Ocean memory mirror: Solaris on blu-ray

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

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

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

Spare a little change: Junebug, coming home, and the eerie effects of the parental gaze

So I’m sitting by the window in this café and the proprietor who I’m friendly with sits besides me and starts telling me about this guy across the street who used to date his sister in high school and was always talking and talking, and there he is now, across the street, 20 years later, and still he’s just talking and talking at someone as though not a moment’s gone by. “If there’s one thing I know about life,” the proprietor announces with absolute conviction, “it’s that people never change.” I ask him why he feels so strongly. He tells me he’s got three kids and that no matter what they do or say as they grow up he saw it all in them from the day they were born. I ask him if perhaps the reason they’ll always seem to the same to him isn’t that they never change but rather that, being his children, he’ll never be able to see them any differently. The proprietor considers this for a good moment and then, quite graciously, concedes that I might have a point.

I told this story to my colleague David Berry and he confessed that he more or less agreed with the café proprietor. People change in little ways, David said, but our essential selves stay the same. But I wonder how many little things need to change to constitute essential change; how much about who we were needs to change before something has changed right down there in that indefinable essence?

When I first left home at 18 and moved to another city, every time I returned felt this involuntary regression. I’m back in the house where I was raised, trying to feel at ease with my family and their habits, yet within minutes we all slip into precisely the same dynamic we’ve always had, the same presumptions and alliances, the same grievances and useless responses. I truly believed that I’d changed, significantly, yet once I entered that house it was as though everything was frozen in time and only physical escape could break the curse of stasis. It took me some years to shake off the frustration that accompanied these reunions. With the holidays here and many of us returning to our families, perhaps for uncomfortably long visits, it got me to thinking about movies that illustrate this scenario.

I thought of The Godfather (1972), how Al Pacino’s Michael Corleone comes back home a war hero, college educated and well-spoken, so different from his siblings, all of whom seem to be easing into their assigned roles within the family’s ethnic tribalism and business of organized crime, and yet by the time the story closes Michael has assumed the position his father once held, as though fate, as it did with Oedipus, were simply meandering on its way to delivering his proscribed sentence. I thought too about Five Easy Pieces (70), which I wrote about last week, how Jack Nicholson’s Bobby Dupea pathologically seeks to reinvent himself as someone from not only a different sort of family but a different class, how he winds up just as unhappy playing the role of a California roughneck as that of a gifted Oregon concert pianist, and how after returning home to find no resolution has no other choice but to keep on running from everything in order to stave off his incessant sense of vacancy. I thought about Brand Upon the Brain! (06) and Guy Maddin’s hero returning to the lighthouse orphanage of his childhood to somnambulistically paint its walls, and about My Own Private Idaho (91), where Keanu Reeves’ male hustler embodies the role of Prince Hal. I also thought about Dogtooth (09) and what happens when the children never leave home. Literally. But that's another story.

The movie that finally struck me as being most emblematic of the experience that had been on my mind was Junebug (05), the debut of director Phil Morrison and writer Angus MacLachlan. After years away, living in Chicago, George (Alessandro Nivola) returns to his rural North Carolina home with Madeline (Embeth Davidtz), his new wife. What’s especially interesting about this homecoming is how George initially recedes from the central storyline upon arriving home. While Madeline awkwardly attempts to ingratiate herself to her in-laws, George seems to be constantly passing out on the sofa, exploring empty rooms or going out. It’s only when he’s called upon by the local pastor to sing a hymn that George breaks the spell and instantly seems to change before Madeline’s eyes into the homey, family-loving Christian his parents raised him to be. “Ye who are weary… Jesus is calling, o sinner, come home,” George sings in a voice so pure it could’ve come from a boy.

