Rivers to the ocean: The Complete Jean Vigo

I keep thinking of that most cherished scene from L’Atalante (1934)—one of the most beautiful movies ever made—the one that forms a bridge between the middle and last parts. The young lovers have separated; the man is miserable. He recalls something the woman told him just after they were wed, that in her village they say that if you dunk your head underwater you will see the face of your beloved. So the man climbs up on the deck of the barge of which he’s skipper and plunges headlong into the wintry-cold canal. And there, below the water’s surface, the villagers’ promise manifests in visions of the woman, all in white, dancing, smiling, a luminous pearl in the liquescent gloom. And it strikes me that this scene invokes the promise of the movies: we submerge ourselves in the dark, hoping to find something like consolation, or excitement, or enlightenment, in the apparitions hovering before us.





A romantic analogy, obviously, but such notions creep up on you when you immerse yourself in the work of Jean Vigo, who died at 29 after having only completed four films, who received scant love while alive but whose posthumous acclaim has found him heralded as the French cinema’s patron saint, a genuine martyr, having literally been killed by filmmaking, his fragile health unable to withstand the bone-chilling location work necessary to complete his masterpiece. I first saw L’Atalante on my birthday, at the Anthology Film Archives, during my first visit to New York. It put me in some kind of a trace. I seemed to be walking on sea legs afterwards, and much of what had just passed before my eyes lingered only as a spectral blur. Thankfully, Criterion has now released The Complete Jean Vigo, and I’m now able to think a little more lucidly about L’Atalante’s singular lyricism, and its echoes in everything else Vigo managed to make during his too-short career.





One of the first examples of what would later be called the essay film, Vigo and co-director Boris Kaufman’s 23-minute À propos de Nice (1930)—the city where Vigo had spent time recovering from tuberculosis, and where he met his wife—is restlessly inventive and irreverent, as much under the spell of Un chien andalou (1929) as it was the fashion for “city films.” It features sail boats, wandering crowds and people lazing in the sun (their clothing changing or suddenly, delightfully, vanishing), car races and can-can dancers (Vigo himself among them), edited in a manner that’s both elegant and mischievous, enthralled by Nice and critical of Nice. It also features gorgeous arial photography, foreshadowing the distinctive gaze from above that would return in each subsequent Vigo.





‘Taris’ (1931), a commissioned, nine-minute documentary on swimming champion Jean Taris, is surprisingly charming and extraordinarily sensual, with images of Taris’ torso twisting below the water’s surface. A final sequence finds him diving in reverse before suddenly appearing in a suit and walking (via superimposition) back into the waves.

A major influence on numerous celebrated films, among them The 400 Blows (1959), Zéro de conduite (1933) is a 44-minute narrative film about the increasingly exhilarating bouts of trouble that a group of boys get into at a provincial boarding school. This ode to childhood disobedience—laying the groundwork for the adult anarchism Vigo ascribed to—makes a cine-poetry of spasms of rebellion, building to an unforgettable climax in which the students declare war on their masters, arming themselves with pillows and converting their dormitory into a battleground strewn with feathers.





Finally, L’Atalante, sadly, Vigo’s sole feature-length work, tells the story of a woman who weds the skipper of a barge. She’s never been outside her village, and though marriage promises to show her the world, she soon realizes that it will mostly be seen only in passing. For the man, this marriage seems to represent a compromise between domesticity and freedom. Vigo conveys their troubled yet passionate romance through a delicate mise-en-scène, flowing with languorous lateral movement, haunting images of water and fog, displays of bizarre objects gathered from around the world, scenes of remarkable, touching intimacy of the sort still rare in movies, and abundant earthy humour in the form of Le père Jules (the great Michel Simon, of Renoir's Boudu Saved From Drowning), the bumbling old sea dog who often steals the show with his rants, accordion playing, and one-man wrestling matches.

