Higher Ground: between God and a hard place

This thing we’ve been calling the culture wars has in recent years aggregated at least one mighty bipartisan ethic: ambivalence is bad for you and your country; tolerance is a slippery slope; agnosticism is for wimps; which side are you on? (Just as an aside: How strange it feels to be posting this review so soon after learning of the death of God is Not Great author Christopher Hitchens.) Yet betweenness is a fundamental part of life; we are ever moving from one place or one absolute to another, most often learning the most we’ll ever learn while on route. Betweenness is what story is made of.

All this is just my way of contextualizing my strong feelings for the closing note struck by Higher Ground—something about which I feel no ambivalence at all. The directorial debut of Vera Farmiga, who also stars, is about living with religious values that remain fixed while one’s life remains insistently fluid. The movie is elegant, intelligent, sensual, and a little uneven—a few truly bum notes stand out against a predominantly careful and wise series of choices. But its closing moments sweep the central character up into a scene of un-showy yet immense bravery and still manage to leave us without firm resolution, and that absence is itself something meaningful.

Farmiga plays Corrine, who, having already conveyed a deep curiosity about Jesus as a child and having survived a potentially catastrophic accident with herself, her husband and her infant child miraculously intact, becomes in adult life a member of some radical New Testament community nestled somewhere in rural New York. Based on Carolyn S. Briggs’ memoir This Dark World, Higher Ground begins with extended scenes depicting key moments in Corrine’s youth before catching up with her in the present, a time of great tumult: Corrine’s best friend (Dagmara Dominczyk), a vivacious, raven-haired fellow believer who has no problem leading a fulfilling erotic existence under God, becomes terrifyingly, senselessly ill; Corrine’s fierce intellect becomes increasingly unsatisfied by the gender codes of her sect and the pastor whom she admires yet resents; and Corrine’s unhappiness with her marriage to her high school sweetheart Ethan (Joshua Leonard) is about to overwhelm her normally unbreakable composure.

Despite the repression, despite moments of alarming, sudden violence, there are no clearly marked villains in Higher Ground, and Corrine’s heroism is a quiet one, rooted mainly in her refusal to shut out the voices of desire or doubt or the longings of the spirit. Farmiga depicts the religious community with both affection and frustration, at times celebrating the camaraderie, at others reeling from its enforced naiveté. Her approach only goes astray in the few moments where she tries to slip fantasies into Corrine’s waking life, and the story itself only feels awkward in a few scenes dealing with Corrine’s immediate family, such as the one involving her sister and a big bag of blow. As for her work as an actor in Higher Ground, I can’t say that Farmiga ever gets it anything but right. Her lack of judgement as a director carried over into her performance, so we see Corrine fully surrendered to the ecstasies of worship, mothering and fighting for her dignity in equal parts. The last seven or eight years has found Farmiga emerging as an interesting actress under the direction of Minghella and Scorsese, but we may just be seeing her at her very best here, taking on both roles, and directing herself.

A price and consent: Chester Brown on sex, choice, and Paying For It

Paying For It: A Comic-Strip Memoir About Being a John (Drawn & Quarterly, $24.95) begins with a depiction of the author’s amicable break-up with his third and what turned out to be final girlfriend, the actress and former VJ Sook-Yin Lee. The year is 1996. Chester Brown was only in his mid-30s. In the subsequent decade and a half Brown neither became a monk nor decided her preferred his own gender. Rather, after some hesitation, he started visiting sex workers, very gradually arrived at the conviction that what we conventionally call romantic love is bullshit, and that the world’s oldest profession is not only acceptable but that its decriminalization was a cause worth fighting for. Brown, who previously authored a celebrated comic-strip biography of the contentious 19th century Métis leader Louis Riel, is an intelligent, even-tempered artist whose work is consistently engaged in issues of individual freedom. Paying For It is an overtly politicized memoir. It’s not incidental that Brown has twice ran as the Libertarian Party candidate for Toronto’s Trinity-Spadina. (Monday’s election earned his 454 votes, placing him fifth in his riding.)

