Vision: this nun won't take nein for an answer

The titular 12th century Benedictine magistra and mystic of writer/director Margarethe von Trotta’s Vision: From the Life of Hildegard von Bingen was a preternatural renaissance woman of the highest order, writing plays, botanical and theological texts, composing music, and founding an independent, all-woman monastery on her way to canonization, feminist revisionism and cinematic stardom. While scandalizing her peers, she was deft in her dealings with both church and state. But she was human like anybody else and suffered from longings and envy, which allows Vision to see-saw engagingly between the steady accumulation of its protagonist’s accomplishments and her occasional surrender to overwhelming emotions.

There’s a superfluous and fairly silly prologue involving a millenarian sect gathering to mark the last night of the first millennium and its implicit apocalypse. But the sun insistently rises the next morning and the world’s stage is set for von Bingen’s entrance… about 98 years later. Von Trotta quickly dramatizes von Bingen’s childhood cloistering before darting ahead 30 years to the moment when she assumes the role that will facilitate her destiny as maverick and renown polymath. Around this point we catch a glimpse of von Bingen’s visions, replete with sudden zooms into our heroine’s supernaturally blue eyes and psychedelic cloud formations. It would seem advisable to regard such religious experiences as best left to the imagination, but von Trotta’s approach to this material generally feels ambivalent about whether to mime it’s subject’s austerity or follow Ken Russell’s example as to how to shoot nuns: on the one hand Vision is almost elliptical in its efficient rendering of biographical bullet points; on the other it employs expressionistic hand-held camerawork and contemporaneous but decidedly non-diegetic choral music that could furnish several Omen sequels.

“God loves beauty,” declares von Bingen in Vision, and the proof is manifested in von Bingen herself, embodied here by the positively ageless Barbara Sukowa in her fifth collaboration with von Trotta, the pair of them having forged their careers four decades back as important figures in the New German Cinema. Sukowa makes an agreeably radiant visionary, though her beauty doesn’t distract from the character’s chaste integrity. For secular viewers at least, Vision will feel most alive when von Bingen throws a bit of a tantrum upon discovering that her young protégée, also rather fetching, will be leaving her for another convent. There’s nothing beyond our own suspicions to imply anything erotic transpiring between the two during those long, lonely Dark Age nights, but perhaps there’s no harm in us having our own visions of transgression nonetheless.

Lost in space, dying of spiritual thirst: Looking back at Darren Aronofsky's Fountain

On the eve of the 2010 Toronto International Film Festival, I thought it would be fun to look back at a review I wrote for Darren Aronofsky's The Fountain, a film almost unanimously dismissed upon its appearance at TIFF 2006, and which might have torpedoed the ambitious young filmmaker's career if it weren't followed by the much celebrated The Wrestler, which had its North American premiere at TIFF 2008. Aronofsky's Black Swan is among the most anticipated films playing at this year's festival.

***

Six years after Requiem for a Dream, Darren Aronofsky’s The Fountain finally arrives with a hefty load of extra-filmic baggage –an infamously protracted and tumultuous production, boos at the Venice Film Festival– and a premise so dazzlingly pretentious as to guarantee responses even more polarized that those that met its predecessor. Yet if this finds the right audience –probably small, probably fans of Ken Russell films, Herman Hesse novels, CG Jung, Joseph Campbell and psychotropic substances– it will in its peculiar way be embraced as the sort of wildly flawed, improbably ambitious gem that comes along only rarely, a phenomenon akin to a comet, the sighting of some endangered beast, or a functioning health care system.

The Fountain’s structure is tripartite and intrinsically circular. In one strand we find Thomas (Hugh Jackman), a genetic scientist desperate to shrink a tumour in a monkey’s brain while his wife Izzi (Rachel Weisz) dies from some terrible illness and composes an enigmatic novel in laughably immaculate calligraphy. In the second, Tomas (again, Jackman) is a conquistador charged with finding the Mayan tree of life in the New World for the lovely Queen Isabel (Weisz). In the third, Tom (yep, Jackman) is the lone inhabitant of some hermetic ball adrift in space, haunted by voices and doing kung fu against the stars. These narratives dove-tail and are compressed into 96 minutes, an impressively taut running time that renders two of these strands, not inappropriately, into virtual cinematic haikus. Visual dynamics dominate: long-shots press up against extra-tight close-ups; gaseous portals seep through the jaundiced glow of space, recalling old sci-fi paperback covers; terrifyingly fecund jungles give way to stark wintry plains. The aesthetic is alternately seductive, chillingly lonely and somewhat oppressive.

Dialogue tends to be awkward, scenes contrived and characters more symbolic than recognizable. What’s of substance here is the fluid realization of deeply primal themes, thus Aronofsky thinks nothing of having a scene where Jackman stabs a tree and out flows the juice of immortality! Which looks suspiciously like cum. Weisz is required mostly to be beatific, yet Jackman’s unruly performance somehow ascends to operatic heights, matching Aronofsky’s lofty themes with vivid romantic fortitude. For every scene that courts ridicule there’s another that, call me crazy, is strangely, profoundly moving. In his desire for everlasting life and love, Tom sacrifices immediacy, and his is a tragedy written in glyphs, not naturalistic gestures.

Because it aspires to fuse images and music into an expression of abstract spiritual and mythical concepts, The Fountain will, for some, invite only mockery and dismissal. But against my more sober criteria, I found myself kind of swept up in it, beguiled by its preposterous beauty and over-earnest transcendentalism, its inarticulate fatalism that finally speaks to our innate sense of eternal return. I can accept or even welcome whatever jabs at its abundant silliness others might make, but I still can’t deny that I left the film feeling eerily connected to that guy sitting cross-legged in his little ball.