Best-made plans: Criterion does The Killing

The title of The Killing (1956) describes what, in one sense of the word, its characters hope to make, yet, in the more literal sense, it’s what they wind up unexpectedly doing a whole lot of once the machinery of their elegantly planned heist goes awry. This was Stanley Kubrick’s third feature, made when he was just 28. It should be seen as his proper arrival, the first film so charged with the particular brand of irony and almost singular rendering of architectural space that would come to define the director’s signature. Though hardly indicative of the towering and exacting displays of ambition to come—see Dr. Strangelove (1964), 2001 (1968), Barry Lyndon (1975), et al—The Killing is also nimble and fleet and yielding of cinematic pleasure in a way that Kubrick would never quite replicate. It features camerawork from the great Lucien Ballard and dialogue from hard-boiled author Jim Thompson—the source material is Lionel White’s Clean Break—and a dream cast of actors that read like a film noir rogue’s gallery: Sterling Hayden, Marie Windsor, Elisha Cook Jr., Vince Edwards, Coleen Gray, and the unmistakable Timothy Carey. The Killing is now available on a great-looking DVD and blu-ray from Criterion.





Career criminal Johnny Clay (Hayden) has already done a five-year stretch, so he figures if he’s going to risk getting caught again it better be for a whopping payday. Two million, split between a small crew, about fits the bill, so Clay assembles a team consisting of a sniper (Carey), a betting window teller (Cook), a cop (Ted de Corsica), a bartender (Joe Sawyer) and—best of all—a wrestler (Kola Kwariani), who at one point actually has his shirt ripped off before he starts to kick ass, to rob a busy race track. Part of what’s meant to make the plan so effective is that no one player in the operation is able to fully see the whole, but this reduction of a larger machine to its individual parts is also part of what causes it to malfunction. The teller’s younger wife (Windsor) tells her boyfriend (Edwards) about the plan and the boyfriend figures to get in on the take; the sniper loses his patience with a parking lot attendant and fellow veteran (James Edwards), lets fire a racist slur, and is eventually fired at himself.





Moving back and forth chronologically—tellingly, the film was an inspiration for the young Quentin Tarantino—we see parts of the plan play out from different perspective; narrated by an anonymous voice who sounds a little too much like he’s narrating a trailer, it’s as though we’re medical students tracking the paths of a cancer. The cynical masterstroke in all this can be traced to the manner in which Kubrick manipulates the viewer’s emotional connections: by The Killing’s brilliantly staged finale, we’re confronted with the fact that we’re far more invested in the fate of a suitcase full of cash than we are in the lives of several characters. Everything, finally, is grist for the mill. As Clay memorably puts it, inadvertently foreshadowing the general shrugging attitude toward human endeavour in so much later Kurbick, “What’s the difference?”





The supplements on Criterion’s release are terrific, especially the interview with Robert Polito, author of the excellent Savage Art: A Biography of Jim Thompson, concerning Thompson’s relationship with Kubrick. (Among Polito’s most interesting insights are the connections he draws between Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me and Nabokov’s Lolita, which Kubrick would soon adapt.) But the obvious supplementary highlight on The Killing is Kubrick’s preceding feature, Killer’s Kiss (1955), also a strong, moody noir about a not very good boxer and a girl in trouble, which memorably features scenes of casual voyeurism, lusty television viewing, underwear fondling, more bad voice-over, and a long, messy, dirty fight involving an axe, a spear, and about a hundred mannequins in various states of assembly. It was also shot by Kubrick, who had by then wound down his career as a photographer for Look, and his memorable, seemingly spontaneous street imagery conveys a curiosity about the world that would rarely resurface in his later work.

Conan the Barbarian: bludgeoning the classics

Steel versus sorcery, self-reliance versus hegemony, cold brutality versus hot sadism: there’s plenty of dramatic conflict inherent in Robert E. Howard’s oft-revived and re-tooled Conan tales, yet the only discernible conflict in director Marcus Nispel’s new Conan the Barbarian concerns the battle between the forces of inspiration and those of crass cynicism. The latter triumphs utterly.





