The Music Room: palatial trance

Satyajit Ray made The Music Room (1958) between the second and third instalments of his beloved Apu Trilogy (1955, 56, 59), the films that launched the great Bengali director’s career and convinced the world—if not quite the Indian public—that Indian movies could occasionally stray from the dictates of the flamboyant song and dance cinema that we instantly associate with “Bollywood” to this day. With The Music Room, Ray in fact did incorporate musical performance into his work, but rather than doing so in the old stop-everything-and-sing fashion, he made the music integral to the story and texture of the film, which turns out to be the very opposite of baroque-bombastic melodrama. This is a sombre, meditative, crepuscular film, about pleasure, devastation, and aristocracy in slow decline. Its gorgeous musical performances are given plenty of space to luxuriate, but they entrance rather than excite the listener. I’m not sure I’ve seen—or heard—anything quite like The Music Room, and once it was over I’d felt like I’d woken from a dream. The film is now available on blu-ray and DVD from the Criterion Collection.

Opening credits appear over an image of a hovering chandelier which looms closer and closer, until we cut to an arresting close-up of Biswambhar Roy (the great Chhabi Biswas), a middle-aged zamindar, or land-owning nobleman, who sits in a big chair on the roof of his crumbling palace, which stands isolated in a vast, hazy landscape that feels like it’s a world away from anyplace. Its flat surroundings reveal vestiges of a regal past: a lone elephant, a starved horse, traces of a road now seldom used, the skeleton of a ship. The Music Room takes place entirely within this landscape; you get to feeling like Roy is somehow sequestered here, in this place where tragedy befalls him during the film’s extensive flashback; and when he attempts to leave it, it’s as though some force buried in the earth has determined to keep him there. Throughout, Ray’s camera explores this landscape, the palace, and everything in it with steady, mesmerizing grace. This is a film founded in music, but also in magisterial spaces, from a sky full of lightning to the immense high ceilings of the titular room to the surface of a glass of tea from which an insect portentously struggles to escape.

It’s no slight on The Music Room to say that it might lull you asleep if you watch it when you’re tired—it’s literally spellbinding. The musical sections, in which gifted musicians perform in Roy’s music room (even when the expense of having them perform threatens to exhaust his dwindling funds) are deliciously drowsy: dudes lying around in their pyjamas on carpets and big pillows, smoking hookah pipes while sitars and tablas vibrate and patter, singers sing of love and desire, and dancers, their legs strewn with bells, move in seductive rhythms that only add to the warm complexity of the music. And it’s a good thing too, that the music and atmospheres of The Music Room so effortlessly carry the picture, because (and here’s my only complaint about the disc) with the white subtitles on the black-and-white images I couldn’t read half of the dialogue. Movies have been around for over a century now; they’ve seen advances in sound, colour and depth that the mediums forefathers could never have imagined. But we still haven’t figured out how to make subtitles legible.

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

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


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

writer/director Mike Mills

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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


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

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

JB: Sounds like something you inherited from them.

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

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

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

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

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

All at sea: Film Socialisme

When asked in a recent interview about the scene where Alain Badiou gives a lecture on geometry and philosophy to an empty auditorium on a cruise ship adrift in the Mediterranean, Jean-Luc Godard explained that he announced the lecture on the ship’s activities calendar but, sadly, nobody came. I hope there’s a better turnout when Film Socialisme screens next weekend at Edmonton's Metro Cinema, but I can almost guarantee that any prospective viewer, regardless of their facility with either philosophy or geometry, would surely have had an easier time grasping the thesis of Badiou’s lecture than that of Godard’s latest bricolage. Abrasive and staccato, fragmented in image, music and language, its multilingual dialogues obscured by Godard’s choice to offer only partial subtitles, riddled with references to politics and art yet withholding of context or commentary, this tripartite Film seems founded on the conviction that the medium itself is corrupted by signifiers that collectively fail to provide meaning. Call it Babel at 24 frames per second. Except that, for the first time in Godard’s oeuvre, it’s all video.

‘Des choses comme ça,’ the first of Film Socialisme’s three sections, struck me in my single viewing as the most coherent. Perhaps because the cruise ship seems to lend itself most easily to persuasive metaphors. A sampling of global citizens, among them a Russian detective, a hunter of war criminals, a Jewish banker, an elderly man accompanied by a young woman, and Patti Smith, found busking in the lobby, are on board, sharing a confined, landless, mobile space constructed for leisure, inaccessible to the underprivileged, offering magnificent views (Godard’s images of pure sea, sometimes almost black, are breathtaking), and containing the possibility of large scale disaster. Crowds gyrate to crushing music in the ship’s apocalyptic discotheque, captured crudely enough to seem almost abstract on what would appear to be a cell phone camera. Models stroll the decks. (There are hot young babes—a Godard staple.) Europe is “humiliated by liberty.” Everything feels vaguely ominous. Or rather ominously vague.

‘Notre Europe’ unfolds on land, amidst a family, their gas station, their llama and his donkey. It irked me to see them let the water gush at full blast while casually brushing their teeth or scrubbing a dish, but otherwise they seem decent enough folks, and there are genuinely endearing moments shared by mother and son. A TV crew arrives. I’m not at all sure they get the coverage they need. ‘Nos humanités’ promises a return to the cruise ship but proves the densest, least grounded section, a travelogue montage of war and atrocity, with visits to Palestine, Egypt, Naples, Hellas, Barcelona, and Odessa, where a re-mix of the most famous moments in Battleship Potemkin forms just one of countless flamboyant appropriations lining Film Socialisme. (Herein lies the title, perhaps: a property-dissolving collective creation, though helmed by a cinematic legend and rigorous anti-populist.) There are quotes from Shakespeare, Balzac, and Derrida, a French cover of ‘Flashdance… What a Feeling,’ and pieces of Cheyenne Autumn, if I’m not mistaken—and I could be, about many things here. My memory’s at sea. I’d need to see Film Socialisme several times to say more. But there are so many Godards to revisit, and several from the middle period especially that I still have yet to see. It might take a while to get round to this one again.

Film Socialisme screens at Metro Cinema from March 18 - 20.