Le Havre: waylaid in Normandy

Two shoeshiners, one French (André Wilms), the other a Vietnamese pretending to be Chinese (Quoc Dung Nguyen), stand together, scanning the passage of feet along the station floor, seeking to ply their trade. A man, his mouth like a hatchet wound, his hand cuffed to a suitcase, presents his right loafer for service, but soon he’s spotted by some other, equally suspicious-looking men. He runs, they chase, there’s gunfire. Another one bites the dust. The shoeshiners don’t even sigh. Clearly, it’s a dangerous world, one fraught with real, nasty, morally repugnant crimes... as well as crimes of a far more ambiguous nature.

Marcel Marx, the French shoeshiner, has been around; he once was a bohemian in Paris, or so he says, but now ekes out a humble but contented existence and comes home every night to a devoted wife and a very cute dog. Soon the wife will be hospitalized with cancer and in her place will appear an African boy named Idrissa (Blondin Miguel), whose clandestine journey by shipping container to the UK got interrupted and is now on the run in this forgotten French port city. Marcel can do nothing about his beloved’s illness but at least he can try to help the boy from harm’s way and secure his safe passage to London, where his mom works illegally in a Chinese laundry (but at least she works). Steering clear of the authorities, the enigmatic and ever-present Inspector Monet (Jean-Pierre Darroussin) especially, and shelling out for human smuggling costs won’t be easy, but our aging hero is determined and, just as importantly, unafraid to ask for help. “I’m not alone,” says Marcel. “I have friends.”

In his return to France (he made La Vie de Bohème there in 1992), Finnish wrier/director Aki Kaurismäki didn’t come alone either; he brought along Kati Outinen, star of eight previous Kaurismäkis and thus a sort of talisman, to play Marcel’s dear Arletty (named after the star of France’s beloved Les enfants du paradis), and bring a boldness and assurance to the film’s more problematic role. (Arletty’s wifely devotion, her refusal to even admit that she’s dying so that she can keep ironing Marcel’s clothes, cooking Marcel’s meals and managing Marcel’s paltry finances for as long as possible, can be a little hard to take; Le Havre’s Marxist cred is pretty impeccable, its feminist cred not so much.)

Both a love letter to French cinema and a letter bomb addressed to France’s xenophobic immigration policy makers, Le Havre, named for the Normandy city in which it’s set (which also happens to be the penultimate stop made by the sailors in Jean Vigo’s L’Atalante), brings Kaurismäki’s ongoing exploration of working class solidarity back to foreign shores, resulting in one of his finest, most affectionate, and probably most crowd-pleasing films. To be sure, Le Havre feels like a summation rather than any sort of renovation of Kaurismäki’s 30-year career, examining familiar themes and tropes—yep, there’s a rock and roll show, this one featuring the vocal stylings of Little Bob—and firmly grounding itself in that distinctive deadpan-melodrama, Bresson-does-Buster Keaton approach that filmgoers will recognize as Kaurismäki’s trademark. Yet for all that, the film feels very much alive, engaged and enraged, full of ragged but persistent hope, less resting on laurels than shaking them back to life. And in the truly remarkable scenes that find Kaurismäki's camera calmly fixing itself upon the faces of the (often real-life) undocumented foreigners, imposing nothing, we sense that no matter how persistently mannered this filmmaker's approach may be, he remains alert to the world, and allows his subjects their dignity, their chance to simply be present for his camera and for all of us around the world watching their faces, and hopefully wondering about their fate.

"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.”

Machete: Knives out, but not much cutting edge

“There’s an interesting face,” Jessica Alba says upon her first glimpse of Danny Trejo in Machete. It’s an observation that’s surely followed Trejo around his whole life. The beloved ex-con, boxer and character actor is 66 now and has been in well over 100 movies, yet, if we don’t count Champion, the documentary about Trejo’s life, Machete marks his debut as a lead. Trejo’s always been a welcome presence wherever he turns up, that distinctively weathered and initially frightening face that masks a terrifically deadpan sense of humour. He’s exactly the sort of perpetual background player film-lovers long to see promoted to the spotlight, yet thanks to largely half-assed conception, Trejo’s star moment as Machete’s eponymous ex-federale hero may just constitute the least interesting performance he’s given.