Morrison subtly emphasizes the role home and place play in George’s transformation through still, often unpopulated, almost painterly shots of houses, rooms, vast lawns, and churches with immense parking lots. Madeline is a diplomat’s daughter, born in Japan and raised between South Africa and DC—a person without roots, as far as George’s mother’s concerned—and no matter how hard she tries she’ll always stick out everywhere she goes in George’s town, while George, after only a short time there, virtually disappears—from Madeline’s view—right into the town’s tapestry. Then a crisis emerges, George helps his sister-in-law through the crisis, and when he emerges from the event he’s suddenly anxious to leave. In what is perhaps the movie’s boldest move, George and Madeline depart and the story ends with George callously expressing his relief at getting out of that place.

Yet we’re not meant to take this as a simplistic finale, nor as disrespect for George's family on the part of the filmmakers. I think we’re to intuit that George’s family will go on with their lives and George will go on with his and both paths involve some irreducible mixture of free will and stubborn changelessness. It’s only when returning home for a few hours, a few days, maybe a few weeks (!), we are all, or at least most of us, susceptible to this eerie magic that renders us a child once more, unable to assert our individuality and wondering how we ever made it out of the driveway on our own. Until of course we do make it out, and repeat the experience all over.

The Thing: Fear the familiar face!

When Hollywood endeavored to remake The Thing From Another World (1951), the late screenwriter Bill Lancaster wisely opted for a radical re-imagining, going back to the source material for inspiration, a novella by John W. Campbell Jr. entitled Who Goes There? Chief among the distinctions between The Thing From Another World and what would simply be called The Thing (82) was the decision, very much in keeping the Campbell’s narrative, to render the titular alien not as an angry salad bar in human form but rather an interplanetary chameleon, a parasite able to rapidly assume the form of whatever host organism it came into contact with after being thawed out by a Norwegian research team in Antarctica. They say mimicry is the highest compliment.

However, Lancaster’s script also differs from the earlier movie in that it features not a single woman. While the presence of women in the earlier movie could be written off as pandering to a broader audience with the arbitrary injection of a love interest, an argument of equal merit could be made that a great opportunity was lost in the resolve to make this an exclusively masculine story. A feminine perspective could have pleasingly complicated the deeply uneasy, paranoid group dynamics of The Thing, and you have to wonder if the absence of women didn’t emerge above all from squeamishness on the part of the filmmakers, all of them men, who may have felt uncomfortable with desecrating female bodies with the same infamously ferocious and nauseating zeal applied to those of men and canines throughout.

The Thing begins with a pretty corny looking flying saucer crashing into Earth, leaving no ambiguity as to what we’re dealing with from the get-go. There’s only a short, divertingly portentous half-hour or so between this cosmic establishing shot and the first manifestation of the alien presence in the encampment’s Husky cage, with flesh flying off of this poor pooch’s skull like a self-peeling banana, and blood-smeared spaghetti whipping around the room to ensnare the other dogs. The alien’s use of familiar flesh as a sort of Trojan Horse reveals a similar tactic to that of the aliens in Invasion of the Body Snatchers (56), which was also imaginatively updated and remade in a version directed by Philip Kaufman in ’78. But in The Thing, directed by John Carpenter, the process of transfiguration is itself the central concern of the movie. It veers away from the concerns of science fiction and into that of horror, emphasizing repeatedly the body as a site of grotesque violence and chilling anonymity.

The Thing, when not making you want to vomit, is pretty fun, another Carpenter siege drama where evil is evil and the good guys do what it takes. But I can’t help but imagine a David Cronenberg version, a movie far more curious, speculative and precise in its biological exegesis and bearing greater pathos. Undoubtedly Cronenberg, like the scientist in The Thing From Another World, would be more sympathetic to the alien than Kurt Russell, who rarely puts on a hat in the –40 tempests and eagerly torches everything in sight. But maybe we should be imagining a Werner Herzog version. Early in The Thing a characters named Windows tries to get in touch with his colleagues at McMurdo Station, the setting of Herzog’s Encounters at the End of the World (07). Would those endearing misfits at McMurdo, spanning many countries of origin and encompassing both genders, have been able to fight off the alien? Or might they have embraced it as just another fellow outsider, far from home and in search of communion?

