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.

Of Gods and Men: the limits of brotherly love

We know that Xavier Beauvois’ Cannes Grand Prize-winner Of Gods and Men was drawn from the 1996 incident in which seven Tibhirine Trappist monks were kidnapped and eventually beheaded during the Algerian Civil War, the exact circumstances of their slaughter a matter of controversy and contention to this day. So we might expect something draped in dread to unfold here, a drama whose hopeless fluctuations amount to nothing more than a death march. But inevitability is a force one strives to come to terms with when one’s life is devoted to worship and public service. That things are bound to end poorly becomes a matter of secondary importance once Beauvois and his collaborators usher us into this realm of carefully nurtured quietude, where disparate, overwhelming inner struggles are conducted and resolve terribly hard-won, where fraternal bonds are largely strengthened as much through disagreement and prolonged panic as they are through a sense of harmony and shared ideals. This is indeed a meditative movie (how could it be otherwise?), yet also at times a joyous one, one that reminds us of several important things: that running away only brings new things to run from; that need, vocation, and genuine communion transcends the confines of dogma; and that god (or God), whether regarded as a concept or a true presence, is only alive when his followers engage fully with the world in all its disorder.

Written by Beauvois and Etienne Comar, and photographed with a loving (and necessary) bias toward natural light by Caroline Champetier, Of Gods and Men pulls us in by immersing us in the monks’ daily activities, especially those of the abbot Christian (Lambert Wilson), an Islamic scholar who has the magnificent nerve to quote the Koran to Muslim terrorists threatening his life, and Luc (Michael Lonsdale), a trained physician who administers humble remedies (not to mention shoes) to the local, largely impoverished Algerian population. As the threat of uprising prompts government officials to plead with that monks to flee and the townsfolk to plead for their steadfastness, each of the monks are forced to make their cases for staying or going, the disagreements causing considerable tension that seems only to abate when the group joins in song, their roster of Gregorian chants emerging as one of the film’s most fortifying refrains, the other being Beauvois’ dogged use of lingering close-ups to glean some sense of the monks’ individual inner turmoil, which emerges as diverse and resonant. Luc, who is not the eldest among the monks but whose health is poor, seems to be the only one who knows from the start what his choice is. “I’m not scared of death,” he says. “I’m a free man.”

It’s serendipitous that Of Gods and Men should arrive in theatres while Claire Denis’ White Material still lingers in the memories of many moviegoers (at least in the US; here in Canada the film has yet to enjoy a well-deserved release). Both concern the legacy of French colonialism as it effects those attempting to make a life for themselves in those countries afflicted, but the contrast is fascinating. Denis’ mise en scène is narcotic in its way, but also secular, dark, fierce and brutal, where Beauvois’ approach centers on the serene and a universal, non-denominational sense of religious feeling, even when the grotesque looms just outside the monastery gates. It’s a gift to have both these visions circulating through our collective consciousness, helping us to reflect on the complexity of global ruptures, and those ghosts from the past that continue to haunt us.

Blue Valentine: Love rocks, then it's on the rocks

As Blue Valentine begins a small child searches for an ominously absent pet. It’s a smart method of alerting us to a more general suspicion that something’s missing in the lives of its central characters, the child’s parents Dean (Ryan Gosling) and Cindy (Michelle Williams). Perpetually robed in paint-splattered pants and goofy animal sweaters, Dean’s an affectionate, playful father to little Frankie (Faith Wladyka), but he’s also childish and needy and starts drinking bright and early because apparently drinking doesn’t hamper his ability to paint houses. Cindy is by necessity more authoritative, probably the only one who makes sure Frankie eats reasonably well and gets to school in time. Cindy’s a nurse in a nearby clinic. A doctor there is eager to convince her to accept a transfer. Cindy’s procrastination in discussing the matter with Dean is, at the very least, conspicuous.

We then meet Dean and Cindy several years earlier, not long before they first met each other, when Dean worked for a Brooklyn moving company and Cindy studied medicine. A pattern is quickly established: for every scene that draws the younger Dean and Cindy closer together we’re given a counter-scene that shows the current Dean and Cindy moving farther apart. Blue Valentine, the sophomore feature from director Derek Cianfrance, written by Cianfrance with Cami Delavigne and Joey Curtis, proposes to carve out a love story by contrasting the moment of its birth with that of its apparent death, replete with bad sex, screaming, and violence. There are many insightfully rendered fragments of this relationship scattered throughout the film, many extraordinarily frank, even touching moments of vulnerability between Gosling and Williams, often shot in tight close-ups that at once heighten a feeling of intimacy and mutual isolation, so I’ve been struggling to sort out why it is that the film ultimately left me feeling unsatisfied. My best guess is that by focusing exclusively on either end of this story, by excising everything that happened in the middle, Blue Valentine neglects to give us a fully convincing sense of what this couple has shared, of the real hard work of marriage, of any sort of deeper connection between them besides the circumstantial. This manner of using only glimpses of a relationship’s progress to suggest something larger, complex and meaningful can work heartbreakingly well in, say, a song—given the working-class, east coast flavour, we might imagine Blue Valentine as a Bruce Springsteen song, or, given the film’s title, early Tom Waits—but as a feature film this love story feels a bit under-loved by its authors.

