Beating a dead horse

Millions of horses died in the Great War. The image of those enormous and elegant, muscular and lithe bodies collapsing, terrified, cut up, scattered, tangled in wire, rotting across muddy European plains alongside the unfathomable numbers of human dead and dying is a very powerful, poignant one. It isn’t difficult to understand how storytellers would be drawn to it. I haven’t read Michael Morpurgo’s 1982 children’s novel, so I can’t attest as to whether or not it works on its own, but as adapted for the screen by Richard Curtis and Lee Hall, adapted into something that doesn’t feel much like a children’s movie (except that it feels naive and oversimplified), and adapted in such a manner that the horse is no longer the centre of the story (and instead fills that centre with corny stock characters), War Horse is astonishingly hollow, simultaneously mechanical and sentimental, faux-innocent, and thus secretly cynical. In short, it brings out the worst in Steven Spielberg, whose direction of actors has never been more leaden (he gets what I can only hope will be the worst, most strained and artificial performance the normally great Peter Mullan will ever give), whose camerawork has never felt more thoughtlessly money-coated (he seems to need a crane just to shoot inserts), and aesthetically droopy (there’s a closing day-for-dusk shot that has to be seen to believe how ugly it is). It may be the nadir of Spielberg regular John Williams’ long career of composing wildly over-animated scores; every time anyone so much as smirks it’s like E.T.’s flying past the moon.

Perhaps Spielberg felt that War Horse would be a return to past glories; after tackling Normandy, he could now sink his teeth into the Somme (from the Holocaust to The War of Worlds, nothing seems to charge the elder Spielberg’s batteries like colossal, senseless death counts). Indeed, Joey, the thoroughbred-turned-plow horse-turned-war horse, becomes something of a Private Ryan. Everything stops, literally, to tend to him. Brits and Germans meet in the middle of a corpse-strewn battlefield and band together to rescue Joey from a lonesome, slow demise. A field doctor stops attending to a glut of agonized wounded soldiers just to help Joey. At some point, the magical aura surrounding this horse and the way it prompts everyone to ignore all else becomes, arguably, kind of offensive.

It doesn’t help that the horse is just, you know, a horse. There’s nothing all that cinematic about him. Spielberg and cinematographer Janusz Kamiński have no special way of rendering him charismatic. I adore horses, but just sticking one in front of a camera doesn’t make me instantly teary-eyed; the fact is, their allure, the particular nature of their features, isn’t easily captured on film... But really, I’m just struggling to make sense of why War Horse is such a dud. I think rather than generalize or theorize I should just say that this is one of those pictures where, scene-by-scene, over the course of its grueling runtime, you’re sort of baffled by all the small, wrote, bad choices that slowly accumulate: the lame comic relief (a goose), the forced emotions, the speechy dialogue. Spielberg, so much more at home with lighter material (E.T., Catch Me If You Can), has gone to war once more, and this time he really got creamed.

It's a Wonderful Life: cold comforts

Grudging altruism, ceaseless compromise, half-measures, a natural talent for holding down the fort, unfulfilled longings that, more harrowingly, perhaps never really could have been fulfilled: all of these things, accumulating over half a lifetime, drove George Bailey to get stinko, drive into an old tree, then stumble toward that snow-caked bridge over which he planned to tumble into the oblivion of river below. Suicide is painless when you’ve never once tasted what you truly craved, when the walls close in. And, for the third time in the movie, George does fall into the water. (Am I the only one that sees Vertigo when Jimmy Stewart makes the plunge, over and over, first for his brother, then into the hidden pool, and then into the river?) Only it’s to save a man from drowning, not to drown himself—yet again, George is a slave to self-sacrifice. That the drowning man is really a trickster guardian angel who proves to George that he’s well-friended, even beloved, that his town would be a nastier place (though one with a far more bustling night life) without him, doesn’t entirely remove the ache of it all, the fact that George Bailey still never got the hell out of Bedford Falls. And I think this is one of the enduring things about It’s a Wonderful Life: the magical consolation that ends the movie is, in the long run, in the years we imagine to come, only marginally consoling. Life will probably not get much easier for George Bailey. But, like some poor soul from Beckett, he’ll go on.

I’m only slightly embarrassed that I’d never seen It’s a Wonderful Life until last night. Everyone I know has seen it on TV; I don’t watch TV. But anyway what’s especially interesting about the movie is the way it actually seems designed/destined to be watched long after its making. It was a box office disappointment in its day, won none of its Oscars, and only became a holiday broadcast staple in the 1970s. It’s a movie about everything that leads us up to our worst moments, the long march of our pasts and the hard work of accepting cold comforts. The movie was always meant to be a classic, which means to be loved sometime in the future, when everyone involved was dead or dying and nostalgia has wrapped itself tightly round the movie’s breast. The sad truth: apparently George Bailey really is worth more to us dead than alive. Though while the screen is alight, he is, somehow, alive. And, as it turns out, he’s in a pretty wonderful movie.

TIFF '11: Take us to the river

Gentle yet spry, shot on especially murky but not unpleasantly hued video in the Sertão region of Northeastern Brazil, from which many aspects of its narrative were derived, Swirl (Girimunho), the feature debut of directors Clarissa Campolina Helvécio Marins Jr., opens with images of bodies moving in dark streets to polyrhythmic drums and spirited singing, and it ends with a reedy, mischievous voice speaking to us softly over the image the film’s octogenarian protagonist (the source of that voice) standing some distance away from the camera, knee-deep in a river under soft daylight. In between is much diegetic music—characters play guitar and trumpet and sing improvised songs about what they’re doing in the moment, and later there’ll be a big band taking a small stage, with insanely gorgeous dancing girls in micro-skirts—serene memories of youthful love, a haunting, some travel, and the singularly lovely vision of a dead man’s clothes adrift in rippling water. “Time doesn’t stop,” Batsu explains to her granddaughter. “It’s us who stop.” Or do we? Batsu’s husband has passed on yet she hears noises in his workshop when no one is there to make them. She initially tries to persuade her husband’s ghost to let her be, with words, and perhaps her old pistol, but when these tactics fail she packs his tools and clothes in a suitcase and searches for a rightful resting place. Swirl is an unassuming work that generates all its charisma from the people it depicts, but elderly Batsu’s adorable demeanor and curious platitudes conceal lingering questions about how to proceed through life, even in its latter stages. The film is about finding one’s own rites of passage, seeking out ways of saying goodbye when one doesn’t weep—vivacious Batsu one made a pact with her husband that neither would ever cry—and granting peace to both the living and the dead.