Paying For It is a fairly unusual graphical novel. An emblematic panel features Brown, rendered as rail-thin, his opaque spectacles obscuring his eyes, laying on his side, ding-dong dangling, in post-coital conversation. “My stuff’s quite different from Archie,” he explains to a sex worker curious about his profession. There’s much humour in the book, often arising from Brown’s politeness and uncertainty regarding etiquette. (Brown's customary neutral facial expressions, his Bressonian drawing style, if you will, also contributes to the overall air of deadpan humour.) One chapter finds him visiting a prostitute that continues to watch soaps during the entirety of their transaction. A not atypical line: “She began to lick and suck my balls. Not this again…” Brown is endearing in his attempts to communicate his needs with respect and clarity, but he insists that he’s a fairly typical john, and that the dangers associated with prostitution are grossly exaggerated or misunderstood. While compelling and entertaining, Paying For It, which features a number of sometimes heated conversations between Brown and his friends about prostitution, as well as a series of exhaustive, informative appendices, is very much a didactic book. That’s not slander—its didacticism is one of the book’s strongest attributes. And, once read, I can’t think of a single reason why any thoughtful person would dismiss it, regardless of how firm their feelings are on the subject.


JB: What do you think a comic-strip memoir about being a john offers that a strictly prose-based memoir wouldn’t?

Chester Brown: I’m not sure that there are advantages. In fact, there’s a disadvantage in it because of my decision not to show the faces of the women. It might have been easier to protect their identities in a prose work without the disguising device being so intrusive.

JB: Let’s talk about that. The book’s foreword explains how important it was for you to not include any details in Paying For It that might endanger the privacy of the sex workers you’ve visited. Did you ever consider contacting some of them to ask if you could include their personal stories?

CB: In most cases I don’t think I would have been able to track them down. I’m not sure I would even know how to go about that. Obviously, I showed the book to the woman I’m currently having sex with. Other than her there are two prostitutes that I might have been able to get in contact with, but it didn’t occur to me to try. Maybe I should have.


JB: You’re meticulous about facts, very precise about dates. I don’t know that people read a literary memoir expecting it to be purely factual, and when you read a memoir in comic-strip form it’s that much more obvious that the form itself will impose a certain layer of artifice.

CB: You may be right. There was a point where I was considering doing Paying For It as fiction. But because I really believed in this as a cause, I felt that the message would come across better if I was clearly speaking from personal experience, that creative license was not an option.

JB: Paying For It addresses very thoroughly the question of romantic love and whether it holds any inherent value, but something that isn’t directly addressed is the idea of seduction. When your sexual activities are pre-arranged and the transaction makes explicit what’s expected from both parties, do you ever miss the ambiguity or anticipation of seduction?

CB: I never liked that part of romantic love, the uncertainty of what was going to happen. I can see why some people do, but it’s not something I responded to. I prefer things this way, where it’s clear what’s going to happen. Although things don’t always happen the way you hope. You can see in the book that in more than one case I ended up not having sex with the woman I’d arranged to see, so there is still some element of uncertainty.


JB: The most interesting narrative thread in Paying For It comes from seeing your attitudes toward love and sex shift as you try to sort out your feelings and arguments about being a john. The book closes on a really interesting note, with your relationship with the prostitute “Denise,” one that’s gone on now for years and seems to be exclusive. Would you describe this relationship as your compromise between conventional romantic love and financially arranged sex? There’s the implication that you enjoy a kind of companionship, which some would consider the central benefit of long-term romance.

CB: It’s certainly a relationship that brings both of us some degree of emotional comfort, though without the disadvantages of what most people consider to be romantic love, what I call possessive monogamy. There’s that whole question of what is romantic love. Toward the end of the book I have several people trying to define it. Depending on your definition, I could characterize my feelings for Denise as feelings of romantic love, but there are surely some people whose definitions would not accommodate our relationship at all. So I’m leaving that a bit open. I have deep feelings for this woman, but because we’re not trying to pin it down, because we’ve made no formal commitment to each other, what we’re engaged in is distinct from what a lot of people want from romantic love.

JB: I’m personally hoping that you continue to develop autobiographical work. One of the demands of that path is the willingness to keep interrogating some unresolved aspect of your life. Now that you’ve published Paying For It, do you feel there are any aspects of your private life that will remain off-limits, or is it all up for grabs?

CB: Unfortunately, there are things that do have to remain off-limits. We’ve been talking about Denise. You may recall she has that line where she says that she’d appreciate it if I put her in the book as little as possible. If I’d told the complete truth about our relationship and how it developed, that would have made a much better book. But I can’t talk about that stuff. I have to respect her wishes. I can’t see her changing her mind about that in the future. So she being a big part of my life means there’s a big part of my life I can’t talk about. With regards to other aspects, we’ll see. There might be some other interesting things that happen to me that I’ll be able to write about. I have no idea what they’ll be, but hopefully that’s part of what will make them relevant when they appear.