Written by Robert Rodriguez and his cousin Álvaro, and directed by Rodriguez and his longtime editor Ethan Maniquis, Machete is the fitfully entertaining extrapolation of a trailer featured in Grindhouse, the exploitation homage collaboration between Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino. Predictably, Machete plays like a convoy of trailers, united by a plot crammed with corrupt Texan politicians and underground revolutionaries that’s more busy than it is cohesive or even coherent. The lack of narrative elegance is of course part of the movie’s ostensible charm, but what starts out as prankish plot holes and playful implausibilities increasingly feels like lazy screenwriting. What resembles button-pushing political commentary rapidly reveals itself to be flamboyantly irrelevant. Rodriquez uses pastiche as an opportunity to rest on cliché. Clichés can make marvelous tools when animated, but Rodriguez frequently seems content to simply prop them up as platforms for yet another set piece.

Bereft of anything like emotions, ambitions or conflicts, Trejo is left mostly with one-liners, some of them quite deftly delivered—I especially liked “Machete don’t text.” Converted to the side of the desperate migrant workers she used to deport, Alba’s immigration cop becomes the resident cheerleader: “There’s the law, and there’s what’s right!” The rest is one-joke stunt casting: Robert De Niro’s an ultra-right wing senator; Don Johnson, in aviator shades, cowboy hat and shark fin sideburns, is a cop who slaughters Mexicans for sport; Lindsay Lohan stretches out to play a rich girl with a drug problem and a hunger for publicity; Steven Segal’s a drug lord with an absurd toupee. Cheech Marin’s a priest with a penchant for weed.

Machete’s most inspired, or at least liveliest bits arrive through a creative attitude toward the human body—a lady retrieves a telephone from her vagina. The killing is gleefully rampant and mercifully cartoonish, with fountains of digital splatter and everything that vaguely resembles a sharp object eventually impaling somebody—kudos to whoever thought of the meat thermometer. Thing is, Machete’s funniest display of violence is decidedly non-lethal, with Trejo warding off a bodyguard by slapping his wrists with a weed whacker. I suppose he could have just chopped his arm off or unspoiled his intestines like he does in so many other confrontations, but in a movie that thrives on excess it’s amazing how far a little restraint can go to win you over. When Trejo and the bodyguard finally part ways the latter is left caged to a wall with pruning shears, no doubt happy just to be alive. He never knew what hit him.

"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.

Denis dans le métro: 35 Rhums on DVD

The crisscrossing of rails seen through the smudged windows of a Parisian train glint softly under dusky autumn light. Soon it will be dark, and the faces and figures of passengers will appear reflected on the Plexiglas. Most of the characters in 35 Rhums work in transportation, driving the trains and taxis that move us around our cities. Among them are Lionel (Alex Descas) and his daughter Joséphine (Mati Diop), whose relationship, one characterized by warmth, patience and generosity, is undergoing transition. The images of Lionel and Joséphine—Jo, for short—that lingers most vividly are of them riding together on Lionel’s motorbike, or, in a brief, lyrical departure from the film’s dominant realism, a horse. Despite its abiding calm 35 Rhums is a film where perpetual motion is always being quietly emphasized, though the movements we witness will come to feel less like arrivals and departures than they do like circulation. This is a gentle story about letting things take their course.

With its attention to potent details that slip outside the dictates of conventional narrative, its resistance to explicit drama where implication will do just fine, and its utter lack of severity or formal rigour while maintaining a perfectly recognizable, carefully honed aesthetic, 35 Rhums is quintessential Claire Denis. 20 years after her feature debut Chocolat (1988), the French writer/director has emerged as an exemplary figure in world cinema, one of those luminaries whose work frequently dazzles audiences, is celebrated, discussed, written about and argued over, yet somehow rarely manages to appear on screens outside of major centres and film festivals. Since I first saw 35 Rhums at the Toronto International Film Festival in September of 2008 Denis has already released a follow-up, which possesses only marginally better chances at finding decent distribution thanks to its exotic milieu—war-torn Cameroon—and the presence of international star Isabelle Huppert. (Like I said, marginally better.) 35 Rhums in the meantime played a number of other major festivals but received no theatrical release in Canada. It’s now available on DVD from Mongrel.

