Midnight in Paris: Better living through better longing

Nostalgia is longing for a past that cannot be returned to—it’s passed. The word is used a lot in Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris, whose protagonist, Gil Pender (Owen Wilson), a dissatisfied Hollywood screenwriter, is writing a novel about the owner of a so-called nostalgia shop and wants to move to Paris so as to bask in a dream of what it would have been like to be a writer in Paris in the 1920s. The word nostalgia has also been used, and will be used plenty more, in all the exegesis surrounding the film. But in every case it’s used incorrectly.

My point here isn’t semantic; what I want to say is that Midnight in Paris, a great Woody Allen movie, is about something different and, in this context, more interesting than nostalgia, something that seems especially personal to Allen. It’s at the root of some of Allen’s most enduringly charming work, such as The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985), and if one were inclined, if could be suggested as the root of Allen’s attraction to much younger women both onscreen, as in the magisterial Manhattan (1979), and off. Midnight in Paris is about fantasy, about the life or the youth or the love you never had at all, yet somehow seems to be slipping away from you with every moment. What Gil longs for never existed, and when he somehow slips away into some realm where his fantasy’s made real, his passage from one place to another is delightfully left unexplained. What makes this very funny film resonate, what imbues its whimsy with wisdom, is its understanding that even in fantasy our longing for that distant, obscure thing must reach its terminal point, and we have to start again, negotiating with the real world, or some rough approximation of it.

Gil is engaged to Inez (Rachel McAdams). They’re “doing” Paris with her parents, and will be unexpectedly joined by Inez’s pedantic former professor Paul (Michael Sheen). Each of these characters are pragmatists who condescendingly dismiss Gil’s impulse to leave both the US and the movie business, and while they’re at it they dismiss his novel too. One night Gil goes off alone to wander the Paris streets. On a particularly lonesome bend, at the stroke of midnight, he’s picked up by a passing car and taken to someplace where everyone parties like its 1922. He’s repeatedly told he “looks lost,” so it seems he’s found the right generation. He meets Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway and Gertrude Stein, and eventually Man Ray, Buñuel, and Salvador Dalí, (Adrien Brody, who wipes the floor with Robert Pattinson and is wildly funny as he arbitrarily obsesses over the image of a rhinoceros). Gil also meets Adriana (Marion Cotillard), who wants to go into fashion, is mistress to the likes of Picasso and Braque, and seems drawn to Gil’s odd sort of melancholy cheerfulness (a combination perhaps only Wilson can conjure so naturally). Like Gil, she also idealizes the past—her belle époque is his 1920s. So their hypothetical romance has a hitch: neither is living in the present.

Wilson is wonderful, emotionally dexterous and taking full ownership of what might otherwise be just another Woody surrogate. Cotillard is deeply alluring. The only weak link is McAdams, though I’d guess it’s entirely Allen’s fault since he’s written Inez far too flatly, telegraphing her obvious incompatibility with Gil from scene one… Well, not quite scene one: Midnight in Paris opens with a lovingly prolonged series of images of the Paris, shot by Darius Khondji, set to Sidney Bechet’s ‘Si tu vois ma mére’, with no close-ups of faces and, highly uncharacteristically for Allen, no voice-over. This lovely foyer to the narrative is all about place, about senses and seduction, about how time just keeps passing us by, and about projecting fantasy onto reality. Which, sometimes, is the best way to remind yourself where you really are.

"There is such a thing as the bliss of evil...": Werner Herzog on The Bad Lieutenant

Call it a twisted little demonstration of the vagaries of karma. Corrupt cop saves guy from drowning and gets saddled with chronic, agonizing back pain for his efforts. Cop is celebrated as a hero while descending deeper into corruption, gambling, gobbling narcotics swiped from the property room, cutting deals with crooks, and generally harassing, threatening, and soliciting sexual favours from civilians. Plus, he’s a total showoff. But then, just when it seems things can’t get any worse, that he’ll never crawl out of the pit he’s dug for himself, everything starts to go his way. Enemies are eliminated. Creditors become pals. Problems disappear. His previously flailing football team even wins a game. We’re left with the possibility that he may be reformed, though it’s difficult to tell. He remains prone to hallucinatory visions of nature, and the lure of chemical therapy never quite dissipates.