Neither spectacularly awful not awfully spectacular, this new Conan makes good on none of its promises nor builds any momentum. A protracted prologue (with narration from Morgan Freeman!), which follows our titular barbarian from the womb (I mean this literally) through to childhood trauma, attempts to infuse the story with some psychology yet fails to produce a Conan half as compelling as Schwarzenegger’s far more single-minded embodiment. Once adult Conan (Jason Momoa, sneering with conviction and plenty buff, though he’d surely look more at home jumping off the top rope than fencing with sand demons) sets upon on his quest to avenge his father’s gruesome death, the film shifts into a steady and mind-numbing series of fight sequences, none of which are very imaginative nor support a coherent set of rules regarding the magical powers of its baddies.





John Milius’ 1982 Conan the Barbarian was an economical fantasy that thoughtfully embraced the savagery of its milieu and made its hero an emblem for its director’s anti-authoritarian, neo-anarchist beliefs and its singularly self-adoring star’s superman self-image. It also featured a wonderfully seductive villain in wigged James Earl Jones, was extremely entertaining and well-structured (the script came from Milius and Oliver Stone), and functioned as an interesting foil to Apocalypse Now (which was scripted by Milius and features a similar trajectory and virtually identical climax).





With its somewhat different narrative thrust (“arc” is too dynamic a term... come to think of it so is “thrust”), the new Conan can’t exactly be called a remake (despite echoes of the earlier film in the score and some of the choreography), but neither can anyone familiar with Milius’ film help but compare the two. The only things to recommend it are supporting performances from Ron Perlman and Conan’s martyred dad and Rose McGowan as the goth sorceress daughter of Conan’s adversary. Her inevitable demise during one of the film’s umpteen endings is almost a disappointment, but hardly enough to invoke “the lamentations of the women.”

Win Win: So-so

Win Win immediately announces itself as the natural successor to actor-turned-writer/director Tom McCarthy’s The Station Agent and The Visitor. McCarthy very deliberately steers his alternately desperate or lonesome characters into each other’s paths, his quiet collisions challenging them to reach out, to make space in their troubled lives for unlikely, difficult, though finally rewarding alliances. But Win Win is where the filmmaker’s tendencies begin to look less like variations on a theme and more like formula—and somebody else’s formula at that. By shifting away from the somber warmth of the first two films into a sort of humanist comedy, McCarthy has, perhaps inadvertently, sacrificed what measure of tonal distinction his directorial approach had previously nurtured. The result is a perfectly likeable if belabored go-for-it movie that may very well get McCarthy his broadest audience yet, though few will likely walk away from it wondering about or even remembering who made it.

Paul Giamatti plays Mike Flaherty, a Jersey lawyer, family man and high school wrestling coach burdened with enough problems (dwindling practice, losing team, clogged toilet, busted copier, falling tree, dying boiler...) that by the time he does something underhanded we’ve already forgiven him. Mike siphons some revenue out of an elderly client in the early stages of dementia played by Burt Young, an endlessly entertaining actor to behold when he gets pissed off. Along comes said client’s grandson Kyle (Alex Shaffer), a teenager with an atrocious dye-job on the run from a bad situation in Ohio. Having just delivered Leo to a nursing home and unwilling to send Kyle back to an empty house (mom’s in rehab), Mike decides to take Kyle in… and soon discovers the kid’s a tiger on the mat!

You can see where this is going. Which, you know, is okay I guess, but it really takes a while to get there. There’s at least one utterly superfluous character here (Station Agent’s Bobby Cannavale, also with bad hair) and a half-dozen scenes that add precious little to the story or stakes, including an annoying paint-by-numbers mid-point montage set to Bon Jovi. The casting of Giamatti’s a no-brainer: save a couple of pep-talky scenes where he strains a little, he’s very enjoyable in another sympathetic shlubby bit. Shaffer’s so natural you almost don’t notice him. Amy Ryan as the take-no-shit wife gives Mike’s home life a little gravity and consequence: she works to fill each of her scenes with some sort of spark. It's clear that McCarthy has a special gift with actors—it’s just that Win Win feels too dependent on these actors to supply all the nuance.