TIFF '11: The roles we play

In the last few years I’ve been able to interview Werner Herzog several times in connection with his Toronto International Film Festival premieres, and as much as I enjoy these experiences—Herzog is nothing if not entertaining company—our conversations, if you can call them that, along with his public appearances, have made me increasingly suspicious: Has the filmmaker become too much of a showman? Has his schtick become too wrote, his eccentricities token, a put-on, an extension of the sort of too-recognizably Herzogian branding that threatens to over-burden films like My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done?, converting them into a sort of check list? When I speak to him I feel less like he’s responding to my questions than he’s launching almost randomly into his prepared anecdotes, which are part of his hard-sell. (“Herzog always delivers!”) But I’ve just seen Into the Abyss, his new film about two inmates in Texas—one on death row, one serving a sentence that wouldn’t see him up for parole for another 40 years—and the families of those inmates victims. It has no trademark Herzog voice-over, and features no exotic landscapes (unless you consider rural Texas to be exotic). And watching it I realize that, while Herzog the public figure may seem less than engaged with an honest and open exchange, Herzog the filmmaker is in fact more invested in people at this point in his career than at any other. In Encounters at the End of the World he was as interested in the people who filter down to the bottom of the world as he was in the Antarctic undersea strangeness. In Cave of Forgotten Dreams he was as curious about the scientists at work in the Chauvet Cave as he was in the cave’s astounding Stone Age art. Into the Abyss is an extraordinary film precisely because of Herzog’s faith in his subjects, all of them struggling to come to terms with different kinds of murder, to supply the film with its wonder and meaning. He listens exceedingly well. He provokes, he seeks out quirk at every chance, but he also exudes real compassion without flamboyant sentiment.


On a somewhat similar note, Alps, the latest from Yorgos Lanthimos, which had its TIFF premiere to some very enthusiastic fans last night, echoes Dogtooth, its predecessor, in its obsession with role-playing and heavily constructed modes of behaviour: the film is about a group of people who rent themselves out as surrogates to people who have lost a loved one, pretending to be the dearly departed for as long as it takes to get over the loss. Of course, it’s kooky and formalist as all hell. It’s also fascinating, and surprisingly poignant. A potential point of contention for some will lay in the fact that while the flat performance style of Dogtooth was contained within a cloistered family unit, Alps opens up the canvas to the rest of the world—and it turns out that everyone else acts like that too. But this filmmaker, so drawn to intricate, rule-laden systems and the process of how they inevitably break down, is not as schematic as the oppressive patriarchal figures he creates. As rigorously Bressonian as his films’ now apparently de rigueur performance style is, there is still room for spontaneity. There are moments when his protagonist—beautifully played by Aggeliki Papoulia—becomes so immersed in the people she’s temporarily resurrecting that emotional or guttural responses break up, or rather transcend her deadpan. There are real people with real feelings in Alps—it’s just that they’re placed in situations that interrogate the very notion of how feelings are expressed.

TIFF '11: We we came from

My first report from the 2011 Toronto International Film Festival is coming shamefully late. My only excuse is that I’ve been traveling, sort of all over the place—Tijuana, San Diego, Denver—and not every stop was strictly voluntary. Yet this sense of steady movement was not inappropriate for what constituted one of yesterday’s highlights, the Mavericks session at the Princess of Wales Theatre that included the world premiere of Jonathan Demme’s Neil Young Journeys, followed by an onstage discussion between programmer Thom Powers, Demme and Young, whose endearingly dry humour and utterly relaxed demeanor charmed the hell out of everybody.


Neil Young Journeys is both a concert movie and a road movie. It shifts between pleasingly unfussy coverage of Young’s pair of recent solo performances at Massey Hall—just a few blocks away from the Princess—and Young’s journey in a Crown Victoria from Omemee (“...a town in North Ontario...”), where he spent part of his childhood, to Toronto for the show. Along the way are amusing recollections of youth, like the one about the kid named Goof who gave Young a nickel to eat tar or tell an old lady she had a fat ass, some very pretty scenery, and Young’s confession that, despite his career-long obsession with maximum sound quality, the car is still his preferred place to listen to music.


No car stereo has anything on the sound system at the Princess however, which Young tweaked so that we listened to Journeys at 96 kilohertz—the first time in history a film was exhibited so thunderously. Given his subject, Demme most often smartly opts to hold images a long while rather than try to impose excitement through a lot of needless cutting. So we get extended shots of Young’s little beak of an upper lip perched on the edge of his harmonica and the tear in the pinch of his beat-up white fedora, or, just as memorably, Young’s face as seen through a psychedelically lit gob of spit clinging to his microphone micro-cam. The songs were mainly culled from Young recent Daniel Lanois-produced Le Noise and from his breakthrough period of 40 years ago. Young’s murder ballad ‘Down By the River’ ends with a wonderfully spooky and hushed “There is no reason for you to hide...” There’s a stirring rendition of ‘After the Gold Rush’ performed on pump organ and harmonica, and an industrial-strength ‘Ohio’ on a Les Paul. The show ends with a terrifically feedback-operatic ‘Walk With Me.’ But among the newer material the song that made the biggest impression on me was ‘You Never Call’—a song that cries out to be covered by Willie Nelson—in which Young repeats a line that evokes death as “the ultimate vacation with no back pain,” and spots a dead friend’s car in the parking lot outside a hockey game.