Who is Terence McDonagh? He’s played by Nicolas Cage, so we already know not to make presumptions. He’s the titular antihero of The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call: New Orleans, which suggests that this sordid tale we’re watching unfold is just one of many pit stops along some longer road to perdition. Of course it also suggests the movie’s somehow related to Abel Ferrara’s cult classic Bad Lieutenant (1992), though connections are limited to their both featuring lieutenants, and the lieutenants are really bad. Perhaps it’s most useful to regard Terry as, above all, a Werner Herzog protagonist, a terminally marginal male, enigmatic, ecstatic, tainted with hubris, capable of violence, witness to revelations or mirages, a tormented refugee from the dark wilderness of the subconscious. Of course, this is also a cop movie, with a lot of perfectly corny generic cop movie shenanigans. The weirdest thing about The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call: New Orleans, even weirder than it’s absurdly double-coloned mouthful of a title, is that Herzog, author of Aguirre: Wrath of God (72), Stroszek (77), Fitzcarradlo (82) and, more recently, Grizzly Man (05) and Encounters at the End of the World (07), directed it at all. Yet the result is a deliciously improbable success, a shotgun marriage of off-Hollywood exploitation and Herzog’s eccentric, romantic, doom-laden outsider art.

It’s also the marriage of Herzog and Cage, who gives one of his most captivating and imaginative performances, steeped in gleeful pathology, seemingly seized by some invisible force that compels him to do things like terrorize a little old lady in a wheelchair with an oxygen tank. He waits for her hidden behind a door, shaving. Herzog and Cage introduced the movie to a very excited capacity crowd at the Ryerson Theatre during last fall’s Toronto International Film Festival, where both The Bad Lieutenant and Herzog’s My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done had their Canadian premiere. Cage played it cool while Herzog played the showman, a position to which he’s naturally suited. In that unmistakable Bavarian-accent, Herzog merrily boasted about how “Herzog delivers the goods!” He explained how he instructed Cage to “turn the pig loose,” and Cage dutifully complied. Is Cage the new Klaus Kinski? Is Eva Mendes, who plays Terry’s call-girl girlfriend, the new Eva Mattes? Such comparisons do injustice to either party, but it’s clear that this new, increasingly almost multiplex friendly Herzog has found a fresh and reliable muse for his lessons in darkness, an actor who also just happens to be one of the biggest box office draws in the world.

When offered time with Herzog I was thrilled, even though the interview would only run about 25 minutes and would be a roundtable rather than one-on-one. This meant that I’d be sharing Herzog with a handful of other writers, including some who appeared shy of legal driving age and a kindly older lady who a tendency to interject with questions that have nothing to do with the topic at hand. Herzog was utterly charming, irreverent, frequently hilarious, playfully aggressive, and occasionally evasive. It made for a surprisingly funny group discussion. The first young woman to ask Herzog about The Bad Lieutenant got the ball rolling with an ill-advised question the director eagerly pounced upon. I think he made her a little nervous.
“How did you make this remake your own?” she asks.
“Explain remake,” Herzog counters, his eyes narrow, fixed dead on his subject. His body is motionless. “What is the remake?”
“Well it was already… Cause, I mean…”
“Explain it.”
“Cause, uh…”
“You are the one who is challenged now.”
“Cause it’s based on a film by Abel Ferrara.”
“No it is not. Explain that. How is it based on a film by Abel Ferrara?”
“Cause it basically follows a similar… It’s based on a screenplay that was…”
“It is not. What is similar there?”
“Okay… Yeah… Nothing.”
“So why do you call it a remake? Why use the term? Because it’s floating around somewhere.”
“Okay, I’ll ask another question…”
Herzog smiles and sits back and gestures for everyone to relax. “It was just a title that was owned by the producers,” he explains. “They hoped to open some sort of franchise. That is the only connection.”

I get my first chance to pose a question. I try something I’d never normally use as an opener, but the clock’s ticking. “I was thinking that the protagonists in both The Bad Lieutenant and My Son, My Son, like many of your protagonists, are men who commit terrible transgressions yet are seized by unnerving visions of the natural world. I wonder if you see these visions as somehow being redeeming qualities in these characters, or if these visions are what drew you to these stories.”