The Rite: Study hard, eat well, exorcize regularly

Diagnosed with a dearth of faith, aspiring priest Michael Kovak (Colin O’Donoghue), who only joined the seminary to wriggle out of working at his old man’s funeral home anyway, gets sent to exorcist school at the Vatican, where he meets a kooky old Welshman (Anthony Hopkins) who teaches him the ropes. Their first client’s a pregnant teen who becomes a contortionist and barfs up bloody spikes whenever the Devil’s steering the bus. But what really rattles Michael’s sturdy skepticism is the way Satan seems to know his secrets, and speaks them out loud through the mouths of the possessed, in front of everybody, and in English, no less. Because The Rite is fundamentally about the acquisition of faith, as a weapon against diabolical forces attempting to control the flesh, as a way of focusing your mind and settling on a career. This is the story of a young fellow finding his vocation, and thus doubles as a recruitment video for the Catholic Church. Come, we’re told, and fetching Italian journalists will dig you, even if you can’t make out with them. More importantly, you’ll get to put demons in the sleeper-hold on a regular basis.

I certainly appreciate how The Rite, helmed by 1408 director Mikael Håfström, “inspired by” true events and “suggested by” a book by Matt Braglio, honours its own convictions enough to hold off on dopey spectacle and manifest its evil in relatively subtler forms—if Satan made everybody levitate and do the head-spin there wouldn’t be any reason to doubt his existence. Perhaps the central problem with the film is that its conflicts are so abstract and internal that the final showdown feels artificially protracted and actually pretty dull, with not especially riveting newcomer O’Donoghue driving the devil out of Hopkins, who in going from mentor to victim gets to transition from affecting an amusingly businesslike air to supplying a torrent of Hannibal Lecter-like taunts. At least he’s having fun.

There’s also something about the way The Rite appeals to the ostensible latent Catholic in all of us that feels annoyingly simplistic, that feeds into a childish desire for sweeping solutions to life’s most complex problems and absolutions from responsibility for our inner demons. Michael does indeed initially question church dogma and defer to psychology in his attempts to explain away freaky phenomena, but once he rises to the occasion and casts Satan out of a poor soul the implication is that he’s learned a glorious truth, one tantamount to a free lunch: by simply speaking some magic words, The Rite assures us, and doing so like you really mean it, we can each of us be cured of what agonizes us.

War buddies! Widowers! Barflies! Gay gangbangers!: Film Noir Collection Vol. 5

Is it my own perverse nature that prompted me to start and now end my summer DVD binges with box sets of noir, hardly the most Frisbee of cinematic corpuses? I wouldn’t put it past me, yet noir isn’t entirely antithetical to summer—it’s so often about generating heat. Truthfully, not everything in Warner’s Film Noir Classic Collection Vol. 5 can rightfully be granted noir or even gris status. There aren’t many classic examples of the movement/style/thematic here, though there’s a pleasing majority of forgotten gems, however you classify them. The only real disappointment is the absence of supplements, given that Warner’s previous collections boasted consistently lively and informative audio commentaries from the likes of Martin Scorsese, James Ellroy, Eddie Muller, Alain Silver and Peter Bogdanovich. To be fair, I guess assembling such material must be costly, and I’d rather have these movies available than not... Anyway, there are eight titles to cover, so I'll keep my comments for each of them brief.

Former song-and-dance man Dick Powell seemed an odd fit as the cinema’s first Philip Marlowe in Edward Dmytryk’s superb Raymond Chandler adaptation Murder, My Sweet (1944), yet as the freshly widowed Canadian pilot and newly released POW Laurence Gerard in Cornered (45), unshaven, cold-eyed, with that severe haircut, he’s so at one with his vengeful protagonist it’s chilling. This reunion with Dmytryk, who displays an exacting sense of atmosphere and detail, is an all-round success, if unrelentingly harrowing. As the war winds down Gerard travels from Europe to Argentina in search of the ostensibly deceased Vichy official responsible for the death of Gerard’s young French bride. Gerard’s single-minded—he’s got noting left to live for—so the trip’s strictly business, yet numerous shady types he encounters provide ample colour, especially the marvelous Walter Slezak.

