Traveling Light: Kelly Reichardt: New Auteurs

River of Grass

The pair meet at a bar, shortly after the guy nearly hits the girl with his car on a dark rural road. “You’re not from around here, are you?” asks the girl. “Nope,” the guy replies, “I’m from Dade.” A seemingly unremarkable exchange, until you consider that the bar these lonesome souls occupy lies somewhere in Broward County, somewhere apparently very close to the Broward/Dade County line. The exchange then becomes ironic, except that the girl and the guy don’t seem to find it all that funny. These lovers on the run in Kelly Reichardt’s debut River of Grass (1994) inhabit what many viewers would deem a decidedly small world, but to them their immediate surroundings feel just as vast and difficult to traverse as any sea or continent. This is a road movie where the protagonists can’t get past the first tollbooth, having embarked on a crime spree with very little in the way of actual crime. At one point the girl (actually a woman, probably in her early 30s) mentions how every place seems the same. This may be a subtle wink to Jim Jarmusch’s Stranger Than Paradise (1984), in which a similar sentiment is expressed when it’s New York-based protagonists find themselves in Florida, which just so happens to be the setting of River of Grass. (Reichardt’s vision of Florida, dingy, eccentric, a place for wanderers, seems somewhat akin to that of novelist Joy Williams). But in this context, the sentiment assumes new hues, because the person who expresses it has hardly gone anywhere.

Ode

River of Grass feels very much like a first film (albeit one by an unusually gifted maker of exceedingly personal films) in that it carries the traces of an artist trying out as many things as she can (the camera movements, the cutting, and the use of voice-over would be tempered or eschewed altogether in her future work) and still craft something with an unmistakable signature. That word, signature, calls to mind things written by hand, and things handmade. The first word expressed in Reichardt’s newest film, Meek’s Cutoff (2010) isn’t spoken but rather traced upon a stone: “LOST.” There could be no better single-word summary of Reichardt’s body of work thus far, stories about people trying to get somewhere and having a tough time of it, unassuming, quiet films made with the bare minimum of participants and equipment. A record gets played in River of Grass: a rendition of ‘Traveling Light.’ A theme song perhaps. Reichardt has often spoke in interviews about her refusal/inability to “move up” to larger scale productions (something that helps explain the decade’s hiatus between her first and second features). This should not be mistaken for lack of ambition. On the contrary, one of the things that make her one of the finest, most distinctive, rigorous American filmmakers alive is her ability to cultivate so much feeling, atmosphere, narrative, character development, and even polemic out of the simplest of stories (many of them coming from collaborations with Jonathan Raymond) and humblest of materials.

Meek's Cutoff

Meek’s Cutoff, Reichardt’s mesmerizing western about homesteaders lost in 19th century Oregon, seen largely through the eyes of women, opens today at TIFF Bell Lightbox, and I urge you to see it. The film’s Toronto premiere has also prompted a most welcome retrospective of Reichardt’s work. They’re showing everything save the short-shorts. (1999’s Ode, a mid-length work, shot on Super 8, which I’ve been waiting years to see, screens on Sunday afternoon.) River was last night, but still to come are multiple screenings of Meek’s, two screenings of Old Joy (2005), two of Wendy and Lucy (2008), and one screening of Nicholas Ray’s The Lusty Men (1952), which was selected by Reichardt for TIFF’s Carte Blanche series. The retrospective is part of TIFF’s New Auteurs series.

The long and winding road: A conversation with independent film producer Jim Stark

Jim Stark occupies the unlikely position of independent film producer. Originally from Ohio, he’s based in Manhattan, though most of his contacts are in Europe, South America or Asia. He’s helped some of the landmark indie films of the 1980s get made and get seen. Most recently he produced and co-wrote the Charles Bukowski adaptation Factotum, a movie about a guy who accepts and abandons a seemingly endless string of jobs. I spoke with Stark on behalf of Vue Weekly about his own string of jobs, the many roles he’s inhabited in a career of making the sort of movies that, as Stark says, “no one makes for the money.”

Vue Weekly: Your film career begins with Jim Jarmusch’s early features. Did you guys know each other from Ohio?

Jim Stark: No, I was a corporate lawyer in New York and had met his girlfriend Sara Driver, who’s also a filmmaker. She approached me, and I got involved in Stranger Than Paradise, which starred my 86-year-old grandmother, among other people. She plays Aunt Lotte. Some people think she steals the movie.

VW: Had you been practicing law long?

