Uprooted and abandoned: Treeless Mountain

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

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

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

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

Landscape-blackout-landscape: Lake Tahoe

A landscape, a blackout, then another landscape. And then, in the next blackout, the crunch of collision. Juan (Diego Cataño) has banged his red Tsuru into a telephone pole. He’s okay, and the damage to the car seems minimal, but he can’t the damned thing going. He’s on a country road, so he needs to walk into town for help. He’s got about $12 in pesos.

The landscape-blackout-landscape pattern continues, and a fair bit of Lake Tahoe (2008), now on DVD from Film Movement, will play out this way, keeping considerable distance from its characters, often implying more emotional content through these landscapes and blackouts than through the faces and bodies and interactions onscreen. Especially since Juan’s private turmoil is buried, albeit shallowly, and it will be some time before we come to understand the reasons behind it. The first half of the movie is task-oriented, with Juan’s attempts to get his car fixed repeatedly thwarted. Those he encounters en route to repair include a Shaolin enthusiast and ostensible mechanic more eager to make friends, play video games and take in a screening of Enter the Dragon (73), than to deliver the desired distributor harness; a young single mother who minds the counter of an auto parts shop and who nurtures ambitions to be a singer—and to seduce Juan; and an old guy who loses his beloved dog and enlists Juan’s help in the search.

In a nod to the movie’s debt to neorealism, the old man’s dog—a boxer, who delivers my favourite performance in the movie—is named Sica, after the director of Umberto D. (52), a movie about an old man who loses his dog. But Lake Tahoe, the second feature from Mexican director Fernando Eimbcke and his co-scenarist Paula Markovitch, who previously collaborated on Duck Season (04), owes much more to the cinema of Jim Jarmusch, and, to a lesser degree, the leading lights of the current wave of Latin American low-budget, observational formalism. (In what’s surely a coincidence, the relationship between the enigmatic, place-based title and the final scenes of Lake Tahoe is mirrored with remarkable fidelity in Lisandro Alonso’s Liverpool (08).)

I’ve no idea whether this was a conscious thing for Eimbcke, but there actually seems to be a strong overall influence of American art traditions on Lake Tahoe. Filmed entirely in Progreso, a fairly sleepy seaside town just a short drive from Mérida, the capital of Yucatán, the movie ’s fixated on bland, flat, anonymous architecture, which it surveys in persistently square compositions that distinctly recall the work of numerous American photographers of the mid-20th century, artists who helped to forge a modern visual vocabulary of urban space as seen through the windows of a car.

Which brings us back to Jarmusch and his trademark dry humour that, in early works like Stranger Than Paradise (84) especially, blossoms from entire scenes that unfold through extended medium shots. There are moments in Lake Tahoe that echo this strategy fruitfully, buoyed on warm humour and a nice feeling for the virtues of community. But there are an awful lot of other moments that feel pretty flat, protracted without apparent purpose, too loosely edited for the humour or internal rhythm to fully come through, too miserly with its actors to capitalize on their individual nuance, and generally overburdened by a sense of formal rigour that simply hasn’t been pushed far enough to make much of an impact. Its heart seems to be in the right place, but basically there’s a lack of frisson here between form and content. Granted, I’m probably a little harder on Lake Tahoe because it’s exactly the kind of movie I’m supposed to like…

For other reasons I might say the same of Cairo Time (09), out on DVD from Mongrel this week, a slow burning almost-romance between mature characters. Patricia Clarkson’s magazine editor, killing time in Cairo while her husband is endlessly delayed by his UN mission in Gaza, and Alexander Siddig’s unmarried local café owner, who has nothing but time, are a warm, welcome presence onscreen together, especially in scenes where they do almost nothing—as David Berry noted in his review when the film briefly hit theatres last October, the richest scene in the movie is the one where Clarkson and Siddig silently enjoy a train ride home together from a wedding. But that scene lasts about a minute, maybe, and is bracketed by a whole bunch of other scenes that are quiet and calm and verging on pulseless.

