Certified Copy: Stranger things have happened

An English writer (William Shimell) arrives late for his own book launch in Arezzo, Tuscany. The book (like the film we're watching) is called Certified Copy. It seems primarily concerned with art history, and its proposal, from what we can gather (the content of the writer's lecture is deliberately overshadowed by whispers and gestures exchanged between a woman in the audience and her son), addresses the slippery nature of authenticity and the inherent value of copies, or reproductions. It’s a subject at least as old as the essays of Walter Benjamin, yet technology has marched furiously ahead in such directions as to keep it from ever becoming dated. The writer is perhaps 50; he’s tall, thin and handsome, chilly yet charismatic; he has a dry sense of humour and a healthy contrarian streak; he seems the antithesis of an academic while writing on subjects that are commonly the stock and trade of the academy. (Could the model for this character be Geoff Dyer?)


The woman having such trouble concentrating on the writer’s lecture (Juliette Binoche) is French but lives in Arezzo, where she runs an antique shop. She seems only slightly younger than the writer, and is very attractive, endearingly nervous, seductive yet moody; she’s alternately flirtatious and argumentative, intelligent yet capable of emotional impulsiveness. She’s purchased multiple copies of Certified Copy for the writer to sign—that is, to certify. Her mischievous adolescent son (Adrian Moore) notes that she seems very drawn to the writer, even while she expresses serious doubts about the validity of his book’s thesis. The day after the lecture, the writer arrives at the woman’s shop and they go for a drive. (This is where you stop reading should you want to enter the film’s second half without a net.) They find themselves in Lucignano, a medieval village where people go to get married, and it’s here, in a moment of transformation so elegant, subtle and carefully graded, that the writer and the woman, who seemed in every way strangers, undergo a drama of re-marriage. A café proprietor assumes they’re a couple, and so a couple is what they become, the parents to the woman’s son, 15 years married, though apparently living apart.


How we shifted from one sort of relationship to another is fascinating and mysterious (though a second viewing reveals certain hints in the film’s first half regarding what will transpire in the second), yet once that shift occurs there’s nothing vague or under-nourished about the ways in which the writer and the woman express their frustrations, argue, reminisce or negotiate their disparate needs as a married couple. In fact, for a film so draped in ambiguity, Certified Copy boasts one of the most resonant and deeply moving—and at times very amusing—portraits of marriage I’ve came upon in a very long while. This is partly due to the precision and unobtrusiveness of the director’s hand, and partly to the seeming transparency of the acting. Shimell is an opera singer and has never acted before, and he seems all the better for it, giving a convincingly re-active performance. Binoche seems to have immersed herself fully into the role (she’s joked that she was merely playing herself); she’s unapologetic about her contradictions; she’s an actress who understands her craft so thoroughly that her craft has merged completely with her being. There are moments in this film that make a strong case for Binoche as one of the finest living masters of the close-up; there is so much going on when the camera isolates her, and none of it feels forced.


Certified Copy is Abbas Kiarostami’s first dramatic feature made outside of his native Iran. It’s both easily recognizable as a Kiarostami film (the layers of performance especially) and as a European art film. Certain points of reference will quickly announce themselves to the cinephiles in the audience—the premise recalls Voyage to Italy and Last Year in Marienbad, while the temporal structure (the writer has to make an evening train), the emotional build, and the final moments recall Before Sunset—yet Certified Copy feels like the epitome of an organically developed story, something that emerged fluidly from a stray notion that must have initially seemed an improbable idea for a film. In that sense, we can locate within Certified Copy a sort of talisman: amongst all the mirrors, the various spoken languages and the inadequate translations that so clearly contribute to the film’s themes, there is also a small part played by none other than Jean-Claude Carrière, who co-authored the scripts for the latter films of Luis Buñuel (so many of them founded in something illogical, yet nonetheless comment brilliantly on human behaviour). Carrière shows up to give a little marital advice to the writer, and you wonder if in some non-verbal way he was also present as a reminder to Binoche, Shimell, and Kiarostami that strange things happen every day. That people fall in love and try to forge lives together is only one of them.

Earwitness to an assassination: Blow Out

Jack (John Travolta) is a sound-effects technician, and thus a gifted listener, which might be another way of saying he’s a born aural voyeur, if you will. Blow Out (1981), Brian De Palma’s conspiracy thriller, continues a rich tradition, following Antonioni’s Blow-Up (1966), which was inspired by Cortázar’s story ‘Las babas del diablo’ (1959), and Coppola’s The Conversation (1974), in that it hinges on its protagonist’s special ability to perceive an incriminating detail hidden in a recording. The inciting incident: Jack’s perched on a bridge in a park at night in search of some good wind. Wearing headphones, handling a baton-like microphone, he captures not just wind in the trees, but also a whispering couple, an owl, and, fatefully, a car skidding off a road and plunging into the river. Jack rushes to help. He can’t save the driver but manages to rescue the driver’s lovely young companion (Nancy Allen). Later, in emergency, he’s told that the driver was a popular presidential candidate. He’s also told there was no lovely young companion, or rather, he’s told that the companion will simply be erased from the official record, just as Jack might excise a single track from a soundscape. Furthermore, Jack’s told that a certain noise he heard (and recorded) just a second before the accident never occurred, a noise that sounded like a gunshot.

