The internal return: Liverpool

We never find out how long Farrel (Juan Fernández) has been out at sea. Long enough, it seems, for his visage to attain an almost inscrutable neutrality, to covey nothing of whatever degree of contentment or despair he’s accumulated by a life of landlessness and lonesomeness. I’d guess he’s in his late 30s, though his grey hair might argue with that. He’s also a tippler, which can do things to how a face wears its years.

Farrel’s cargo ship docks in Ushuaia, capital of the Argentine province of Tierra del Fuego and commonly regarded as the southernmost city in the world. So you could say he’s at the end of something. He tells his superior he wants to visit the village where he grew up, to see if his mother is still alive. But is there more to this? He packs a bag while onboard, only to stash it away somewhere near the docks before setting out to traverse a snowbound landscape that sees a minimum of human life. It is unclear to us whether or not he plans to return. It may very well be unclear to him, too.

Like the protagonists of Lisandro Alonso’s previous films, Farrel’s journey from one world to another supplies the bulk of Liverpool’s decidedly spare narrative. The shift from sea to rough roads to a remote and wintry logging village offers countless images of stark, rugged beauty, while causing us to feel that we’re also somehow sliding deeper into Farrel’s hidden anxieties. When he comes home hardly anyone recognizes him. A young woman of ambiguous mental facilities seems to have taken up his role in the place where he used to live. He keeps drinking, remains reticent, though something in him seems to be changing in this place. By the time we arrive at the film’s final, pivotal image, we’ve gleaned just enough to understand what this journey was really all about.

I’ve seen Alonso’s two previous features, both of which share Liverpool’s rigorously detached, largely observational, almost anthropological formal strategy. I found Los Muertos (2004), the story of an ex-con returning to the scene of the crime, a masterful example of this sort of filmmaking, as well as surprisingly moving. By contrast, I found Fantasmas (06), which I won’t bother to describe except to say it centers around a screening of Los Muertos, to be a turgid parody of this same style, as though Alonso wanted to take the piss out of his own work and do so in the most annoyingly pretentious and unfunny way possible.

I thus came to Liverpool with a great deal of skepticism, but the film quickly won me over. Whatever pitfalls Alonso may stumble into as he develops his body of work, he clearly has a tremendous affinity for these stories of solitary, stoic figures working their way through the world. It’s interesting to write this after having just revisited Paris, Texas (84). That film’s vision of restlessness, masculine self-loathing, familial unease, and landscape as a metaphor for the vast and hostile unconscious seems to echo favourably in Liverpool. Perhaps the peculiar stories that grow out of one America are not so different than those of another.

Landscape-blackout-landscape: Lake Tahoe

A landscape, a blackout, then another landscape. And then, in the next blackout, the crunch of collision. Juan (Diego Cataño) has banged his red Tsuru into a telephone pole. He’s okay, and the damage to the car seems minimal, but he can’t the damned thing going. He’s on a country road, so he needs to walk into town for help. He’s got about $12 in pesos.

The landscape-blackout-landscape pattern continues, and a fair bit of Lake Tahoe (2008), now on DVD from Film Movement, will play out this way, keeping considerable distance from its characters, often implying more emotional content through these landscapes and blackouts than through the faces and bodies and interactions onscreen. Especially since Juan’s private turmoil is buried, albeit shallowly, and it will be some time before we come to understand the reasons behind it. The first half of the movie is task-oriented, with Juan’s attempts to get his car fixed repeatedly thwarted. Those he encounters en route to repair include a Shaolin enthusiast and ostensible mechanic more eager to make friends, play video games and take in a screening of Enter the Dragon (73), than to deliver the desired distributor harness; a young single mother who minds the counter of an auto parts shop and who nurtures ambitions to be a singer—and to seduce Juan; and an old guy who loses his beloved dog and enlists Juan’s help in the search.

In a nod to the movie’s debt to neorealism, the old man’s dog—a boxer, who delivers my favourite performance in the movie—is named Sica, after the director of Umberto D. (52), a movie about an old man who loses his dog. But Lake Tahoe, the second feature from Mexican director Fernando Eimbcke and his co-scenarist Paula Markovitch, who previously collaborated on Duck Season (04), owes much more to the cinema of Jim Jarmusch, and, to a lesser degree, the leading lights of the current wave of Latin American low-budget, observational formalism. (In what’s surely a coincidence, the relationship between the enigmatic, place-based title and the final scenes of Lake Tahoe is mirrored with remarkable fidelity in Lisandro Alonso’s Liverpool (08).)