The onstage Q&A was a little too brief. It featured a very funny story from Demme about how he and Young first met, the happy revelation that Young is writing a memoir, and one-too-many old schoolchums in the audience who just wanted to say hi. Still, the atmosphere was palpably affectionate, imbued with the feeling that each of us has a road of differing lengths behind us, and we were all of us sharing a very memorable stop.

"The person’s gone, but scenes from the relationship you shared with them are still ringing in your ears": Mike Mills on Beginners

Beginners begins with an ending, with introverted thirty-something Californian illustrator Oliver (Ewan McGregor) mourning the death of his father Hal (Christopher Plummer), who came out of the closet at 75, following the death of his wife, Oliver’s mother, and then died five years later. Oliver inherits Hal’s house and his dog, who’s telepathic and knows 150 words of English, and whose thoughts we glean through subtitles, which along with numerous drawings, notebooks, postcards and graffiti contribute to this film’s charming, text-heavy, scrapbook texture. Oliver falls in love with a gorgeous, funny, friendly yet oddly unknowable French girl (Mélanie Laurent, of Inglorious Basterds), who he takes rollerskating and whose smile inexplicably breaks your heart, in part because she doesn’t speak for the first part of the movie. Oliver meets Anna at a Halloween party, where he’s dressed as Freud and she suffers from laryngitis. As he falls in love he remembers Hal falling in love, or something like it, in his final years, when everything in life was new again and he enjoyed speaking to inanimate objects and trying on various forms of expressing his sexual identity the way one tries on outfits. Oliver also remembers his mother, back when he was a boy and they used to rehearse movie deaths for fun, or go to the museum and imitate the sculptures. Memory and the present are intertwined. They bleed into each other and fold into a single narrative that’s admittedly a little sketchy in some of the emotionally complicated bits yet brims overall with spontaneity and moments of truth that are touching and wry.


Beginners is the second feature from writer/director Mike Mills, who previously made Thumbsucker and many music videos and is also a graphic designer, a musician, and probably a lot of other things too. He’s a very sweet, endlessly curious man. We met for our interview in a fancy hotel in Toronto, where there’s supposedly massive televisions hiding behind the bathroom mirrors, though no one could prove this to me. Mills wore a tie and carried a small camera and was very generous.

writer/director Mike Mills

JB: Beginners feels like a very natural progression from Thumbsucker. It also feels very personal. What prompted the film?

Mike Mills: It comes from my real dad, actually, who came out when he was 75 and passed away five years later, just as I was finishing Thumbsucker. I started writing Beginners right after that. I think I’m always going to be writing about families and relationships and people trying to figure out who they are, trying to get the bad story out of their head and get to the better story. That’s certainly true of both films and seems to be the case with the one I’m writing now. But Beginners was a very immediate reaction to my life.

JB: Did your father know that you were planning to incorporate his story into your next movie?

MM: My dad was really having his party by then. I said to him, “I want to make something about you and mom and your whole deal.” And he was just sort of pleasantly taken aback. I interviewed him a few times, so he knew I was investigating. When he came out, he really came out. He was very politicized, very social, very involved in gay pride groups in Santa Barbara. So I felt he would be down with this idea of coming out more and more and in different ways.


JB: Having seen the film, it’s difficult to imagine it with anyone besides Christopher Plummer playing Hal, but were you ever feeling like you should cast a gay actor in the role?

MM: My first concern was with finding someone who could really get my dad right. But there’s also this fact that my dad was sort of playing a straight man, or half wanted to be a straight man, for 75 years. He didn’t really have any gay affectations. I liked the idea of taking Captain von Trapp and having him be gay. I thought about this a lot, and it wasn’t an easy decision, but this intuitively felt more natural to me.

JB: I guess you were developing the project for a fairly long period. Was it difficult to finance?

MM: It was difficult in that Thumbsucker wasn’t a hit. Beginners is also what people call a “small” film, which I don’t know if I understand, given that it’s about things like death and love and self-discovery. Even after I got Ewan and Christopher attached the economic crisis hit and it remained an uphill battle. But the more alone or hopeless I felt about it, the more I thought this might be the last movie anyone ever lets me make, the more it made me want to invest even more of myself into the project. What makes me unique as a director? What interests me most? Those were the questions that kept me working and the answers all got thrown in.


JB: Both Thumbsucker and Beginners develop this theme of finding one’s voice, quite literally. Did you grow up with a speech impediment or otherwise have a tough time feeling confident speaking?

MM: I’m definitely a recovering very shy person. But even if you’re not shy, I think figuring out who you are and not listening to those voices that demand that you conform or be simpler or more likable is such a common issue. It’s central to family relationships. So much of what constitutes our voice is the result of what story we inherit from out little family, or immediate family, and also from our bigger family, which seems to have to do with the place we grew up.

JB: It’s interesting to consider how your filmmaking relates to your work as a graphic designer. I think about the way you photograph empty spaces or the way you incorporate text, which is especially layered in Beginners. Is it that your work in graphic design informs your filmmaking, or is it more that you have a particular sensibility that imbues everything you do with these motifs?

MM: I think it’s the latter. I don’t really make a big division between media in my head. I went to art school, and I think a lot of what I do just comes from an “art” context, rather than a strictly cinematic context. With this film I felt free to put all that stuff into one project, to speak through drawings or stills. But, you know, one of my favourite graphic designers is Jean-Luc Godard. The graphics in his films are cooler than anybody’s. His sense of design influenced me as a graphic designer before I was a filmmaker. A lot of my still photography is also pretty flat or proscenium. You could say that comes from graphics, but it also comes from my love of William Eggleston, Stephen Shore, or Robert Adams—it comes from the photography that I like. Also, in my family things were always vague or unexplained or confusing, so I think the way I construct images has a lot to do with trying to make things clear and expository and observable. So it’s as much an emotional sensibility as it is a purely aesthetic one.