Much of what really works very well here occurs in the first half, including Cianfrnace’s imaginative use of instrumental versions of Grizzly Bear tunes. Dean’s conversations with his male coworkers at the moving company about how men and women fall in love possess a shaggy fraternal warmth that recalls similar scenes in David Gordon Green’s George Washington, particularly because of Dean’s somewhat overstated naïveté. Cindy’s more introverted and remote, yet the way we see her coasting through a mismatched relationship with a wrestler, caring for her grandmother, or ignoring the freaky outbursts of her father, a guy who’s got major problems with meatloaf, tells us something about her. As is so often the case in romantic love, Dean and Cindy’s convergence seems dependent on coincidence and impulsive decisions. Their courtship is basically a single impromptu date, incorporating a ukulele serenade and tap dancing, that’s very cute to watch unfold. They meet by chance, and by chance Cindy gets pregnant right around the same time. Feeling such longing for a woman he really doesn’t know yet, and having no clear ambitions to betray in any case, Dean hurls himself into becoming a husband and father, or at least the idea of it. Cindy’s reasons for being with Dean may be more practical, and fair enough, I guess. But I don’t think anyone whose ever given themselves to love-term love will recognize the foundations of something like that here. So do see the film for those sometimes vivid glimpses of passion and playfulness, for its most inspired floating moments of ecstasy or ache—just don’t expect it to all add up.

Vivre sa vie on DVD: Godard year zero – Karina's visage – trouble with words – A double game

In an interview for Sight & Sound, conducted by Tom Milne in October of 1962, Jean-Luc Godard was asked if he felt his most recent work, Vivre sa vie (62), was a departure from its predecessors. Godard replied that, on the contrary, he felt it was an arrival. The previous work had been the product of a cinephile, one whose knowledge of life had accumulated exclusively within the spectral darkness of the cinema, where as this, his fourth movie, a somewhat somber chronicle of an aspiring actress’ slippage into prostitution, was the first to be constructed in the open air, so to speak, to attempt to absorb and reflect upon the realities of the world beyond, not to mention upon art forms other than the movies. It may read as sacrilege, particularly on this, the 50th anniversary of Breathless (60), his iconoclastic debut, the movie that more than any other encapsulates the French New Wave, but Vivre sa vie does feel in some sense like Godard Year Zero, like the full emergence, both politicized and poeticized, of the auteur who dominated the 1960s and changed his medium forever. It certainly had far greater impact on me, someone discovering these movies decades later. Breathless excited me. Vivre sa vie arrested me, and continues to do so. It’s now available on DVD and Blu-ray, with characteristically superb supplements, from the Criterion Collection.

A “film in twelve tableaux,” each preceded by a title card listing telegraphic synopses of their contents—ie: THE BOULEVARDS – THE FIRST MAN – THE ROOM—Vivre sa vie, though compact and economical, unfolds with the rhythm and structural intricacy of a novel, perhaps a character study from Zola, from whom Godard borrowed his heroine’s name. Yet Nana (Anna Karina), first seen during the credits in a trio of close-ups, resembling mug-shots, is also an anagram for the name of the actress portraying her. This is but one of multiple allusions to the nature of this movie’s double game: it is at once a work of fiction and a kind of documentary, about prostitution, of which we will learn a fair amount, particularly in the montage of transactions set to a series of frequently asked questions; about Paris’ suburbs and the lives passing through them; and about Karina, Godard’s wife and valiant collaborator, who like her character came from elsewhere to make it in the movies. Karina’s performance is repeatedly startling. At times she looks directly at the camera, with those immense, worried eyes, as though checking in, or wondering if this is how things were meant to go. She seems always to be utterly immersed in the most immediate sources of stimulus for her character—writing a letter, dancing, conversing with a philosopher, “hooking” a client, or, most famously, being moved to tears by The Passion of Joan of Arc (28)—while also somehow aware of being the subject of a movie. While positively radiating innocence, Karina, then all of 21, had already sufficiently developed as an artist to follow her husband/director onto the high wire, the result being this movie that, in a new age of understanding and sophistication with regards to what movies can be, draws attention to its artifice, though camera work and through its eerie use of truncated fragments of Michel Legrand’s score, while never spoiling its fictive illusions.

Prostitution is a primal theme in Godard’s work, and the problematic role of actresses in the movies, as the subject of the (predominantly) male gaze, is never far from the surface. Fortunately Godard isn’t interested in victimization—the excerpt he selects from Joan of Arc emphasizes the heroine’s participation in her own martyrdom—but rather in the social dynamics that allow one such as Nana to be gradually swallowed up by misfortune. There is in Vivre sa vie a constant mistrust of interpretation, or even of the meaning of words themselves, not an insignificant statement coming from a former critic. Nana expresses her discomfort with words in the first scene, where she breaks up with a boyfriend in a café, trying out certain token phrases as though trying for the best line reading, while Godard, perversely, shoots their conversation from behind, so that their faces are unseen and all we have to go on are their words themselves. Godard places obstacles between Karina’s face and the camera almost as often as he allows her face to consume its frame in an act of pure portraiture, yet the images in Vivre sa vie, though occasionally awkward, aren’t obtuse but rather fixating and beautiful, and there seems to be a sly joke in the fact that the first name of Nana’s pimp is the same as that of the movie’s cinematographer, Raoul Coutard. From start to finish Vivre sa vie continually reminds us that Godard’s greatest work is never, as the cliché suggests, a cold, intellectual exercise. This is a work of rapture, curiosity, rigorous play, and, indeed, genuine compassion, so that even if its abrupt finale feels perhaps like the intrusion of one type of movie onto another, we’re left with the devastating feeling that at any moment those who slip through the cracks, whether in art or in life, are that much more likely to be caught in the crossfire.