Waxing La Moustache

General Emiliano Zapata and his fateful moustache

Have you ever encountered a book that seems created especially for you? I don’t mean a book that’s simply very good—the book I’m thinking about doesn’t need to be the best thing you’ve ever read. Rather, I’m talking about something that radiates déjà vu upon contact, something seemingly plucked from your subconscious.

I think it would be fair to say I’ve always been somewhat obsessed with moustaches. I won’t attempt to analyze it unduly. I do not habitually wear a moustache. I find it difficult to grow a very convincing one. But they interest me. Perhaps as the embodiment of male vanity and affectation, perhaps as the insignia of some occult brotherly union that transcends age, culture, and fashion. I certainly underwent that life-altering experience so many of us experience as small children, that fateful day when your normally moustache-emblazoned father suddenly emerges from a steam-filled washroom with his upper lip freshly stripped of hair. He stands before you and your family, perhaps sheepishly awaiting validation, and you find yourself frozen, prickled by the whiskers of the uncanny, wondering who is this strange, pale-faced man masquerading as your father? It’s a trauma we shrug off and laugh about, yet never quite get over.

Did Emmanuel Carrère endure the moustacheless father experience? Did he fear the moustacheless impostor? Does he himself wear a moustache, or, as they’re sometimes referred to in 19th century literature, moustaches? I have no idea. (I’ve seen a few images of him on the internet, all of them sans moustache.) Curiously, we have the same birthday, along with John Cassavetes, whom I’ve also never seen with a moustache. In any case, despite the fact that he’s made films, written a book about Philip K. Dick (of course!), and another about Werner Herzog (talk about memorable moustaches!), I’d never heard of Carrère until just weeks ago, when I was digging through a box of abandoned books on the street near my house and discovered a copy of Carrère’s 1986 novel La Moustache. I recalled having heard of a film of the same name coming out a few years ago, and thinking I should really watch that. Turns out it was adapted and directed by Carrère himself from his own novel. I understand it costars Emmanuelle Devos, who I find terribly appealing. But I still haven’t watched it yet. I’m just not ready.

Werner Herzog once wore a lovely moustache

John Cassavettes, to my knowledge, did not wear a moustache

“What would you say if I shaved off my moustache?” La Moustache begins with our hero asking his beloved spouse Agnes this innocuous question. He’s in the bath, contentedly enacting his long-practiced grooming ritual. “It was the only time he had left for meditation, self-knowledge, and the spiritual world…” Our hero has worn a moustache his entire adult life. He’s been married five years. He’s an average, middle-class French guy—this is the mid-1980s, so moustaches have not yet entered their current, unfortunate phase of being identified with kitsch, considered the exclusive facial décor of cops, cowboys, gay guys, or Mexicans—so his whimsical suggestion is loaded with consequence. He’s going to look different. Perhaps people will laugh at him. But what the hell?

He shaves it off while Agnes runs an errand. She returns, and he’s cheerfully prepared himself for whatever response his naked lip garners. He doesn’t expect no response. Agnes seems completely oblivious. Is she toying with him? They go to visit their best friends. They too seem not to notice. Did Agnes clandestinely warn them in advance? This conspiracy of silence continues, following our hero all the way home, all the way to bed. He confronts Agnes, but even after the mounting tension doesn’t expect what she has to tell him: that he never had a moustache. At this early stage, La Moustache has already descended into nightmare, one that reverses the childhood scenario described earlier, one akin to tales of metamorphosis from Kafka or Gogol or, more recently, Kobo Abe, whose novels include one about a guy who finds cauliflower growing on his legs. One no less unnerving for its absurdity.