Images 2011: Two images, one colossal sound, and water, water everywhere

The first screening of the 2011 Images Festival (not counting the “bonus” pre-fest ‘Landscape as Expression’ series, which included a Chris Marker) was Lou Li’s Rivers and My Father. The first river that appears in Rivers and My Father is a miniature, almost obsidian stream flowing along an undulation in some rain-dappled pavement, a gorgeous image, plucked from the banal and hoisted up onto the screen to hurl the viewer into watery reverie, one of several strong images scattered throughout the film, though the only one with such velvety texture. Shot in black and white, Rivers and My Father shifts from Canada to China and back again. It features maps, children, water and various forms of transportation, and recreates by the simplest possible means memories of the filmmaker’s father, prompted by said father’s memoir, entitled An Account at 60. The film becomes a platform for dialogue between father and son. Stories are told over suppers and lunches. Dudes wearing fanny-packs push scooters up stone steps. A child rides a train with a broken leg. The whole thing ends, delightfully, with a detailed critique of the film thus far from the father and the son’s equally exhaustive response. The tone remains tranquil, or sometimes just sleepy, with the filmmaker’s soft-spoken voice-over and the film’s hazy grey scale. Certain sequences lack rhythm, while others come to life via stirring discoveries or amusing discrepancies, or thanks to a quiet sense of mischief that arises in unexpected moments. Rivers and My Father won this year’s Images Prize.


Lina Rodriguez’s silent, three-minute ‘Einschnitte,’ screened in the 'Stone and Salt and Stars and Skin' program, was gleaned from three rolls of Super 8 shot while the filmmaker traversed Europe before being blown up to 35mm. It is a collage of details of aging monuments, never providing context nor revealing the sculptures in full, thus stripping them of their ostensible meanings and emphasizing surface. The imprint of history lies only in the sensual smoothness of time’s eroding effects. There are many cuts given the subject and run-time, and through these cuts we sense a suppleness, a fluidity in the immobile. That’s the element I found most alluring. The feeling that one carved slab of stone was reaching out to touch another.


Images closed with a work that combined old images with new sounds. Tod Browning’s exotic, progeny-obsessed 1928 revenge drama West of Zanzibar was shown in a 35mm print, courtesy of George Eastman House, in the hidden yet massive subterranean movie palace that is the domain of Toronto Underground Cinema. A live score was performed by Toronto’s own Fucked Up, a band that if nothing else possesses the ideal moniker to accompany Browning’s wonderfully perverse masterpiece, in which the amazing Lon Chaney, with lame legs and shaved head, lives in an African veldt where he turns the natives into slaves and fellow American ex-pats into drunkards, patiently plots against the man who cuckolded him 20 years ago, and snuggles a chimp. Fucked Up constructs a colossal sound from the get-go, with two-chord snap-crackle building and building along to thunderous drums. Eventually you get thundered out: the thunder is utterly impressive in its own right, yet makes it tough to fully become absorbed in the bizarre narrative unfolding and the subtleties of Chaney’s performance in particular. The term ‘silent film’ is something of a misnomer generally, but when Fucked Up arrive on the scene it assumes a new level of irony. I did very much enjoy the well-oiled African dancers rocking out to what becomes the world’s loudest acoustic guitar performance.

I scream, you scream, we're all screamed out: Scream 4

The cinema’s most annoying crank caller returns in this latest installment of Wes Craven’s franchise, as does original scripter Kevin Williamson, several original castmembers and that stupid ghost-face mask. After a decade spent licking her wounds, working on her martial arts technique and writing a memoir which apparently consists of nothing but self-help platitudes, final girl Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell) finds herself back in old Woodsboro, overwhelmingly white and middle-class, with tastefully-tended gardens lining the boulevards, that blander-than-life, fantasy American no-place where killing’s just too much fun to keep those rascally, movie-obsessed kids away from.

Donning the old mask and wielding the old knife, the mayhem is rebooted and mostly shamelessly rehashed: to say that Scream 4 is more amusing than most youth-oriented contemporary horror is not much of a compliment. At once unlikely in its winky po-mo conceit and half-assed in its execution, the film’s immaculately cleansed and powdered zitless nubile babes discussing strategies for genre renovation reduces forward-thinking horror to nothing but infinite variations on “boo” moments, utterly removed from thornier challenges such as the consideration of what lies behind fear, anxiety, dangerous thrills, perverse humour or morbid curiosity. To note the film’s inherent preposterousness seems redundant, though the truth is that nothing in Scream 4 seems more improbable than a teenager who can’t remember where she left her mobile phone.