JB: The style of Thumbsucker felt more severe to me, more pared down. Something about Beginners by contrast feels looser, perhaps more guided by the emotional patterns of the story.

MM: Yeah, Thumbsucker turned out to be a little more formal that I intended, partly by shooting anamorphic, which actually has a lot of restrictions.

JB: Funny you should mention that. I was really aware of the aspect ratio as I watched Thumbsucker recently.

MM: You don’t want to totally control films. They have their own life. I knew I wanted more movement in this one. The story between Oliver and Anna is all hand-held, no marks, and hardly any lights. The story between Oliver and his dad is all locked off or tracking shots. I thought that was a good way to talk about the difference between memory and being in the present. The bottom line was that, while the film has a death at the heart of it and several sad parts, I really wanted it to be filled with life.


JB: It’s interesting the way you introduce the character of Andy, the young boyfriend. It’s a sort of snapshot. I think he says one line.

MM: That’s right. And he’s part of a much longer barrage of information.

JB: Right. From the start of the film these sorts of moments made me feel like part of what I was watching was Oliver trying to come to terms with the discrepancies in his memories. You also have these flashbacks scattered throughout that seem to respond to something happening to Oliver in the present, though the parallels are always just shy of being obvious, which makes them more fun and interesting. Were these flashbacks part of one narrative thread you had in your mind, while everything in the present tense was another thread and you then had to find ways to marry the two? Or did you just write it all in the order that it came out?

MM: I wrote it as two stories. I wanted to interweave them. That was what interested me. There’s a film called Love Film by István Szabó that has a similar structure that I’ve always loved, and that’s kind of how I was living at the time. I was writing this right after my dad died, and when something like that happens it’s like the past just keeps flooding into the present. The person’s gone, but scenes from the relationship you shared with them are still ringing in your ears. So it felt natural and intuitive. A lot of this was derived from my own very real memories, which the more you examine the more crazy and unreliable they seem. Try and stare at a memory—I invite you to do it—some pivotal moment in your life. They’re so fragmentary and slippery. The longer you try to look at it the more it tries to slip away, and when all you have left of your parents are memories, that’s a banal but pretty earth-shattering discovery. I tried to work that feeling into the film, like when Oliver remembers his father wearing a sweater but he was really wearing a robe. I don’t think anybody notices this, but there are memories that reoccur throughout the film and each time they’re a different take, and something is slightly different.


JB: In making Beginners did you uncover any shocking memories of your parents that you’d completely forgotten?

MM: No, but I’m glad I wrote them all down, and not just those that made it into the film. I have this big stack of 5x7 cards that I made notes on to start with, and I was just looking at them recently and already noticing how easily things slip away, things you thought you’d never forget. I didn’t unearth anything big, but it was really interesting to write from my parents’ perspective. One discovery I made was realizing that they were funny. They liked to use humour in this subversive way, maybe just out of the desire to make life more unusual or beat back unhappiness.

JB: Sounds like something you inherited from them.

MM: I guess so, but you never think of your parents as funny. There are those two main things: your parents aren’t funny and they don’t have sex…

JB: Or they’re only funny when they have sex!

MM: [Laughs] Anyway, there’s lots of stuff in the movie that didn’t actually happen to me or my family. I have two sisters that aren’t even represented in the movie. It’s not a memoir. Your parents dying is so much bigger than making a movie about it. But making this movie has been a way of hanging onto all these things.

JB: And maybe also a way of letting go of them.

MM: Yeah, that’s true. Spewing all this out into the world is a funny sort of way to burn it all up.

Gil Scott-Heron, 1949 - 2011

Man, this is some sad, awful news. Only 62 years old. And just last night my friend Alvaro was spinning into the wee hours at Not My Dog and got everyone's ears pricked right up (and many of their asses grooving) when he laid down 'New York Is Killing Me.' (I guess Scott-Heron wasn't kidding when he came up with that title.) Actually, every time we have a party and I play anything by GSC, inevitably, someone, usually someone on the young side, who might not typically be all that curious about the train of songs working through the stereo, will suddenly stop whatever they were doing and ask me: "Who is that?" Pieces of a Man has been with me a long, long time. I'm New Here, with its beautifully personalized eponymous Bill Callahan cover, was one of my favourite records of the past several years, although I play it rarely, because I think the liner notes are quite right about it being something to listen to in a very private, quiet, nighttime space. It seemed like Scott-Heron was enjoying this incredible resurgence of creative energy. I can't quite believe that's it...

Times obit here.

Ocean memory mirror: Solaris on blu-ray

Andrei Tarkovsky’s is very much a wet cinema, and Solaris (1972), his first foray into science fiction, newly available on blu-ray from Criterion, represents his densest and most haunting use of water, not only as an elemental motif, but as a fundamental narrative resource. Inspired by (though far from beholden to) the novel of the same name by Stanislaw Lem, Solaris finds its baffled protagonist, a psychologist of clinical demeanor named Kris Kelvin (Donatas Banionis), on a space station hovering over the oceanic surface of the eponymous distant planet, a planet that seems to be delivering to its visitors resurrected figures from their past. The waters of Solaris are a source of life, or rather deathlessness. Kris is visited and revisited by his wife Hari (Natalya Bondarchuk), who suicided some ten years ago. Her memories are initially so miniscule that she’s even surprised by her own face in the mirror, but very quickly the old/original Hari’s memories accumulate. At first Kris tries to get rid of her, but she just comes back. Like the lovers of Last Year at Marienbad (1961), Kris and Hari appear to be condemned to (or blessed with) a closed circuit of eternal return, at least for as long as Kris stays within Solaris’ inscrutable orbit.