Blow Out navigates the elusive bridge that divides authenticity and artifice: a bridge built on technology. This theme is cleverly integrated right into the film’s opening sequence, when a screening of an excerpt from Jacks’ current project, the exploitation slasher film-within-the-film, could initially be mistaken for the film itself. It’s interrupted only when one of the slasher’s naked nubile victims lets out a scream that doesn’t sound authentic enough and the producer calls the screening to a halt. (Amusingly, the producer tries to find a more authentic scream by bringing pairs of young women into the studio: one screams into a microphone while the other pulls her hair.) Jack knows the woman was in the car; he knows there were two sharp sounds: first the gunshot, then the blow out. But he has to get someone to believe him, to listen as he listens. We in the audience know there’s no ambiguity or paranoia here: we know Jack’s telling the truth because, unlike The Conversation, Blow Out doesn’t adhere exclusively to its protagonist’s subjective experience. De Palma breaks away from Jack on several occasions to follow John Lithgow’s misogynistic hired killer with a penchant for strangling his victims with wire. (A playful linguistic doubling: Travolta and Lithgow each possess their own kind of potentially lethal “wire.”)

Blow Out is the most compelling De Palma film I’ve seen. Its camerawork, courtesy of Vilmos Zsigmond, is relentlessly inventive; it’s heightened red-and-blue-all-over production design (perhaps substituting film noir’s black and white with a punchier sort of monochromatic palate) makes for weirdly fascinating eye candy; and its obsessive replaying of Jack’s recording of the assassination, along with its cluttered mechanical milieu of tape, reels and buttons, is engrossing. I have several reservations, yet thinking about them makes me want to watch Blow Out again (something that Criterion’s velvety-gorgeous new DVD and Blu-ray editions make that much more tempting). Travolta is young, beautiful, and gives a focused, nuanced performance, yet his character feels inadequately shaded, less implicated in the story’s darkness. Yes, Jack’s got a guilty conscience about an undercover police gig that went horribly wrong, yet this shadowy past doesn’t resonate in his presence. It feels oddly incidental. Meanwhile De Palma’s use of split screens, process shots, variable speeds and 360-degree pans become increasingly leaden, and Pino Donaggio’s cartoony score thwarts at least as many moments of intimacy or suspense as it enhances.

I know many have tremendous affection for De Palma, fellow critics especially (“Paulettes” most especially). Yet there’s something in his approach that consistently pushes me out. His work deserves scrutiny on a film-by-film basis, but I’ll offer one generalization. Whenever De Palma unfurls his more expensive, grandiose set pieces, whether in Blow Out or The Untouchables (1987) or The Black Dahlia (2006), when everything slows to a crawl and every frame is so conspicuously composed, I inevitably feel as though I’ve been asked to sit through an over-rehearsed audition. There’s a strange thinness to these sequences (not unlike the thinness that plagues certain De Palma characters). De Palma’s frequently taken to task for cynicism or irony, but the way he crafts such sequences strikes me as nakedly earnest. He suddenly wants genuine opera, and it feels awkward. Yet in the case of Blow Out the big set pieces hardly spoil things overall, and the quieter bits (that inciting incident especially) are eloquent and highly memorable. So if you happen to share some of my frustrations with De Palma, do see this one. It’s looking an awful lot like his masterpiece.

Flying in a pocket of silence: Kes on DVD

Early in Kes (1970) Billy Casper declares that he will not grow up to work in the coal mine that consumes droves of Barnsley lads, his big brother Jud included, like so much grist for the mill. Yet even in this first scene Billy could almost be “in the pit” already, sharing a twin-sized bed with the bullying, loutish Jud in a cramped, fatherless flat in the cold gloom of an early Northern England morning. Based on Barnsley-born Barry Hines’ novel A Kestrel For a Knave (1968), produced by Tony Garrett and directed by Ken Loach, Kes, while unwaveringly focused on working-class marginality and crushed ambition, is not fundamentally pessimistic. Rather, its raison d’être lies in its authenticity, in granting its characters their due dignity by conveying their arduous lives and meager options for advancement with as much fidelity to the political realities of its era as possible.

If there’s a balm for deterministic despair in Kes it’s in the film’s warm and abundant humour, especially the scene where Billy, 15 but boyish and slight enough to slip in your backpack, attempts to let a book out from the local library, but having no membership and not wanting to wait to get his mum to sign the form claims, with utter deadpan, that he’s old enough to vote. It’s in the natural light, blue hues, gentle attentiveness and subtly lyrical camerawork of cinematographer Chris Menges. It’s in Barnsley boy David Bradley’s tremendous, artless central performance, in Billy’s tender relationship with the kestrel falcon he captures, tames and befriends, in the quiet promise of freedom Kes (as Billy dubs the bird) represents whenever she takes flight in the open spaces near Billy’s home, transforming her surroundings into a “pocket of silence” (evoked delicately through composer John Cameron’s solo flute passages) in which Billy can fleetingly take refuge from a life of abuse, neglect and outright dismissal. Kes achieves a balance rare in movies, rare even in the oeuvre of the British cinema’s most committed socialist auteur, Ken Loach: it’s at once adorable and unsentimental, endearing and appallingly brutal. It’s now available from Criterion.

Among the most valuable supplements in Criterion’s Kes are its subtitles (the Northern accents are doughy as Yorkshire pudding) and an earlier Loach-Garrett feature, the made-for-TV Cathy Come Home (1966). Employing jarring jump-cuts and abrupt aural transitions from dietetic dialogue to music to collages of commentary from a chorus of citizens and social workers (Loach was apparently gobbling up a lot of Godard in those days), this bracing docudrama exposes Britain’s postwar housing shortages via the deftly compressed story of a young Birmingham working-class couple. Limited job prospects, a work-related accident and a tendency to produce offspring snare the couple into increasingly punishing living conditions, Cathy’s bitchy mother-in-law’s tiny flat being far from the worst of them. Cathy Come Home is a harrowing condemnation of classist policies that was watched and discussed by millions during its original broadcast, though the issues it addresses regarding access to affordable housing remain urgent in cities here and elsewhere. It also reminds us what a loss it was that its remarkable lead actress Carol White’s career evaporated a few years later, the result, it seems, of bad habits, bad substances and bad relationships with famous men. She died in Florida in 1991 at the age of 48.

