Inside Job: Wall Street Blues

Perhaps it takes one to know one when we’re talking about buckets of money. Charles Ferguson made a bundle selling Vermeer Technologies to Microsoft in the mid-90s, and thereafter opted for research, writing, entrepreneurship, and finally filmmaking, over expanding his yacht collection or trying his hand at arms manufacturing. He last gave us the highly valuable No End in Sight: The American Occupation of Iraq, but I think Inside Job might be the movie he was destined to make, a wide-ranging analysis of the 2008 economic collapse that opens with a title card that declares: “This is how it happened.” I’m in no position to verify Ferguson’s ballsy assertion, but it would be my pleasure to direct you to the theatre where he’s laying it all out for your scrutiny.

If you’re as essentially ignorant about the finer points of financial swindling as I am, rest assured that Inside Job functions as a solid crash course in how markets crash, while those responsible walk away from the disaster in only cozier positions of power and influence. Ferguson’s investigation into the roots of deregulation under Reagan and how it was merrily maintained by every presidency from then on is sufficiently thorough as to reawaken one’s indignation over just how low Wall Street accountability has fallen over the last 30 years. Darting between a few dozen talking heads representing just about every point on the political spectrum—including disgraced former New York attorney general and governor Eliot Spitzer, the altogether enlightening subject of another new documentary called Client 9, which we’ll hopefully see turning up soon—Ferguson conjures an insane parade of predatory loans, $1,000 an hour prostitutes, multi-million dollar bonuses, lobbyists making colossal campaign contributions, Alan Greenspan getting paid $40,000 for a letter of support for Charles Keating’s dodging of the Federal Home Loan Bank’s ten percent rule—that being just one of countless examples of such advocacy—and, as we steer toward the aftermath, President Obama’s failure to do anything about any of it.

For all those who opted to appear in Inside Job there are numerous conspicuous absentees, such as AIG’s Joseph Cassano, Lehman Brothers’ Richard Fuld, former Goldman Sachs CEO and Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, and, obviously, Greenspan. The refusal of so many lowdown higher-ups to be interviewed could have discouraged a different sort of filmmaker, but Ferguson turns it into a running joke. Not a cheap joke, mind you. Ferguson strives to engage and entertain by infuriation, but he isn’t interested in Michael Moore’s shenanigans or sweeping ideological condemnations, which means that Inside Job is a vastly more lucid indictment of American greed than Capitalism: A Love Story.

Ferguson’s cinematic style is slick, sometimes excessively so. Architecture emerges as his favoured storytelling device, the fortress-like skyscrapers that symbolize inaccessibility and decadence, the helicopter overhead shots of cities that incite vertigo. It’s a workable and kinetic if not especially original convention. It shows his visual imagination to be stronger than that brought to the movie’s soundscape. Matt Damon supplies a pleasingly sober narration, but Alex Heffes’ score alternately invokes boilerplate corporate thrillers and gladiator movies and in any case occasionally spills over the top. This weightiness is somewhat balanced by familiar frat rock classics like ‘Big Time,’ ‘New York Groove,’ and the almost obligatory ‘Takin’ Care of Business.’

director Charles Ferguson

At times you wonder if a 90-miute movie is really the best way to present this material, yet the format can arguably reach audiences who are by now glazing over news and magazine pieces on the recession. Ferguson, to his credit, takes care not to snow layman viewers. He surely had to fight the temptation to pile on more data since he’s so obviously better versed in the nitty-grit than most of us. Bottom line: Inside Job gets your attention, and ultimately rewards it. The question is: what happens next?

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.

Unfinished business: books from Aira, Curtis, Bolaño intersect in spooky buildings

Just last week I was reading Roberto Bolaño’s short story ‘Dentist’ and I was struck by something said by the titular character regarding what one feels when in an empty building, or rather, a seemingly empty building: “the reason you’re anxious or afraid is that you know, deep down, that there is no such thing as an empty building; in every so-called empty building, someone is hiding, keeping quiet, and that’s the terrifying thing: the fact that you are not alone… even when everything indicates that you are.”

The dentist’s little monologue is very much a detour, having no direct consequence on the rest of the story, yet this passage stood out, I suppose, because it rings absolutely true: an empty building becomes anxiogenic precisely when you don’t fully believe it to be empty, when you sense a presence whose intentions are, at best, unnervingly ambiguous. And this passage lingered in my mind just long enough for me to notice how it flowers fully in an altogether different text, Ghosts (New Directions, $14.50), César Aira’s wonderfully strange, characteristically taut and yet irreducible 1989 novel, translated by Chris Andrews and now published for the first time in English. The novel takes place largely within the confines of a Buenos Aires apartment building still under construction. The building, still without doors, flooring or even windows, is ostensibly empty, yet the family of a Chilean immigrant worker is squatting there—along with a company of phantoms who typically appear during siesta, naked, and covered in dust. The ghosts are all male. Are they immigrant workers who died on the job? Aira doesn’t say. The date is December 31st. The heat, we’re told, is supernatural.