Written by Denis and her frequent co-scenarist Jean-Pol Fargeau, 35 Rhums feels like an homage to the films of Yasujiro Ozu, Late Spring (49) in particular. It’s not simply the mellow air or the poetic intermediary scenes that invoke the Japanese master but the story itself, the widowed father, the adult daughter, the negotiations that lead to her full blossoming into independence. Not that any of this is clearly stated in the film—Denis’ approach feels antithetical to exposition, and part of the pleasure of immersing yourself into this film comes from gradually discovering the relationships and histories shared by the characters through their behaviour, their layers of trust, their boundaries. There’s Gabrielle (Nicole Dogué), the taxi driver close in age to Lionel who lives in the same building, who smokes a lot on her balcony, and observes, who’s perfectly at ease with Lionel and Jo yet also accustomed to being pushed away when she tries too aggressively to be part of their family. There’s Noé (Grégoire Colin), closer to Jo’s age, living in an apartment full of memories with a fat old cat and an intense, inarticulate desire to change everything in his life. And there are Lionel’s work buddies, who go out drinking when there’s an occasion to celebrate, such as the retirement of René (Julieth Mars Toussaint), a quiet man with a sweet smile and heavy-lidded eyes. He keeps a famous photograph pasted up in his locker of a guy keeping dozens of plates spinning on rods. What will René do when he has no more plates to spin?

Populated with actors who evoke through their mere presence a rich sense of past experiences—Descas, a regular feature of Denis’ work, is especially good at evoking a long, intriguing personal story without saying a word—nothing about what’s going on either up front or in the margins of 35 Rhums is entirely ambiguous. So much is communicated through glances, embraces, through the way people stand up to eat dinner in their kitchen, the way they might enjoy farting on the couch of a friend when he’s not home, they way they trade off partners when dancing in a small restaurant to the Commodores’ ‘Nightshift’—the song’s rippling guitar/bass/percussion/keyboard groove never sounded so seductive—after being stranded in some suburb when Gabrielle’s car breaks down on the way to a concert. 35 Rhums is elliptical, yet Denis isn’t withholding. She’s selective—what she chooses to show and what she chooses to leave out are major elements of her craft. When Lionel and Jo finally reach the moment where their paths must diverge we know we haven’t learned everything about them. We know their lives are far too much to fathom for a movie. But we’ve seen enough of what they share to sharply feel the rushing current of conflicting emotions welling up in both of them, and this variation on an oft-told tale becomes something singular.

Heart-shaped box step: James Gray talks about Two Lovers, the dictates of desire, and the uncertain whereabouts of Joaquin Phoenix

As Leonard sinks to the bottom he looks up toward the shrinking sun shattering in the frigid water, and just when he seems resigned to his death a woman crosses his field of vision, apologizing for having to leave. So what shakes Leonard out of his suicidal calm it seems is not even the promise of the woman’s return, but rather the mere chance to caress the melancholy memory of her leaving him one more time. This is how Two Lovers begins. This phantom woman from Leonard’s past will not reappear, but two others will take her place in his unfading desire to be swept away by some overpowering feminine force.

As depicted by Joaquin Phoenix, Leonard is at once among the most pathetic and dynamic protagonists in recent movies. He’s introduced to the lovely, kind and comforting Sandra, exquisitely and movingly played by Vinessa Shaw, by his parents. She’ll be good for him, as well as good for business, given her family’s interests in investing in Leonard’s parents’ Brighton Beach dry cleaning. She’s a too-perfect match for this depressed but sheepishly charming guy from good immigrant Jewish stock. She even works for Pfizer, the company that produces Leonard's medication. 

By accident, though it somehow feels closer to his own volition, Leonard meets Michelle, an unstable, vivacious new neighbour played by Gwyneth Paltrow. Michelle, who dates her older, married, wealthy boss, who likes designer drugs, who is not Jewish, is clearly not good for Leonard the way Sandra is. She comes to embody everything Leonard longs for, as opposed to what he can have.

The third woman in Leonard’s life is Ruth, Leonard’s mother, played by the inimitable Isabella Rossellini not as the stereotypical nasally Jewish momma, but as a concerned and outwardly conservative woman who deep inside just wants to do right by the unruly dictates of her son’s heart. Two Lovers is not so much a love triangle as an uneasy quadrant around which Leonard must box step until he builds up the courage or foolishness to break off in a single, focused direction.

As wildly distinct as the very intimate Two Lovers is from We Own the Night (2007), the large-scale crime drama director and co-scenarist James Gray made immediately before this, it’s startling how closely their thematic trajectories match up. It’s something we spoke about quite a bit when I interviewed Gray. With four films now under his belt—the others are Little Odessa (94) and The Yards (00)—Gray has developed a very particular body of work, one that combines familiar, audience friendly genres and talented stars with a flair for intricate visual poetics, but that’s arguably had a hard time finding the larger audience it deserves. Still, as Gray explains it, he’s been lucky to make these films at all, and to make him his way.