Solaris was my first Tarkovsky, and its lulling opening images of a pond and its undulating vegetation leave deep impressions on me still. That first half-hour or so, an earthbound prologue entirely absent from Lem’s book, set in and around Kris’ family’s dacha, impart a vital sense of Tarkovsky’s attachment to nature just before he launches his (and our) imagination into space. A sudden shower passes through the countryside as Kris wanders the dacha’s grounds, while the sun continues to beam down and cast objects in a dewy glow. Children play in the woods. A horse ambles around. Though a city of cold, teeming freeways lays somewhere nearby, though this seems to be a world made of men largely suffering in the absence of women, we get the impression that this is close enough to paradise—as close as we’ve any right to. Before Kris leaves on his mission he starts a small fire outside the dacha and begins burning piles of old research notes and personal items. In a sense he’s taking his memories and turning them into smoke and ash, yet these memories will soon be resurrected through the mysterious formative powers of Solaris’ oceans. The two scientists left on Solaris, already more than familiar with the phenomenon that will afflict the newcomer, suggest that these needy, tactile ghosts, or “guests,” as they refer to them, have “something to do with conscience.” Are they referring to guilt over decades-old wrongdoings or guilt over their more recent bombarding of the Solaris ocean with radiation, which they say prompted the first apparitions? There is also the suggestion, made not by the scientists so much as by Tarkovsky himself, that whether Solaris is explored further or simply abandoned, some trace of those who came to it will remain, perhaps as tiny islands upon which memories replay themselves over and over again.

Solaris features images and ideas that continue to alternately fascinate, frighten and move me. Tarkovsky’s trademark expansive tracking shots and elliptical storytelling only heighten the film’s potency. The only flaws that stick with me after seeing it again arise from Tarkovsky’s disinterest in the allure of outer space (could he not have done a little more with the journey to Solaris?) and from Banionis’ performance, which feels lacking or vague, occasionally coming off more as that of an actor at a loss as to what he’s to be doing than it does as that of a character tormented by inexplicable events and a resurgence of dormant emotions. (Still, Banionis has the sort of face that rewards lingering shots, and looks kind of great while stumbling around the derelict space station in his underpants and monogrammed pajama top.) At one point a character echoes what were surely the sentiments of the film’s director when he says: “We don’t need other worlds. We need a mirror.” The enduring enigma and poetry of Tarkovsky’s work can be located in its capacity to hold up a mirror to the human soul and stir its murkiest existential questions, and in the curious case of Solaris, that mirror actually covers the surface of an entire world.

Death trip: Enter the Void

Central to Enter the Void is not so much a character as a point of view. Oscar (Nathaniel Brown), a young American living, loafing and dealing various drugs in Tokyo, is observed relatively little (though for a while we get a rather thorough study of the back of his head) yet is, in the loosest sense, present in every scene. Gaspar Noé uses Oscar’s consciousness as a cinematic vessel: we see and hear what he sees and hears, a device familiar from its fleeting employment in slasher films but, documentaries aside, is rarely used in extended duration, some memorable exceptions being Russian Ark, The Lady in the Lake, and the first part of Dark Passage, whose title could easily be substituted for the one Noé settled on for this, his follow-up to Irreversible and third feature as writer/director/editor/cinematographer/provocateur/

etc.

Enter the Void follows, or rather inhabits, Oscar as he gets profoundly stoned, walks to a nightclub, gets killed, and thence drifts in spirit-form through a narrow network of past and present. His life seems to have consisted mainly of one major source of trauma (his parents’ death in a car accident when Oscar was a child, an event he was present for) and one of comfort (his sister, with whom he’s made a pact to always be together, even after death). It is in any case these items that doggedly haunt Oscar’s afterlife and Noé’s project. Over and over we witness the accident from the backseat, the lifeless bodies, the sister wailing. The memory repeats until it no longer shocks us nor deeply troubles Oscar, the implication being, I suppose, that he’s letting go of earthly woes. Over and over we visit Oscar’s sister (Paz de la Huerta, frequently naked and, less appealingly, screaming), usually while she’s getting laid or dancing in a g-string. Oscar’s protective impulse and incestuous desire for his sister merge into a single focused longing for reunion that finally manifests in a sequence that ushers Oscar toward reincarnation via one particular anatomical dark passage that, it’s probably safe to say, the movies have never taken us through before.

Equal parts mind-blowing and incredibly boring, I can no more deny the tedium of Enter the Void than I can its ingenuity. Maybe that’s just it: displays of ingenuity are tedious, at least when undertaken by artists who seem drawn to nothing so much as their own sublime gimmickry. (To be fair, the tedium is surely more oppressive in the 160-minute version I’ve seen than in the 137-minute version that’s screened in some theatres.) The first half-hour or so, where Oscar trips out to visions of branching galactic veins of pulsating, morphing beauty, where paranoia burgeons and fades, where his buddy Alex (Cyril Roy, oddly charismatic, and giving the closest thing to a two-dimensional performance) comes by to explain the Tibetan Book of the Dead (Noé’s source material), is easily the most engaging and witty section. Noé’s evocation of Oscar’s reeling response to his narcotic cocktail, which includes DMT, is uncanny: anyone who takes drugs for extra-medicinal purposes will recognize the sensations carefully conjured here. But once Oscar goes astral, momentum and insight is largely discarded. Yes, the soaring-over-Tokyo camerawork is wondrous, a milestone even. But Oscar’s a bland cipher, his afterlife hardly the sort anyone truly invested in spiritual questions would choose for such extensive cinematic examination. His posthumous wandering might have worked better as an installation or visionary video game, which it resembles in many respects. Stanley Kubrick and 2001 especially are touchstones, though Noé has yet to muster up even Kubrick’s negligible level of interest in characters. Enter the Void is one hell of a trip, but you may find you’ve come down long before its final fade to black.