“I don’t think in such abstract terms,” Herzog replies. “There was a good story in both cases. I didn’t really make much choice. The film projects that I do always come like burglars at night. Like a home invasion! I just get them out. It is legitimate that you ask a question like that, but there are much simpler reasons why I do it. The Bad Lieutenant, a wonderful opportunity to work with Nicolas Cage. We kept an eye on each other for three decades. It never occurred to either of us that we should work together, and then, almost at the same moment, we thought this was an outrage. We started to try to find out about each other. I stumbled onto this screenplay and that same day I got a call from Australia from Nicolas Cage and within less than 60 seconds we were in business.”
“Do you feel any personal connection with these characters?”

“I only know that both are welcome new members to my family of characters. They’re comfortably seated at the table. Your question is certainly correct even if I don’t spontaneously connect to the way of thinking.”

Another writer asks about Cage, in what way was his performance a revelation?
“It’s not a revelation,” says Herzog. “I just pushed him to his limits. Just by my standing next to the camera and lingering there, he knew he had to go for it. He knew this was not a boy-scout field trip! But I’m not one who torture his actors like Kubrick would have done with 120 takes, completely senseless. I shoot two, three times and then it’s over.”
The kindly older lady interjects. “Woody Allen likes one or two shots. He likes to go home at 5:00, he says.”
“Well, he’s lazy bum,” says Herzog. “I’m not finishing my days early because I want to go home by 5:00. I finish it because I know this is the best we could have done.”

A young fellow asks about William Finkelstein’s script for The Bad Lieutenant, noting how much it seems like Herzog’s work, especially the iguana sequences, and lines like “Do fish dream?”
“That’s all mine,” admits Herzog. “And the entire beginning. I said to Billy Finkelstein that the beginning is boring. In his original screenplay the bad lieutenant rescues someone who is suicidal and jumps on the tracks of an incoming subway train. So what? I said we have to start it completely vile and debased and evil from the first moment, so I invented the flooded prison tract and they’re betting over how quickly the forgotten prisoner is going to drown. Also, I wanted to have more substance to the relationship between the young woman and the bad lieutenant, so I wrote the scene with the pirate treasure and the sterling spoon he gives to her as if he were handing over his whole childhood dreams. And of course the iguana and dancing souls, that’s all mine. But it was a very nice collaboration. I liked Billy so much I gave him a part as a gangster. He’s the one whose soul is dancing, with the pink jacket.”
“That’s a very impressive performance,” I blurt.
“Yes,” agrees Herzog. “I make everyone good.”
Everyone laughs.

The young woman who asked the first question returns. “In the movie you see Nicolas Cage being rewarded even though he’s constantly behaving badly. Do you feel that way about American society? That bad behaviour is constantly being rewarded?”
“We must be cautious,” says Herzog. “We are into movies. Nicolas asked me, ‘Why is he so bad?’ And I said don’t bore me with conceptual questions. And he laughed! He said, ‘Is it his childhood? Is it drugs? Is it New Orleans?’ I said to him, ‘There is such a thing as he bliss of evil. Let’s go for that.’ He just nodded and understood what I meant. But don’t draw too many connections to real life and real society. This is movies.”
Another writer says, “You’ve said that fiction is more interesting than truth…”
“No,” Herzog interjects. “Fiction is more interesting than fact. Truth is something way beyond all that.”
“Yet in terms of shooting locations,” she continues, “you vastly prefer a real city with a real story to a studio where you can control everything. Is that because the fact of landscape is inescapable?”
“I’ve never been a person who would ever like to work in a studio,” says Herzog. “Working in New Orleans was quite fascinating. I think the screenplay was written originally to be set in New York or Detroit, and the producer Avi Lerner was very apologetic and said, ‘Werner, we have to look after money, could you consider to do it in New Orleans because we have these fantastic tax incentives in Louisiana?’ I said, ‘Sure, wonderful! Can it get any better? Yes, let’s move to New Orleans!’ And what I didn’t know was that Nicolas Cage was pushing very hard to have it be in New Orleans because he loves the city. He speaks of renewal or being reborn in New Orleans. Whatever he actually means by that is certainly of deeper meaning for him. You can see that city is in a way a leading character. I avoided the clichés, Bourbon Street and voodoo and jazz musicians and you name it. It’s a very bleak…”
“And good restaurants,” says kindly older lady. There is a long pause. No one knows what to say. Kindly older lady breaks the silence. “But I don’t understand bliss of evil. I’ve never felt very much bliss of evil. I’ve felt bliss of good.”
“You are speaking of personal life,” Herzog says to her with a warm smile. “I’m speaking of movies. It’s figments of fantasies. We have to make a distinction. You have probably lived a blessed life so far. The bad lieutenant lives elsewhere.”