This time out there’s a geek who wears a camera on his ear so he can stream his POV on the internet, adding an ostensible layer to the film’s overall hall of mirrors thematic, which includes a sequels-within-sequels prelude. David Arquette drives around frowning as Sheriff Chipmunk while Courtney Cox’s journalist-mannequin tries to take the serial killer investigation into her own hands, invoking Sarah Palin in her declaration that she’s “going rogue.” Supposedly, these two are married. Campbell meanwhile seems at a complete loss, unable to do much besides wince angrily when confronted by yet another attack, yet another strangely listless scene of murder that at best recalls lesser bits of Roadrunner cartoons without the laughs. At least Marley Shelton is genuinely cute as a dutiful deputy, and the ending-ending, which is to say the ending that follows the predictably false false ending, is so loopy it’s actually rather winning.

To be assembled posthumously: The Windmill Movie on DVD

Richard P. Rogers was born into East Coast WASP privilege and most of its accompanying neuroses. His people summered in the Hamptons. They sent him to Dalton and Harvard to make something of himself. But Rogers became an experimental and documentary filmmaker—a filmmaker’s filmmaker, marginal and respected. He also became a beloved educator at SUNY Purchase. His familial legacy left him with pangs of unease regarding his inability to accumulate wealth and a facility with small talk and tennis. He was simultaneously envious of his more successful (ie: rich and famous) peers and so hopelessly rebellious there was no way he could ever have followed their paths. Most scandalously, he fell for Jewish girls, and eventually, while dying from cancer, even married one, the esteemed Magnum photographer Susan Meiselas, with whom he’d shared decades-long romance marked by long absences and affairs with other women—Rogers was an unlikely yet prodigious Don Juan. He died in 2001 at the age of 56.

Rogers was undoubtedly a man of many curious and contradictory qualities, but those listed above are the ones that linger with me after seeing The Windmill Movie (2009). It’s a strange and fascinating artifact: a memoir by proxy, an 80-minute essay constructed from some 200 hours of material shot or collected by Rogers with the vague intention of being either a self-portrait or a critique of the culture that spawned him. Maybe, inevitably, both. It was produced by Meiselas and David Grubin, and directed, edited and written by Alexander Olch, a student of Rogers with a somewhat similar background and a sense of kinship strong enough to encourage Olch to compose narration in Rogers’ voice. Watching The Windmill Movie, you can’t help but wonder if it wasn’t all designed this way, if only unconsciously. Keep in mind: though you may not have heard of him, Rogers was a prolific, hard-working, at times very personal filmmaker—not a dilettante. So if he never finished his Windmill, even when diagnosed with a terminal illness, it might be that he never truly planned to. It’s someone else’s Movie now, someone else’s portrait, though still suitably subjective, poetic, uneven, uncertain, and shot through with lust, indecision, and existential doubt. It’s available this week on DVD from Zeitgeist.

Remarkable images reappear throughout The Windmill Movie, as though circling Rogers’ psyche. Hands at a garden party, the corner of a sail brushing reeds, pretty young bronzed thighs on bicycles or beach blankets: one of the possible themes of Rogers’ project was summertime, the feeling that important things happen in this seemingly most leisurely of seasons. Rogers recalls being taken to the beach as a child and falling in love with other people’s mothers. He reflects on his own mother, abandoned by his father. She appears before his camera, in old age, wearing a wig, at one point shoveling dirt into a car. You imagine her sharing cocktails with reclusive socialite Edie Beale, made famous in the Maysle Brothers’ Grey Gardens (75) and a Hamptons neighbour.

Olch’s assembly is respectful, but not too respectful. He doesn’t flatter Rogers. He understands the perils in making a film about a filmmaker struggling to make a film about a dead filmmaker struggling to make a film, and thus grounds The Windmill Movie in specific memories and encounters, successes and failures. Some of Olch’s additions don’t entirely work. Rogers’ old friend, actor and playwright Wallace Shawn shows up, reads aloud some of Rogers’ musings, and finally feels underused, present mostly as a talisman. But for the most part Olch finds ways to honour his subject while establishing his own voice. There’s little in The Windmill Movie to indicate Rogers’ accomplishments as a filmmaker (nor is this film the place for it), but thankfully Zeitgeist has included two really wonderful shorts by Rogers: ‘Elephants: Fragments of an Argument’ (73) and ‘226-1690’ (84), which chronicles a year in Rogers’ life via views from his New York apartment window and messages left on his answering machine.