Open House: The Kids Are All Right

For having been together for the better part of two decades, the ever-searching-for-organic-harmony aspiring garden designer Jules (Julianne Moore) and her no-nonsense Dr Nic (Annette Bening) are faring well. We meet them during what seems like a spell of marital routine fatigue, yet there’s a sense that neither is willing to go too long without attending to the other’s needs, whether that manifest through Nic giving Jules space to work through her spiritual issues or Jules performing cunnilingus on Nic while she watches hunky guy-on-guy porn, a quirk that makes for what’s surely the movies’ funniest lesbian love scene.

Their teenage kids, meanwhile, are more than all right. Sure, Laser (Josh Hutcherson) hasn’t yet found his calling and is into homoerotic wrestling with a homophobic moron, while seemingly straight-laced Joni (Mia Wasikowska), readying herself for college, goes behind the moms’ backs to track down the siblings’ biological dad, but such minor transgressions reveal a perfectly healthy curiosity and robust sense of good will. So the stakes in The Kids Are All Right arise not through perilous character flaws or insurmountable familial feuds, but rather through the accumulation of smaller tensions as its story builds, specifically from the introduction of mystery sperm donor Paul (Mark Ruffalo) into the family dynamic. A sexy, scruffy restaurateur with a habit of avoiding interpersonal commitments, Paul’s intrigued by his new friends, by the unexpected possibility of being a genuine dad, and, just maybe, by the even stranger possibility of luring Jules away.

Director/co-writer Lisa Cholodenko chronicled women shedding off stolid conventional lifestyles to explore the cultural fringe in High Art and Laurel Canyon. With The Kids Are All Right she now seems interested in seeing what happens when seemingly unconventional lifestyles have become entirely domesticated. Make no mistake, this is a movie about family values that actually values family. Beautifully captured through sinuous, sun-soaked, hand-held photography that seems always alert to the nuances of its superb ensemble, this film’s group portrait is warm, fun, and complicated, its politics left entirely implicit so that these characters can behave like real people instead of mouthpieces—if the film can do anything to persuade its opponents that gay marriage represents any sort of scourge to society, it’s by letting this particular gay marriage simply exist up there on screen, warts and all.

Moore and Bening are so good together that they can be bad to each other without our feeling as though their conflicts are dramaturgical conceits. When called upon to explain the kick they get from guy-on-guy porn, Moore mumbles something about the inauthenticy of most ostensible lesbian porn being an unsexy distraction, but there’s no such distractions to be found in the employment of these two famous actresses, both of them married to men, playing a lesbian couple. Like Hutcherson and Wasikowska, they graciously fail to comment on their sexuality. They focus rather on enriching the storytelling by giving the fullest possible life to these characters, whose dialogue, it must be said, isn’t always very good, and occasionally slips into cliché. It’s no slight to say that Cholodenko’s casting often trumps her writing since this story’s eloquence is in the unspoken aspects of its interactions.

Ruffalo is wonderfully passive-aggressive as the interloper, soft-spoken, entirely sympathetic, yet often on the defense. “I’m a doer,” he says in response to his lack of education. “I’m funny that way, I guess.” It’s unfortunate that Paul gets sort of abandoned in the final act, because in the first two-thirds he’s treated as an equal within the film’s ensemble, developing, making discoveries, and having scenes all his own, entirely outside of those pertaining directly to the family. Moving as gracefully as it does from one busy, diverting and thorny sequence to another, The Kids Are All Right only starts to reveal its shortcomings in this last section, when it starts to abruptly, somewhat forcedly shut all those doors it previously left wide-open as it searches for resolutions that aren’t entirely needed. So we should see this film not to anticipate closure but to bask in its transitory pleasures, which are plentiful. Kids grow up and leave home, bachelors get middle-aged and anxious, marriages get knocked around and need time to regain their senses. Sometimes you just have to enjoy the fleeting chaos before it all passes you by.

Secrets between silences: Genius Within: The Inner Life of Glenn Gould

The solitary figure wanders through the autumnal Ontario hinterland, in famous overcoat, gloves and cap, lingering here and there, swinging his arms as though conducting the rivers and woods to ripple and sway with greater zest. We hear the figure’s disembodied voice, expressing a sense of “distance from the world” as being an endemic virtue of music and art. Of course the figure only seems solitary, only seems distant, a triumphant escapee from the oppressive hubbub of the world—someone else, after all, is operating the camera.

Having exploded on the world stage in the mid-1950s, Glenn Gould was arguably the most thrilling, iconoclastic concert pianist alive before taking his final bow just a handful of years later at the age of 31. Only half-jokingly, he once referred to audiences as “a force of evil.” He continued to make records and developed a career in broadcasting and theory that would in some sense equal the dynamicism and brilliance of his virtuosic musical performances. Yet this retirement from the stage also indulged Gould’s considerable quirks. It was accompanied by a retirement from public spontaneity. His public persona became honed to the point where nothing could escape his meticulous design. So we should not mistake that lonesome kook in the wilderness as anything less than a calculated, and highly marketable image. Which is not the same thing as mistaking this as a false image. Just as Gould’s more considered, more meditative 1981 recording of Bach’s Goldberg Variations should not be mistaken for some sort of false reworking of Gould’s youthful and more frenetic 1955 recording. Both possess their disparate authenticity. One Glenn Gould is not necessarily more real than the other. This elusiveness of singular truth in biography or in art is among the compelling subjects of Michèle Hozer and Peter Raymont’s new documentary Genius Within: The Inner Life of Glenn Gould.