He quickly found the smaller bag they used for the bathroom waste can, picked out cotton swabs, two Tampaxes, an old tube of toothpaste, another one for skin lotion, and some used razor blades. And there it was, his hair. Lots of it, but scattered all over, not exactly as he’d hoped. He’d imagined a nice compact tuft, something like a moustache, holding together all by itself. He gathered as much of it as possible and collected it in the palm of his hand. When he’d amassed a little mound, less than he thought he shaved off, he went back upstairs. He entered the room without a sound, his cupped hand outstretched. Sitting down on the bed next to Agnes, who was apparently asleep, he switched on the night-table lamp. She moaned softly. Then, since he was shaking her shoulders, she blinked open her eyes and grimaced when she saw his open palm thrust in her face.
“And this,” he said harshly, “what do you call this?”

Our hero cradles the remains of his moustache as through it were intact, independent, soul-bearing, his proof that something now lost, dissembled, waiting to merge with nature, once existed, this formerly integral piece of him that no one recalls. (This scene has its echo in the film The Man Who Wasn’t There, when Billy Bob Thornton’s barber reverently resolves to take the day’s mass of cut hair and bury it behind the shop, as though it constituted a dearly departed.) I don’t want to spoil too much of where La Moustache goes, but there is the suggestion that there’s something inherently hazardous to one’s identity in grooming, in clipping away at our extremities, which, once vanquished from body, may vanish from memory too. And if a moustache could just disappear as though it never existed, what might follow? “One should always hold on to everything, never overlook the slightest bit of evidence,” our hero muses, recalling an animist tribe in Java who once collected their fingernail clippings, excrement, and hair, “everything that was a part of them and that would allow them to enter the gates of paradise in one whole and unmutilated piece.”

Emmanuel Carrère

Of course, the real warning in La Moustache might be against growing a moustache at all. Perhaps when I next see my father I should ask not who he might become without his moustache, but whether the moustache hides another, unknown person altogether.

Sleep, shadows, secret lives: Murakami, Hoffmann, Stevenson

Sleeping Beauty Edward Burne-Jones 1870

The days close early, and soon they’ll change the time on us and darkness will fall before we even leave work. October brings with it a surplus of night, but not, for some of us, any extra sleep. Me, I wake up in the wee hours, and most often pass the time reading. Come autumn I get hooked on spooky stories, and I got to thinking on stories about sleep itself. A favourite from Haruki Murakami—you can find it in The Elephant Vanishes—is actually called ‘Sleep.’ A seemingly normal middleclass woman stops sleeping. She reads Anna Karinina. The problem is that she never catches up—I’m told by experts that no one ever actually “catches up” on sleep, but it’s a handy expression—and she kinda likes it, the freedom, the hours no longer spent idly—think of all the gigantic Russian novels to read. She feels energized, renewed, as though undergoing some transformation. But into what?

E.T.A. Hoffmann

I don’t know if E.T.A. Hoffmann had trouble sleeping, though it’s easy to imagine how the writing of ‘The Sandman,’ first published in 1818 in a collection entitled, aptly enough, The Night Pieces, might have troubled his rest of the author. “Something terrible has entered my life,” writes Nathaniel to his dear friend Lothario—the first part of the story is delivered through a series of letters. He recounts a childhood marked by his mother’s nightly demands that he be off to bed lest the sandman come and find him, and indeed, he hears him mounting the stairs as he lay awake in the dark. This sandman is eventually discovered to be a lawyer—like Hoffmann—and colleague of Nathaniel’s father, a man with hairy hands who scares children away with the mere threat of his touch, “a repellant, spectral monster bringing misery, distress and earthly and eternal ruination wherever he went.” Nathaniel believes him to be the murderer of his father. Now Nathaniel is an adult student, living in another city, but he claims the sandman has reappeared in his life, posing as a seller of barometers.