Parallel lives: Allen Shawn's Twin

Twin (Viking, $32.50) is the second memoir from Allen Shawn. His first, entitled Wish I Could Be There, was a personal investigation into phobias, of which Shawn admits to possessing several. Here, picking up from themes developed in the earlier book, Shawn explores the nature of his relationship to his autistic twin sister, Mary, who was removed from the family home at eight, and has since lived in various institutions designed to assist those with similar disabilities. Allen and Mary are now in their early 60s and visit regularly, yet it’s clear that the familiarity and comfort they enjoy in each other’s presence remains accompanied by profound, sometimes troubling mysteries of identity and perception seemingly inherent in their very coexistence. “It wasn’t until I reached middle age,” Shawn writes, “that I could even begin to acknowledge that being Mary’s twin was a central fact, perhaps the central fact, of my life.”

Shawn is the brother of actor and playwright Wallace Shawn and the son of long-time New Yorker editor William Shawn. He’s forged a career as a composer and teacher, though I’m far more familiar with his brother’s plays and memorable performances in Woody Allen movies or My Dinner With Andre. However, reading Twin, it becomes immediately apparent that however talented he may be in the discipline to which he’s devoted much of his life, Shawn is, like his brother, an immensely gifted writer. He displays a knack for transitioning between personal storytelling and essaying on science and history, weaving these elements into a seamless whole by way of an articulate yet arrestingly frank voice. It’s rare to encounter a book as emotionally involving from its first page as Twin—though it bears mentioning that that first page also features a joke about Mormon heaven that made me laugh out loud, and an amusing analogy between deep feelings of loss and the worry one might suffer over a vanishing pair of pants.

Allen Shawn

One chapter begins with a compelling defense of agnosticism, of acknowledging the value of religious feeling even if one isn’t inclined to value religion. This speaks to Shawn’s restless questioning and unsettledness, a fundamental aspect of his psychological makeup that no doubt feeds his continued desire to understand Mary’s inner life while never presuming that such understanding could ever be complete or even accurate. Shawn interrogates the moments in his life where he believes he may have come closest to experiencing something akin to Mary’s state of being, such as a fever-induced out-of-body experience he once endured as a child, or the feeling of being transported that comes with listening to or especially composing music. “Perhaps the closest I can come to understanding her inner life,” Shawn writes, “is when I am sick, or exhausted, or anxious, or exhilarated, or have taken a drug that changes what I hear and see and feel. Such moments at least suggest that there are different ways of perceiving and being.”

The Shawn family was unusually secretive, founded on a parental relationship at once brimming with kindness and even romance and defined in part by William Shawn’s romantic partnership with another woman, which continued concurrent to his marriage and lasted 40 years, ending only with his death. “We are a very bright, attractive and unusual family,” Shawn’s mother once told the medical staff of one of Mary’s homes. She rather hilariously compared her family to the Kennedys. Shawn doesn’t mock or take sides with either of his parents, but wonders how their complicated dynamic affected and was affected by Mary’s condition. He also comes to terms with their varied methods of accepting Mary’s separation, and his own lingering guilt. Shawn’s writing conveys such bravery and insight that it can only serve to remind us just how painfully long it can take to begin peeling back the veils enveloping our families and inherited legacies. He relates how in his final years his father once stated: “They made a big mistake making life so short.” Ain’t that the truth. But would it ever be long enough to settle such questions once and for all?

Out of Sheer Rage: the road not taken

Geoff Dyer, not writing about D.H. Lawrence

Geoff Dyer negotiated with the inexplicable allure of great music by invoking moments in the lives of several giants of jazz through fiction-like prose in But Beautiful, one of my favourite books about music ever. Now back in print, Dyer’s 1997 book Out of Sheer Rage (Picador, $15 USD) takes a very different approach to writing about D.H. Lawrence, the writer who made Dyer want to be a writer. Dyer’s approach to Lawrence however is largely about avoiding any approach whatsoever. Out of Sheer Rage is a memoir of perpetual procrastination, addiction to anticipation, and despair. Steve Martin says it’s the funniest book he’s ever read. I’m rather fond of it myself.

D.H. Lawrence

Dyer’s considerable feat is to sustain our interest in something he’s promised from the beginning is going nowhere by actually going all over the place: to Italy, Greece, Mexico, to the US, and back home to England, to survive an island moped crash, illness, dubbed movies, the temptation to masturbate in public, and, echoing a choice passage from Don DeLillo's White Noise, the inevitable disappointment of standing in a place intended to radiate significance, or more precisely, to stand in the place where some dead admired person once stood, trying to conjure nonexistent emotions. This is something Dyer does especially well, dissecting conflicted responses to ostensible grandeur, always with a wit every bit the equal of Dyer’s titular rage.