TIFF '09: "Shoot him again! His soul is still dancing..." Two new films from Werner Herzog

Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans

The 34th Toronto International Film Festival draws to its close today, and if the end of press and industry screenings, the evacuation of virtually all movie stars, or sheer fucking exhaustion hasn’t sent everyone slouching back home, the sudden, bracing, vertiginous drop in temperatures last night should have done the trick. So here I am, wearing a sweater for the first time in months, goosebumpy, teeth rattling, trying to drink my coffee before it freezes, trying to put the last ten days of movie love and publicist aggravation into some sort of order. Fortunately, every time I think about the interview I was able to do with Werner Herzog, or Herzog and Nicolas Cage’s appearance at the premiere of Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, or Herzog’s comments during the film’s press conference, I start laughing so hard as to generate a surge of body heat. Herzog, whether on stage in a grandiose theatre or in the relative intimacy of a Yorkville dining room, is a true showman, proudly discussing his encouragement of Cage to “let the pig loose” (apparently a Bavarian expression), or affectionately calling Woody Allen “a lazy bum.”

My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done

Herzog had two films at TIFF this year, both with very long names. Besides his batshit, supremely bad-ass Bad Lieutenant—don’t even think of calling it a remake, sequel, or anything that might associate it with Abel Ferrara’s cult classic—there was also My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done, “presented” by David Lynch, featuring Willem Defoe, Michael Shannon, Chloe Sevigny, Grace Zabriskie, and Udo Kier, set largely in suburban San Diego, and like its companion work, also a crime film, though one where the investigation is an entirely psychological and essentially irresolvable one that takes us to the wild rapids of Peru and the (fictional) architectural wonders of Alberta. (It says something about the filmmaker, I think, that he journeys deep into South America and apparently Central Asia to shoot fragments of flashback material for this low-budget feature yet doesn’t feel it necessary to visit Calgary.)

Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans

Both films centre around protagonists who perform acts of violent transgression yet are haunted by mystical visions of nature. Both films, need I even bother to mention, feature cameos by dwarves. If the former is quite clearly a compromise between Herzog’s signature preoccupations and his desire to “deliver the goods” and prove he can make a crowd-pleaser (okay, a totally demented and bizarrely digressive crowd-pleaser), it should be said that it reaches delicious heights of audacity, and offers one of Cage’s finest, most tirelessly inventive performances ever. At one point he hides behind an open door, waiting for the arrival of two women he needs to interrogate, shaving. The most quotable line of any movie at TIFF this year? “Shoot him again! His soul is still dancing,” Cage demands of a Louisiana gangster as he watches another, much older and fatter gangster's errant spirit bust some serious moves on a marble floor. The latter meanwhile, though equally wobbly with regards to narrative coherence, shows Herzog’s approach to atmosphere at its freshest in years, my favourite moments being ones where all characters onscreen suddenly fall silent and stop moving before the camera while a song by Caetano Veloso or Chavela Vargas plays out on the soundtrack.

More TIFF notes on the way...

Detrimental education: Whatever Works

Its title alone, the verbal equivalent of a shrug, evokes creative lethargy, and indeed the script was dug out of a desk drawer caked in 30 years of dust. But no one ever accused Woody Allen of trying to be up-to-date—not even Woody Allen. So if the stray signs of contemporary life spied in the margins of the Manhattan Chinatown locations are just about the only things that keep Whatever Works from feeling like 1979, well, the comic sensibility driving the film is of a considerably elder vintage anyway. And if we like Woody, we’re hardly bothered by his tending to the flame of old-old school humour accompanied by a soundtrack of even older records. “They really don’t write them like they used to,” says our protagonist Boris Yellnikoff. Though he has exclusive knowledge of his being watched by an audience and repeatedly breaks the fourth wall, Boris seems somehow oblivious to the fact the movie he lives inside of is being written very much like they used to.