Was Bolaño thinking of Ghosts when he wrote ‘Dentist’? It’s certainly possible, since Ghosts was first published long before ‘Dentist’ and Bolaño was a vocal admirer of Aira’s work. As well, there is the curious coincidence regarding the Chilean origins of both Aira’s central characters and of Bolaño himself. In fact, Ghosts, in its ebulliently playful, frequently funny way, is somewhat obsessive in its cataloging of the distinctions between the Chilean and Argentine characters and mores. In any case, the way the dentist’s digression on anxiety and empty buildings speaks to Aira’s novel made the reading of it that much more pleasing. However, until well into the novel’s final third, when they make a proposal that will put a character’s life in mortal danger, Aira’s ghosts are not necessarily rendered as terribly frightening. Actually the living squatters seem perfectly at ease with the daily apparitions of the dead squatters. Raúl, the family patriarch and building’s nightwatchman, even stores wine in the thorax of a ghost to keep it cool. (Maybe this is a Chilean thing?)

Though it drifts between a multitude of characters for the first half or so, Ghosts does ultimately settle on a single protagonist—Raúl’s daughter, Patri—and while Aira tends to subvert traditionally coherent storytelling whenever possible, there is an identifiable dramatic climax. But Ghosts is also a kind of jazzy essay, which performs its jig with one foot in vividly detailed, more or less realistic people, places and behaviour, and unfettered, often dazzling abstraction. The in-between state of a partially finished building evokes the purgatorial or transitory. “The architectural key to the built/unbuilt opposition,” Aira writes, “is the flight of time toward space. And dreaming is that flight. While habits, whether sedentary or nomadic, are made of time, dreams are time-free. Dreams are made of pure space, the species that arrayed in eternity.” So seen through Aira’s lens the novel’s setting, like its personage, is both material and rather less than material, And the presence of the ghosts, like that of the Chileans, calls into question the way we feel about architectural space, and—especially in places like my home province of Alberta, which draws so many with its promise of expansive, neatly contained and unsullied property—about the value we place on the seeming newness of newly built or renovated homes, places offered as a sort of tabula rasa upon which we can identify as exclusively ours, places we can gradually forge the imprint of our own experiences on and invest with our dreams of the future, unburdened by the psychic complications engendered by a history.

These thoughts lingered with me as well as I continued to read Barry Curtis’ Dark Places: The Haunted House in Film (Reaktion Books, $19.50), one of the most intriguing recent movie-related books I’ve come across in a while. Curtis has an especially deft hand with examining how a wide variety of cultural influences, from the Gothic to the Surrealists, converge to shape the 21st century notion of the ghost story. And he articulates is crisp, precise language the power of historical burdens on place and the numerous expectations we place on homes, even as out notions about what constitutes a good home evolves in an age simultaneously characterized by the conflicting lures of nostalgia and ecological awareness.

The discovery of Dark Places, which is an essay primarily concerned with architecture and ghost stories, at the same moment that I discovered Ghosts, an essay-like ghost story deeply interested in architecture, has made for one of those deeply pleasurable coincidences a reader comes across now and then, when books come into your hands almost by accident only to then start speaking to one another, while you just sit back and take it all in, picking up one book to continue from page 91 just as the other is being put down on page 129. It’s like literary tag-team wrestling. As soon as I’m finished writing this I’m planning on going back and digging into Dark Places again… Except I’m alone, here in my apparently empty house, and it’s a little bit, I don’t know… creepy.

Building mood: Hiroshi Teshigahara's tour of the architecture of Antonio Gaudí is a sublime study in strangeness

With its broad, undulating surfaces and proto-Cubist mosaics of broken tile, its membranous mugwump spires and smooth spinal railings, its leaf storm motifs and, most of all, its ubiquity of knotty tree imagery, the work of Catalan architect Antonio Gaudí (1852-1926) seems designed to forever inspire pause in passersby, to de-stabilize our sense of passively moving through discreet, utilitarian physical boundaries. When he first laid eyes on Gaudí’s work in the spring of 1959, Hiroshi Teshigahara felt a surge of creative empowerment, later crediting the work with endowing him with an understanding that, like those between shelter and open spaces, the boundaries between artistic disciplines were meant to be questioned. It was a pivotal realization in the development of this most distinctive Japanese filmmaker—and a debt eventually paid in filmic homage.