JB: Two Lovers seems in one sense a cautionary tale against family as a force that’s antithetical to self-realization. It contradicts so many movies set in ethnic communities that strive to show family as something comforting, fortifying, and at worst frustratingly quirky.

James Gray: Absolutely. And addressing something of both these things you describe is part of what makes movies about family so intriguing. Family can be a locus of great emotional support, and also a terrible place where your dreams are killed. In Two Lovers the family stifles Leonard, but it also saves his life.

JB: Obviously it would be deluded to blame Leonard’s problems on anything other than his own weaknesses and precarious desires, but I couldn’t help but consider how much he’s a product of this very specific environment the film carefully evokes.


JG: It was especially important to me that Leonard’s parents were very clearly not Americans, that he felt outside the mainstream from the very beginning. And that the family home itself is claustrophobic. It’s shot that way. We didn’t construct a set, so you couldn’t just move walls around. Essentially the camera was always in a place where a person could be.

JB: So when we watch Leonard in his parents’ home, even when alone with a woman, there’s always this ghost of a familial presence. Yet it’s interesting that you mention the claustrophobic scenes, because I want to ask you about another scene that feels exactly the opposite, this moment where Leonard confesses his love to Michelle on the roof. It’s a turning point that manifests very emotionally, very physically. One of the things that made it so memorable for me is the fact that it’s delivered in this slow, unbroken, gliding, nearly hypnotic overhead shot.

JG: Yeah, the camera starts about eight feet in the air while they’re in that brick gazebo and winds up becoming a two-shot in profile of the actors. The shot is about five minutes long. What happens here, what I intended, was that at about this point in the film things start to become dreamlike, more cosmic and mythic. I was trying to find a way to mirror how delusional Leonard was becoming.


JB: A number of critics describe your films as old-fashioned, but this is a highly unconventional way to cover a love scene.

JG: The old-fashioned thing comes from a lack of vocabulary, I think, from people who view things like storytelling and sincerity as old-fashioned. Some people are just anxious to categorize. Old-fashioned to me doesn’t mean anything.

JB: Your camera, if I recall correctly, takes a similar perspective in one of the most memorable and visceral scenes in The Yards. I’m thinking of that terrifically dirty fight between Joaquin Phoenix and Mark Wahlberg.

JG: That was for a different reason, but you’re very right. I wanted that fight to show how these people were struggling against an oppressive environment that was much bigger than them. But then I suppose the same thing is true of the scene we're discussing in Two Lovers. You can see the whole neighbourhood in the distance, a whole other world that’s quite indifferent to Leonard or Michelle’s predicaments. I never shot any other coverage for that scene because anything else would have seemed bogus. Plus I had him turning away from camera for a great deal of that confession. The idea was that he would turn away from camera so the audience would understand how embarrassed he was without him having to say it, or play it even.

JB: Hm. What you’re saying reminds me of the famous shot in Taxi Driver where the camera turns away from Travis as he speaks with Betsy on the phone...

JG: And it dollies down that empty hall. Fantastic.


JB: It’s a testament to the complexity of Two Lovers that Sandra, while representing the safer romantic choice for Leonard, is so utterly appealing, beautiful, unpretentious, sexy and emotionally frank, while Michelle is hardly a mere vixen. The performances really defy the archetypes.

JG: I tried to steer clear of the romantic comedy version of this story. I wanted it to be that Leonard was blind, that what made Sandra unappealing was how much the family liked her, to express how elements of our desire for someone is entirely external to who the person really is or what they look like. Sandra could be the most beautiful person on earth and Leonard wouldn’t have seen it. Some feel she’s too good looking to be Leonard’s second fiddle, but that’s such a dunderheaded way of thinking about characterization. I mean, how many times in life do we find ourselves thinking, “What does she see in him?” Or, “She’s so lovely, what is his problem?”

JB: Something that defines Leonard is his inner conflict between the reassurances of traditions and the allure of recklessly breaking away from everything and venturing into new terrain. I wonder if you don’t feel something similar at times in the way you’ve developed your films, which echo previous periods of film history and yet seem poised on the vanguard of the current scene.

JG: I used to think a lot more about where I sit in the world, who likes me and who doesn’t. But one of the advantages of getting older and more decrepit is that at a certain point you don’t give a shit anymore and you do the work that feels close to you. To me, the litmus test for a work of art—and in my case I’m using the term loosely—is whether it can move you without offending you. That’s it. We’re living in a cultural scene that largely quite bereft of soul. It can be quite depressing. But I’ve been very lucky. I get to make the films I want to make. I have been denounced by some but very respected by others. You really can’t ask for more than that.