While it isn’t able to delve very deeply into certain areas of his diverse achievements, especially as a theorist, Genius Within offers a coherent summation of Gould’s major artistic feats, not to mention his well-known eccentricities—the drugs and hypochondria, the humming and unusually intimate relationship the keyboard, the Petula Clark fixation—with tributes from the likes of Russian conductor and pianist Vladimir Ashkenazy and Canadian philosopher Mark Kingwell. Where Genius Within boldly strays from the established Gouldology is in its focus on Gould’s personal relationships, such as his friendship with the recording engineer whom he asked to become his legal brother, and most especially his affair with painter and mother-of-two Cornelia Foss, who was still married to composer and conductor Lukas Foss for the duration of her five-year relationship with Gould. She provides some of the most candid and insightful comments about the hazy region that spans the gap between Gould the solitary, difficult artist, and Gould the sociable, romantic, child-friendly domestic.

Throughout Genius Within Hozer and Raymont emphasize the gray zone between the myth and the essentially unknowable man, all the while enriching our appreciation of the music. They also, as the title implies, subtly attempt to get at what it is that constitutes the genius of one such as Gould. Happily, some mysteries remain too durable to penetrate.

Giant Steps

The titles or authors I can’t recall, the content only barely, but the photos in my elementary school’s surprisingly bountiful selection of Bigfoot books spring back into memory as though only days, rather than decades, have passed. The thing lived on the peripheries of the visible, so naturally it was the images that really mattered. The elusiveness of the creature could not have seemed more carefully designed. The iconic, infinitely reproduced stills from the 1967 Roger Patterson film, sensuously grainy, as though the creature’s fur were mottled with blur, and that pose, looking back over its shoulder like a wounded lover bidding a dramatic farewell, fascinated me like it did millions of other kids, and, I guess, almost as many adults. Bigfoot was already so perfect, I couldn’t understand why anyone would want to alter its allure by trying to prove its existence, or by, most appallingly, trying to hunt it down and kill it. Bigfoot—or Sasquatch, to use the more noble-sounding and proudly Canadian term—would only ever be Bigfoot so long as it remained in the shadows, off the grid, never quite seen by prying eyes.

Author Joshua Blu Buhs

Much to the chagrin of those determined to usher the creature into the annals of legitimate science, Bigfoot lends himself quite nicely to being placed within the universal myth of the wild man, a potent symbol of our primal conscience. If he does exist, would Bigfoot be the product of nature, or would be some manifestation of the collective unconscious, a shared desire to believe that something almost human could persevere uncorrupted by the domesticating and soul-deadening effects of civilization, a Frankenstein’s monster built not of disparate body parts but of fragments from our vast cultural swamp? Such questions, however ridiculous the subject matter might seem to some, can yield complex and revealing answers, and I can’t imagine anyone providing better ones that Joshua Blu Buhs does in his engrossing read Bigfoot: The Life and Times of a Legend (The University of Chicago Press, $34.95). The book is a biography of a figure whose existence is extremely dubious at best—and Buhs, while remaining respectful of true believers, makes clear from the outset that he’s not among them—and is thus in essence a biography of the conditions under which this figure was cultivated and came to thrive. Buhs tells a great story by weaving together a multitude of interrelated stories taking place over two continents and the better part of a century. There are countless terrific anecdotes: the man who shot Bigfoot and listened to him tell his life story as he lay dying; a guy being abducted by a Bigfoot and held captive in a cave with an entire Bigfoot family, the implication being that he was destined to become the boyfriend of Bigfoot’s daughter; Jimmy Stewart agreeing to smuggle a Yeti paw from Nepal to England. Bigfoot spawned a lot of things, among them great stories, heated arguments, and a hugely profitable industry. But along the way he also spawned a community of misfits, some passionate and articulate, some cynical, some cracked. The story of their formation is one of the book’s highlights.

“What accounts for Bigfoot’s popularity?” Buhs asks. Perhaps it is that the possibility of its existence “was evidence that the world was not yet fully explored, that there was still room for man to test his mettle, to touch the really real behind the false front of consumer goods and scientific arrogance.” This angle, of modern man—and we are talking mostly about males here—alienated by an intellectualized, feminized, materialistic or reductive culture lies at the heart of Buhs’ thesis. The men who made Bigfoot what he is were mostly white, working-class and rural, loggers, hunters, small town reporters, disgruntled scientists and more than a few outright con men, Patterson, as most reports attest, being one of them. Following the emergence of sensational Yeti reports in the Himalayas, sightings of Bigfoot in the Pacific Northwest and of Sasquatch in British Columbia, as well as reports of traces of the creature, such as hair, feces and, most famously, footprints, began to accumulate in the 1950s, leading to an explosion of Bigfoot related material in the 60s, the overwhelming majority of it turning up in magazines devoted to a blend of traditional masculine interests and the paranormal. As Buhs traces the development of Bigfoot iconography a compelling case is built around the creature fulfilling a deep need, becoming a figure of authenticity in a world where so much of what constitutes daily life is composed of the overtly phony, and mass produced.