There is of course plenty of literary commentary in Out of Sheer Rage, its belated arrival feeling almost subversive. Dyer considers his youthful reading and in some cases refusal to reread much of Lawrence—save the entire collected correspondence—as well as the work of Thomas Bernhard and Milan Kundera. He makes a compelling case for the writing of a book being only slightly ahead of the research for a book, for a writer’s notes for a novel sometimes being more valuable than the novels themselves. In one passage of just a few pages, Dyer eloquently sums up much of what David Shields spent all of Reality Hunger, his fascinating and frustrating manifesto-by-collage, trying to say—partially through pulling quotes from Out of Sheer Rage. This might explain Dyer’s own wry appraisal of Reality Hunger: “Reading it, I kept thinking, ‘Yes, exactly, I wish I’d said that,’ and then I realized I had.” Shields only included citations in his book because his publishers forced him to, so all readers who hungered for more of the reality Shields used as his source material owe the old farts at Knopf a great favour, because they at least had the courtesy to include the information that might lead us to read Out of Sheer Rage.

Eat Pray Love: JR tours the globe in search of Enlightenment Lite

In her Washington Post review of Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search For Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia, Grace Lichtenstein quipped that the only thing wrong with Elizabeth Gilbert’s memoir “is that it seems so much like a Jennifer Aniston movie.” Lichtenstein misread the book. It’s actually a Julia Roberts movie. It is very much a Julia Roberts movie.

Roberts is ten years older than Gilbert was in her memoir, and this might contribute to the some of what feels off in the comma-excised adaptation of Eat Pray Love, directed by Ryan Murphy, who seems drawn to best-selling memoirs in which privileged people quench their spiritual thirst by trying on alternative lifestyles. Roberts is very youthful and still adorable, but it’s to Roberts’ credit as a human that her Liz seems like she should be a lot smarter by this point in life. Marital disharmony to Billy Crudup sends Liz to prayer, self-help books, and James Franco’s cutie-pie actor, which is how we discover that Gilbert’s also the author of one of the worst plays in the English language.

When none of those remedies serve, the next step is travel—lots of it. Liz’s tours of Italy, Calcutta and Bali hit on each of the titular verbs, though Gilbert forgot to add Shop. A feast of cultural stereotypes and pop psychology bullshit follows. It’s frustrating because it’s not as though most of us can’t relate to Liz’s search for inner balance, and it would be pointless to condemn her for having the means to solve her problems through extended peregrination.

Roberts embodies Liz’s yearning while never succumbing to morbid self-absorption—remember, Roberts was born perky. In fact, Roberts is capable of many things, including smartness, sexiness, even misdirection. As a star, the only thing missing is taste. Things might have worked better without Liz’s voice-over, which starts by telling us that survivors of genocide just want relationship advice and goes downhill from there. Liz becomes didactic by example, though I don’t buy any of her tidy revelations. She’s far more convincing when she’s just having a good time.

Richard Jenkins is nice as an abrasive Texan, until he’s prompted to suddenly spill his guts. Javier Bardem is strangely tough to accept as Brazilian, though I’m not sure if this tremendously gifted actor is actually trying. Is it just me, or is Bardem’s sloppily emotive performance commenting on the material? Is he perhaps wondering when exactly he was pegged as the new Antonio Banderas?

Roberts and her crazy brother Eric both have new movies out this weekend, one for women, the other, boys. Neither goes any distance toward renovating the careers of these talented siblings. Maybe they need to be in a movie together? My Best Friend's the Pope of Greenwich Village? Runaway Bride-Train? Help me out here.

The deliciously cinematic perpetual storytelling of a transplanted thespian: Presenting Sacha Guitry on DVD

I hadn’t heard of him either, yet the writer, director and star of everything in Eclipse’s Presenting Sacha Guitry was Paris’ most popular and prolific playwright of the 1920s. Guitry’s reluctant turn toward the cinema—which seemed to him an inferior and technically fussy medium, one attempting to pickle the ephemeral vivacity of theatre—was initially done only as a method of reaching a larger audience. Yet the story of Sacha Guitry is as compelling a piece of evidence as I’ve seen that great things can arise when an artist is coerced to work in a form other than the one in which he or she feels most comfortable. I can imagine Guitry’s stage work as very fleet-footed, pithy and entertaining, but I’d be surprised if it had anything on the playful innovation or unbridled narrative accumulation or sense of quiet spaces within a noisy world that one finds in the quartet of movies collected here.