Buxom, blonde, and dangerous to know: Cleo Moore and Bad Girls of Film Noir, Vol. 2 on DVD

Cleo Moore was born on Halloween, 1928 in Baton Rouge. At 15 she was briefly married to Huey Long’s youngest son, and had very likely already assumed the sort of undulating corporeal proportions that can make a guy break down and weep. She would eventually set records for the longest filmed kiss on live television, run for governor of Louisiana, and enter the world of real estate before dying of a heart attack at the age of 44. But in the 1950s she was a star of sorts, the muse of eccentric Czech-born auteur Hugo Haas, slated at one point to star in a bio-pic of Jean Harlow, though I knew her only for her memorable cameo in Nicholas Ray’s On Dangerous Ground (1952). If we shave off just one of its four titles, the recently released Bad Girls of Film Noir, Vol. 2 could just as easily be titled The Cleo Moore Signature Collection. The two-disc set serves as an introduction to a minor but nonetheless interesting career, one that speaks volumes about the role of women in postwar America.

The girls in these titles tend to not be all that bad, and the films certainly not all that noir. Too transparent for manipulation, Moore didn’t play the femme fatale. At the start of Haas’ One Girl’s Confession (53), Moore’s waitress steals $25,000 from her scumbag employer, hides it, and thereafter turns herself in. She becomes a model prisoner, and upon early release goes back to where she came from and, too deeply paranoid about people spying on her to recover her stash, takes another gig slinging drinks for a swarthy, lecherous gambler, played with terrific zest by Haas himself, who becomes chastely enamored with Moore, even after she nearly kills him. This strange tale of feminine self-reliance and the perils of coveting dirty money is highlighted by pleasingly bizarre plot twists and Haas’ distinctive use of close-ups. It’s a bit disappointing when Moore winds up content to be romanced by a horny fisherman, but in her private thoughts, conveyed through dreamy voice-over, she confesses that she’s genuinely drawn to him. He has clean fingernails, she thinks. “From all that salt water, I guess.”

“Caged men are separated only by a thick wall—from caged women. The system is wrong…” So goes the over-heated opening narration of Women’s Prison (55), directed by Lewis Seiler from a script by Jack DeWitt and Crane Wilbur, and the mother of all babes-behind-bars movies. It’s an ensemble piece, and Moore has a smaller role here, co-starring with none other than Ida Lupino, who plays the stylish and sadistic supervisor of the female half of the penitentiary where all the action takes place, as well as Jan Sterling, who starred with Kirk Douglas in Ace in the Hole (51), and Audrey Totter, veteran of several key noirs, such as Lady in the Lake (47), The Set-Up (49) and Tension (49). Despite Lupino’s prestige, Women’s Prison is about as trashy as you’d expect, given the period and the studio gloss, with hysterical inmates, saucy wisecracks, and a tawdry secret rendezvous, though there's little to suggest the subgenre’s token lesbianism. It’s perhaps a little fantastic that virtually all the women seem to do their time together in perfect harmony, exuding solidarity, but the pay-off comes when they organize to take over the joint with only a couple of knives and some ingenuity, and can only be suppressed by rifles, gas and the promise of revenge on Lupino.

Over-Exposed (56) begins when Moore’s snared in a police raid of a bar frequented by prostitutes and is ordered to leave town. She doesn’t, and instead is taken under the wing of a kindly old tippling photographer with a cat who runs in slow-motion. She learns the trade and adopts a new identity, trading in Lily Krenshka for Lila Crane—a name which would assume very different connotations only a few years later when given to Janet Leigh’s sister in Psycho (60). She moves to New York, rises in the ranks of society and becomes a famous portraitist, at one point a guest on this bizarre television program where the host phones her celebrity guests at their homes instead of bringing them on the show. Her ambition is soured by greed and a growing distrust of everyone around her. The mafia connections responsible for her social position prove to be her undoing, but as hubristic as Moore’s heroine may be its immensely frustrating when the movie ends with her succumbing to the drab, condescending, paternal affections of journalist/conscience Richard Crenna, who would one day become Rambo’s father figure, and the film’s latent feminism nose-dives with the realization that no woman in her right mind would choose a career over becoming an obedient spouse. Over-Exposed would be Moore’s second-last credit, and even if she never quite embodied the truly independent bombshell in the movies, she seems to have made considerable strides over the remainder of her too-short life.

The sole non-Moore title in Bad Girls, Vol. 2, which also lacks a female protagonist, is Night Editor (46), part of an unrealized franchise of wee-hour tales told by a big city newsman. A married cop witnesses a banker beat a woman’s brains in with a stick while trysting in some tall grass with the glamorous, wealthy, and equally married Janis Carter, excellent as the poisonous other woman. Some great location work and weird details, such as the old ethnic cop who habitually downs four glasses of buttermilk in a row, bring some flavour to an otherwise moralistic but entertaining thriller.

"In that place, life is in charge": A conversation with Pedro Costa on Letters From Fontaínhas

This is one of the great stories of 21st century cinema, how Pedro Costa returned home to Portugal after making his second feature in Cabo Verde, with messages and gifts in tow, how he was asked to deliver these items to Cabo Verdeans living in the ramshackle labyrinth of Lisbon’s Fontaínhas and discovered the place where he would forge something new. He was still making films, however unusual they may be, within the conventional means of production, with generators, lights, crews, and craft services, and by the time he’d wrapped Ossos (1997), he’d had enough. That film, which traces the paths of several characters in and out of Fontaínhas, including one who endeavours to sell his newborn child, is haunting, funky, appalling, deadpan funny, at times perplexing, and, photographed by former Robert Bresson collaborator Emmanuel Machuel, gorgeously crafted. The performances owe something to Bresson’s dictum of the actor as model, but Costa lingers upon stillness until it yields unexpected riches, and allows the personal experiences of his cast to imbue their stark performances. The film’s compositions are dominated by corners, rippling across the frame with insistent angularity and depth, suggesting dilemmas, a constant potential for grand dramas that never quite arrive. But despite its tremendous merits, Ossos didn’t convey the Fontaínhas Costa wanted to know.