Yet from almost the very beginning Bigfoot seemed ready to be co-opted. The creature represented a tireless resistance against consumerism within the very culture in which consumerism was born, yet this same creature was all too adaptable not only to the dictates of literature and movies, but to New Age ideologues and people trying to sell more Canadian Club and Kokanee—like a good many backwoodsmen, Bigfoot, it seems, is a heavy drinker. He would with time become safe, cuddly, a best friend to the Hendersons. He would be the poster monster for environmentalists, and a sort of prototype for the teachings of Iron John and Women Who Run With the Wolves. The creature has never been captured, but he has been stuffed with fire-repellant materials and can be frequently found enjoying a wild ride at Disneyland. By taking a closer look at the cultural history, Buhs suggests that with the demise of the primitive Bigfoot and the ascendance of the new, hip, fully tamed one, we can trace some sort of gradual surrender to the unstoppable juggernaut of modern artificiality. The stalwarts, meanwhile, have not given up their vigil. The creature may still be out there, immune to polluted streams and deforestation, smacking his feet into some soft earth as a way to say “I was here,” and laughing at us as he returns to his cave to watch free cable.

Ballast: death, family, responsibility, and the precarious art of aestheticizing poverty

Ballast begins with one self-inflected death, that of Lawrence’s brother Darius, and it might have been two if it weren’t for the kindly neighbour being nearby and calling in Lawrence’s suicide attempt, a gunshot to the chest that pierced his lung but failed to deliver him from this altogether bleak and newly lonesome rural Mississippi winter. Lawrence’s remaining behind after his brother’s death feels either a betrayal of some biological contract or the completion of some ruthless process of deterministic reduction. Lawrence and Darius, you see, were twins, and Darius, unamicably estranged from his wife and son, has left Lawrence alone and with much to resolve. So Ballast becomes a story of ambiguous responsibility, and forgiveness too, and, more subtly, identity asserting itself by force of fate.

The clouds hold rain and the people hold massive emotions, but the movie is, for the most part, rigorously unassuming. Writer/director/producer Lance Hammer’s valiantly self-distributed feature debut was a critical favourite at Sundance a year back, and, really, you have to figure that sheer austerity and the mere presentation of impoverished African-Americans had more than a little to do with that. The camera work, courtesy of Lol Crawley, is hand-held but shot on 35 mm, with a striking beauty to its expansive overcast landscapes and stark compositions. The rhythms are jarring and the jump cuts made even terser by the utter absence of any musical scoring. The talk is most often subdued, and at times the whispered mumbling is almost perversely obscure. This world of rattling trains and strip malls in the middle of nowhere, of wood paneling and track pants, of bottled-up despair and readily available guns, vividly evokes the lives of so many Americans that rarely make it into the movies. It all makes an impression, but I guess I just have to say that at times it also feels generic, like these characters and this approach are closer to elegantly selected tropes than to the unadorned reality that Hammer seems to be striving for.

Lawrence (Michael J. Smith Sr.) is but one third of Ballast’s centre. James (JimMyron Ross) is his nephew and Marlee (Tarra Riggs) his sister-in-law, that is, the family Darius left him with. They mightn’t have had any reason to communicate, much less reconcile, if it weren’t for James’ involvement in the local crack-peddling scene, thus the need for Lawrence’s gun, and Marlee’s discovery that Darius bequeathed to her his half of the house and convenience store business he shared with Lawrence. Neither party initially sees any opportunity in the inheritance, but economics and, one guesses, a lingering sense of familial duty, driven by desperation, will make picking up the pieces of the business and moving into the house seem more inviting than trying to sell everything off for what will surely be a pittance.

Of course the relationships I’ve just described are in some sense spoilers. Hammer lets us in on how these characters interconnect in a strictly piecemeal fashion—this is very much in keeping with the movie’s style and doesn’t feel needlessly withholding or gimmicky—but it’s difficult to say much about Ballast without setting these bare facts straight. So many things are broken or breaking at the onset of this story, and it is these points of connection between people that provides the only traces of hope. Yet it’s in these very connection points that Ballast reveals its limitations. Some of the moments shared by Lawrence and James resonate intensely, an effect only heightened by masculine codes of reserve and by the bracing emotional residue of Darius’ departure. Moments shared by either of these guys and Marlee however prove more problematic. Riggs gets stuck with the movie’s most awkward bits of dialogue. One scene finds her coming home after losing her job, nearly hysterical as she launches into a short monologue about how being black and poor renders her invisible in the work place. This scene is an especially strong example of how Ballast, for all its understated tone, can be both overly expository and didactic.

Am I coming down too hard on this handsome, well crafted and let’s say a little too earnest independent? My intention isn’t to bully the underdog but to simply acknowledge that the careful nurturing of a sensibility isn’t quite the same thing as actually telling a story in the most honest way. I was engaged in Ballast. It certainly looks like a movie I like. (Am I too suspicious of movies that look too tailored to me tastes?) But I also felt left outside of it, as though it were more a type than a specific thing. I encourage you to see it, and to disagree.

Paradise lies on the other end of the magic intestine: Coraline

It all begins with a girl and a house. Her parents are there, too, having just transplanted the whole family, but they’re too bogged down with gardening literature projects to even bother unpacking and sprucing things up, and anyway they’re too impatient. There’s also the neighbouring boy, but he’s so sheepishly well intentioned and sort of annoying, and anyway, a boy. There’s a cat, but he’s a mangy old puss that’s kind of falling apart. There are other neighbours who will prove to be genuine eccentrics and sources of diversion, but they come a little later. So what sticks in my mind after watching it is Coraline (voiced by Dakota Fanning) and this house, looming, so empty and creaky and drab, like pretty much everything surrounding it in this permanently overcast, hilly rural Halloween setting.