Atrocity Exposition: Winter Soldier

He can’t remember how many times he’d seen prisoners bound and blindfolded with copper wire and thrown from mobile US aircraft, but Rusty Sachs, 27 year-old veteran of the US Marine Air Wing, thinks it must have been somewhere between 15 and 50. Sachs describes this activity, performed in the spirit of competition (the prisoners were being tossed from choppers not only for sadistic amusement or some perverse notion of efficiency, but to see who could throw theirs the furthest), in the opening moments of Winter Solider (1972). This documentary, chronicling the Winter Solider Investigation, which took place during the winter of 1971 in a Detroit Howard Johnson, wisely gets right down to business. Nothing that’s discussed over the course of the film’s 96-minute running time is for the faint of heart or anyone nurturing illusions about Americans in Vietnam. Winter Solider, along with Hearts and Minds, is one of the essential films about Vietnam, and as such is utterly devastating.

The film was produced by the Winterfilm Collective, which included Sachs, documentarian David Grubin, and Barbara Kopple, who would go on to make Harlan County, USA (76), another of the greatest, most valiant nonfiction films of the era. But the decision to attribute Winter Soldier to a collective rather than a single filmmaker or even handful of filmmakers is appropriate. Few films seem as necessarily subservient to simply assembling participants for the purpose of condensing and conveying vital information. What sensibility emerges feels very much the product of likeminded activists whose private ambitions are secondary to the event unfolding before the cameras. Solidarity is woven into the film’s core. All we get, interspersed with footage from the war, are testimonies, both formal (speakers on stage, with a microphone, before a small public) and informal (veterans and citizens comparing notes during breaks in the hearings). Among those veterans who speak out against the war is future Presidential candidate John Kerry. The images, particularly the long, unbroken close-ups, are somewhat overexposed, with lots of hot white in the Caucasian faces, the details blasted from the background, nothing to distract from what’s being said and how, all of it very wintry indeed.

What’s discussed? The list of atrocities could consume the span of this review and some. Torture, rape, mutilation, humiliation, disembowelment, destruction of property. The slaughter of children. The regarding of all Vietnamese as the enemy, especially once they’re dead. Wildly inflated body counts. Nightmares. Patriotism. Racism, perhaps as a bottom line that goes so much deeper into history and the social fabric than the then-current conflict. Soft-spoken and handsome in his dark beard, Scott Camil, who was discharged after having received 13 medals and attained the rank of Sergeant, recalls going to Vietnam to find out what kind of a man he was. Even after witnessing countless flamboyant violations of the Geneva Convention, Camil still believed he was doing what was right for his country. Beyond the atrocities committed, beyond policy, beyond whatever we can regard as history or as an ongoing, fundamental concern about government and war, Winter Solider haunts us with the question of how it is Scott Camil became what he became for the four years he served. At least we know that whatever he became, he could somehow, eventually, come back from it, and tell his story.

Winter Soldier screens this weekend at Edmonton's Metro Cinema.

"Getting lost doesn't help creativity at all": Javier Bardem and Alejandro González Iñárritu on their Biutiful collaboration

“The movie is like a Francis Bacon painting,” Javier Bardem says when asked to characterize Biutiful, the film in which he portrays a dying man who communicates with the recently dead while moving through a crime-ridden contemporary Barcelona that itself resembles some outer circle of the inferno. “Some people can take it. Some can’t. Some people can look at the surface and then go deeper to see the love beneath, the compassion that’s woven into the horror of life.”

Babel

Biutiful is the fourth feature from Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu. Following his alternately acclaimed and denounced tripartite, “globalized” drama Babel, Biutiful is most closely related in ontological terms to González Iñárritu’s second feature 21 Grams. It’s his first movie in his native Spanish since his exhilarating multi-narrative debut Amores Perros. It’s also the first he’s made without screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga. When González Iñárritu and Arriaga inamicably parted ways after fighting over credits for Babel, I wondered if their individual subsequent films would indicate which of them was responsible for the heavy-handedness and dependency on dramatic irony that increasingly plagued their collaborations. But both Biutiful and Arriaga’s recent directorial debut The Burning Plain make clear that the tendency was mutual. There are numerous moments in Biutiful that possess a certain penetrating eloquence, but they’re set within an at times oppressive framework far too eager to declare its self-importance, too proud of its fitfully successful attempts to say something meaningful about “the world we live in” generally, and the world of illegal migrant laborers specifically.

What makes Biutiful essential viewing then isn’t its socially burdened narrative or its ostentatious, immaculately crafted mise en scène—it’s Bardem’s impossibly rich, marathon central performance, and the way that performance is nurtured and heightened by González Iñárritu's precision approach. The shoot took place over five months, and as we watch Bardem’s flawed hero, Uxbal, wither away from the cancer that’s rapidly consuming him, while frantically trying to leave his children in the best possible position to continue in his absence, we’re watching a performance so immersive, so exhaustive, so rife with resonant contradictions, that by the end we can’t but feel we know this man somehow. We know he’s sick when the other characters don’t. We know his fateful errors in judgment and his efforts to do good. We witness his conferences with the dead, though Bardem never plays the supernatural bits any differently than the ones where he’s collecting money or feeding his kids. Uxbal clings to life while desperately maintaining some essential dignity, and when he’s finally forced to let go the loss is almost palpable in a way that the movie’s poetic intimations of an afterlife can’t diminish.