Hoffmann, with friends

Clara is Lothario’s sister and Nathaniel’s fiancée. She reads the letter intended for her brother and writes back to Nathaniel, assuring him in so many words that he’s basically just a little crazy. She suggests that he simply endeavour to “be cheerful.” But Nathaniel’s caught up in something clearly beyond Clara’s understanding. He’s convinced his will is subject to some power mysterious and vast. He’s confronted again by the barometer seller, who covers a table in glasses, and later telescopes, one of which is purchased by Nathaniel, who begins to feel foolish about his suspicions and becomes fascinated by the object. And it strikes me as interesting that this fascination with seeing, specifically with seeing through the aid of a mechanical object, is what seems to lead Nathaniel to his downfall. He falls in love with another woman, one not so cheerful as Clara, but whose strange stillness is transfixing. She’s more like a coveted object than a person. Something inside of Nathaniel begins to split apart. The ending of ‘The Sandman’ is rather ambiguous, and brilliantly chilling. It’s referenced at length in Freud’s ‘The Uncanny.’

Grave of Hoffmann

Hoffmann himself has been characterized as a guy with two distinct faces, and the theme of man’s dual nature is given further expression in ‘Mademoiselle de Scudéry,’ his most famous story, one often considered the prototype for detective fiction—it predates Edgar Allen Poe’s ‘Murders in the Rue Morgue’ by 20 years. It certainly must be the first example of this odd convention of having mysteries solved by old ladies—its title character petitions numerous local authorities to reconsider their assumptions about the murder of a celebrated maker of jewelry named Cardillac in 1680 Paris. Cardillac is actually the story’s most memorable character, with Hoffmann’s portrait compelling us to draw parallels between virtuosity and villainy, art and evil. Cardillac claims to have been followed all his life by an “evil star,” and we start to see how the jewels he so admires twinkle just like that heavenly eye. Of course ‘Mademoiselle de Scudéry’ isn’t terribly macabre, which is what I’ve been in the mood for and, with Halloween approaching, what I aim to steer you toward. But it led me to finally read a horror classic I’d previously neglected, one regarded as the definitive narrative investigation into the multiplicities of self, and the beast within.

Portraits of Stevenson by John Singer Sargent

Imagine you have an old friend so beloved to yourself, held in such high esteem by others, that were he to change radically, to alter his behaviour in a wildly grotesque fashion, you wouldn’t even recognize him standing before you. That’s one of the questions that lingers with you after reading Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Stevenson was inspired by the true story of Deacon Brody, respected businessman by day, burglar and thief by night. But the story of Dr Jekyll and his slow surrender to his shadow self also lends itself to being read as a parable of drug addiction, and it’s notable that after having his manuscript destroyed Stevenson rewrote the whole thing during a six-day cocaine binge. The work lends itself to so many interpretations, and nearly all of them work because Stevenson’s storytelling is so geared toward realistic detail and the rich evocations of its relationships. His is a world of bachelors, of intense male friendships, allegiances that defy law or even logic in the actions that inspire. (There’s surely a queer reading out there, too.)


“I have lost confidence in myself,” Jekyll tells his friend Utterson—another lawyer. Indeed his self is not what he thought it to be. The cruel and murderous Mr Hyde is the result of some fantastic experiment, but he was surely waiting within Jekyll’s psyche all along. It takes a drug to shake “the fortress of identity,” but the more important ingredient in Hyde’s birth was surely Jekyll’s urge to let loose his demons and to do so without punishment, to have his evil other hide in plain sight. Stevenson closes the novella with Jekyll’s own words, which elevates its horror by leaving us not with Utterson’s “I thought I knew the man…” but with something rather more frightening: the man never really knew himself.

It's no fun being an illegal alien—or changing into one: District 9

Not invaders so much as castaways, the aliens wash up over Johannesburg, their great ship looming, suspended and ominously silent for a long while until we humans finally break in and discover the lot of them ailing and with no place to go. More than two decades later the aliens have become the new gypsies, a nationless people unwanted, feared, segregated, blamed for all sorts of things. They’re already loosely confined to zone, but our story begins proper when a private multinational is hired to round them all up and send them to a more remote colony, out of sight, out of mind, herded into the ghetto.