JS: About four or five years, doing mostly corporate litigation, trademark, contracts, intellectual property stuff. Jim and Sara needed help on this movie and they couldn’t afford to pay anybody. The last person Jim wanted to meet was a corporate lawyer, but we were both from Ohio, both Indians fans. We got along well and worked on the film together for a couple of years, which turned into a surprising success. He made some others I was involved in—Down By Law, Mystery Train, Night on Earth—and then made somewhat bigger films, where I wanted to stay doing what I was doing. I’ve worked with a number of different directors since.

VW: Did you always have aspirations to work in film?

JS: I took film classes as a teenager. I was very interested in European films, much more than American films. I spent a week at USC until I realized that, at that point, there was no use in getting a film degree. So I returned to New York and went to law school.

VW: Once into film, were you happy producing or hoping to be involved more creatively?

JS: I enjoyed being involved in the process of making movies, particularly starting at the beginning. Some I’ve had more creative involvement in, some less. I had a tiny bit of creative involvement in Stranger and Down By Law, but as time went on Jim insisted that he make all the creative decisions. With other directors, I’ve been more involved in terms of casting, editing or, in a couple of cases, writing. My entrée into this was through being able to organize things and get the money, push the project through to completion, which is often the hardest part.

VW: Cold Fever was your first screenplay. How did that come about?

JS: Mystery Train was invited to the Reykjavík Film Festival. Jim, not being a big Festival guy, didn’t want to go, but I’d always been fascinated by Iceland, so we asked if they’d invite the producer. They would have taken the gaffer, because not so many people come up to Iceland, so off I went. The airport’s about 40 minutes outside Reykjavík, and the landscape is this sort of unbelievable moonscape of lava fields. I’d never seen anything like it. For somebody who does road movies, it was like a billion dollars in free production design. By the time I got into town I really wanted to make a movie there. I’d enjoyed working with Masatoshi Nagase on Mystery Train and somehow these two ideas got entwined in my head: I thought, I’m going to do a movie about a Japanese guy who comes to Iceland and goes on the road! Anyway, I had a good experience collaborating with Fridrik Fridriksson, but that was my only writing experience until I met Bent Hamer, who already had this idea to film Charles Bukowski’s Factotum.

VW: The novel’s quite episodic. Was it an arduous adaptation?

JS: The biggest challenge was to give the film multiple layers. When you read the book, it’s just full of ironic observations; if you take away the descriptions, and just show what’s going on, you don’t get a feeling for this man’s keen intelligence. That’s why we inserted the poetry, which is largely from sources other than Factotum.

VW: What about updating the novel from the ‘40s to the present?

JS: It’s funny. I had people telling me nobody drinks anymore, it should be about drugs. Well, these people don’t get out much. I remember the last night we were shooting in a rooming house, and as I was sitting on this very decrepit furniture in the hall, these people would come out, use the communal toilet and go back into their tiny rooms, living very much the life Bukowski was describing. When we took a break, somebody came in and stole all our liquor bottles.

VW: The sense of alcoholism and loneliness is addressed quite differently in Factotum than it is in Barfly (the 1987 film written by Bukowski). I wonder if that doesn’t have something to do with Hamer being from Norway, where alcoholism is less veiled in the culture.

JS: Probably. I drink very little, but Bent, as you pointed out, comes from a society where drinking’s very much the norm. He was fascinated from the beginning about alcoholism and what it takes to stay there, the work involved.

VW: Did Bukowski’s concerns resonate with you?

JS: I was very admiring of his style. I wasn’t as attracted to the lifestyle, as many fans of his are. Neither Bent nor I were Bukowski fanatics, and I’ve run into a bunch of those since we started with this. We had our own take on it. For me, what was most interesting was this need of Bukowski’s to reject all of the trappings of bourgeois society, not to have a house, not to have a job, not to have a relationship, because all of these things will interfere with and cheapen your art, that to be a real artist means to be an outsider.

VW: Factotum premiered in spring 2005, finally opened in US theatres in autumn 2006, and, as we speak, is still making the rounds. Is it draining to sit through this protracted process of watching a film get distributed?

JS: Well, people think that everything that happens in a movie happens on the set, but that’s not making the movie. It’s the year or two or more before, the script, the casting, pre-production, financing. Then a year of post-production, editing, sound, all the technical work to get a finished print. Then it circulates for a year, year-and-a-half, sometimes more. Canada’s not the last country. I think they’re waiting for Factotum in Japan. Then there’s licensing, DVD, and later re-licensing ... it goes on forever. But it’s always been this way. It’s just a little harder now. You just have to get out there, try and get people to see it, to be interested in it, because no one’s going to do it for you. 