Cairo Time largely suffers the opposite problem of Lake Tahoe. Where Eimbcke keeps his camerawork to a stifling minimum, erring on the side of allusion, writer/director Ruba Nadda seems dependent on way too much coverage. Her scenes are cluttered with too many angles, too much needless lingering, too many indicators, too many limpid phone call scenes, too many redundancies overall—the tone seems subtle, but the storytelling isn’t subtle at all. Still, you might want to give it a whirl anyway. There are moments here—a hesitant kiss that results in an adorable “Oh!” from Clarkson before she escapes into an elevator—that hold some genuine immediacy and truth.

Stolen moments: Bicycle Thieves

By 1948 the war was already three years gone, yet Italy stills looks exhausted—back then, as today, the process of recovery could seem endless. Life went on, grudgingly, chaotically. So in some tattered, flaking, sun-beaten suburb, Antonio Ricci (Lamberto Maggiorani) emerges from a mass of jobless men to accept employment pasting up posters of Rita Hayworth. Any work’s to be envied, regardless of how menial, and his peers are far from congratulatory, especially since they all know Antonio doesn’t possess the one item required for the gig: a bicycle. But Antonio rushes off to find his wife Maria (Lianella Carrell), who solves the problem easily enough. She sells their bedclothes. We can sleep without them, she says. The money the sheets gain from the pawnbroker is just enough to get Antonio’s old Fides out of hock.

Antonio’s new career however is short-lived. His Fides is stolen. We were waiting for this, of course, the pay-off on the title. But the pay-off isn’t complete until Antonio and his son Bruno (Enzo Staiola), a shoeshine boy, have scoured the city streets in search of the thief, and finally, out of pure desperation, Antonio himself becomes a thief. This is the most persuasive point of the movie, that we are all potential bicycle thieves, subordinate to the vagaries of money, opportunity, and luck. Antonio’s story is famously simple: guy loses bike, guy tries to get bike back. Yet the story of Bicycle Thieves lies not just in Antonio’s actions but in the faces, gestures and voices of everyone he encounters, crowds of mostly ordinary, equally struggling people who collectively alternate between moments of solidarity and mercenary measures. The movie starts with Antonio emerging from a crowd and by its end he’ll vanish into the crowd once more. One of my favourite things about Bicycle Thieves is its ambiguity as to whether that crowd is meant to offer any consolation.

Vittorio De Sica directed several films that would become central to the movement known as Italian neo-realism, Bicycle Thieves chief among them. It was shot mostly in real locations, mostly under natural light, with non-professional actors—though their performances are certainly theatrical, you might say very “Italian,” nonetheless. The movie spoke of banality, drudgery, fleeting pleasures, and simple tasks, yet there’s much diversion, and there’s tremendous visual poetry in Carlo Montuori’s fluid camerawork, the images of bikes and ladders flooding the streets, the busy market place, the chorus of street-sweepers, and in an especially memorable scene, men running to take shelter from a downpour while carrying gramophones. De Sica finds beauty in hard times. Some viewers grumble about the aestheticization of poverty, but I’m more concerned with the romanticization of naïveté. I hope I’ve made it clear, should it need repeating, that Bicycle Thieves is of monumental historical importance and is a pretty great movie. The resigned finale, with Maggiorani's speechlessness, is terribly moving. But it’s also a movie that strains a bit for my taste. It’s tough to make a fully fleshed-out story when the story’s trying so hard to make a point. It’s noble to speak for those who have no voice, but it’s precarious too.

It’s instructive to compare Bicycle Thieves not only to, say, the work of Roberto Rossellini, that other great, far harsher Italian neo-realist most famous for Rome: Open City (1945), but also to other movies with similar themes and tactics. Luis Buñuel’s Los Olvidados (50) depicted impoverished kids in Mexico City, but it eschewed the sentimental, embracing petty cruelties and perversion, imbuing characters with greater specificity and greater possibility. Charles Burnett has paid tribute to Bicycle Thieves as a formative influence, but Burnett’s Killer of Sheep (77) portrays the plight of Los Angeles’ downtrodden with far more idiosyncrasy, humour, and personal vision. The Dardenne Brothers, in movies like L’Enfant (05), revitalized neo-realism’s task-oriented narrative structures through a distinctly dogged, rivetingly relentless mise en scene. Most recently, Kelly Reichardt’s Wendy and Lucy (08) used the premise of a girl search for a lost dog—a premise superficially similar to De Sica’s Umberto D. (52)—to comment on the status of the non-upwardly mobile or economically disadvantaged in contemporary America. While actually watching Wendy and Lucy I was completely immersed in Wendy’s personal, immediate story—its commentary on the larger social issues started to sink in only later on. By contrast, while watching Bicycle Thieves, for all of its marvels, I could rarely forget that the movie was building a thesis.