District 9 takes a rather visionary approach to our anxious dreams of extraterrestrial first contact, picking up cues from a lot of great science fiction prose, the sort that rarely gets made into movies. (It’s also entirely possible that parts of its story were inspired by Stanley Kramer’s 1958 film The Defiant Ones.) By rendering the aliens as ostracized refugees in South Africa the film opens the doors wide to invite all manner of metaphorical interpretation, grounding its narrative in the landscape of apartheid and having human characters of all racial backgrounds disparage their visitors with reactionary, colonialist rhetoric, their intolerance made ostensibly acceptable by the humanoid yet crustacean-like aliens’ all too evident Otherness. But this remarkable feature debut from South African-Canadian filmmaker Neill Blomkamp, made under the auspices of producer Peter Jackson, also functions quite nicely as engrossing comic book stuff. In fact, the deeper it ventures into pulp territory the better it gets.

Wikus Van De Merwe (Sharlto Copley) is our unlikely protagonist, a naïve, clownish, moustached bureaucrat who earns his high profile position of supervising the relocation project through pure nepotism. He’s a Kafkaesque tragic character in more ways than one, having first been ill-prepared for a mission fraught with issues of miscommunication and conflicting agendas, and then coming into contact with an alien fluid that infects him with some mysterious gene-altering virus. Wikus could never be mistaken for a hero—it’s only his process of transfiguration, and his sudden value to military strategists, that forces him to become heroic. He gets lucky, and his sheer will to survive is strong. He becomes an unwitting symbol for the possibility of racial conciliation, and embarks on a bloody adventure that slowly turns desperate self-interest into something far grander.

District 9 is wildly ambitious. By its brilliantly realized finale these ambitions are surprisingly fulfilled. Its difficulties arise mostly through a sense of uncertainty with form. Of the more mature filmmakers one might imagine taking on such a project—Paul Verhoven or David Cronenberg spring to mind—I can’t think of any who would have stuck with the limiting faux documentary approach developed by Blomkamp and his co-scenarist Terri Tatchell, which simply causes a lot of unnecessary problems. Opening with the news show style commentaries and character introductions offers the filmmakers a perfectly legitimate—if rather generic—opportunity to get a lot of exposition out of the way. But they continue to try and convince us that we’re watching a kind of documentary long afterwards, and it’s only when the form’s limitations become too constraining—we eventually need to see characters in situations that no diegetically-placed camera could possibly capture—that the film starts breaking its own rules and things get confused. With its handheld, vérité aesthetic, the faux doc format allows filmmakers to cheat certain things that a more classical approach is less forgiving of, but Blomkamp hardly seems like he’s trying to make The Blair Witch Project—on the contrary, he seems a skilled craftsman, so I can’t help but wonder why he didn’t go al the way and embrace the aesthetic demands of an unmistakably fiction film when his story started begging for it.

So District 9 gets off to a wobbly, distracting start, but rest assured it will more than make up for it, partially just because the story is so well-structured and the political—at times outright satirical—undercurrents so rich. Copley compliments this by hurling himself into the squirm-inducing physicality of the role and surrendering completely to the risky notion of the totally bumbling protagonist. Wikus is definitely not cut from the Cronenbergian model of the reflective hero fascinated by his own terrifying metamorphosis. The guy is really an idiot, and through it serves the drama effectively the meager redemption he finds is hard-won. This is what makes this sort of story work, the understanding that heroism is always a balance of character and circumstance, and once in while the latter grossly outweighs the former. In any case, it’s a must-see for anyone with even the slightest appetite for smart spectacle. It sure beats the hell out of the rest of the current summer stock.

Tokyo gall

This triptych sets each of its tales within the titular Japanese capital, but unlike similarly conceived recent tributes to Paris, New York and Toronto, the filmmakers arrive on the scene to reveal far more perverse invention than touristy affection toward their host city. Here, here! Tokyo!, now available on DVD from Liberation Entertainment, is no more a cohesive masterpiece than your average omnibus feature, but, helmed by two mischievous Frenchmen and a Korean—talk about courting contentious international relations—it is bold, strange, fun and occasionally thought provoking.