Ossos

Prompted by Vanda Duarte, among the most darkly luminous locals in Ossos’ cast, Costa started going back to Fontaínhas every day with just his Panasonic DV camera, passing time, using the minimal available light to create elegant chiaroscuro chambers of domestic activity, patiently working through hundreds of hours of tape, trying to get closer to the actual flow of life through this place that fascinated him and was now slowly being demolished by the municipality. In Vanda’s Room (00) documents a world undergoing it’s own private apocalypse, nearly three hours of people in tiny rooms, waking up, taking drugs, selling things, coughing, talking and talking, while the bulldozers rumble just outside. It’s the product of skeletal resources, years of hard work, and deepening friendships. It led to Colossal Youth (06), perhaps Costa’s masterpiece, in which he returns to Fontaínhas to find a world largely vanished, relegated to memory, in which the graying, oracular, strangely charming Ventura, a man with ghostly eyes and stiffened limbs, pays visits to a number of individuals—including Vanda, who’s given birth and gotten clean since we last saw her—whom he claims are his offspring, though whether or not they are the literal fruit of his lions is difficult to determine. The landscape he traverses is largely white, vertical, and featureless, loomed over by the housing projects erected in the wake of Fontaínhas’ collapse. Old Fontaínhas seems to have survived as one last hovel, occupied by a woman named Bete. At one point Bete and Ventura sit on her floor, marveling at the things they can read in the gloom of Bete’s crumbling, well-lived-in walls, things they’ll never be able to see once they’re relocated to the white towers.

In Vanda's Room

A formal motif that runs through all of the Costa films I’ve seen—including Casa de lava (94), the Cabo Verde project, an elliptical remake of I Walked With a Zombie (42), featuring Ivorian actor Isaach De Bankolé—is the employment of a kind of portraiture, the typically static camera holding enigmatically upon a face—or, in Casa de lava, the back of a head. I note this particular motif because it both alludes to Costa’s formal rigour as well as his fundamental interest in people. It’s this investment in individuals, rather than some vague “social problem,” that makes In Vanda’s Room as powerful and accumulatively moving as it is. Yet newcomers to Costa should be aware of the fact that these films can be difficult in ways that mirror the arduousness of their genesis. They are long and slow, and Costa has a special disinclination to provide context. By far the best method of really understanding and enjoying these films is to simply spend a lot of time with them, to gradually make sense of how the whole ambitious project fits together. Thankfully, after years of international acclaim and virtually no opportunities for anyone other than festival attendees and major centre cinematheque-goers to see this work, the Criterion Collection is releasing Letters From Fontaínhas: Three Films by Pedro Costa, which collects Ossos, In Vanda’s Room and Colossal Youth in a single box, along with a wealth of illuminating supplements.

Colossal Youth

I’d already heard Costa speak once during a post-screening Q&A session and knew his responses could be as circular and loquacious as his films. Even though Costa granted me twice the amount of time I was supposed to have been allotted—in fact, I was the one who unfortunately had to draw the conversation to a close when I ran out of both tape and battery power for my phone—I think I might have asked him perhaps two of my long list of prepared questions. As with the experience of watching and listening to his films, speaking with Costa rewards deeper and longer investments. I hope the next time we talk it will be face-to-face, without time limits and an economy pack of micro-cassettes.

JB: Could you talk about where you were at in your life when you began work on Ossos?

Pedro Costa: I had a period of five or six years as assistant director on lots of films, so I was very close to directors, actors, producers. This was after not even two years at film school, which I never finished, one of the reasons being that working on production crews seemed more useful. Those years I spent as an assistant gave me a very bad feeling of things to come. It wasn’t the work I’d wanted to do. I started wondering, without finding an answer, how I could make my films without falling into these traps. Filmmaking seemed to mirror the worst relations in our society. I went into my first films always thinking about that. It was only on the second one, Casa de lava, that I started taking measures to change this. It provided the key to opening the others. It shot it in Africa, in Cabo Verde, the islands from where all the people I’m working with now come from. It’s funny, but I had to go to this faraway land to stop these games. I grabbed a camera, I grabbed two or three technicians and a crew, and I shot what I wanted. This gave the film a very strange form. You can see it in the acting. I’d written that this girl is lost, this guy’s in a coma, that one’s crazy, and I did everything possible to ensure they became really crazy and lost and in a coma. [Laughs] I’d left them with the script to think about, but our contract did not require them to think. By the time I went to make Ossos it was clear that Fontaínhas could be a studio for me, like in the old days. I had the actors, the set, the props. In a sense I had screenwriters writing all the time. In that place life is in charge.

JB: Did the story emerge from Fontaínhas and the people you met there, or did Fontaínhas influence Ossos only as you were making it?

PC: There’s a lot of answers for that. Sometimes I say that the beginning of Ossos is really Casa de lava. Without it I would have never found that place. I had no reason to go there until I came from Africa with messages to pass onto people who lived there.

Casa de lava

JB: I wonder if this process of discovering the inner margins of Portugal via its outer margins was important in itself.