Coraline and the house are a good match, even if she doesn’t recognize it at first. She’s sly and given to mischief, while the house hides a secret labyrinth. They’re both deceptively compact, she being so slight yet fiercely resilient, and the house, for all its dilapidated grandeur, holds countless inner passageways and impossible spaces. Soon she’ll discover a little door in a wall that during the day opens only onto brick but at night onto this intestinal tunnel, at the end of which is a parallel world where everything seems sort of the same yet suddenly much more fun. Precariously fun. There’s a mechanical chicken that shits out popcorn. There’s a burlesque show performed by elderly acrobats (voiced by the always lively pairing of Jennifer Saunders and Dawn French) for an audience of Scottish terriers.

Most importantly, there is an “Other-mother” and “Other-father,” completely devoted to their beloved little girl, cooking up delicious meals, showering Coraline with gifts and games, so attentive as to seem almost pathological. They have black buttons for eyes, rendering their every expression of servile joy a little hollow. And here, we sense, is the catch. Everybody knows there’s no such thing as a free lunch but Coraline’s going to learn it the hard way. In a way Coraline is a haunted house story, built around the protagonist’s ability to identify and drive away the demon spirits.

It would be enough to get just about anything new from Henry Selick, the director of The Nightmare Before Christmas and James and the Giant Peach. His stop-motion animation has such a tactile quality that feels only more enchanting now that so many mainstream animated films fuss endlessly over computer-generated whimsy. His figures each possess unique rhythms, and their transformations are so much more startling for having mass and texture. But the story of Coraline, taken from the novel by Neil Gaiman, is pretty enchanting in its own right, a throwback in the best possible way to old-fashioned stories that lure the magical out of the ordinary. The role of the döppelganger doll Coraline is given near the start is especially smart in that it adds to the richness of Selick’s world and its fascination with objects and the shadow side of just about everything. Pretty fun, overall, and probably ideally suited to kids just old enough to handle a few scenes of extended creepiness.

Make mine a double: Rivka Galchen's Atmospheric Disturbances

This is probably not the right place to talk about how I once saw my own double, many years back, and about the usual trauma such events wreak, but maybe you’ve seen your double, too, or thought you did, or looked for it in a moving crowd reflected in some shop window. In any case you too might harbour some persistent fascination with doubles, especially if you’re a reader of fiction, where they crop up in the damnedest places, generally as harbingers of doom, sometimes as shocked by seeing their supposed original as the supposed original is by them, stunned by that pit-of-your-stomach feeling and that little voice that whispers, “This town ain’t big enough for the both of us.”

In the canonical works of Hoffmann, Dostoyevsky, and Poe, in the great crime fiction of Raymond Chandler, Frederic Brown and Boileau-Narcejac, in contemporary novels and stories from the likes of Haruki Murakami, Philip K. Dick, Kazuo Ishiguro and José Saramago, doubles loom forbiddingly, (over-)populating a great number of my favourite books. So I confess that when I picked up Rivka Galchen’s debut novel Atmospheric Disturbances (HarperCollins, $29.95), I was sold on the first sentence: “Last December a woman entered my apartment who looked exactly like my wife.” That was pretty much all it took. That and the strange ink drawings that enveloped the book. But this admittedly thru-the-back-door entry into a book review is my way of trying to impart just how refreshing Galchen’s approach to a certain beloved trope is. Atmospheric Disturbances is much more than a simulacrum of the old double myth. It’s a very sly, and very entertaining spin on the blurring effects of modern life and the heights of panic that afflict those who find themselves troublingly in love.

They tell us that, at the atomic level, we supposedly regenerate ourselves every seven years or so, which means that by middle-age we’ve somehow died and been replaced, or replicated, if you will, about seven times. Somebody says to their spouse, “You’re not the person I married fourteen years ago!” Buddy, you don’t know the half of it. In Jack Finney’s The Body Snatchers, the source material for the four and counting film versions, the entire populace of a Marin County town seems to suffer an epidemic that causes everyone to believe their loves ones are actually imposters—which, as it turns out, they are. In Atmospheric Disturbances, 51-year-old New York psychiatrist Dr. Leo Liebenstein finds himself in a similar scenario, yet you get to feeling that there’s probably not any alien and/or communist conspiracy behind it all. You get to feeling that Leo, for all his insight into the mind’s machinations, isn’t seeing things straight, that his own anxiety about love’s instability, about his deservingness of a woman’s love, about the incessant unknowability of others—and perhaps, his unresolved feelings about his parents, now both deceased—is clouding his ability to see Rema, his beautiful, younger, foreign-born wife, for who she is, that all he can see is a döppelganger that doesn’t correlate to his idealized or nostalgic vision.

Galchen’s prose style is concise, humorous, buoyant and inviting, but what really lifts it up off the page and lights the reader’s imagination is how daringly she eschews any of the customary distance from Leo’s apparent neurosis, writing the entire novel in first-person, so that Leo, educated, sober, skeptical and highly reflexive, can speak directly to us in relatively jargon-free language, giving us no privileged perspective. Hardly just another unreliable narrator, Leo so often seems exactly like someone you might rely on under other circumstances, and here comes some near spoilers. It’s why he can so thoroughly convince Harvey, a patient who believes he’s a psychic agent for a meteorological society who takes his orders through hidden messages on page six of The New York Post, that Leo, too, belongs to the same order and communicates regularly with it’s leader, Tzvi Gal-chen, who it turns out actually is a renown meteorologist with some fascinating theories about weather. Or rather, Gal-chen was all of the above. Turns out he died in 1994. Additionally, though it’s not made explicit anywhere in the novel, Gal-chen is also the author’s father, which begs the question, just who can we rely on here? You might be best to place your bets on the double.