Drawing on the margins: Kelly Reichardt on Wendy and Lucy

Wendy is the stoic young woman setting out in the hopes of finding work in Alaska’s fisheries. Lucy’s her dog, and clearly by far the most beloved person in Wendy’s life. They get stalled in Oregon when their car breaks down, and with a budget that’s unforgiving of unforeseen obstacles, their journey ripped from the pages of Jack London is already in danger of a most un-romantic collapse. Wendy’s troubles are exacerbated by a run-in with the police, some unwanted attention from strange forest dwellers, and, worst of all, Lucy’s disappearance.

A girl needs to find her dog and fix her car: Wendy and Lucy is so refreshingly simple and immediate it seems almost a throwback to the task-oriented narratives of Italian neo-realism. Yet Kelly Reichardt’s third feature, which stars Michelle Williams and Reichardt’s own pooch, is rich in atmosphere and in implications about how we live today, our fortress of ostensible prosperity, and who among us is most in danger of slipping through its cracks. Reichardt and Jonathan Raymond adapted the film from Raymond’s story ‘Train Song,’ and for all the desperation, the call of those long steel rails is indeed alluring, as are the images that recall the photography of Walker Evans or Gary Winogrand. It begins with the sounds of a tune softly hummed and a passing train. It ends with the image of a landscape blurring by.

Such elements have become Reichardt’s signature. Her previous film, 2006’s Old Joy, about two old friends who reunite to go camping and begin to realize how time has silently betrayed their youthful ideals, also traversed the Pacific Northwest in the company of characters who exude a certain discomfort with conformity. Reichardt has a special gift for penetrating the lives of such characters with an absolute minimum of artifice. Her films, suffused with humour and subtle eccentricities—Will Patton has a marvelous supporting turn—give off a warmth, linger on the unspoken, allow us to live with these people just long enough to know something about them, to care, and likely feel troubled about where they might be heading.

Reichardt’s a teacher by profession and filmmaker by vocation. From 1994’s River of Grass through 1999’s mid-length Ode and her more recent projects, she’s worked with skeleton crews and skeletal budgets. Her sets operate more like campsites than corporations, and that’s how she likes it. The posh comforts of the hotel room where we met during last September’s Toronto International Film Festival seemed a somewhat incongruous place to discuss such an arduous, no-frills production. But the fussiness of our surroundings fell away soon enough, and we could have just as easily been sitting round a fire in Mount Hood National Forest.

JB: There’s this quality to Michelle Williams in Wendy and Lucy I hadn’t seen before, a severity, a containment that builds to this transcendent, almost Bressonian level of release when we finally get to see her smile. Is it a gamble, figuring out how long audiences will go along with this kind of restraint?

Kelly Reichardt: That was our ongoing conversation. It was a little nerve-wracking for Michelle, but it was important for us to stick with it. It’s funny you mention Bresson because I was thinking of Bresson’s Mouchette a lot while shooting. Its protagonist is a character who’s really buttoned down emotionally and it’s only through small gestures that we gain any access to her interior world. Joan Bennett in Max Ophüls’ The Reckless Moment is another example of a woman who we see really just dealing with the tasks at hand and it’s only at the very end where we see that single-mindedness start to break down. So those are examples of this idea working brilliantly. But basically, I just think that when you consider what’s in store for Wendy, going off to work in the canneries, which is a pretty rough and tumble scene, she can’t be this delicate flower. I thought of Wendy as someone who just keeps looking at her to-do list, who worries about what’s right in front of her, because the big picture would just be too overwhelming. I think the tipping moment with the scary homeless guy in the park is really, amongst other things, a realization of how close her situation is to his.