PC: I think the answer to that exists a little bit in Colossal Youth, and is starting to reveal itself more and more in the film I’m starting now. It’s getting to a point where the levels of the political and the religious, where all levels are balanced. There was a revolution in my country in 1974. I was 13, very young, but I was conscious. For three years I was involved, everybody was. Before there was fascism and now there was some kind of freedom. I was discovering politics—and film and music and books. Everything was mixed. It was the punk rock movement. When you have the streets filled with people and you walk into a cinema showing a Godard film, or even a John Ford film, I think you see it differently, read it differently, feel it differently. I wasn’t just a cinephile locked in a cinematheque. These films had a correspondence in the streets, in our lives. So I’m trying to tell you that the aim was to do films that were everything, that could be tragic and funny and political, and serious and strong and beautiful. Sometimes you read that some filmmakers want to do a film because of actors. Others want to do it because of the urgency of the theme, or something. Never happened to me. It’s something much more subterranean, more invisible, something you have to discover slowly. What I was not willing to do was discover it alone in my room, facing a blank page and writing stuff. That’s something I can’t understand, even today. This probably isn’t answering your question, but it was important that my approach to Fontaínhas was not pre-conceived. It didn’t come from searching for poverty or a reason to say something or defend something. I was really pushed by these people in Cabo Verde who said go there and see my mother, go and see my brother, tell them hello, I’m okay. Please bring them this tobacco. And when I went there it wasn’t misery that was in front of me—it was humanity. I have to confess I was absolutely fascinated by appearances, by surface, by colours, by smells, by sounds. I discovered an aesthetic world to which I could relate, finally. So I had to think a little bit about that. How to go beyond this fascination. And it was mutual I think, because they were so fascinated by me.

JB: What is it about you that fascinated them?

PC: We still talk about that. I’ve been there for years now, we’re brothers and sisters. The way they talk about meeting me is like the way I talk about them. “We saw this white guy coming alone, trying to be cool”—because I was afraid—“to speak his rudimentary Creole…” They saw me falling into this seductive trap they’d put on me. It was a spell. Their fascination was: “What does he want from us?” That was the preparation for Ossos, to come back to your other question. There wasn’t a script. There weren’t ideas. There were feelings. I felt I wanted to film the walls, the colours, some faces, then perhaps some feelings. It took a year to put all of that together. I remember I was hearing stories, reading things in the paper while taking the bus from my house to their place. I’d read something about a baby being sold, and then started trying to bring out ideas from the neighbourhood guys I was working with. But it’s still a very controlled film. I was doing everything according to the rules of cinema. It took time to get rid of that. It took getting to know Vanda, especially. During the shooting of Ossos I had no time to know them, and that’s the painful thing, that’s the old mistake. You don’t have time to know people, or you know them only very superficially. Often your experience of discovering something is so much more interesting than the result.

In Vanda's Room

JB: You’re weighing the values of process over product, but one of the extraordinary things about this body of work we’re discussing is that, as you alluded to, we see the process of one film reflected in its predecessor. We see the process of In Vanda’s Room reflected in Ossos. We see Colossal Youth reflected in Vanda.

PC: Yeah. For the first time in my life, working in that place with those guys and girls, sometimes I get a glimpse of something collective, something that happens because we took a lot of time. Sometimes it’s boring. Sometimes it’s painful and there’s lots of takes, lots of trying this and that, and then it works and something materializes, something brief. I don’t know if it’s there in the films, though I hope it is. For me, In Vanda’s Room, which has this extreme, expansive form, has the feeling of two scientists researching something. I even see myself in the film, researching something. I see Vanda and her sister discovering something for the first time, how to say something about their mother, how to say something to this guy, how to walk through that door. It gives this very laboratorial air to the film.

JB: Were there days when you felt like you were getting a sculpted performance and others where you were felt you were getting something more unguarded and immediate?

PC: You should not take this as devaluation of cinema—I’m doing the things I do because I have the highest esteem for film. And I admit I suffer a little bit from nostalgia for a cinema that no longer exists, you know, this feeling that everything was better in the 40s or 30s or 20s. That’s always in the back of my mind, even when the conditions of the day-by-day work is very loose, very on the edge of nothing, because the camera is so small, because I never say “silence” or “action.” Even Vanda asked me many times, “When are we starting?” And we had started already, months ago. Those guys knew what a film was supposed to be, because they saw the shooting of Ossos, which was big, with trucks, with lights, with a 50-person crew, and money and producers. The problem was that I broke completely that cliché, and for the next film I was alone with my backpack and the sort of camera that everyone has, to film their babies and families. It seemed not serious, like, “What happened to this guy?” So I always say, for my sake and for their sake, that I had a double-task. One was to do the film that I wanted to do with them, and I expressed that every day. The other was to declare a cinema possible in this place, but not like Ossos. We have to learn it, this new book of rules. We have to start with less money, less machines, no lights. I had to remind them that cinema could be just a girl in the corner of a room and, I don’t know, some flowers, let’s say. No cars, no explosions, no guns. That was part of the job. All this is to say that I’m always aware of the fact that I’m a filmmaker and they’re actors. There is a ritual. We go into this mode and we do this take and then we try to do another take that could be better. Sometimes I like that they behave a little capriciously, or star-like. Vanda is very star-like. She wants things, like money, but we don’t have them. I like them to be actors and I’m very proud when people say Vanda or Ventura touches them, because of course they were acting. I don’t know if I was directing them. I was organizing something.

JB: Something that’s so resonant in these films is their manner of reflecting a complex sense of place, of home. How has your own sense of place informed your approach to this material?

PC: That’s something I’ve been discovering with these films. I’ve always loved reading interviews with filmmakers. It’s constituted a large part of my reading and learning, not theory or history, but reading something by Erich von Stroheim or Jerry Lewis. They’re very precise, very concrete, not like today where most filmmakers are vague. So I always had this impression that filmmaking was a good way to learn about yourself, about what you like and don’t like, even to learn how to accept or refuse certain things, to let things in that you could never imagine possible. So I’m making discoveries, and one of those has been that, well, what can I say? I’m a product of, how do you call it, a dysfunctional family? I’m a product of divorced parents, of a small city, but one with all the weaknesses of my social class. Everything that I’m trying to destroy, to dynamite, comes from my place in the world, my geographical or mental place. My city, the place I was born, is the antithesis of emotionally strength, its people are ill prepared to live with other human beings, this petit bourgeoisie that regards money as something very dirty, that you keep to yourself. These are things I’ve been trying to destroy because I found the opposite by working among people that lack everything, that lose everything, lose more with each day, these people who I’ve roped into my project. You have a sense that there are some social classes that cheat, and others are cheated. That’s Fontaínhas. It’s a reason not to cheat them with some kind of glamour-based thing that they thought cinema was. To speak in cinematographic terms, I had to focus myself, like a lens—even if my films seems out of focus, which they often are. [Laughs] But I’ve been focused on finding a centre for myself. If I feel that if I’m not having a confrontation with some sort of reality when I’m working, I’m in danger.