González Iñárritu and Bardem were promoting Biutiful during last September’s Toronto International Film Festival. We meet them in hotel rooms, separately, as though we’re interrogating them, hoping to pit one against the other in a ploy to get good copy. But despite the fact that the more divisive aspects of Biutiful could be regarded as representing a battle between Bardem’s deeply felt movie and González Iñárritu’s somewhat forced one, between an Oscar-nominated performance viewers are inclined to surrender to and a ruthlessly sculpted directorial vision some will be annoyed by, both artists make clear from the get-go that Biutiful is the result of a much-desired alliance. Bardem wanted to work with González Iñárritu, particularly for the way he works with actors, and González Iñárritu wanted to work with Bardem. The role of Uxbal, father to two children, husband to a woman suffering flamboyantly from bipolar disorder, and a sort of managerial figure for numerous underworld enterprises, was based to some extent on González Iñárritu’s own father, but written specifically for Bardem to interpret.

“Javier’s physically very strong,” explains González Iñárritu, “but, after having known him for eight or nine years, I know how delicate and sensitive he is on the inside. This Minotaur’s face of his envelops a poet’s soul. It’s a strange combination that attaches itself nicely to Uxbal, who’s a tough guy, a street guy, but at bottom is a vulnerable, sophisticated spirit. Primitive culturally, but spiritually sophisticated.”

When told about González Iñárritu’s assessment of his persona, Bardem considers this for a moment. “Tough on the outside and tender on the inside…” he says. “Like a melon!” We all laugh. “Melon Brando!” he then quips, and we laugh even harder. He immediately apologizes for the bad pun, but his ease and warmth loosens up the whole room. Bardem draws a curtain, pours himself some water, sits with us, rather than before us. He seems happy and relaxed, yet he’s frank with regards to the movie’s bleakness.

“Alejandro told me from the beginning that this was a tragedy,” says Bardem. “Like a Greek tragedy, where the gods enter the story in order to remind human beings how weak they are, how much help they need, and how little help they’re going to provide, because they have to learn by themselves.”

We discuss González Iñárritu’s infamous perfectionism, his habit of doing dozens of takes for every camera set-up. Bardem claims that while this approach can be draining it always led him to the best results. I tell Bardem that for all the scenes of intense drama, for me the most memorable was one where Uxbal openly confesses his terminal illness to a complete stranger in a noisy nightclub. The scene is moving because, in a sense, Bardem seems to just throw the line away, making nothing of it. Bardem, whose performances in Before Night Falls and The Sea Inside have already made him an old hand at on-screen death, points out however that even that scene was the product of countless takes and varying approaches. His performance only appears casual. But Bardem also acknowledges the importance of balancing lightness and weight when telling a story such as this, and credits his junior costars with helping him to map out his character’s degrees of gravity, as well as shake it all off when the workday is over.

“Alejandro didn’t want the kids to feel they were witnessing something real, something they’re going to bring home with them,” Bardem explains. “Everything was a game. Those kids would play their emotions and when he says cut they’d go back to their toys and do goofy things. That’s the way it has to be. You have to learn to detach yourself from the material at some points or you get lost in your own thing, and getting lost doesn’t help creativity at all. Some days were harder than others, but through the kids I learned how to go back to the days when I’d be playing a galaxy warrior one moment and then have to go home or off to class the next. I didn’t have to say to myself, ‘Hold on, I was just a galaxy warrior, how am I going to focus on the mathematics now?’ No. You jump. That’s what it’s all about. Be there, experience what you have to experience, but leave a little room in your brain where you tell yourself this is fiction.”

Death looms over every scene of Biutiful. It comes for Uxbal and it comes for many other characters too, especially those surviving on the fringes of the society. Death is finally the central theme of Biutiful: how to accept it, to prepare for it, to reconcile oneself to its mysteries—though it’s slightly less mysterious for the likes of Uxbal than it is for most of us. We see Uxbal in a wintry forest, a place resembling this world yet clearly not of it, a place where he meets someone from his past, someone long gone. Uxbal’s connection to an afterlife is no mere fantastic construct for González Iñárritu. It’s inspired by the director’s own experience with people who he feels possess a genuine ability to see things most of us don’t, things hidden from the established senses. As González Iñárritu sits perched on his chair, trying to come to terms with our questions about what drove him to make Biutiful, there’s an undeniable feeling that his encounters with such people humbled him, and are meant to endow the work not with despair but rather with a sense of wonder.

“The character of Uxbal’s spiritual advisor, or mentor, was based on a woman I met in a very rundown neighbourhood in Mexico City,” González Iñárritu explains. “It was cold out, and I was wearing all these layers, these sweaters and coats and scarves, so you couldn’t see any part of my body below my face, and yet this woman immediately knew that I’d recently had surgery. She didn’t make a big deal about it. She just asked me how I was recovering. These people, it’s not like they’re trying to see something—they just know it. It’s a gift. They don’t want you to pay them. It’s a kind of burden they carry. The good news, or maybe bad news, is that all of them say that death is not the end. On the contrary, it’s just the beginning of a long and fucking hard road.”

Rock Crystal: Lost in the glittering winter darkness, and happily so

“In most places, midnight as the very hour of his birth is solemnized by ritual of great splendor, to which the bells ring out their heartsome invitation through the still darkness of the wintry air; then with their lanterns, along dim familiar paths, from snow-clad mountains, past forest-boughs encrusted with rime, through crackling orchards, folk flock to the church from which solemn strains are pouring—the church rising from the heart of the village, enshrouded in ice-laden trees, its stately windows aglow.”

Adalbert Stifter

I realize now that, as a child, whatever magic surrounded Christmas for me seemed drawn exclusively from the past: old movies and old storybooks; my grandmother’s anecdotes of her own childhood Christmases; paintings, photographs, or other such images culled from or invoking of antiquity. I’ve just read Adalbert Stifter’s novella Rock Crystal (New York Review of Books Classics, $14.95), quoted above. It was written in, I believe, 1853. I was immediately entranced and even moved by the book’s delicate evocation of a time of year that as an adult I’ve come largely to dread—I’m irreligious, have no children, dislike frantic shopping and hate most Christmas music—and this relationship between Christmas’ former allure and such elements as the darkness of long nights unadulterated by streetlamps and luminous skyscrapers, genuine quietude, ancient rites and activities, and the serenity of an era that predates modern consumerism, now seems very obvious to me. I didn’t want to be transported to a mall; I wanted to be transported back to several decades before my birth. I’ve always had a special attachment to Ingmar Bergman films—maybe I just wanted to share my holidays with Fanny and Alexander.