So another old curmudgeon strikes up an unlikely but not inconceivable romance with a nubile innocent, the pair enacting a variation on Pygmalion in which the professor provides lessons not so much in sophistication as cynicism. Boris is a windbag, a stupendously voluble misanthrope, the self-described intellectual superior of the vast majority of the human race, a fact he’s able to confirm regularly by teaching chess to talentless children who, naturally, he chastises mercilessly. At one point, he suggests that all parents should send their kids to concentration camp. He’s a total prick and makes no bones about it. But he has his vulnerable side: he’s deeply paranoid and superstitious, a failed suicide attempt has left him with a permanent limp, and he has regular middle-of-the-night panic attacks. He's also one of the worst-dressed people in a movie full of people who dress really, really bad.

He’s also got some sort of a soft spot, however small, one massaged by Melodie St. Ann Celestine, an absurdly cheerful Southern elf who Boris grudgingly takes into his home. She talks like an endearing idiot, though we assume must have sort of edge to her given that she had the gumption to leave a stable home and starve it out in the Big Apple all alone with nothing more than the near-uniformly pink clothes on her back. And we know she must possess some sense of discretion when she comes home disappointed after hearing a concert by some band called Anal Sphincter. We might suspect Boris of lecherous intentions but he makes it perfectly clear that he’s uninterested in sex. How these two manage to connect seems to have more to do with desperation and sublime timing.

The casting of Larry David as Boris seems inspired, the star of Curb Your Enthusiasm being a garrulous ranter of singular ability. It’s no stretch whatsoever to imagine David in the role of resident Allen stand-in. But maybe that’s the problem. Had David been forced to stretch a little more he may have been better able to play stakes convincingly, thus making the comedy more urgent and, we hope, funnier. (A few choice moments really fly, but more of them fall flat.) And he may have been able to convey more of a sense of Boris’ inner life, the house of all those kooky contradictions that Allen loves to play with. Boris finally seems like he should really have just been played by Allen, who, no matter how droopy the material, can virtually always make us believe that he’s truly falling in love. Or at the very least, lust.

Rounding out the cast, Even Rachel Wood does a pretty remarkable job of giving Melodie some sort of journey of self-discovery, and if the guy she inevitably leaves Boris for is complete tool—he’s a handsome actor who lives on a houseboat and plays the flute for Christ’s sake—well, perhaps there’s some truth to that sort of match. Patricia Clarkson plays Melodie’s mom and Ed Begley Jr. plays her dad, and they too manage to breathe a little life into their corny types, ie: Jesus-lovin’ Southern conservatives that only need a sojourn in funky ol’ New York with frank atheists like Boris to realize how much richer life can actually be when you redefine yourselves as pseudo-cultured bohemians. But regardless of the cast’s efforts, the unmistakable thinness of these characters, each of them essentially background players in a one-man show, combined with the limits of the story’s dynamics, dependent as it is on cliché plot twists, renders Whatever Works into passable Woody, but hardly must-see. At least it makes an effort to be genuinely optimistic in the end, which is surely not the easiest thing for Woody Allen and, for that alone, I confess I left the theatre with my cockles a little warmer than when I entered.

Nocturnes: Kazuo Ishiguro's variations on a theme always amabile, rarely animato

In Kazuo Ishiguro’s most widely admired novels, such as The Remains of the Day, When We Were Orphans or his most recent, Never Let Me Go, memory’s vice grips conspire with some essential inward tendencies within his narrators to gradually reveal intricate discrepancies between the personal story being relayed and the larger story of the world surrounding. Unreliable narrators constitute a well-mined trope in fiction, but Ishiguro has raised it to a highly particular, melancholy art though crisp, concise language, inventive narratives, a sly manipulation of genres as varied as science-fiction and mystery, and, most especially, an unusual willingness to immerse himself so fully into the minds of his protagonists. I’ve pretty much adored everything he’s written, and greatly admired its daring variation, so I guess I’ve set the bar pretty high.

Still, with Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall (Knopf, $29.95), Ishiguro’s first story cycle, I began to wonder if the one literary boundary Ishiguro’s genius can’t quite traverse is the one that separates the needs of long-from from the short. The stories in Nocturnes are each perfectly absorbing and worth the relatively brief investment required, but taken either as separate components or as a whole—which is presumably the author’s intention—they never quite ascend to Ishiguro’s established heights of emotional complexity. As with all Ishiguro’s work, these stories—of vagabond third wheels trying to interpret the cryptic tensions that exist between couples; of musicians who never quite make it as big as they’d hoped; of lives in stasis contrasted with lives in upheaval—observe the precariousness of nostalgia and the pitfalls of poor communication with knowingness. The problem might simply be that few of these characters truly come to life so as to make that knowingness resonate deeply.