JB: That scene strikes me in one sense as a response to the end of Old Joy, where we last see Will Oldham’s Kurt looking kind of lost on this street at night, and we’re not sure what he’s destined for. We’re left with a sense that he may not be that well equipped to move forward in his own life and there’s something about those people surrounding him that makes him uncomfortable, something he recognizes.

KR: I think for Kurt it’s more a lifestyle choice, though it still addresses questions regarding how the accepted way to live in America continues to narrow. How does anyone who doesn’t fit inside that model operate? We’re in the middle of this election just now, coming off the heels of the Republican convention and the much-celebrated Sarah Palin speech, which I thought really laid bare the absolute animosity towards people that are living in peril or dealing with poverty. It’s not just that we don’t care about you. It’s aggressive. There’s this meanness to it. With Wendy and Lucy Jon Raymond and I started by thinking about the aftermath of Katrina, this attitude that says, “If these people had their shit together they wouldn’t be in the situation they’re in.” We were wondering about how you pull yourself up if you don’t have an inheritance, if you’ve gone to a shitty school, if you don’t have a job that offers you anything other than a paycheque to get you through the week. If you have the drive but lack the financial or social means, can you really get a toehold in the middle class? So we took this classic American “go west” impulse, this character who does have the drive and desire and determination to get herself into a better situation, and we made a road movie. Now, hopefully all that stuff falls away and what you finally see when you’re actually watching the film is a personal story.

JB: Both Wendy and Lucy and Old Joy have characters that don’t really traverse a lot of distance, yet these films indeed really capture an essence of the road movie. They engage in a dialogue with those themes the best road movies tend to address, such as the illusion of freedom or the way one sees oneself reflected in one’s surroundings.

KR: Well, my first film, River of Grass, is also a road movie. The characters set out to embody the mythology of the road movie but never even get out of their neighbourhood. I seem to have specialized in stalled road movies for some reason. There’s no release or power until there’s movement, and maybe that’s a sort of metaphor for not being able to have a piece of that pie that is the American dream.


JB: Your films do retain these distinctive themes and atmospheres despite there being a considerable gap between River of Grass and Old Joy. Throughout all these years, have you deliberately set about nurturing a certain sensibility? Would you say you have a specific strategy?

KR: I don’t know that there’s a strategy. When I made River of Grass it was with a 13-person crew. People didn’t get along, I was young, and every day was really a struggle. But when I made Ode, which was shot on Super 8 and had only two actors and a two-person crew, which included myself, there was this thrilling intimacy. It was just the ultimate artistic experience. In between River and Ode there’d been these lost years where I was supposed to make this much bigger film and I went to LA. It never materialized and it was a very hard experience. But then I just went back to what I did in college. I dug out my Super 8 camera and had this epiphany. I discovered the sort of environment where I felt I could be creative. A lot of people I know can really feed off of the stress of a bigger production, but it’s not for me. So with Old Joy it was a crew of six, two actors and a dog. We went and rented these cabins, lived in this old growth forest and ate dinner around the fire at night. There wasn’t a lot of separation between the actors and the crew. You’re all in it together, finding it together. With Wendy and Lucy we again tried to keep the apparatus as small as possible. So Michelle really had to come into our world. We’d have to say to her, “I know this isn’t what you’re used to, but when you’re done with that scene pick up that apple box and bring it over here.” [Laughs] And she just got into it. There’s something about having everything that small, you know, there’s no one watching us, no producers coming to set to see what we’re doing. And I guess this has sort of become my method. For however long we can pull it off. We’ll see.