Atmospheric Disturbances is funny, perplexing and full of unexpected adventures, including a journey to Patagonia, “the wild, uncultivated unconscious of Argentina,” which in some ways feels like Galchen’s equivalent to Murakami’s Hokkaido. And at certain moments, the novel is tremendously moving. Leo reasons his way through his conviction that the woman who appears to be Rema is not his wife by focusing on the sort of minutia that cohabitating lovers hold dear, and by holding to a predetermined idea of all the little things Rema wouldn’t do. Meanwhile, Rema, or “Rema,” is wont to do whatever she needs to of her own volition, replicated or not, and she tries very hard to follow Leo into his neurotic odyssey and bring him back to safety. Their struggle to cope with alienation and to return to and/or rediscover each other as individuals destined to change in a changing world is at the core of this story that bridges the seeming fantastical with the most ordinary absurdities.

At one point, Leo is communicating with Tzvi Gal-chen—I won’t bother explaining this little phenomenon here, and I don’t think I can, actually—and they begin to discuss Dante and his relationship to the dead in The Divine Comedy. The dead, Gal-chen explains, seem to know everything about the past and perhaps even the future, but nothing about the present, and for such knowledge they turn to Dante. “And that somehow is what being alive is, to be suspended in the present, to be suspended in time.” Atmospheric Disturbances generates some superb storytelling on the basis of this realization, the understanding that we are stuck always in the now, and that taking anything in this life for granted, even the love of that one nearest to us, requires nothing less than a huge, crazy leap of faith.

Fear and Loathing made wistful: Gibney's Gonzo a timid tribute to Thompson (the gentleman ordering up a round of vodka, eight-balls and ammo below)

It would clearly be unwise to expect a gonzo approach to a documentary about the daddy of gonzo journalism. Applying such flights of rambling conjecture, digression, lamentation and outright hallucination as were the benchmarks of Hunter S. Thompson’s distinctive prose to most non-fiction movies of any kind would be inadvisable—unless perhaps they were supplied by Thompson himself. Alas, Thompson’s been dead these three years, and his best work was a good three decades behind him in any case.

But you still have to wonder if the good doctor, a counterculture hero, a lefty with right wing tastes who once represented the very best spirit of Rolling Stone, a container of more drugs than Keith Richards, and author of such iconoclastic works of oddly eloquent political commentary as Hell’s Angels, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, doesn’t deserve a portrait more provocative, or at least more questioning in spirit than the one delivered by Alex Gibney, director of Taxi to the Dark Side and Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room. Gibney’s Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson may have no lack of great anecdotes and archival material to feed upon, not to mention a head-spinning array of new interviews with ex-wives and ex-US Presidents, but the liveliness of the subject matter and commentary it inspires can’t quite make up for what’s basically a safe, conventional delivery.

“He was my friend. He never paid his rent, broke up my marriage, and taught my children to smoke pot.” Now, if that’s not a tribute… It comes from Thomson’s neighbour and landlord, and it does, for the record, come with a nostalgic smile. Those who knew and loved Thompson tend to feel conflicted about the style of both Thompson’s life and his death, which came from the barrel of one of the author’s many guns one night in his kitchen in 2005, while his family relaxed in the next room. He always said he’d do it that way, and no one seemed too shocked, but it made you question the relationship between bravado and cowardice, an intersection lorded over by Hemingway. “We need his voice now more and than ever,” is something said several times in Gonzo, yet not as many times as admittances that the guy was on auto-pilot for ages, isolated, paranoid, all-too akin to his caricature in the Doonesbury comics, and getting drunk with the likes of Pat Buchanan for god's sake. As Rolling Stone editor Jann Wenner puts it, in the end Thompson was “hostage to his own persona.”

Gonzo focuses, naturally, on the good years, the 60s and 70s, when like everybody Thompson went off his rocker and yet actually had some hope. He was handsome, daring, gainfully employed and listened to. He even advocated presidential candidates, invented drugs for their opponents to be addicted to, and ran for Sheriff of Pitkin County, Colorado. He legitimized fringe sensibilities in political discourse. But Gibney frames it all like a greatest hits package, replete with predictable, hokey-jokey use of period pop songs and insertions of deeply mannered readings of Thompson’s work by Johnny Depp, who for all his warm intentions just does not get the ribald tone at all.

Redbelt: David Mamet flexes his muscles, acknowledges the old masters, kicks pretty good ass

“There is no situation from which you cannot escape,” promises earnest jujitsu instructor Mike Terry (Chiwetel Ejiofor) in the instantly engaging opening scene of Redbelt. It’s a promise Terry plans to exemplify to the last, and it simultaneously signifies the ballsy promise of writer/director David Mamet’s tenth feature, a taut, inventive, wildly convoluted little thriller that operates unapologetically by the tried and true rules of old Hollywood, the sort of movie that thinks nothing of spelling out its theme right from the start. In fact, it spells it out over and over. 

The story revolves around genuine, unwavering heroism struggling amidst universal corruption—the setting is Los Angeles, the bad guys are movie people—while the plot continually exploits bald artifice in the name of forward motion and an ever-tightening net. There is from start to finish no lack of panache, or jazzy craftsmanship, or conviction. Though people repeat themselves a hell of a lot, the dialogue bounces and pops and twists out incremental variations—it’s its own kind of martial art, full of bluster and wit so witty you’re not even sure it’s wit. 