The Band's Visit: Tons of loneliness, rendered ever so lightly

Dressed from cap to pant cuff in a spotless powder blue rarely seen these days outside of baby pajamas and vintage tuxedos, an all-male group of mostly older Egyptian musicians, practitioners of a classical style that’s entered its cultural twilight, arrive in Israel, where they’re booked to perform a modest concert. Confused, and suffering a serious linguistic handicap, they mean to go to one town and accidentally wind up in another, one so sleepy it’s practically inert. Mid-day, its citizenry are found catatonically propped up on chairs in front of what may very well be the only café. With no means of transportation available until the following day, the musicians, entirely dependent on the kindness of these locals, have no choice but to spend the night.

The café proprietor is Dina (the terrifically vivacious Ronit Elkabetz), an almond-eyed knockout divorcée somewhere in the neighbourhood of 40 who tends to survey everything with a baldly sexy, cockeyed skepticism, often with one hand on her hip. She feeds the group, then arranges accommodations for them all. With considerable, hormone-fuelled persistence, she talks the impossible gentlemanly, droopy-nosed bandleader Lieutenant-colonel Tawfiq Zacharya (Sasson Gabai) out for a night on the town. Haled (Saleh Bakri), the band’s youngest and most subordinate member and a self-styled Don Juan, meanwhile is whisked away to a cramped roller rink that serves as the town’s disco, where he plays Cyrano to a timid young nerd and his weepy blind date in a marvelous scene of purely physical comedy.

Most of the Egyptians and Israelis can at least communicate in the lingua franca of broken English –which offers a surplus of comic delights for Anglophone audiences. When Haled sings Chet Baker through Plexiglas to a pretty girl held captive in the airport’s info booth, there’s the doubled pleasure of our recognizing both the mangled spoken words and the song being sung. But central to our understanding of the scenario is the fact that everyone, to some degree, knows ‘My Funny Valentine,’ that is, they at least know the feeling, the cadence, the song’s usefulness as a seductive tool. Later, an uncomfortably assembled group huddles around a dinner table and breaks into an ensemble rendition of ‘Summertime.’ Gradually, it becomes clear that the other lingua franca spoken here is music. It can’t resolve conflicts, change anyone’s course or alleviate the banal frustrations common nearly all the characters –something one of them describes as “tons of loneliness”– but it can provide fleeting connections between strangers in the night.

The cinema of dislocation that is the melancholy-comic terrain traversed in The Band’s Visit (Bikur Ha-Tizmoret) has found a worthy cartographer in writer/director Eran Kolirin, here making his feature debut. Previous travelers along this particular road include Aki Kaurismäki, Gus Van Sant, Wim Wenders, Sophia Coppola, Takashi Kitano and Jim Jarmusch, whose Stranger Than Paradise so emphatically subverted any exoticism once associated with the road movie a quarter century ago. The trick to charting your way through this meta-country is to light one’s gaze upon the specifics of a place while carefully rendering it not quite anywhere.
The arid Israeli backwater where the Alexandria Ceremonial Police Orchestra accidentally find themselves is imbued with a wealth of rich detail to help define it, yet it nonetheless feels like a locale that’s managed to slip off the maps: forgettable, insignificant, a footnote in a travel guide. Insignificance is of course essential to this sort of movie, which vies for its status right from the opening title card, informing us about the band’s visit before qualifying this with “not many remember this. It was not that important.”

It would be all too easy to characterize The Band’s Visit as a slavish exercise in this little dislocation subgenre, to note how it features the customarily subtle balance of cuteness and sadness while staying just a hair’s breadth away from sentimentality. The gags are deadpan, there’s a lot of walking through strange lands with luggage noisily rolling behind, plenty of your standard miscommunication via linguistic limitations, and blank Buster Keaton stares abound. All of these could be called tropes –yet any genre, however tenuously defined, has its tropes. The question is whether the tropes are displayed or discovered anew. Kolirin, with a very adult attitude toward resolution and the staying power of life’s lingering aches, manages to breathe life into these throughout. While some moments feel more vital than others, his film is genuinely unforced, genuinely sweet and man, is it funny. And very much worth a visit. 

Views of Strange Lands from Windshields: Jarmusch on DVD

In Jim Jarmusch’s 1984 film Stranger Than Paradise we light upon the confluence of many streams of poetic cinema, of numerous currents of the NYC underground of the period (already on its last legs), and of drifting strangers discarding the signifiers of their varied homelands both geographical and psychological. I retain a deep love for this “indie” landmark in part because while it’s so very about something, it evokes its themes, ideas and emotions with such a light touch, such singular, rigorous formal grace, and such emphasis on languid humour and the pure pleasures of unfiltered –and uncut– human behaviour.