Transplanting Gabrielle Bell’s graphic novel Cecil and Jordan in New York to the other side of the planet, Michel Gondry’s ‘Interior Design’ finds a typical Gondry self-appointed creative genius hoping against the odds to make it big in the big, crowded city with his ramshackle, no-budget apocalypse disaster flicks—screened with smoke machines for that twee theatrical edge. The real protagonist here however is the fledging auteur’s girlfriend, played by Steven Segal’s daughter Ayako Fugitani, who by contrast is a sort of non-being, a person with no significant ambitions of her own. She eventually seems to vanish altogether in a surreal twist that’s best discovered in the moment. I enjoyed the film, but I couldn’t help but question Gondry’s subconscious motives and the ostensible inventiveness of creating this character of a Japanese woman who only finds herself by being transformed into the perfect object of servility.

Most memorable by far is Leos Carax’s ‘Merde,’ the director’s first film in a decade and a wildly caustic bit of politically hostile monster movie chaos. Everyone’s favourite nutcase Denis Lavant, who I'd like to nominate for an Oscar, crawls out of the Tokyo sewers like some demented offspring of a violent, racist French leprechaun and Harpo Marx driven insane by painful cataracts and years of living underground. In an opening sequence of inspired anarchy he terrorizes the local citizenry by gobbling cash and flowers, stealing smoking cigarettes and then tossing the burning butts into baby carriages. He’s finally captured and put on trial, defended by one of the only people on earth to speak his language—though once everyone knows what he’s saying this only serves to make the creature even more unsympathetic. He’s condemned to death, but monsters never die easily in the Japanese cinema, nor do martyrs of its bureaucratic processes (see Oshima’s Death by Hanging for the climactic sequence’s basis). Sequels are promised. Shit!

‘Shaking Tokyo,’ directed by The Host’s Bong Joon-ho and starring Tokyo Sonata’s wonderful Teruyuki Kagawa, is as obsessed with apocalypse as its predecessors, but is as sweet and sensitive as ‘Merde’ is grotesque and outrageous. Taking the national xenophobia under fire by Carax into a much quieter place, the film concerns a hikikomori—Japanese for shut-in—who’s solitary life of reading, shitting, sleeping and building orderly walls of pizza boxes and toilet paper rolls is interrupted by the possibility of love with a pizza delivery girl in danger of becoming just as reclusive as he is. The narrative naturally lends itself to a predictable climax of classical emotional liberation, but Bong, with great help from the tightly wound but finely expressive Kagawa, does a lovely job of making the journey distinctive and compelling.

The Brave One: This time, it's personal, or maybe it's generic, or maybe neither

When The Brave One cropped up last fall I was knee deep in TIFF and barely noticed it. It was only later that I began to notice how wildly conflicted the critical response was and my curiosity grew. The film’s genealogy as a vigilante thriller is of course impressive, with executive producer and star Jodie Foster in a sense assuming the Travis Bickle role from Taxi Driver, the film in which she played the pubescent prostitute who becomes Bickle’s personal salvation project.

The Brave One cements its kinship with Taxi Driver in its use of voice-over, the evocative New York location work, the convenience store-killing initiation scene, and, at points, even its score, which features surges of nearly atonal brass and strings. As well, there’s the protagonist’s unusual sensitivity to the ever-shifting city via the dictates of their occupation: from the cockpit of his cab, Bickle primarily saw and smelled New York, where Foster’s Erica, a public radio broadcaster who makes field recordings and comments on New York’s evolution on her show, primarily listens to it

Filmic heritage aside, what’s most interesting here is basically the cultivation of Erica’s sense of internal transfiguration. Having survived the brutal assault that killed her fiancé, her isolation and despair compounded by the apparent absence of any other friends or relatives in her life, she feels that she’s literally become someone else, someone now capable of cold retribution. This discovery of one’s basic, killer instincts was effectively mined most recently in A History of Violence, but the connection between trauma and response is more immediate in The Brave One, with Erica going from victim to vigilante in a matter of weeks. Her transformation is quickened by her sudden proximity to random acts of violence, and, while it feels like something of a baldly magical conceit, I liked this element too, the idea that once violence touches you, you suddenly start to see it everywhere.