Death of a Cyclist: screening the delicate balance between pure polemic and pure pleasure

It opens on a stretch of country road so gray, stark and forsaken as to feel pulled from a dream—even the two or three trees look cold and lonely. The image of this landscape stays fixed as the cyclist passes us by, exiting the frame not long before the car enters it, the collision between the two happening off-screen in the eerie, phantasmagoric interim. The car stops and the couple within exits to survey the damage. The man, Juan (Alberto Closas), surmises that he cyclist is dying—all we can see in the framing is the still-spinning wheel. The woman, Maria (Lucia Bosé), urges the man to leave. They drive away, abandoning the cyclist, and the titular event of Spanish filmmaker Juan Antonio Bardem’s Death of a Cyclist (1955), newly released by the Criterion Collection, has transpired with bracing efficiency.

Accompanied by a score of Herrmannesque portent, a tone of an unmistakably noir melodrama has been set. Yet right there within this brooding atmosphere lies the first of numerous overt, pointed allusions to a troubling class disparity: a humble-looking man on a bike is knocked down by a well-dressed couple in a sleek automobile; the couple, we learn immediately after, are having an affair, and are more concerned with maintaining their secrecy—and with it their comfortable bourgeois existence—than with the welfare of the victim of their negligence.

With each subsequent scene come further layers of social critique: the insularity and nepotism that allows Juan to hold an enviable position at a university; the appearance of a nefarious art critic, a self-described “good for nothing” who lurks in elevated social circles sniffing out opportunities for blackmail with an ingratiating smile (there is the sense that the art critic’s vocation is itself deemed a product of bourgeois decadence); the fact that Juan looks conspicuously similar to Miguel, Maria’s wealthy husband, implying that her extramarital activities are so automated that she doesn’t even require a lover that embodies a genuine variation of her husband. The accumulative effect, made complete by the sudden development of Juan’s class-consciousness, spurred by guilt over the accident, is a depiction of a Spain well-settled into Franco’s triumph, sinking into its own turgid morass of Fascist reactionism.

If Death of Cyclist reads as schematic, that’s because it is, and the supplementary texts in Criterion’s package, including one from Bardem himself, emphasize the director’s schema all the more. Bardem had publicly declared the Spanish cinema as “politically ineffective, socially false, intellectually worthless, aesthetically nonexistent, industrially crippled,” and Marsha Kinder’s essay ‘Creating a Modern Spanish Cinema’ shows in great detail how Death of a Cyclist was designed as the antidote, a work that would subversively exploit the trappings of Hollywood thrillers as a way to synthesize and heighten Bardem’s polemical call to arms, its true stylistic genre being that of neorealism.

The problem with this sort of reading is that is renders the movie as an airless manifesto in which the artist only reluctantly lowers himself to entertaining us. It also does a great discredit to Hollywood—American film noir, for all its compromises, was already a great source of social criticism, frequently pulling back the curtain of American prosperity to reveal the corruption at the heart of the capitalist impulse, and the typical noir already possessed many of the same innovations as neorealism, such as its use of location shooting. Death of a Cyclist arrived right at the climax of the original noir cycle, the same year of Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly, and Maria, its femme fatale, even attempts to secure her social standing using the same shocking method as Margo in the superb poverty row noir Decoy (46).

Regardless of Bardem’s personal aspirations, focusing all one’s attention on its political promptings can make Death of a Cyclist feel somewhat academic, while the best compliment one can give it is to in fact call it a very elegant, highly effective, often fascinating noir. The film moves superbly, the brisk pacing enhanced by the consistent use of shock cuts, those transitions where one image weirdly matches another in an entirely different scene, as though the storytelling itself infuses disparate events with some creepy synchronicity; exposition is handled with tremendous economy; and there’s a bizarre, fascinating morbidity to the way the accident influences the love affair, which reaches its natural erotic climax in a spray of blood and mechanical impact, acting as a subtle precursor to the bizarre equations of David Cronenberg’s Crash (96).

Death of a Cyclist in the end did not signal much of a revolution in Spanish cinema—not even Luis Buñuel’s return to Spain to make the deliriously perverse Viridiana (60) could manage that. Sweeping changes wouldn’t arrive until the 70s while Franco was either in decline, dying or dead. But Bardem’s film can be admired greatly for the way it gives us a portrait of his country in a period of deep repression and stagnancy, and delivering this portrait in the shape of a thriller sculpted from desire, coincidence, small dreams and the never quite squashed undercurrent of social unrest.