In ‘Crooner,’ Jan, a cheerful young Polish guitarist living in Venice, plays for tourists on the piazza circuit, one of whom being Tony Gardner, a 60ish, once-famous American vocalist. He asks Jan to play backup during a moonlight serenade for Garnder’s wife Lindy. They discuss strategies for injecting specificity of feeling into one’s performances, cultivating those unuttered mental images that imbue one’s playing with texture. What Jan has in his mind—memories of his mother taking consolation in Gardner’s records during bleak days in Communist Poland—differs greatly with what Gardner has in mind—memories of a marriage that for his wife has essentially been a career move. Jan says of his playing: “I tried to make it sound like America, sad roadside bars, big long highways, and I guess I was thinking of my mother, the way I’d come into the room and see her on the sofa gazing at her record sleeve…” Each is lost in private, disparate reveries, but if Jan’s reverie is slightly clichéd, I can’t say I ever bought into Gardner’s story at all. Like a number of the larger-than-life Americans found in Nocturnes, he feels like a conceit.

Lindy Garder however is more developed, particularly since she’s able to return later in ‘Nocturne,’ the fourth story, which—get this—finds Steve, a struggling Los Angeles saxophonist, agreeing to allow the rich man who stole his wife from him to pay for Steve’s plastic surgery, a dubious effort to help forward the unhandsome session player’s lagging career. Steve winds up spending his post-surgery rest period in the posh hotel where he meets the slightly older, rather convincingly batty Lindy, who’s just gone under the knife for the third or fourth time. There are several moments in Nocturnes where Ishiguro, who mastered a Kafkaesque comic vernacular in his underrated The Unconsoled, strains for laughs. But once Steve and Lindy meet, the both of them traipsing around the hotel in the middle of the night with their heads wrapped in bandages, at one point trying to retrieve a stolen trophy from the bowels of a roast turkey, I have to hand it to Ish: this stuff is pretty hilarious. And it cries out for a younger Woody Allen and Diane Keaton, say, to do the movie version.

But in ‘Come Rain or Come Shine,’ similar hi-jinx are thwarted by an uncertain tone or too much repetition. Middle-aged university pals reunite. They’re so comfortable with each other that they can insult each other and, despite protests to the contrary, insist they know what the other is thinking to increasingly absurd degrees. Basically, they don’t listen to each other. This not listening goes on for a while. Again, Ishiguro holds things together. He never betrays the basic traits with which he’s endowed his protagonist—though he does, rather improbably, have him imitate a dog. But what he has endowed his protagonist and his narrative with here is pretty limited, even for a short story. The more serious ‘Malvern Hills’ is similarly founded in a solid premise—young English guitarist meets long-married Swiss tourists so oblivious to each other they don’t seem to exist on the same planet—that doesn’t arrive at a very satisfying resolution.

Which leaves us with ‘Cellists,’ the collection’s final and in some ways strongest tale, partially because while being written in Ishiguro’s customary first-person, the narrator is telling the stories of other people who remain sufficiently enigmatic as to make us wonder about what really transpired between them and where their paths led them in the shadow years after the story finishes. It concerns Tibor, another talented young musician from another Eastern European country—Ishiguro’s quite sensitive to the distinctive experiences of Eastern Europeans who fall under the spell of Western music—whose taken under the wing of Eloise, another American musical celebrity—or at least that what Eloise advertises herself as. Eloise is a fascinating question mark, existing on this strange frontier where it’s hard to distinguish between what passes as lived-in wisdom and as pure fantasy. Her true nature is fundamentally unknown to us, yet what we do know about her are details so carefully arranged that we leave the story wanting to know more without feeling we’ve been ripped off.