Colossal Youth

JB: You’ve lived your whole life in Lisbon. I wonder if you hadn’t discovered Fontaínhas if you would have stayed in Lisbon and continued your practice there.

PC: I don’t know. I can fantasize. I was told at some moment that my life was planned for me. I was told by a producer, several times, to go home, write, and bring in something bigger, but in the same style as the previous film. That’s what 90% of filmmakers do. You can feel that with Ossos. It’s not that I don’t like the film, but that’s the one where you can see that if the director behaves he can probably just keep doing that same sort of thing for the rest of his life. So in another life I’d be doing that, probably having a slightly more comfortable existence, with more chances to do films with more money and more quickly. Or maybe I’d have gone into something else, some anthropological work, historical work, because I did history in university. I’d be very into the past and stones and people living in deserts. But I saw this chance for me and, this sounds pretentious, but for them too, how this could be great for this girl or this junky guy, and of course when you think of one in those places you think of everybody. The films are a bit like that, choosing one to speak for all. I think we’re almost succeeding with Ventura in Colossal Youth. The most beautiful compliment I ever heard about my films was in Fontaínhas, just after the first screening of Colossal Youth. Two or three of the young guys, the rappers, the activists, they left the theatre, walked straight up to Ventura and said: “This is amazing, Ventura. For 25 years we’ve seen you in Fontaínas, drunk. A bum. Crazy. Saying stupid things. Drooling. Falling apart. And then we see you like this in this film…. How!?” That was great. For me, for them, for Ventura. For everybody.

Uprooted and abandoned: Treeless Mountain

Moving from city to village to countryside, from a wearied mother to a neglectful aunt to an elderly grandparent, Jin and Bin (Hee Yeon Kim, Song Hee Kim) cultivate an impressive itinerary for a couple of sisters aged six and four respectively. Having already been abandoned by one parent, Jin and Bin are uprooted from their Seoul home and taken to live with their “Big Auntie” so that their mother can search for their errant father. When not drunk or inexplicably absent Big Auntie can be found extorting money from neighbours or occasionally throwing together a not very nutritious looking meal. The sisters take to roasting grasshoppers alive and selling them on the street, the money earned intended not for filling their rumbling bellies but rather the piggy bank given to them by mom just before her departure. By the time it’s filled, she tells them, I’ll be back. The girls take this promise at face value and receive their first lesson in how our parents bullshit us. Their journey features passages so desperate as to make your head spin, yet by the end of Treeless Mountain we’re left not with a sense of despair over the cruelty and indifference of the world but rather one of confidence in the inherent resilience of children.

This gradual sense of consolation arises partially from Korean-American writer/director So Yong Kim’s carefully modulated script, and partially, and perhaps more significantly, from her willingness to let her child actors frequently take the lead. Kim’s second feature opens with a series of close-ups of Jin, listening to her teacher at school, going home to retrieve Bin from a neighbour, having supper, being scolded by her mother. As Kim explains during an interview featured on Oscilloscope’s new DVD, close-ups became the master shots while making Treeless Mountain, so that scene after scene had to be constructed to an unusual degree from images of the children’s faces fully immersed in the act of trying to understand what’s going on. If you know something about how movies are made such a strategy might seem like a gamble, but it plays out here as a very sound approach to telling a story centering on kids. The camera stays close so as to register the slightest transition, and it typically does so from the height of the kids themselves. Just as the movie doesn’t concern itself with plot points the kids wouldn’t have access to, so does it evoke something of their perspective. This surrendering to the experience of its characters and the untutored contributions of its actors is what makes Treeless Mountain memorable.

Kim’s willingness to observe rather than impose is also in keeping with the tenants of neorealism, and Treeless Mountain can certainly be regarded as a noble entry into the genre. It not only features kids in trouble—a neorealist staple—but also spends a good third of its running time monitoring its characters as they single-mindedly try to perform a simple task. You could argue that the relatively early fulfillment of this task—the girls manage to fill the piggy bank a good half-hour before the end—is a major flaw in the movie’s construction, letting the air out of the whole thing so that it just sort of drifts toward finale. But the lack of dramatic escalation is one of the things that actually make Treeless Mountain absorbing. The narrative is as unanchored as its characters. The shape of the movie feels right for the content. And there’s never really a dull moment. Hee Yong and Song Hee are extremely cute and also captivating in their train of discoveries, and their director’s judicious use of Ozu-like intermediary scenes—a sky bisected by power lines becomes a motif—endow the whole with a sense of even pacing and a unified aesthetic.

Oscilloscope’s disc is handsomely packaged, though some of the extras are insubstantial. The audio commentary from Kim and producer Bradley Rust Gray feels unprepared for, with the pair prompting each other to say something to fill the gaps. Better is the Q&A presided over by Kim after a screening at New York’s Film Forum. She discusses the casting—Hee Yong was found at her elementary school, Song Hee at an orphanage—and her technique to working with them. Despite the uniformity of last names the writer/director and her actors are none related to the other, yet there is a sense here of an artist’s refamiliarizing herself with her roots. Having been transplanted to the US at the age of 12, Kim lives in Brooklyn and made Treeless Mountain under the auspices of the Sundance Institute. But the village where much of the movie was shot was the same one where Kim grew up, and, having spent so much of her life abroad, her spoken Korean is actually less proficient that that of Hee Yong’s. So perhaps the conditions under which the movie was made formed a sort of equalizer—language has a great way of demolishing hierarchy. In any case it’s always a pleasure to see a movie about kids where the adults filing them aren’t always looking down.