Deadline at Dawn (46), inspired by a Cornell Woolrich novel, is considerably lighter. It’s a sweltering New York night when taxi dancer Susan Hayward feels compelled to look after a young sailor on shore leave who mistakenly robbed and maybe murdered a woman while drunk. The sailor had a near-death experience at the age of 12, so maybe that somehow contributed to his almost absurd air of innocence. The script comes from socialist thespian Clifford Odets and abounds in corny ethnic working-class types and cornier dialogue. Still, it’s quite diverting, at times intriguingly loopy and, best of all, swathed in the chiaroscuro imagery of cinematographer Nicholas Musaraca, best known for Out of the Past (47) and his work with Val Lewton.

Desperate (47) was director Anthony Mann’s first noir and fully exercises the sort of muscular expressionism and bracing brutality he’d become known for: Steve Brodie’s truck-driving hero is beaten in some dingy basement under a swinging lamp whose hard light slices the assailants’ faces before we’re treated to a tight close-up of a broken bottle held by Raymond Burr, who really resembles Victor Mature—if Mature ate donuts and hunkered over Wittgenstein instead of going to the gym. Newlywed Brodie is framed by Burr’s thugs but proves highly resourceful—his desire for pleasantly dull domesticity is that strong.

Perhaps the biggest surprise in this set is Dial 1119 (50), a terrifically menacing little hostage drama I’d never heard of, though fellow noir addicts with welcome the sight of William Conrad, James Bell and Sam Levene like old pals. Conrad plays Chuckles, the proprietor of the ironically titled Oasis, the bar under siege, while Bell’s a lonely older nerdy type who shamelessly propositions a drunk blonde, and Levene, as always, is the resident doctor. The sound of wrestling on TV is the only scoring in the movie, even during the beautiful, long reaction shot of all the barflies when formerly institutionalized Marshall Thompson says out loud that he’s going to kill everyone. We believe him—he’s already iced a bus driver. Very effective, taut, and worth checking out just for the loving attention it brings to the sad night lives of the Oasis clientele.

Backfire (50) is another title I’d never come across, somewhat surprising given that noir mainstay Edmond O’Brien’s one of its pair of war buddies hoping to go in on a ranch together once Gordon MacRae gets out of the veterans’ hospital. Some fox with a sexy foreign accent comes to the hospital one night to tell a doped-up MacRae that O’Brien’s been debilitated and is suicidal. The next morning everyone thinks the lady messenger was a hallucination, but O’Brien’s missing and MacRae immediately starts to play detective upon checking out. It’s a picture full of interesting relationships and ominous clues that would have appealed to Polanski.

Armored Car Robbery (50) meanwhile looks forward to Stanley Kubrick’s early feature The Killing (56), whose plot is nearly identical. Helmed by Richard Fleischer, it’s a bracingly efficient 67-minutes—the titular heist unfolds with barely a word of dialogue spoken, even when one of the robbers gets shot in the guts—yet leaves plenty of room for imaginative character development. Charles McGraw would reunite with Fleischer for the more famous Narrow Margin (52), but anticipates that film’s protagonist here with his charismatically gruff Lieutenant Jim Cordell, a cop so useless with sentiment he can barely offer condolences to his partner’s widow. He’s complimented superbly by the froggy-eyed criminal mastermind played by William Talman, a really interesting actor whose work I'm only started to track but am hungry to see more of.

“Fancy women, slot machines and booze,” go the lyrics to ‘Phenix City Blues’, the song performed near the top of The Phenix City Story (55), Phil Karlson’s appallingly violent docudrama about the seemingly impossible task of driving organized crime out of a notoriously corrupt Alabama town. It features the always likable John McIntire—the sheriff from Psycho (60)—as a crusading DA undeterred by threats as unabashed as having a murdered black girl tossed on his front lawn from a moving car in broad daylight. Something tells me they mightn’t have gotten away with that if it weren’t for the story’s foundation in fact.