JB: Do you teach as a sideline?

JG: I taught at USC about seven years ago, but I don’t think they liked me very much. They never asked me back, anyway. I probably was not very good. You know, students would make movies and the lights would come up and I’d say, “That movie was really bad—let’s talk about why,” which is not what you’re supposed to do, I guess. You’re supposed to tell everyone that everything they do is fantastic. [Laughs]


JB: You’ve worked with Joaquin Phoenix now on three pictures, and his performances in them have been among the finest of his career. How have his contributions changed or intensified the stories you’ve been trying to tell, or perhaps the way you’ve told them?

JG: He has sharpened my sense of what constitutes my biggest interest in movies, which is the ability to depict the external and the internal conflict in hand. He’s quite brilliant in that way, very experimental, very inventive. He’s raised the bar. I’ve learned a lot from him.

JB: I wonder if when you first worked with him these were things you might have only been able to see in the cutting room, things that it took longer to learn how to detect while actually on set. After all this time, are you now better able to read each other in the moment?

JG: I don’t think we read each other at all anymore. We finish each other’s sentences. It’s become almost boring. I don’t talk to him. He doesn’t talk to me. I do another take and he says, “Yeah, I know.” Honestly, I remember being very aware of what he was doing the first time we worked together, very aware of what kind of actor he was.


JB: I guess there’s still some ambiguity regarding whether or not Phoenix will ever go back to acting, but I wonder if you have any more projects you’re hoping to tempt him with.

JG: Sure. But I’m just trying to figure out where he’s at. The bigger question is what he wants to do. I don’t know what he’s up to. I really don’t. But if he decides to act, believe me, I’ll find work for him.

Over the border and into the bathos

Crossing Over features a cross-section of characters figuratively situated on either side of the US border, people who either want in, want to stay, or want to determine who makes the cut. You’ve got your Mexican mom illegally cranking out textiles for a few bucks to fund a better life for her little boy. You’ve got your affluent Iranian family with its soon-to-be naturalized patriarch and daughter turned black sheep on account of assimilating too fully into the Western model of feminine independence. You’ve got your Chinese family, the parents humbly coveting citizenship while their punk kid scoffs at such a legit entrée into an American dream he’s figured is available only to the Tony Montanas of the world. You’ve got your naïve Islamic teen apologist for the 9/11 hijackers persecuted for exercising her freedom of speech. You’ve got just about everything you could think to throw into a movie about the overwhelming morass surrounding US immigration. Everything except a rounded character, a single plausible scene or even a coherent polemic.

Hopping around Los Angeles to follow several characters as they cross paths and slide into detours, Crossing Over is earnest as all hell, ostensibly muckraking, dramaturgically strangled, and deeply mawkish. In other words, it’s the new Crash—there’s even an actual car crash that brings together, wouldn’t you know it, someone trying to get a green card with someone who approves green cards! So lovely young would-be Aussie starlet Alice Eve winds up screwing shameless old bureaucrat Ray Liotta in a motel room, but at least she cries in the shower afterwards. Meanwhile senior migra Harrison Ford goes on a private crusade to protect an abandoned child and immigration lawyer Ashley Judd has to deal with aggressively moronic feds who go ballistic over militant Islamic chat rooms found on annoyingly self-righteous Summer Bishil’s computer. The pervading dumbness reaches its spectacular nadir in a convenience store robbery gone wrong where, after splattering three kids brains all over the walls, Cliff Curtis, in a scene he’s surely praying future-employers will soon forget, delivers a monologue about how becoming an American constituted the greatest moment of his life to a crybaby twit pressing a loaded gun into a terrified innocent’s woman’s skull. It’s so unintentionally funny it’s not even funny.

Writer/director Wayne Kramer (The Cooler), a South African who doubtlessly has some first-hand knowledge of the issue at hand, apparently wants to tell a story about the masks we wear and compromises we make to get by. Perhaps the fundamental problem with Crossing Over is that for so much of the film masks are about all we see. Despite the efforts of a few of the better actors, these characters are crude types, overwrought mouthpieces for a grossly over-calculated scheme. Nothing feels natural, so nothing resonates. Images of crying kids are milked to death. Bizarrely, given the context, the sex and violence feels gratuitous. Bishil’s one victimized facial expression grates. Good intentions only make the whole thing more frustrating to sit through. I’ll say this for Kramer: at least his ambitions are to provoke viewers to reconsider what it means to be a patriotic American. Still, you should see The Visitor instead.