I’ve no idea whether this was a conscious thing for Eimbcke, but there actually seems to be a strong overall influence of American art traditions on Lake Tahoe. Filmed entirely in Progreso, a fairly sleepy seaside town just a short drive from Mérida, the capital of Yucatán, the movie ’s fixated on bland, flat, anonymous architecture, which it surveys in persistently square compositions that distinctly recall the work of numerous American photographers of the mid-20th century, artists who helped to forge a modern visual vocabulary of urban space as seen through the windows of a car.

Which brings us back to Jarmusch and his trademark dry humour that, in early works like Stranger Than Paradise (84) especially, blossoms from entire scenes that unfold through extended medium shots. There are moments in Lake Tahoe that echo this strategy fruitfully, buoyed on warm humour and a nice feeling for the virtues of community. But there are an awful lot of other moments that feel pretty flat, protracted without apparent purpose, too loosely edited for the humour or internal rhythm to fully come through, too miserly with its actors to capitalize on their individual nuance, and generally overburdened by a sense of formal rigour that simply hasn’t been pushed far enough to make much of an impact. Its heart seems to be in the right place, but basically there’s a lack of frisson here between form and content. Granted, I’m probably a little harder on Lake Tahoe because it’s exactly the kind of movie I’m supposed to like…

For other reasons I might say the same of Cairo Time (09), out on DVD from Mongrel this week, a slow burning almost-romance between mature characters. Patricia Clarkson’s magazine editor, killing time in Cairo while her husband is endlessly delayed by his UN mission in Gaza, and Alexander Siddig’s unmarried local café owner, who has nothing but time, are a warm, welcome presence onscreen together, especially in scenes where they do almost nothing—as David Berry noted in his review when the film briefly hit theatres last October, the richest scene in the movie is the one where Clarkson and Siddig silently enjoy a train ride home together from a wedding. But that scene lasts about a minute, maybe, and is bracketed by a whole bunch of other scenes that are quiet and calm and verging on pulseless.

Cairo Time largely suffers the opposite problem of Lake Tahoe. Where Eimbcke keeps his camerawork to a stifling minimum, erring on the side of allusion, writer/director Ruba Nadda seems dependent on way too much coverage. Her scenes are cluttered with too many angles, too much needless lingering, too many indicators, too many limpid phone call scenes, too many redundancies overall—the tone seems subtle, but the storytelling isn’t subtle at all. Still, you might want to give it a whirl anyway. There are moments here—a hesitant kiss that results in an adorable “Oh!” from Clarkson before she escapes into an elevator—that hold some genuine immediacy and truth.

2009: the year in movies

Let me first confess that I still haven’t seen at least one movie that I predict I’m going to adore. It's been a busy winter! Fortunately, I don’t think there’s any lack of love out there for Fantastic Mr. Fox and it’ll surely be heartily celebrated elsewhere. This may not be case however with my first pick for the best of 2009, which barely screened anywhere in Canada but is now at least available on DVD. In fact so many of my favourites didn’t hit theatres or had only limited runs that I’ve decided to comprise my list from anything that debuted in theatres or on DVD in 2009. This is hardly news of course, but given the current state of exhibitors, unless we all get to attend major festivals we need to look to screens of all sizes if we’re to embrace the spectrum of what’s exciting in movies these days.


The Headless Woman
A hit and run occurs. We don’t see the victim, but neither does the driver. We see the driver work through her decision not to look—the process is oddly transfixing. We then see her do many strange yet finally instinctively logical things in response to the accident. We’re dream-deep in noir territory, but the author of this beguiling movie is Lucrecia Martel, who made The Holy Girl, so along its periphery are unforgettably peculiar, unnervingly funny details, and troubling questions of class solidarity and willful blindness. María Onetto gives an immensely absorbing performance, like Gena Rowlands on Quaaludes.


Summer Hours
A final family reunion precedes a matriarch’s death. Her adult children, now spread across the globe, must reconvene to sort out mother’s legacy. Olivier Assayas’ most emotionally rich work is about things, “bric-a-brac from another era,” the residue of a life, its memories and secrets. It offers a sobering sense of mortality, followed by the consolation of renewal: the last characters we see are the matriarch’s teenaged grandchildren, whiling away the summer hours at grandmother’s old house one last time, before it becomes the property of someone else.