"To disappear into something greater than you...": a conversation with Willem Dafoe

It’s 2019. The citizenry of our unnamed setting are pale, listless, and seem perpetually hung-over, garbed in Prada undertaker. You can smoke again on subway platforms, where you can also grab a coffee that’s 20% blood. A devastating pandemic has rendered nearly everyone a vampire. The non-vampire population, whose fluids are essential to vampire survival, is rapidly dwindling. Social commentary abounds in Daybreakers: sustainability, the erosion of civil rights, drug addiction, and health care are all carefully woven as key metaphors into what’s otherwise a pretty familiar narrative that fuses horror movie tropes with science-fiction’s grandiose scope and goofy expository dialogue.

Daybreakers (2009)

Our hero, a vampire hematologist played by Ethan Hawke, is captured by renegade humans, led by the charismatic Lionel, who’ve devised a cure for the vampire disease. Dressed in baseball jacket, T-shirt and jeans, comfortably scarred and ready to kick undead ass, Lionel’s entrance literally breathes life into Daybreakers. It should come as no surprise that Lionel, who greatly helps to ensure this sophomore effort from the brothers Michael and Peter Spierig becomes something pretty fun, is played by Willem Dafoe. Both a character actor and an occasional leading man, Dafoe has one of the most interesting faces in movies, though those familiar with his extensive background in theatre, his long-time association with New York’s Wooster Group especially, or those who’ve seen his more flamboyantly physical performances in films like The Last Temptation of Christ, Wild at Heart, Body of Evidence, Shadow of the Vampire or Antichrist, know that Dafoe also inhabits one of the movies’ most extraordinary bodies, which at the age of 54 still seems capable of just about anything.

I had the great honour, and pleasure, of speaking with Dafoe about his work on Daybreakers and much more. An inspiring, unusually articulate and thoughtful yet utterly unpretentious actor, he was delightfully engaged and generous, making the most of the short time we had.

Shadow of the Vampire (00)

JB: What drew you to Daybreakers?

Willem Dafoe: It seemed like it would be fun. I was in the mood to do something like it. It’s always a combination of things that make you want to do something. I was very struck by the Spierigs. I saw their first film, Undead, and while I wouldn’t call it a masterpiece it certainly had some stuff in it. It was very inventive. I admired how they made it, practically self-financing it, doing all the effects in-house, by themselves. While the results aren’t always of the highest level technically, sometimes that homemade feeling has an immediacy I can really appreciate.

JB: Resourcefulness seems an especially attractive quality in your choice of collaborators.

WD: That’s true. A script or a character is not enough. Those are things you can only anticipate—I have more faith in people. I like being around people that are excited and passionate about what they do, and who are very clear about how I collaborate with them. With a horror movie, traditionally at least, the performances aren’t that important. You scratch your head and say you could get anybody to do this. But they way the Spierigs talked about the material was very specific and they wanted me to have some input, so it seemed like a creative proposal.

The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou (04)

JB: Your character, Lionel “Elvis” Cormac, has gone from being human to vampire and back again, he’s survived being roasted alive—nothing seems to get him too worked up. He’s about as cool as they come. Is it more fun to play these cocky, confident characters, or do you prefer playing someone more vulnerable, like Klaus Daimler from The Life Aquatic, for example?

WD: Klaus is pretty cocky in his own way; it’s just he caves in every once in a while. Basically, with Lionel, I liked the idea of this blue-collar custom car modification guy who’s working with a scientist and a woman to save the human race. That’s pretty good!

The Last Temptation of Christ (88)

JB: I’ve been watching your work since I was a kid, and I’ve been trying to decide which performances or collaborations have kept me the most engaged, and I find myself coming back to your work with Paul Schrader. If we count The Last Temptation of Christ you’ve worked with on six projects now. Would you describe your experiences with him as unique?

WD: Each one is very specific. You’re right that he’s the guy that I’ve worked with probably more than anyone else outside of the theatre. He always proposes something interesting to do. I like his writing. His approach is very pragmatic. He deals with very hot things in a very composed, clear way. That’s an interesting aesthetic.

JB: Do you have a sense as what it is he especially likes about you?

WD: I don’t. And I never pressed him on it. As I say, each time I’ve functioned differently. Three of the things that I did with him were quite small, because we’re friends and he knows I like to support his work and to be around him. With Affliction, I knew Russell Banks very well, the novelist. I liked the story very much. I liked the cast. That one I didn’t do so much for Paul but because of the whole project. With Adam Resurrected, he really needed me to do that to help get it financed. The Walker was just a quick thing, and I thought it was interesting. The more expansive ones, Light Sleeper and Auto-Focus, those were just flat-out good roles.

Light Sleeper (92), Auto-Focus (02), Adam Resurrected (08)

JB: I always felt like Light Sleeper was a sort of turning point in your career.

WD: It was important to me because it was a role that was very thinly veiled. I could have been that guy if my life was different.

JB: There seemed to be less of a mask.

WD: Yes, less of a mask. I enjoy working with a mask, but that was very sincere. As far as it being a turning point, it’s hard to say. It had its admirers, but it wasn’t widely seen.

Wild at Heart (90)

JB: I imagine Schrader as very clear. Do you find you’re able to respond to direction that’s more abstract? I recall another interview you did where you said that while working on Wild at Heart David Lynch once asked that a scene go from “a maroon to a deep brown.”