Though it opens with a riveting and very stylishly wrought confrontation between rival youth gangs, Crime in the Streets (56), all too much the “social problem” picture, is both the chronological last and probably least powerful movie in Film Noir Vol. 5. Having said that, I’m fascinated that the gang leader seems to deliberately select the most obviously gay kids in his group—among them Sal Mineo—to be part of his nutso murder conspiracy. Admirers will surely be curious to see a very young John Cassavetes as Frankie Dane, though, speaking as one of those admirers, I can’t say he looks very comfortable in this psychotic, not altogether convincing role.

The Expendables: Island hosts a cage match

Sylvester Stallone’s throwback actioner gathers as many genre stars as can fit on the poster and casts them as soldiers of fortune who take out baddies on a made-up Latin American isle where ugly American Eric Roberts has erected a puppet dictator in the interests of squeezing as much dope from cheap labour as possible. Somewhere in all this the mercenaries talk about feelings and ostensibly gain some social conscience. Obviously, the whole thing’s absurd and wildly bloodthirsty. Amongst the more astonishing sequences has Stallone and Jason Statham just barely escape from the island only to double back for no other reason than to slaughter dozens of underpaid local military. Yes, these are the good guys. And if their journey gradually bears vague traces of a Wild Bunch type of suicidal, go-for-broke, final act shoot-up, you can rest assured that the list of casualties will manage to stay extremely one-sided.

The Expendables is not without bizarre points of interest. Plenty of shit blows up for those requiring that sort of thing, but merely beholding this motley assemblage of hulks, he-men and has-beens can be kind of fascinating in its own right. Mickey Rourke especially seems present for no other reason than to present Mickey Rourke. He enters on a Harley, sports his favoured Predator hairdo, does tattoos, smokes a pipe, and gets a teary monologue soaked in regret and despair—is it me or did Rourke invent this character on his own? Jet Li is the butt of many short jokes and that’s about it. Dolph Lundgren gets the nuttiest bit as the loose cannon who turns on his own crew, with lines like “Life’s a joke, shitbird!” and “Bring it, Happy Feet!” (That one’s for Li.) Stallone for his part underplays every scene, his face clay-like and largely immobile, his bulging veins resembling a topographical map of the Himalayas, which might be the place on earth where The Expendables isn’t opening this weekend. It’ll be bigger than Westlemania.

See Wednesday's post for a wide-ranging rooftop interview with Dolph Lundgren

Running down a dreamhome: Race with the Devil

After reading Susan Compo’s Warren Oates: A Wild Life I found myself hungry for more Oates and tracked down a copy of Race with the Devil (1975). Written by Wes Bishop and Lee Frost, who had collaborated before on some fabulously intriguing genetic thriller called The Thing with Two Heads (72), and directed by Jack Starrett, who cut his teeth on Hell Angels on Wheels (67) and would later helm First Blood (82), this road action-heavy variation on the hillbilly horror flick finds Oates on holiday with his pal Peter Fonda, their lady friends Loretta Swit and Lara Parker, and a little pooch. On the maiden voyage of their newly purchased recreational vehicle, with Fonda’s requisite dirt bikes in tow, the happy campers cruise un-abused until an unfortunate choice of parking spot puts them in harm’s way. All hell breaks loose, and soon they’re careening down tumultuous stretches of Texas highway with Satan hot on their heels.

“It’s not a barbecue,” Oates deliciously quips as he and Fonda spy innocently on some exotically groomed strangers mingling around an enormous bonfire and wearing a conspicuous lack of clothing for a January night sufficiently frigid to inspire Oates to don a toque. Oates’ face lights up under his goofy headgear as he and Fonda get to figuring they’ve stumbled across some crazed hippies having an orgy, but any hopes of enjoying a free show are dashed when a dagger is crammed into the torso of one of the coven’s supply of naked and nubile blonde automatons. The crafty coven of rural Devil worshipers quickly realize they’re being watched and a chase ensues that will consume much of Race with the Devil’s remaining 70 or so minutes, though a sequence where the girls finish vacuuming up the first act’s damage and opt to hit the local library to do a little research into human sacrifice makes a pretty delightful detour in the otherwise driving narrative.