So far so intriguing, but where everything completely falls apart is in the final act, which climaxes in one of most astoundingly stupid, most grossly misguided finales in recent memory. How could the presumably reasonably intelligent people working on The Brave One possibly agree to such a pathetic resolution? I was hoping that the making-of featurette on Warner’s new DVD might enlighten us.

Basically, the film’s producers explain how Roderick and Bruce Taylor’s screenplay was initially a straight-ahead genre piece, but when Neil Jordan signed on as director they knew it could be so much more and another writer, Cynthia Mort, was brought it to ostensibly smarten it up. Jordan himself says he actually wanted to make a genre film, something in keeping with the work of say, Sam Fuller or Don Siegel. Indeed, these testimonies finally begin to add up: in the end, The Brave One is caught between being exploitation and something more reflective, and suffers profoundly from this indecision.

Body trouble: a short piece on the conflicted aesthetic pretentions and elegant alienation of Peter Greenaway

Peter Greenaway at the very least deserves to be considered a special case. Not only does Greenaway bring the distinct sensibility of the painter to (more or less) mainstream cinema, not only does he subvert the vocabulary of narrative film to make essentially associational structural explorations: Peter Greenaway is a grand cinematic alienator, wildly prolific and without peer. He doesn’t seem to even want you to like his films, which is fortunate.

I started hating Greenaway with 8 1/2 Women (1999), which I saw at Edmonton's Metro Cinema years ago. It’s Metro again who’ve prompted me to revisit Greenaway’s work for the first time since. Making up one half of their weekend Greenaway double bill, Metro’s screening A Zed & Two Noughts (85), perhaps the coldest movie about grief ever made. A clinically elegant approach to design and symmetry permeates the film from the surface down to its core. A car accident outside the Rotterdam Zoo, on a road titled Swan Way, is caused by a swan. Two women perish, each one spouse to one of a pair of Siamese twins. The widowers soon become lovers to the accident’s sole survivor, the driver of the car, who lost one leg in the violence and, urged by the surgeon brother of a famous forger of Vermeer paintings, is considering getting rid of the other. The twins also console themselves with documentaries about the origins of life and by monitoring of decomposition in various organic subjects: an apple, some prawns, a swan. The march of bloat, bubble and rot whizzes by in time-lapse images set to hyper-speed music.

Seen at the close of the opening credits, the image of the dead wives, leaning almost sensuously against one and other as sparks cascade behind them, possesses a certain perverse pageantry that determines the tone of what proceeds. The spectacle owes something to Warhol and JG Ballard in its transfixing power: morbid, telegraphic, flat, yet layered with meaning. It matches the highly theatrical quality of the film’s lighting, composition, production design and even dialogue. In Greenaway’s theatre, civilization is a sort of catastrophe waiting to happen, where genes dictate destiny and personality melts into base needs and the useless accumulation of knowledge. Incidentally, I don’t recall a single close-up in the whole thing: humans are to be observed from a distance sufficient for erasing the possibility of character identification.

Greenaway has stated that cinema doesn’t connect with the body the way painting has. The two mediums behave so differently that I don’t doubt for a moment that he’s right. Yet, while Greenaway has frequently condemned films for clinging to the aesthetics of the novel, I wonder if he’s aware of just how equally limiting his appropriation of the aesthetics of painting is. The body is often most palpably felt in films that fully exploit the medium’s particular sense of movement and urgency -elements Greenaway frequently avoids. In any case,  A Zed & Two Noughts is compelling precisely for its use of static or virtually static imagery. This is something worth praising, even if it’s a far cry from its creator’s ostensible goals.