Heavy weather: Three Monkeys

The family lives in an apartment block so tall and emaciated as to look unfinished and precarious. Their dining room boasts a spectacular view of the Bosporus, yet its waters are choppy and forbidding, and between it and the building lie a freeway and railway, whose pedestrian underpass casts jagged shadows on its users. The story begins with an accident caused by a Turkish politician, and the politician persuading his driver Eyüp (Yavuz Bingol) to take the rap, a year’s stretch at most, with a substantial reward at the end of it. Such negotiations have a tendency to proliferate, so while Eyüp’s imprisoned his wife Hacer (Hatice Aslan), concerned for their son Ismail (Rifat Sungar), who’s seemingly unable to find work or get into university, comes to the politician’s office asking for an advance. The politician names, or rather implies, his price, and perhaps Hacer was hoping for such a discreet agreement all along. But what will happen when Eyüp comes home?

Co-scripted with the director’s wife Ebru Bilge Ceylan and actor Ecran Kesal, who plays the politician, Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Three Monkeys (Üç maymun) weds the contemporary image and atmosphere-rich European art film with the fundamentals of film noir. Unlike Christian Petzold’s Jerichow, rooted in James M. Cain, or Béla Tarr’s The Man From London, taken from Georges Simenon’s novel, Three Monkeys does not, so far as I can tell, have a single overt source, though there are intriguing echoes of The Reckless Moment and The Deep End, both adaptations of the same Elisabeth Sanxay Holding story. Unlike most films noir, Three Monkeys doesn’t evoke desperation through taut pacing, neurotic framing, or heated verbal exchange. In keeping with Ceylan’s distinctive style, the film above all broods luxuriously, in sumptuous digital images of looming storms and scenes sodden with unease and suspicion, imbued with an aquatic tinge that renders everyone victims of motion sickness.

Several sequences feel incidental while underway, yet everything counts at the end of Ceylan’s karmic equation, even Hacer’s comical ringtone. Much is destined to remain unresolved however, particularly once the stream of water imagery is completed by visits from the ghost of a drowned child. There are these two turning points for Hacer, wordless, nearly static moments in which a decision is made, one where she comes home, slumps in a chair, and flips off her shoe, another where she lies on her bed having been mauled by her angry husband, wearing lingerie that’s red and transparent, while a gust of wind balloons the curtain. It says a lot about Ceylan’s approach, and about the potency of Aslan’s screen presence, that both moments are pretty riveting. Ceylan, who is also a photographer, could be seen as bearing a kinship with the late Michelangelo Antonioni, in that landscape, weather and architecture play such a central role in his method of storytelling. Yet rather than exclude nuanced performance, this method depends utterly on actors who can deliver heaps of drama with a glance or a gesture. And despite a narrative that can at times teeter on a sort of bleak math, the cast of Three Monkeys delivers in spades.

Drawing on the margins: Kelly Reichardt on Wendy and Lucy

Wendy is the stoic young woman setting out in the hopes of finding work in Alaska’s fisheries. Lucy’s her dog, and clearly by far the most beloved person in Wendy’s life. They get stalled in Oregon when their car breaks down, and with a budget that’s unforgiving of unforeseen obstacles, their journey ripped from the pages of Jack London is already in danger of a most un-romantic collapse. Wendy’s troubles are exacerbated by a run-in with the police, some unwanted attention from strange forest dwellers, and, worst of all, Lucy’s disappearance.

A girl needs to find her dog and fix her car: Wendy and Lucy is so refreshingly simple and immediate it seems almost a throwback to the task-oriented narratives of Italian neo-realism. Yet Kelly Reichardt’s third feature, which stars Michelle Williams and Reichardt’s own pooch, is rich in atmosphere and in implications about how we live today, our fortress of ostensible prosperity, and who among us is most in danger of slipping through its cracks. Reichardt and Jonathan Raymond adapted the film from Raymond’s story ‘Train Song,’ and for all the desperation, the call of those long steel rails is indeed alluring, as are the images that recall the photography of Walker Evans or Gary Winogrand. It begins with the sounds of a tune softly hummed and a passing train. It ends with the image of a landscape blurring by.