Antonio Gaudí (1984) is an endlessly striking, audaciously hypnotic, deeply contemplative documentary study of Gaudí’s legacy, which is spread throughout Barcelona and the surrounding countryside: the Santa Teresa School, with its lithe, ovular arches; the Park Güell, with its oceanic outlines, sprawling gardens and serpentine benches; the Casa Batlló, with its skeletal formations that are said to represent the story of St. George and the Dragon; the Church of Colònia Güell, with its cavernous crypt resembling the interior of some massive sea creature; and the great, unfinished Sagrada Família, which has got to be the most tremendously bizarre, subversively sensuous place of Christian worship ever erected. Teshigahara’s cameras explore each of these places, the austerity of the filmmaker’s aesthetic beautifully complimenting the irregular and fantastically intricate aesthetic of the architect.

The film’s comprised almost exclusively of imagery and music, with little in the way of commentary or even titles to interrupt the reverie of looking, scouting, tracing. Context is not developed through biographical, historical or political facts—which can be easily found elsewhere—but rather through revealing how Gaudí’s ostentatious structures interact with the places they inhabit and the people who inhabit them. Among the film’s most inspired depictions of human activity are the images of crowds performing sardana, the ancient circle dance. Curiously, they are depicted without their accompanying music, rendering their motions primordial, trance-like, quite funny.

Above all, with Antonio Gaudí Teshigahara honours his undying awe for his favourite architect through the careful cultivation of a profound sense of utter strangeness, juxtaposing what we see and hear in such a way that it builds up a sort of roiling disquiet. Some of the glacial traveling shots arguably recall the technique of Stanley Kubrick, but more specifically they align themselves with like sequences in Teshigahara’s earlier films, such as those that focus on the weirdly sinister, ever-collapsing sands in Woman in the Dunes (64). There is finally no attempt here to place Gaudí’s work into settings that would make it easily digestible. Teshigahara’s tour of these places is happily resigned to seeing their forms as alien things—and for this reason, Antonio Gaudi makes a terrific double bill with Metro Cinema’s other feature of the week Fantastic Planet (73).

Inland Empire: Lynch and Dern crawl deep inside to break out, crack up, throw down the gauntlet for exploring the new digital landscape

A new neighbour with a Martian-like head drops in on actress Nikki Grace (the fearless, inimitable, marvelous Laura Dern). She accurately predicts that Nikki will be selected for a much-sought-after role and then recalls a folktale about a boy who, leaving his house one day, catches sight of himself in a mirror, inadvertently releasing evil unto the world.

The notion of evil residing in one’s reflection exists in many myths; in Inland Empire it brilliantly manifests as the fearful fascination one finds when one’s image looks back at them from a movie screen.

Polish mobsters, Hollywood prostitutes, movie people, a Balkan circus troupe, anthropomorphic rabbits confined to a room like the trio in No Exit: each of these milieus intersect, refracting off each other over the course of Inland Empire. Things shift from menacing, basically realistic intrigue into a layered world of overlapping anxieties and violence. Causality becomes overwhelmingly tenuous, lucidity evaporates and fantasy takes hold, clenching the fabric of the established reality in its bared teeth. Nikki’s new movie, it’s discovered, has secret, cursed roots in an earlier, unfinished production. She comes to identify with her adulterous role, so closely that her persona blurs into it completely.

While aligning to his previous tropes and unbridled appetite for portent, the self-distributed Inland Empire breaks much new ground for David Lynch. It’s an epic set—not on some vast landscape but in a largely insular, even interior region. It’s visually dynamic, hauntingly image-saturated, yet shot with low-grade DV cameras. It’s more resistant to simple summation than anything since Eraserhead, and so rich with a sense of discovery, goofy humour (enter a panhandling Harry Dean Stanton) and billowing strangeness as to be considered among Lynch’s masterworks.

Exiting a press screening for Inland Empire, I overheard one critic say, “Good thing they didn’t cut that down to only two-hours; then it wouldn’t have many any sense!” A clever quip, but misleading commentary. Yes, Inland Empire is three hours long, much of it audaciously perplexing, rippling with ambiguity even in its resolution. Admittedly, there’s the sense of Lynch being somewhat indecisive, inviting one too many freaks for dinner, but still I’d argue that the movie’s protracted duration itself is a key factor in how it works on you.

Like Hitchcock, Lynch is interested in “putting the audience through it,” the “it” signifying normally unpleasant sensations such as terror and unease. Inland Empire is extremely successful at inflicting unease and one of the ways in which it does so is through sheer hallucinatory relentlessness. Spend enough time in Nikki’s nightmare and you’ll leave the theatre feeling very much like you’ve been through something—and I don’t know about you, but this sort of transporting experience is precisely what I go to the movies hoping to have.