Far from stage-bound—it was actually based on Guitry’s only novel—The Story of a Cheat (1936) could only have been conveyed through Guitry’s rigorous, sometimes audacious embracing of montage, voice-over, and an audiovisual dissonance unique to movies. The Cahiers crowd would dub it “pure cinema.” As Guitry’s titular grifter writes his memoirs his words summon up images from the past, or in any case his own no doubt fabulous version of it—no one in these flashbacks speaks, so no one can contradict the narrator or subvert his total control. He was born to provincial grocers and had a litter of siblings, all of them killed by a poisonous fungus dinner the child cheat was denied because he swiped change from the register. So he learned very early that crime pays, and as his biography unfolds at absurd, breakneck speed, he moves between France and Monaco, becomes a card shark, a soldier, a master of disguise and a croupier. He tries to go straight now and then, but he’s always dragged back, perhaps because the particular rules of Guitry’s universe insist that anything that happens once will happen again and again.

A chronicle of crossed destinies that traverses continents and centuries in its attempt to follow the movement of small precious objects as they’re passed between royals and thieves, The Pearls of the Crown (37) seems ripe material for an Italo Calvino novel, but Guitry rendered it instead as a dizzying historical-apocryphal-completely made-up cinema spectacle, one incorporating over 80 locations and some 200 characters, many of them famous monarchs, three of which are played by Guitry, and another three by his spouse and regular costar Jacqueline Delubac, so witty and lovely and possessing of a smile that would later grace the visage of Brooke Adams. The Pearls of the Crown is in part a cosmic-comic study in simultaneity. The dialogue is divided between three languages—four if you count Guitry’s “Abyssinian,” which is actually French played backwards—though you need only understand one of them to get the gist of any given scene. Language lessons become grounds for seduction, half an entire conversation consists solely of adverbs, a statue comes to life—twice, lovely heads are chopped off, wars are fought, revolutions erupt, men scour the globe on wild goose chases, and those milky pearls are bequeathed from one generation to another. You feel like Guitry could keep telling the story forever, yet when it ends it ends at precisely the only place it could have.

A twisty comedy of complicated love, Quadrille (38) is chronologically the last movie in Presenting Sacha Guitry. It’s perfectly delightful, utterly engrossing, and most obviously based on a play. I’d rather end by describing Désiré (37), which seems much more modest than its predecessors yet might be my favourite. Guitry plays the dapper and meticulous titular valet who arrives very late one night in the hope of finding work with Delubac’s Odette Cléry, a retired and obviously wealthy actress currently involved with a starchy politician. From the start Désiré’s new gig is unnervingly tenuous—Odette telephones Désiré’s previous employer and discovers that his position was terminated only on account of certain romantic tensions that arose between the two—and you get the sense that Désiré’s gift for suddenly improvising monologues that feel like resolved conversations is the only thing keeping him off the streets.

Guitry’s age and portly figure—he resembles a cross between Jean Gabin and the elderly Fritz Lang—make his assuming the role of the haplessly seductive Désiré seem comical or simply the whim of a director’s vanity, yet this bit of counter-intuitive casting makes the protagonist only more interesting, and his situation far more desperate. Meanwhile, the off-screen action and dearth of locations feel less like canned theatre than an exploration of the cloistered world of servants, and the story’s focus on erotic dreams and private conversations provide a sense of intimacy and nocturnal quietude. It all ends as simply and strangely as it began, and for all its talk there’s so much left unsaid, leaving us strangely moved. Guitry is customarily compared to Noël Coward, but something in Désiré at least reminded me of Robert Walser. Here’s hoping that we can continue to discover more from this forgotten master.

David Shields tries to make it real... but compared to what? Plus: Lermontov!

David Shields

I think I've underlined more passages in my copy of David Shields’ Reality Hunger: A Manifesto (Knopf, $28.95) than any other book I own. This initially struck me as inherently impressive, until I noticed how many of these passages seemed familiar, those stray lines that echo Roland Barthes, Walter Benjamin, or W.G. Sebald, or the paragraph of dictums taken directly from another manifesto, that of the Dogme 95 movement. I make a habit of learning as little about a book before reading it as possible, so forgive me for being slow on the uptake. Though it’s no secret, I didn’t clue into the fact that not only does Shields include un-attributed quotations in Reality Hunger but that such quotes, sometimes altered by Shields, constitute the bulk of the book, which is about a lot of things—far too many things, in fact, to be a coherent manifesto—but is perhaps above all, or at its best, a defense of collage and appropriation as a fecund and arguably unavoidable MO for artists. (Shields’ sources are listed in the back of the book, though he urges us to rip those pages out and ignore their content in the spirit of… well, we’ll get to that. The problem with this isn’t that readers are such sticklers for copyright law but that we, you know, like to read, and might want to find out who wrote something especially juicy so as to follow our interests.)