Startling intimacies, drifting narratives: Garrel x 2

An actress accosts her filmmaker husband for casting another actress in a role clearly modeled after her. A woman sits perched on a toilet in a pocket washroom while her boyfriend crouches just outside the door, kissing her, which prompts the release of her urine heard tinkling merrily on the porcelain. A couple discuss whether or not one is able to paint the portrait of the other, their very proximity being an obstruction to their ability to truly see one another. A smiling elderly woman explains to a young mother that she’ll always be welcomed here while both clutch a child’s denim jacket, the confused child standing just a few feet away, staring at a man who timidly alludes to his new role as surrogate father. A woman waits on a subway platform while she watches another woman, who we by now see as a sort of double for her, enter a train from the other side and be carried away in the opposite direction from where the woman is heading.

These images, which I’ve plucked more or less randomly from my recent crash course in the cinema of the prolific but under-seen French filmmaker Philippe Garrel, appear onscreen with a minimum of context, if not downright cryptically. Each hovers in its own space, pieces of a mosaic. You get the impression, even after watching only two Garrel movies, that maybe every scene in every Garrel movie hovers in a similar way, the mosaic to which they belong being not any single picture but the whole body of work which, peculiar, at times unabashedly courting pretentiousness, strikes me as genuinely singular.

I Can No Longer Hear the Guitar (J’entends plus la guitare, 1991) and Emergency Kisses (Les Baisers de secours, 89), the movies collected in Zeitgeist’s new Philippe Garrel X 2 two-disc set, generate an atmosphere I can honestly say I’ve never seen in movies before, or at least not pursued with such rigour and for such sustained durations. Garrel has a way of placing the camera before one or two figures—usually gorgeous, forthright women and unassuming, often far weaker, sometimes homely men—and letting them build a vivid hum of intimacy that defies filmic artifice. There’s something of Ingmar Bergman in this, and Robert Bresson too, but Garrel’s lyrical naturalism has none of the carefully honed dramaturgy or overt urge toward transcendence of either. (Garrel cited Jean-Luc Godard as his cinematic idol way back in the 1960s, but it seems to me the Godard movies which feel closest to Garrel’s are the lesser-known, playfully self-referential ones, like 1980’s Sauve qui peut (la vie), which come long after the canonical 60s works.) Garrel’s stories have no beginning and no end. The relationship between these characters and the people playing or directing them often seems flamboyantly blurred. If they had dramatic arcs these stories would resemble Woody Allen movies or Chekhov plays, all these sophisticated couples negotiating their love affairs and philosophizing about the wayward nature of their lives, frequently stupefied by the presence of their offspring.

I Can No Longer Hear the Guitar begins with two couples on holiday, no longer young—or at least no longer innocent—bohemians who seem set on a course of perpetual ambivalence. The movie is dedicated to Nico, the statuesque German-born model and deep-voiced chanteuse most famous for her collaboration with the Velvet Underground on their eponymous debut. Nico lived with Garrel for several years and appeared in a number of his films. Marianne (Dutch actress Johanna ter Steege) is clearly based on Nico, heroin habit included. Marianne and Gerard (Benoît Régent), Garrel’s stand-in, drift together and apart, at times compelled toward stability, at times finding it unbearable and thwarting it however they can, usually through the accumulation of other lovers, their undulating trajectories moving in time to Faton Cahen’s eloquent score.

It was while going into production on Emergency Kisses that Garrel learned of Nico’s death and decided to make a film about their relationship. Yet Emergency Kisses is in fact a far more overwhelmingly self-reflexive work, with Garrel himself playing Mathieu, the filmmaker husband of the disgruntled actress Jeanne, played by Brigitte Sy, who was Garrel’s wife at the time. Garrel and Sy’s son, the now well-known actor Louis Garrel, plays Mathieu and Jeanne’s son. Garrel’s father Maurice plays Mathieu’s father. Garrel’s ex-girlfriend Anémone plays Minouchette, the actress Mathieu chooses to play Jeanne… You get the (meta-)picture, which of course reads like a wildly elaborate form of group therapy but does indeed cohere into something that reaches marvelous heights of emotional richness—though there’s something presumably unintentionally comical about Garrel’s onscreen presence, his enormous mushroom-mound of frizzy graying hair and his little voice. Mathieu and Jeanne, like Marianne and Gerard, do their dance of partnership and paternity, of uncertainty, self-interest, self-loathing and love, and love, as is explicitly stated by the characters, is what makes the stories of their lives. And these stories make for surprisingly absorbing and sensitive filmmaking, culminating in a bravura finale that, after so much talk, engulfs the last moments with a poetry that’s wordless, visually inspired, metaphorically pointed and quite moving.