At a crucial juncture, Nikki is putting some groceries in her car when she spots some cryptic writing on a wall. She’s compelled to enter a darkened door and, in a memorably chilling sequence sees—in a manner of speaking—her reflection. From here, Nikki tumbles down the rabbit hole, where she’s lost for a very long time. She enters what appears to be a two-dimensional set. Once she’s inside, however, it proves to be a real, furnished bungalow, one Dorothy Vallens might have inhabited if she moved to the Los Angeles suburbs. She’s entered the labyrinth of Inland Empire, crossing over into a realm where identity, place and even time assume a tempestuous fluidity.

And Lynch himself has crossed over into new territory. His grainy DV creates unstable, textured shadows, looming close-ups, distorting rays of light and the most ghostly hand-held camerawork I think I’ve ever seen. (Lynch says what he loves about these cameras is that he can hold the image in the palm of his hand—accordingly, the camerawork assumes an unusually physical, choreographic quality.) He’s renovated his sensibility to embrace a now primitive technology, ironically employed to capture images of glamour; in doing so, he’s revealed glamour’s darkest underbelly, picking up where Mulholland Drive left off and moving even deeper into the empire of our movie-infected subconscious. 

As a post script, I think it's also worth mentioning that Inland Empire pretty much has my new favourite closing credit sequence ever, employing Nina Simone's rendition of 'Sinnerman' to a very different yet equally tremendous effect as Golden Door did the same year. It's wonderful, flashy, loopy, sort of delirious, featuring numerous cast members, friends, lip-synching performers, a monkey. It's also a shrewd move, a way to keep exasperated audiences in their seats (if they've made it this far...) rather than jolt up or run out screaming, to come down a bit from a long, frequently insane ride. 

Vivre le peau nouveau: Eyes Without a Face

Firstly, it’s a movie consumed with surfaces: a woman in a shiny black leather raincoat stalks Paris in an equally slick, black, beetle-like Citroën; black water at night swirling like an abyss; trees along a roadside at night awash in an x-ray glow of headlights; a carefully-placed pearl choker of milky white; stainless steel medical equipment that reflects hard light in its immaculate cleanliness; a satin gown that renders the wearer a perfect little doll, one whose face is encased in a smooth, immobile mask devoid of human flaw; and in that mask a sight so tragic and gruesome that the frozen camera can’t turn away, can only mercifully fade to black.

Originally released to much outrage and disgust in 1960, George Franju’s Eyes Without a Face (Les Yeux sans visage) was too well crafted to be dismissed as just another exploitation horror flick. Nobody seemed to know what to do with it, and so it was destined to achieve its classic status only gradually. It's still absolutely chilling and quite singular, a skin-crawling tale of obsession, arrogance and murder both lyrical and clinical. As Carlos Clarens wrote in his 1967 Illustrated History of the Horror Film, with only his second feature (after numerous shorts and documentaries), Franju had lit upon “the elusive alliance of poetry and terror.”

Doctor Génessier (Pierre Brasseur) works in a clinic near his sprawling estate outside Paris. Though highly regarded for his advances in plastic surgery, Génessier has withdrawn from social life following the disappearance of his daughter Christiane (Edith Scob), who literally lost her face in an accident in which Génessier was the driver. Everyone, her fiancé included, assumes Christiane has suicided; she’s in fact secretly confined in her father’s mansion, awaiting the experimental surgery that her father has promised will give her back her face, surgery requiring the face of another, unwilling, donor.

Synopses don’t suit Eyes Without a Face. The story, simple as a fairy tale, builds at a deliberate pace, offering information in short doses and building suspense with little exposition. Early scenes in which Génessier’s devoted assistant Louise (Alida Valli of The Third Man) prowls the Latin Quarter, smoking cigarettes and sizing up young women are presented ambiguously, and Franju gives an ominous degree of attention to simple movements through doors, down corridors, up stairs, as though our sense of architecture were essential to our understanding of the drama silently unfolding. It’s weird, and through its unsettling weirdness works very well.

I mentioned surfaces: the cold brilliance of this story, cleanly adapted by the team of Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac (Les Diaboliques, Vertigo) from Jean Redon’s novel, lies in our peculiar attachment to our faces, that body part most closely associated with our sense of identity, thus the surface reflects unseen depths. But ironically, though Franju lingers on many faces throughout, its probably Christiane’s mask that, while unspeakably creepy, is also the most affecting face in the movie. Animated only by voice and gestures made by her thin limbs, the mask becomes a haunted and haunting thing, with Scob constituting the movie’s closest thing to a truly sympathetic person.

Uncontrollable and uncooperative, flesh itself is an independent force in Eyes Without a Face, a sort of precedent for David Cronenberg’s flesh-driven films. But by the wondrous, beautiful final images, aflutter with newly released doves, dogs and leaves caressed by evening breeze, we see that Eyes Without a Face is also about the spirit, adrift in a world full only of imperfect houses in which in can dwell.