Stranger Than Paradise is concerned with self-determination. Right off the bat, Willie (John Lurie) is heard demanding his Hungarian aunt speak to him in English and not call him Bela, his given name. We see Willie’s visiting Hungarian cousin Eva (Eszter Balint) tour “The New World” of New York while playing Screamin’ Jay Hawkins on her tape recorder, in effect projecting her prized artifact of America back into America streets. We see Eddie (Richard Edson) struggle with his role as the supremely pushy Willie’s sidekick. Without having to actively do a whole lot, these characters, buoyed by the ease, playfulness and individuality of the actors, become tremendously well fleshed out. Like J. Hoberman wrote in his original Village Voice review, “half the fun in Jarmusch’s leisurely paced film is just watching those palookas breathe.”

But it was Jarmusch’s self-determination that was also announcing itself. His cinematic influences can be seen in every unbroken scene –Ozu, Dryer, Warhol and Antonioni, not to mention The Honeymooners, are all evident precursors– yet his style as developed here exudes a very particular vision of the world. Jarmusch’s individuality is something explored in depth in Criterion’s new Stranger Than Paradise two-disc set, which contains smart essays, the German documentary Kino ’84: Jim Jarmusch, and, most excitingly, Jarmusch’s relatively little-seen 1980 feature debut Permanent Vacation.

Permanent Vacation opens with NYC crowds undulating in slow motion juxtaposed with nearly abandoned streets and, eventually, a series of varied empty living spaces. “I’ve known all kinds of people,” protagonist Allie (Chris Parker) tells us, “and to me those people are like a series of rooms.” The newness dies, a creeping dread emerges, and then its time to split. Allie, with his floppy pompadour and endearingly pretentious air of cultivated outsiderness, spends much of the film wandering between people, rooms and empty lots, pontificating on his inability to settle. The filmic space is a frontier bridging the real world and one malleable to the characters’ fantasies, and in this sense it’s really a coming-of-age film. This goes for Jarmusch as much as Allie: the young writer/director is already honing his minimalist, episodic sensibilities, and his special interest in the interchangability of the foreign and familiar.

Along with Stranger Than Paradise, Criterion has also released Jarmusch’s 1991 film Night on Earth, the ambitious portmanteau Jarmusch initially wanted to title L.A. New York Paris Rome Helsinki, a tell-it-like-it-is rundown of the film’s travelogue. Each episode is set in one of the above cities, each more or less confined to a taxi cab. Though he professes to not be of an analytical mindset, Jarmusch in fact describes the idea of the film perfectly in a short Belgian TV interview included here: he states that he was interested in the freedom of the fleeting intimacy with a complete stranger one finds while taking a cab, as well as the ostensible insignificance of a taxi ride, the point of which is usually to get from one place to another. An artist isn’t always the most accurate representative of his work, but I don’t think I could come up with a better summation of what Night on Earth is about than what Jarmusch himself describes.

The events depicted in Night on Earth are unassuming even by Jarmusch standards –a talent agent offers a cabbie a job; a passenger takes control of the steering wheel when its clear the newly immigrated cabbie can’t drive automatic– yet at less than a half-hour each they provide rich portraits and conviviality. Re-teaming after Down By Law (1986), Jarmusch gets another career-best performance from Robert Benigni, who rambles on about fucking pumpkins and livestock of all things; he gets a marvelous camaraderie going between a double recorder-sporting ex-clown Armin Mueller-Stahl and an impossibly enthusiastic Giancarlo Esposito; he summons up a genuinely quirky and deeply sad story from the late, great Finnish actor Matti Pellonpåå in the film’s final, melancholy dawn; and he wrangles a highly memorable, Mingus-inspired score from Tom Waits. Any one moment here can seem slight, yet Night on Earth amounts to fare more than the sum of its deeply charming parts.

Repeating the terrific supplement found on their Down By Law release, the highlight of Criterion’s disc is easily the audio-only Jarmusch Q&A, where he responds to questions emailed in from fans the world over. His comments are fun, insightful, anecdotal, alive with attitude and full of homage for his esteemed colleagues. By the time you get through Night on Earth and all its supplementary material you’ll likely feel as though you’ve passed a long night yourself, but one that leaves you satisfied, alert to simple beauty and a little bit in love with people and the world.