At the heart of Redbelt’s crisp, clean functionality is a unity between the ideals of the hero and the filmmakers. Terry is a no-shit guy and, in this case at least, Mamet, greatly aided by cinematographer Robert Elswit (There Will Be Blood), directs us a winsomely no-shit movie. Deception, slight-of-hand and conspiracy run rampant, things often strain to make any sense, but every wild reversal is finally earned and every scene plays out with exacting nimbleness. The conditions of the drama are laid out bluntly: Terry’s studio is in dire straits financially. His wife (Alicia Braga), who runs a fabric import business on the side, is getting fed up. The martial arts community knows Terry’s one of the best fighters and desires to lure him out of his non-aggressive, non-competitive stance and get him in the ring where the real money is.

It’s Terry’s good will that slowly gets him into trouble. He helps a drunk actor (Tim Allen) out of a potentially gruesome bar fight. He accepts a lucrative invite to consult on a movie. He tries to build up confidence in a whacked-out, drug-addicted lawyer (Emily Watson). He gives an expensive watch to a cop friend. Every gesture can seem either disastrous or benign, every new character a potential friend or enemy. Nothing, as they say, it what it seems. The pleasure comes in watching things unfold in the very bizarre causality of Mamet’s imagination.

When its mechanics are as respected and continually flexed as they are here, the particular brand of classicism to which Mamet adheres allows for a great deal of playfulness. Redbelt, fronted by the seemingly effortless nobility of Ejiofor’s performance, emerges naturally out of a cycle of fight movies like Body and Soul (1947) and The Set-Up (49)—yet the notion of an African-American mastering an Asian fighting discipline and exhibiting an anachronistic code of honour links Redbelt most interestingly to Jim Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (99). But the most notable difference between Mamet and Jarmusch’s vision of the world lies in their attitude toward the rewards of honour and the number of shades applied to those who betray honour. For Mamet, in the end, such matters become as black and white as the old movies he clearly worships, and our satisfaction arises from this implicit moral conviction. Put altogether, it may not be as sophisticated, but man, does it ever make for a knock-out finish.

London to Brighton: a dire case of the cunty bollocks

It’s 3.00 in the morning, so the stark flash of a title card tells us, and an angst-ridden woman with a face approximately one-third beat-to-shit hunkers in a public toilet gobbling chips with a troubled little girl before dashing out to service some grim-faced john in the front of his sedan—just a few more quid and they’ll soon be on their train whose trajectory provides the film’s title. While this is going down we also meet a stubble-headed thug or two, collecting fares from their stable of cheerless tricks, threatening every no-hoper in arm’s reach with violence, and speaking the vernacular we might best describe as “home cunties.” There’s shouting, crying and a sweeping ugliness under fluorescent lights.

A self-assured entry into British brutalism from writer/director Paul Andrew Williams, London to Brighton doesn’t leave us wondering what sort of movie we’re watching. The handheld camera locks on close-ups of damaged faces, very rarely allowing two characters to share the frame, preferring to cut back and forth in an exchange or desperate and/or sinister glances. This sordid tale of the marginalized, the crooked, the corrupted and the plain old perverse unfolds with the appropriate level of panic, abuse, misery and dread. If Mike Leigh lost both his sense of humour and his richly shaded characters and suddenly wanted to make a grotesque thriller, might it look something like this?

Williams understands that in such a setting a variety of types needn’t equal any variation in charisma or presence. His spectrum of characters, the small-time and powerful alike, all conform neatly into people who clearly should be doing something else with their lives: Kelly (Lorraine Stanley), the hopeless hooker who appears to be past whatever passes for prime on these streets; Joanne (Georgia Groome), the 11-year-old runaway Kelly plucks from the pavement to initiate into the trade; Derek (Johnny Harris), the track pants pimp-bully taking clients way out of his league; Chum (Nathan Constance), Derek’s largely mute, homogenously groomed yet incongruously handsome sidekick; or Stuart (Sam Spruell), the über-scumbag crime lord who unenthusiastically exacts the bits of routine sadism expected from him while suffering from a whopper of an Oedipal complex. All the lonely people, where do they all come from? London, apparently. And they collide after Stuart’s pa’s craving for pubescent flesh leads him to Kelly via Joanne via Derek and a date that goes horribly, gruesomely wrong. Not that there could have ever been a happy version.

A certain bare minimum of authenticity sits firmly along the bottom line for a film like London to Brighton, but its is a kind of authenticity that, in trying to offer a grittier alternative to Hollywood artifice, excludes such things as a casual brush with human warmth or a second of spontaneity. Which is fine, I suppose, since even those of us most jazzed about this sort of thing generally want it to proceed fast and ruthlessly as possible. Williams never seems less than in his element delivering the staple goods, though a third act conversation about daddy issues between Stuart and Joanne hints at a penchant for greater subtext than London to Brighton allows. Underlying Williams’ narrative are themes that look past the generic, particularly when it comes down to the notion of accountability among the equally downtrodden—Kelly is the closest thing we have to a heroine here, yet her maternal instincts toward Joanne are severely compromised by her role in feeding her to the slobbering pedophiles who pepper her clientele.

In any case, regardless of Williams’ intentions or more subtle talents, your interest in London to Brighton should roughly align to your eagerness to spend time with a lot of largely irredeemable human waste trapped in a deterministic world where only the youngest inhabitants have even the slightest chance of escape. On such terms, Williams has produced a solid feature debut.