The story of Rock Crystal is easy enough to summarize: two children travel from their tiny Alpine village to a slightly larger Alpine village to visit their grandmother on Christmas Eve; on the way back they’re lost in a snowstorm and forced to pass the night outdoors. The problem with offering such a synopsis is that this little drama constitutes only about half of Rock Crystal’s page-count. The first third or so, in which Stifter’s trickling prose runs through descriptions of the villages of Gschiad and Millsdorf, their inhabitants and customs, their relationship to the world beyond and most especially to the natural splendour surrounding them, initially seems to promise no drama at all. It seems rather like a work of wondrous, affectionate anthropology, until we gradually realize that everything Stifter details foreshadows the children’s journey: the hubris of their shoemaker father, the gifts provided by their grandmother, the discovery of the remains of a baker in the woods. Stifter draws his narrative from an exacting sense of place, an approach that, along with Rock Crystal’s setting, may have had a considerable influence on Visitation, a wonderful recent novel by the contemporary German author Jenny Erpenbeck.

W.G. Sebald

I don’t know how I first came to hear about Stifter, who was born in Bohemia in 1805, and died in Austria in 1868. Everything I’ve read refers to him as unknown or forgotten, but my finally getting around to reading Stifter this past week was prompted by W.G. Sebald, that specialist of the forgotten, who cited Stifter as an influence and, indeed, whose ornate sentences not only owe something to Stifter’s, but whose particular obsession with history possessed an unmistakable precedent in Rock Crystal, whose descriptions are so rapturous that it’s as though posterity depends on sheer urgency and devotion. (Incidentally, Stifter’s description of how the residents of Gschaid “are obliged to keep their dead with them over the winter till they can bring them to the valley for burial after the snow has melted” reads almost exactly like the description of dealing with the dead in Sebald’s own Alpine village offered in Sebald’s 1998 Writers & Company interview with Eleanor Wachtel.) In the writings of both Stifter and Sebald, memory is a living force, the past inextricable from the now, and the dead remain somehow present. Reading their work inevitably comes with an air of melancholy, but it also comes with deep consolation, perhaps most of all during these longest nights of the year.

The Original of Laura: pieces of a man

“Only by identifying her with an unwritten, half-written, rewritten difficult book could one hope to render at last what contemporary descriptions of intercourse so seldom convey…”

—from The Original of Laura

Its weight in your hands approximates that of someone’s remains. It contains the unfinished work of a dying man mediating on physical things, so there’s plenty of sex and a sense of proximity to death all the more unnerving for its relentless playfulness. It’s one of these posthumously published puzzles pulled from the fire, but to my nose smells nothing like literary betrayal nor crass cash-in. Take a look at its thick, largely blank pages: no one could mistake this for anything other than what it is: an art object; an homage; a glorious sketch. It leaves us wanting more, as it should. This “novel in fragments” doesn’t even hold all the fragments necessary to make a whole book—not even a third, I’d guess. But what remains of its narrative ambitions is also something about fragments, about the body as Death’s construction site, or rather demolition zone, a place where fragments of a person can be stolen or actually willed away, piece by piece, in this case from the feet up. There’s another title, not on the jacket but inside: Dying is Fun. I’m not sure if I buy this assertion, but if anyone could transform such irony into articulated desire it would’ve been Vladimir Nabokov.

I stalled an awfully long time on reading The Original of Laura (Knopf, $42), feeling that perhaps I should wait until I’ve read everything else by Nabokov—still working on that one!—uncertain as to how this artifact should be approached. The book came out one year ago and I’m only now finally reporting on it, feeling silly for my trepidation. It’s actually a pretty fun, fascinating read, and the context provided by the packaging and introduction is all the context anyone needs. It can’t be stated too clearly that this represents the roughest of, well, not even something we can call a draft, from an author whose prose is famous for its shining eloquence. But, as with say, the Bootleg Series recordings of Bob Dylan, this roughness, this exposure of process, is partly what’s so interesting to examine.

“Learning to use the vigor of the body for the purpose of its own deletion,” an wealthy, elderly, fat man considers science, writing, and his slow disappearance, as well as his longing for the young woman whose name rhymes with the one in the title. Flora recalls Margot from Laughter in the Dark and, quite obviously, the eponymous nymph of Lolita—she’s even molested as a child by an older man named Hubert H. Hubert. Her backstory is arguably the book’s most coherent section, and includes a suicide recorded on camera and a fatal stroke occurring in an elevator: “Going up, one would like to surmise.” The Original of Laura was the project undertaken by Nabokov during his final, sickly years in Montreux. It was clearly far from completion when he died in 1977, though his son Dmitri offers what seems to me a perfectly convincing case for its survival and publication in his painstakingly Nabakovian introduction, which possesses the faintest echo of Pale Fire, and in its concern with correcting legacy invokes The Real Life of Sebastian Knight.

Designed by Chip Kidd, the cover emphasizes themes of disintegration and absence, with words fading to black before their termination. Nabokov’s text itself appears as facsimiles of the index cars upon which the author composed his works, the edges of which perforated, encouraging consumers to punch them out and perhaps rearrange them in some new order, though, jarring as many of the transitions may be, it’s hard to imagine an arrangement more satisfying than the one presented here. The Original of Laura is fractured and elliptical, a mere hint at something that might have been, peppered with sparks of the old brilliance in search of their final form, mischievously sculpted to make it almost seem intentional, and in precisely this way it’s kind of perfect.