The Limits of Control
“As I descended into impassable rivers, I no longer felt guided by the ferryman.” The opening Rimbaud quote says it all: surrender to the drift, the buoyancy of the texture, mystery and playfulness will carry you along. Thus unmoored, Jim Jarmusch made one of the loosest, most chimerical and, it would appear, most divisive works of his career. Smartly suited Isaach De Bankolé slips across Spain, meeting with shadowy figures, deciphering cryptic messages, drinking twin espressos and even enjoying some after-hours flamenco on his way to complete a sinister mission. Pitched somewhere between Point Blank, The Passenger and Jarmusch’s own Ghost Dog, this is a cinema of wanderlust and hypnosis, far more concerned with architecture, atmosphere, jokes, musical logic, naked ladies, sensation and sensibility, than it is about, say, espionage. My second viewing was approached very skeptically. I still loved it completely.


Inglorious Basterds
Here’s some synchronicity for you: 17 years after Reservoir Dogs Quentin Tarantino finally goes completely bananas and reaches the peak of his maniacal, pastiche-frenzied craftsmanship at the same time. Who else could have made this insanely verbose, over-the-top epic about resistance in war-torn Europe that fantasizes both a scalp-collecting Jewish revenge squad and the complete annihilation of the entire Nazi elite in one explosive screening at a Parisian movie palace? I rest my case.


35 Rhums
This was Claire Denis’ entrancing and moving tale of a closely bound father and daughter gradually finding their individual paths after years of living together. Denis’ touch is so light as to seem weightless, her exposition so minimal as to seem neglectful of plot, yet no one makes movies like this, so alive, so warm and sometimes funky and funny, so sensitive to everyday rhythms and nuance, so trusting in story to reveal itself once nurtured. I could curl up on a rug and drift away with her films for ages.


A Serious Man
Remember the story of Job? Well, this is funnier. A physics professor’s wife leaves him. His brother is arrested. He could any moment be accused of taking a bribe from an alarmingly deadpan student from Korea. He’s inexplicably hounded by the Columbia Record Club. This is the Coen Brother’s vision of the universe, set in the Minneapolis suburbs, circa 1967. A tornado might come along and kill everybody. Uncertainty is the only certainty. There’s no comfort in religion, though it’s kind of fun to look for it anyway. As the Korean student’s dad advises, “Accept the mystery.”


Two Lovers
Speaking of Jews in trouble. A Brooklyn dry cleaner’s son trying not to be suicidal, Joaquin Phoenix loves the sweet girl his family has implicitly selected for him. He also loves Gwyneth Paltrow, who’s clearly bad news but is so much more exciting. He also loves his mom, who happens to be Isabella Rossellini. James Gray is a master storyteller, and this is his best work, a vision of the abyss we traverse when we surrender fully to romantic longing, and of those harrowing moments when compromise wollops us upside the head until out ears ring.


Che
The first part of Steven Soderbergh’s portrait of Ernesto Guevara is a puzzle made of trial and error while the second arm-wrestles with The Thin Red Line for the title of Most Hypnotic War Movie. The whole thing eschews Guevara the T-shirt icon, yet it doesn’t hoist phony biopic vulnerability on him either. It’s by turns lyrical and strategic, a manual on armed revolution and a consideration of violence as a tool for social change.


Sugar
Miguel ‘Sugar’ Santos is hardly a revolutionary, but his story provides us with much insight into the uneasy alliances that span the Americas. Recruited to play ball, he leaves the DR for the US, discovers French toast and TV on the Radio, as well as the simultaneous warmth and cool conservatism of the semi-rural Midwest. So much more than a sports movie—though the baseball is rendered excitingly—Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden’s follow-up to Half Nelson is a beautiful, profoundly resonant tale of the unpredictable paths that characterize the immigrant experience.

Wendy and Lucy
One needn’t be an immigrant however to understand how riddled with obstacles American life can be. Kelly Reichardt’s neorealist story of a young woman stranded in Oregon, trying to find her dog and get to Alaska, uses the simplest of narrative elements to forge both a lament for the outsider in the ostensible land of plenty and an ode to the kindness of strangers.

Liverpool

A sailor goes ashore in Argentina. He says he wants to visit his home, a tiny village in the mountains, to see if his mother is still alive. It's winter, and the sailor drinks, swigging off a bottle he keeps in his small bag. But it may not only be the cold that he's bracing himself for. Lisandro Alonso's rigorously observational approach is employed with special elegance here, gradually gliding away from the protagonist to someone else, someone he's forgotten, until we rest on the image that explains the enigmatic title, and offers up some touchingly subtle gesture of things passed along from one generation to another.

Maybe not quite as good but still very good: Hunger, The Hurt Locker, Let the Right One In, Pontypool, The Road, Tulpan.