Such elements have become Reichardt’s signature. Her previous film, 2006’s Old Joy, about two old friends who reunite to go camping and begin to realize how time has silently betrayed their youthful ideals, also traversed the Pacific Northwest in the company of characters who exude a certain discomfort with conformity. Reichardt has a special gift for penetrating the lives of such characters with an absolute minimum of artifice. Her films, suffused with humour and subtle eccentricities—Will Patton has a marvelous supporting turn—give off a warmth, linger on the unspoken, allow us to live with these people just long enough to know something about them, to care, and likely feel troubled about where they might be heading.

Reichardt’s a teacher by profession and filmmaker by vocation. From 1994’s River of Grass through 1999’s mid-length Ode and her more recent projects, she’s worked with skeleton crews and skeletal budgets. Her sets operate more like campsites than corporations, and that’s how she likes it. The posh comforts of the hotel room where we met during last September’s Toronto International Film Festival seemed a somewhat incongruous place to discuss such an arduous, no-frills production. But the fussiness of our surroundings fell away soon enough, and we could have just as easily been sitting round a fire in Mount Hood National Forest.

JB: There’s this quality to Michelle Williams in Wendy and Lucy I hadn’t seen before, a severity, a containment that builds to this transcendent, almost Bressonian level of release when we finally get to see her smile. Is it a gamble, figuring out how long audiences will go along with this kind of restraint?

Kelly Reichardt: That was our ongoing conversation. It was a little nerve-wracking for Michelle, but it was important for us to stick with it. It’s funny you mention Bresson because I was thinking of Bresson’s Mouchette a lot while shooting. Its protagonist is a character who’s really buttoned down emotionally and it’s only through small gestures that we gain any access to her interior world. Joan Bennett in Max Ophüls’ The Reckless Moment is another example of a woman who we see really just dealing with the tasks at hand and it’s only at the very end where we see that single-mindedness start to break down. So those are examples of this idea working brilliantly. But basically, I just think that when you consider what’s in store for Wendy, going off to work in the canneries, which is a pretty rough and tumble scene, she can’t be this delicate flower. I thought of Wendy as someone who just keeps looking at her to-do list, who worries about what’s right in front of her, because the big picture would just be too overwhelming. I think the tipping moment with the scary homeless guy in the park is really, amongst other things, a realization of how close her situation is to his.


JB: That scene strikes me in one sense as a response to the end of Old Joy, where we last see Will Oldham’s Kurt looking kind of lost on this street at night, and we’re not sure what he’s destined for. We’re left with a sense that he may not be that well equipped to move forward in his own life and there’s something about those people surrounding him that makes him uncomfortable, something he recognizes.

KR: I think for Kurt it’s more a lifestyle choice, though it still addresses questions regarding how the accepted way to live in America continues to narrow. How does anyone who doesn’t fit inside that model operate? We’re in the middle of this election just now, coming off the heels of the Republican convention and the much-celebrated Sarah Palin speech, which I thought really laid bare the absolute animosity towards people that are living in peril or dealing with poverty. It’s not just that we don’t care about you. It’s aggressive. There’s this meanness to it. With Wendy and Lucy Jon Raymond and I started by thinking about the aftermath of Katrina, this attitude that says, “If these people had their shit together they wouldn’t be in the situation they’re in.” We were wondering about how you pull yourself up if you don’t have an inheritance, if you’ve gone to a shitty school, if you don’t have a job that offers you anything other than a paycheque to get you through the week. If you have the drive but lack the financial or social means, can you really get a toehold in the middle class? So we took this classic American “go west” impulse, this character who does have the drive and desire and determination to get herself into a better situation, and we made a road movie. Now, hopefully all that stuff falls away and what you finally see when you’re actually watching the film is a personal story.

JB: Both Wendy and Lucy and Old Joy have characters that don’t really traverse a lot of distance, yet these films indeed really capture an essence of the road movie. They engage in a dialogue with those themes the best road movies tend to address, such as the illusion of freedom or the way one sees oneself reflected in one’s surroundings.

KR: Well, my first film, River of Grass, is also a road movie. The characters set out to embody the mythology of the road movie but never even get out of their neighbourhood. I seem to have specialized in stalled road movies for some reason. There’s no release or power until there’s movement, and maybe that’s a sort of metaphor for not being able to have a piece of that pie that is the American dream.