WD: [Laughs] I figure that’s the most interesting part of my job. Every time I do something, I adapt to the dominant way of working. I almost don’t have a preference. I know I have certain tendencies, but I like to fight those tendencies. The truth is every time you approach something you reinvent your process. I think of myself less as an actor sometimes than as a person who makes things. In order to do that I usually attach myself to a director with a very strong vision of what they want.

JB: You recently had the opportunity to work with Werner Herzog. He’s habitually worked with actors who are either infamously eccentric, such as Klaus Kinski, or who aren’t really actors at all, such as Bruno S. or the stars of his many documentaries. Was he an effective communicator?

WD: He was very clear. My role was very clear. It’s not that I don’t try to make it a full character, but the role I played in My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done is very much a device. It’s a case where I have to have a certain clarity, a certain tone, to enter the world and serve the story. Maybe it wasn’t the sexiest collaboration in the world, but he’s a very bright guy and he’s great to be around. I had a good time working with him and I hope to do it again in a more expansive way, where there’s more stakes emotionally for me.

My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done? (09)

JB: I wonder how he directed you in that peculiar scene where you and Michael Peña are sort of hovering very still outside of suspected killer Brad McCullum’s house for a long while. I guess with your particular theatrical background your task in that scene can seem more straightforward than it might for other actors.

WD: I don’t ask. I try to be receptive. You’re right that because of my theatre background I’m a little more flexible. If you remember, there was that beautiful song playing, that spiritual. [Singing] “I was born to preach the gospel…” Remember? Now, that song is beautiful, and where he places it in the story is beautiful, so as an actor I can invest myself in the pretending, in the situation of being a cop out there, but at the same time there’s another part of me that’s listening to the song and taking in how beautiful it is. It’s a magical cinema moment that I can absolutely get behind.

Idiot Savant (09)

JB: You recently closed a show in New York with Richard Foreman. How was that?

WD: I worked with him 25 years ago. I’ve known him for years. He’s always been one of my favourite theatre-makers. He’s one of the great granddaddies of the American avant-garde as far as I’m concerned. Many people I know, including Elizabeth LeCompte, who I worked with for so many years at the Wooster Group, were influenced so much by his work. He says Idiot Savant will be his last show. Some people don’t quite believe him, but I sort of do. I felt honored that he chose me—the show very much hung on my character. He’s got a very rigid way. He’s very clear about what he likes and doesn’t like. But I found that it was one of the most satisfying collaborations I’ve ever had.

JB: Different as they are, do you find that your theatre and film work feed one another?

WD: Always.

JB: Are you aware of learning tricks of the trade, so to speak?

WD: I don’t think those are necessarily what you learn. You learn a character thing, a personal philosophy of how you activate yourself. This thing I said about receptivity, that’s something I learned doing theatre. There’s a physicality that I’m reminded of when doing theatre that’s typically missing in film, where sometimes it seems that everything conspires against you using your body. Film is so influenced by television that the close-up has kind of polluted film language. There’s a tendency to act from the shoulders up. But to answer your question, I know nothing! [Laughs] All I know is that I feel stronger, more confident, very turned-on when I’m working in the theatre, and that helps my work in film.

Platoon (86)

JB: As you said, some of your strengths an actor are receptivity and flexibility, but have you ever had to fight for a choice you believe correct?

WD: Nope. It’s funny. When I’m approaching a scene I have certain things that I anticipate—those are usually the things you should let go. The stuff that you cling to or that you’re proud of sometimes is the stuff you should wriggle free of. Obviously I make choices, but I make them instinctively. When I don’t feel comfortable, or when I’m limited, I’m very vocal, very clear. I try to find out why I feel stuck. But I don’t think of conveying something. It’s more a feeling, a sense of being in a world, having the story work on you. When I fight for things I’m usually fighting for a feeling that I’m on the right track.

JB: Is it hard to watch yourself in movies?

WD: I go through phases. Sometimes I can’t stand it. Sometimes I sort of enjoy it. Generally I try not to dwell on things. When watching your work, if you like what you see it doesn’t necessarily help you, and if you don’t like what you see it doesn’t necessarily help you. There’s a part of you that wants to know how it turned out in a very practical way, but as far as learning lessons or studying it, I can’t do that. I’m too close to it. It’s a record. It prompts associations, and that’s all I can think about. The experience of making the movie, for me, is always stronger than the movie itself.

To Live and Die in L.A. (85)

JB: What about watching something you did say, 20 years ago?

WD: That’s even worse, because I’m thinking things like, my god, you look like such a little kid! Suddenly I have an onslaught of memories of my life that don’t even include the movie. It becomes the family album, a meditation, a stirring of memory that can be disturbing, can be pleasurable.

JB: I know Jim Jarmusch never watches his movies, not even when he’s asked to do audio commentaries.

WD: That makes sense. But if I’m at a film festival, let’s say, and something’s playing, I don’t close my eyes. On the other hand I don’t say, hey, I’ve got a little time on my hands—let’s take a look at Streets of Fire! Let’s see how that one holds up!

JB: Your work has been so diverse, but I wonder if you get a lot of scripts that seem to be trying to cater to a Willem Dafoe type, whatever that may be?

WD: I’ve been doing this long enough that hopefully there are different Willem Dafoe types for different people. I feel like as I get older the range of what gets offered to me is, oddly enough, broader. I shouldn’t brag, but even as movies are shrinking I feel like there’s actually more for me to do.

Inside Man (06)

JB: Do you think you’ll be doing this for the rest of your life?

WD: I do. You know, I’m an idiot! I love performing. I love the state it puts me in. It allows for this experience of working on something with people where you don’t know quite what it is. It parallels life. It’s a wonderful game, and the playing of it is a wonderful way to disappear into something greater than you. We all seek that in our different ways, but I’ve very much found it in this strange trade.