Starting Out in the Evening: the literary movie, its splendour, and its limits

There’s no mistaking Starting Out in the Evening for anything but a very literary-minded film. There is, rather refreshingly, no sense of apology whatsoever for this from its director Andrew Wagner. The film opens and closes with its protagonist, septuagenarian novelist Leonard Schiller (the marvelous Frank Langella), seated with stony concentration before a typewriter, one thick hand closed around the other, patiently waiting for the conditions, at once familiar and mysterious, to arrange themselves in his mind and body, for that crisp moment that allows him to start his daily work. It is a moment recognizable to any writer, but it also plays with surprising clarity on the screen to a general audience. In these visual bookends is the implication that it is only with Leonard’s intake of breath and the pounding of text onto paper that this particular film can begin and end.

Based on the novel by Brian Morton, and adapted by Wagner and his co-scripter Fred Parnes, Starting Out in the Evening is elegiac, frequently elegant, and, by its very literariness, perhaps a bit cloistered in a world apart from most movies. It is a film in which two of the three central characters, all of them New Yorkers, all of them very comfortable, live their lives passionately for books. Indeed, they converse about everything, even their most conflicted feelings, with a certain formality, a declaratory, almost didactic bookishness. You might say they speak like characters in a Woody Allen movie, except they’re not very funny. For all that, they do feel real. They’re feelings feel real. Their stories are very adult. And, despite a few stumbles here and there, the whole thing is not only intellectually stimulating but also quite moving. Yet, sadly, is it any wonder such a film barely made the rounds in today’s climate of movie distribution? Hopefully, Starting Out in the Evening will find a new life on DVD.

Leonard is visited by one Heather Wolfe (Lauren Ambrose), a young, gifted female student looking for his participation in the development of her doctoral thesis on his work. She petite but strikingly sexy. She has a mane of red hair that frames a round face and large eyes that fix on Leonard like he’s the only person in whatever room. She’s clearly in love of a sort, but also very tough and uncompromising in her attack on his small oeuvre—his first novel changed her life, while the subsequent ones she finds increasingly soft.

Leonard, a long-time widower living in a large but fragile body, is a man whose spent decades carefully nurturing a lifestyle that courts no surprises and is devoted to work. Heather seems set to revive something in him long forgotten, something perhaps connected to some missing vitality in his work. But don’t let the set-up fool you. Both characters go far beyond facile April-December archetypes, things do not wrap up so neatly, there is no wish fulfillment waiting to be enacted, lives are stirred and shifted to be sure, but sweeping changes do not come easy to these people, while betrayal and adoration prove to be close neighbours. Most importantly, Starting Out in the Evening defies the tired notion that art can be reduced by the values of a single age group, a single critical perspective, or of a single era.

There is another woman in Leonard’s life to help thicken the plot. Ariel (Lili Taylor) is Leonard’s daughter, not a literary type but a yoga instructor and once a dancer. She’s pushing 40, wants a baby something fierce, but has serious problems with long-term relationships. After failing at tricking a current boyfriend into unknowing paternity, she goes back to a precarious lover from her past, one disapproved of by Leonard. As terrific and utterly unique an actor as Taylor is, Ariel’s subplot does expose some of the more blatantly artificial mechanics at work in the film, her emotional ups and downs and healing process with her ex are approached rather preciously by Wagner, and they often seem to weigh down Leonard’s story unnecessarily, which is itself more than rich enough for one movie. In short, the breadth of Ariel’s presence in the film does in fact feel like a device more in keeping with a novel than a film.

Starting Out in the Evening works best when most immediate, when words are merely implied or are simply insufficient for even these articulate characters to express themselves, when talking ceases and body language takes over: a brush of fingers on lips, a little wave across a crowded room, a hovering hand over a prone, fully clothed body. In such scenes Langella exhibits a titanic presence, embodying so much while doing so little. Thus it is finally the moments of silent or near-silent connection, as well of those where connections suddenly snap harshly, are the ones that make this film worth watching. They also make Wagner a filmmaker to watch, and make you wonder if Langella, in the “evening” of his acting career, might not just be reaching his heights of grace.