JB: Your films do retain these distinctive themes and atmospheres despite there being a considerable gap between River of Grass and Old Joy. Throughout all these years, have you deliberately set about nurturing a certain sensibility? Would you say you have a specific strategy?

KR: I don’t know that there’s a strategy. When I made River of Grass it was with a 13-person crew. People didn’t get along, I was young, and every day was really a struggle. But when I made Ode, which was shot on Super 8 and had only two actors and a two-person crew, which included myself, there was this thrilling intimacy. It was just the ultimate artistic experience. In between River and Ode there’d been these lost years where I was supposed to make this much bigger film and I went to LA. It never materialized and it was a very hard experience. But then I just went back to what I did in college. I dug out my Super 8 camera and had this epiphany. I discovered the sort of environment where I felt I could be creative. A lot of people I know can really feed off of the stress of a bigger production, but it’s not for me. So with Old Joy it was a crew of six, two actors and a dog. We went and rented these cabins, lived in this old growth forest and ate dinner around the fire at night. There wasn’t a lot of separation between the actors and the crew. You’re all in it together, finding it together. With Wendy and Lucy we again tried to keep the apparatus as small as possible. So Michelle really had to come into our world. We’d have to say to her, “I know this isn’t what you’re used to, but when you’re done with that scene pick up that apple box and bring it over here.” [Laughs] And she just got into it. There’s something about having everything that small, you know, there’s no one watching us, no producers coming to set to see what we’re doing. And I guess this has sort of become my method. For however long we can pull it off. We’ll see.

Tender mercy killings: murderous intentions clog perky postwar spousal calm in Ira Sachs' Married Life, now on DVD

1949, the Pacific Northwest. Buttoned-down Harry (Chris Cooper) is in love with Kay (Rachel McAdams), a war widow apparently one-third his age wearing in her first appearance a conspicuously vertiginous bun in her supernaturally Hitchcock blonde hair. Harry's in love, so Harry needs to leave his wife Pat (Patricia Clarkson). But Harry fears the shock will kill poor Pat, and thus Harry figures he’d best beat the grim reaper to the punch and just quietly, mercifully poison her to death. Watching all this from the sidelines and itching for a chance to get in the game is Richard (Pierce Brosnan), Harry’s dapper, dashing old buddy with the sly eyes who wears his hat just so. He offers his cabin in the woods for Harry and Kay to tryst the night away but all the while has his eyes on the prize.

Based on John Bingham’s 1953 novel Five Roundabouts to Heaven, which also goes by the decidedly less cagey title of The Tender Poisoner, Married Life ostensibly excavates post-war repression but really works best as a multiple character study and mood piece that bows devoutly in the direction of the filmmakers whose work drew upon the shadow side of that period’s optimistic façade: Douglas Sirk, Max Ophüls (or at least The Reckless Moment, that marvelously coded domestic noir) and the aforementioned master of suspense. There’s even a scene in which a fateful decision is made while watching a James Mason movie. Directed by Ira Sachs, this movie, a cocktail of equal parts neo-noir and black comedy, is nicely paced and quite engaging, if rather over-calculated and over-reliant on conventional attitudes toward the era’s conformist principals. But maybe its themes seemed just so 1949, or at least 2002, the year of Todd Haynes’ sublime Sirk homage Far From Heaven—Married Life didn’t have much of a life at the box office. It’s now looking for a new one on DVD.

Married Life's distance from its 60-year-old story becomes critical rather than just temporal by way of pairing its characters’ outwardly dominant traits with their polar opposites. Harry is the picture of the gentle company man and supportive spouse, but he’s fucking homicidal; Pat seems the ever-adoring, erotically undemanding homemaker about to get ditched for a younger sexpot, but truth is she’s a minx who thinks people get married first and foremost to get laid on a regular basis; Richard is the poster boy for elegantly aging sexual nomadism but deep down is getting all choked up about settling down and picking out the curtains with Kay. In every case these potentially too-cute character reversals are given breath and texture by the superb cast, Clarkson especially. Only McAdams feels a bit flat here. Totally hot, but flat. (Just like, to twist an expression, Georgia asphalt.) After seeing her shine in The Lucky Ones, it strikes me as kinda funny that she’s more at home playing a soldier than a soldier’s wife.