want.

JB: You recently had the opportunity to work with Werner Herzog. He’s habitually worked with actors who are either infamously eccentric, such as Klaus Kinski, or who aren’t really actors at all, such as Bruno S. or the stars of his many documentaries. Was he an effective communicator?

WD: He was very clear. My role was very clear. It’s not that I don’t try to make it a full character, but the role I played in My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done is very much a device. It’s a case where I have to have a certain clarity, a certain tone, to enter the world and serve the story. Maybe it wasn’t the sexiest collaboration in the world, but he’s a very bright guy and he’s great to be around. I had a good time working with him and I hope to do it again in a more expansive way, where there’s more stakes emotionally for me.

My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done? (09)

JB: I wonder how he directed you in that peculiar scene where you and Michael Peña are sort of hovering very still outside of suspected killer Brad McCullum’s house for a long while. I guess with your particular theatrical background your task in that scene can seem more straightforward than it might for other actors.

WD: I don’t ask. I try to be receptive. You’re right that because of my theatre background I’m a little more flexible. If you remember, there was that beautiful song playing, that spiritual. [Singing] “I was born to preach the gospel…” Remember? Now, that song is beautiful, and where he places it in the story is beautiful, so as an actor I can invest myself in the pretending, in the situation of being a cop out there, but at the same time there’s another part of me that’s listening to the song and taking in how beautiful it is. It’s a magical cinema moment that I can absolutely get behind.

Idiot Savant (09)

JB: You recently closed a show in New York with Richard Foreman. How was that?

WD: I worked with him 25 years ago. I’ve known him for years. He’s always been one of my favourite theatre-makers. He’s one of the great granddaddies of the American avant-garde as far as I’m concerned. Many people I know, including Elizabeth LeCompte, who I worked with for so many years at the Wooster Group, were influenced so much by his work. He says Idiot Savant will be his last show. Some people don’t quite believe him, but I sort of do. I felt honored that he chose me—the show very much hung on my character. He’s got a very rigid way. He’s very clear about what he likes and doesn’t like. But I found that it was one of the most satisfying collaborations I’ve ever had.

JB: Different as they are, do you find that your theatre and film work feed one another?

WD: Always.

JB: Are you aware of learning tricks of the trade, so to speak?

WD: I don’t think those are necessarily what you learn. You learn a character thing, a personal philosophy of how you activate yourself. This thing I said about receptivity, that’s something I learned doing theatre. There’s a physicality that I’m reminded of when doing theatre that’s typically missing in film, where sometimes it seems that everything conspires against you using your body. Film is so influenced by television that the close-up has kind of polluted film language. There’s a tendency to act from the shoulders up. But to answer your question, I know nothing! [Laughs] All I know is that I feel stronger, more confident, very turned-on when I’m working in the theatre, and that helps my work in film.

Platoon (86)

JB: As you said, some of your strengths an actor are receptivity and flexibility, but have you ever had to fight for a choice you believe correct?

WD: Nope. It’s funny. When I’m approaching a scene I have certain things that I anticipate—those are usually the things you should let go. The stuff that you cling to or that you’re proud of sometimes is the stuff you should wriggle free of. Obviously I make choices, but I make them instinctively. When I don’t feel comfortable, or when I’m limited, I’m very vocal, very clear. I try to find out why I feel stuck. But I don’t think of conveying something. It’s more a feeling, a sense of being in a world, having the story work on you. When I fight for things I’m usually fighting for a feeling that I’m on the right track.

JB: Is it hard to watch yourself in movies?

WD: I go through phases. Sometimes I can’t stand it. Sometimes I sort of enjoy it. Generally I try not to dwell on things. When watching your work, if you like what you see it doesn’t necessarily help you, and if you don’t like what you see it doesn’t necessarily help you. There’s a part of you that wants to know how it turned out in a very practical way, but as far as learning lessons or studying it, I can’t do that. I’m too close to it. It’s a record. It prompts associations, and that’s all I can think about. The experience of making the movie, for me, is always stronger than the movie itself.

To Live and Die in L.A. (85)

JB: What about watching something you did say, 20 years ago?

WD: That’s even worse, because I’m thinking things like, my god, you look like such a little kid! Suddenly I have an onslaught of memories of my life that don’t even include the movie. It becomes the family album, a meditation, a stirring of memory that can be disturbing, can be pleasurable.

JB: I know Jim Jarmusch never watches his movies, not even when he’s asked to do audio commentaries.

WD: That makes sense. But if I’m at a film festival, let’s say, and something’s playing, I don’t close my eyes. On the other hand I don’t say, hey, I’ve got a little time on my hands—let’s take a look at Streets of Fire! Let’s see how that one holds up!

JB: Your work has been so diverse, but I wonder if you get a lot of scripts that seem to be trying to cater to a Willem Dafoe type, whatever that may be?

WD: I’ve been doing this long enough that hopefully there are different Willem Dafoe types for different people. I feel like as I get older the range of what gets offered to me is, oddly enough, broader. I shouldn’t brag, but even as movies are shrinking I feel like there’s actually more for me to do.

Inside Man (06)

JB: Do you think you’ll be doing this for the rest of your life?

WD: I do. You know, I’m an idiot! I love performing. I love the state it puts me in. It allows for this experience of working on something with people where you don’t know quite what it is. It parallels life. It’s a wonderful game, and the playing of it is a wonderful way to disappear into something greater than you. We all seek that in our different ways, but I’ve very much found it in this strange trade.