Andy Kaufman: master of reality

Reality Hunger contains 618 texts, written or selected by Shields, designed to collectively argue our living in a period in which, to paraphrase Michael Moore’s Oscar acceptance speech, quoted by Shields, we hunger for reality because our daily lives are so inundated with fiction, ie: politics, advertising, junk journalism. We crave art and entertainment that responds to and interacts with the real. We embrace whatever promises to deliver it: memoirs, sample-heavy hip-hop, YouTube karaoke, reality TV. Yet Shields assures us, quite rightly, that reality, or at least randomness, has been infiltrating the artifices of art for millennia—even the Bible is a work of assemblage. Something Shields doesn’t explain is how exactly one is supposed to find their dose of unfiltered reality through programs that are painstakingly designed works of wish fulfillment, soap opera by another name. Shields is anti-narrative, but reality TV appeals to viewers precisely because of its resilience of classical narrative. Despite his inclusion of a tired reexamination of the James Frey controversy and a For Dummies history of DJ culture, Shields is obviously a smart, immensely curious guy with an impeccable radar for cultural shifts, and Reality Hunger is a fun, oddly breezy, engrossing read. But while the argument being built here—an extension of Jonathan Lethem’s landmark essay ‘The Ecstasy of Influence,’ published in Harper’s in 2007—is fascinating, it’s also a mess. Nearly everything intrigues, yet little holds up to close scrutiny.

Lil Wayne: keeping it real?

Manifestos require monsters to rally against, preferably ones long embedded in the establishment. Shields’ main monster, after copyright law, is the novel, and his criticisms of it yield this book’s most overpowering wafts of horseshit. He champions personal essayists over novelists because they “keep looking at their own lives from different angles.” Yet dozens of the authors whose work Shields upholds as helping to sate our reality hunger write books we still call novels—the list includes Proust, Joyce, and Beckett—while there’s surely no limit to the number of personal essays out there that are both crap literature and complete failures at critical self-examination. Uninterested in the fiction part of fiction, Shields wants to do away with reading “700 pages” of story—an exaggeration, since few contemporary novels are even half that length—and just get to the point already. But what is the point of a novel, and can it be distilled without losing its resonance? What exactly is a novel anyway? What’s a memoir? And what the hell is “reality” supposed to be? Is there really more of it in The Bachelor than in Moby Dick? Is Lil Wayne more in touch with it than Gabriel García Márquez? For the record, Shields, directly or indirectly, asks similar questions. The mystery is how can he ask them and still arrive at some of the half-baked conclusions he posits. It doesn’t sound as provocative, but in many respects Reality Hunger is basically a fresh plea to continue applying rigour to the postmodern project, especially if we boil postmodernism down to staying alert to form and accident and a willingness to negotiate the fourth wall. This is no small achievement.

Lermontov: before moustache

Shields asks: “Is there a sense in which a writer’s vision gets more thoroughly and beautifully tested in a book of linked stories than it does in a collection of miscellaneous stories or in a novel? …I’m thinking of Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time, Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son.” (You’ll note that two of Shields’ examples were called novels by their authors.) Anyway, I like this question very much and, having already read and enjoyed two of these titles I decided to read the third. I bought a dog-eared copy of A Hero of Our Time years ago, my knowledge of Lermontov limited to the facts surrounding his untimely death and references to him made by Solyony in Three Sisters. Plus, I liked his moustache.

Lermontov: with moustache

The hero in question is Pechorin, an officer and a pretty nasty piece of work: romantic, manipulative, charismatic, cynical, unable to empathize with others, exhausted by life’s disappointments: “One just goes on living out of curiosity, waiting for something new. It’s absurd and annoying.” How emblematic Pechorin is of mid-19th century Russian society I’m unsure, but regarding Shields’ question about linked stories, A Hero of Our Time does seem to reach its heights of character development and social critique through the deployment of varied anecdotes and genres. We learn about Pechorin through stories told by a man who once knew him, by a fleeting encounter with a writer, by news of his fate, and by his (edited) journals, which describe a love affair, a duel, and, in the book’s chilling final chapter, an evening spent debating determinism and death with a man about to die. Once you’ve read this slim but rich novel it becomes impossible to imagine how this character in all his complexities could be conveyed without Lermontov’s pattern of hearsay, memory, and private rumination, of external and internal portraiture. So all credit to Shields for, however it might contradict his thesis, pointing out the links between literary works of 1992, 1979, and 1840, and for getting me to finally read a masterpiece that’s been sitting on my shelf since about 1994.