Surprisingly well-crafted and featuring utterly game performances from all involved—including R.G. Armstrong as a placating mustachioed sheriff—the Scooby-Doo premise makes for solid, often eccentric entertainment, with the relentless—and shirtless!—Southern Satanists leaping onto the exterior of the protagonists’ speeding fortress with Cirque du Soleil prowess and flamboyant Mexican wrestler garb. Setting some sort of precedence in sub-subgenre, Race with the Devil is surely among the few home invasion thrillers where the home in question is mobile. The novelty takes on extra resonance in early scenes where Oates’ character, with disarming earnestness, takes pains to establish just what this RV means to him, which is pretty much everything. Things are further imbued with meaning when you account for the extra-filmic factor that the geographically restless Oates was himself deeply enamored with his own RV, which he christened the Roach Coach. It must have pained him to have to witness the accumulative wear and tear done to the deluxe model they used for the movie.

Don't look back: Of Time and the City

Writer, director and one-time actor Terrence Davies in only his mid-60s, yet his voice, while sonorous and formidable, coheres disembodied to the flow of images in Of Time and the City with the withering crust and wearied basement furnace grumble of someone inching up on 100 at least. His is the voice of one whose disenchantment with the world has long turned toxic, who seems to have come to terms the delusional nature of nostalgia sometime shortly following his birth.

Nevertheless, Davies looks long and hard into the past in this, his first documentary and his first film of any sort since his woefully underappreciated Edith Wharton adaptation The House of Mirth (2000), which gave Gillian Anderson her finest role. The subject of this new film is Liverpool, Davies’ hometown. It was commissioned by the city following its designation as a European Cultural Capital in 1998. If those in charge were actually expecting something warm and inviting they must have been pretty pissed when Davies’ treatment was finally delivered. But then they must not have seen any of his previous films set in Liverpool, such as The Long Day Closes (92), Distant Voices, Still Lives (88) and the trilogy composed of ‘Children’ (76), ‘Madonna and Child’ (80) and ‘Death and Transfiguration’ (83), none of which are likely to win the hearts of the local tourist board. The fondest memories shared here seem most closely linked to going to the movies, Davies’ hearty interest in professional wrestlers—one of the film’s absolute highlights—and going on holidays. Davies’ contempt for the postwar Liverpool of his youth is only matched by his utter dismay at the Liverpool of the present.

There is, to be sure, something quite seductive, at least for a while, in Davies’ carefully rendered recollections, a sense of longing that lingers even when caked in disappointment and conveyed through numerous bitter witticisms, one of which is a clever dis to the Beatles that’s sure to get a crackling response from just about any audience. His departure from the Catholic Church and general shedding of faith, his budding homosexuality and gradual gleaning of its forbidding precariousness, his working-class upbringing and the dire limitations it wrought: as he speaks about these themes there come certain emotionally pointed synchronicities between his words and the imagery, much of it archival footage, some of it quite fascinating. Even here there is ample evidence of Davies' particular gifts. He's among the world's best filmmakers who seem unable to make very many films. But this film’s attitude is essentially static, its approach not all that driven by actual questions or curiosity, and Davies’ voice seems almost designed to lull you to sleep while its message diligently grinds you down.

I have to admire the way Davies arranges his selection of images from the past, which thread along with a lyricism perhaps informed by English poetry, something Davies clearly adores unreservedly. Yet the dominant utility of all the new footage he’s cultivated seems to be one of fodder for comments of sarcasm and condescension toward Liverpool’s architecture, civic pride, culture and appallingly dressed people. The pomposity, bile and curmudgeonly defiance do not in themselves spoil the value of the film; the problem rather has to do with the limits of what this inclination can possibly yield after 72 minutes.

Unfinished business: books from Aira, Curtis, Bolaño intersect in spooky buildings

Just last week I was reading Roberto Bolaño’s short story ‘Dentist’ and I was struck by something said by the titular character regarding what one feels when in an empty building, or rather, a seemingly empty building: “the reason you’re anxious or afraid is that you know, deep down, that there is no such thing as an empty building; in every so-called empty building, someone is hiding, keeping quiet, and that’s the terrifying thing: the fact that you are not alone… even when everything indicates that you are.”

The dentist’s little monologue is very much a detour, having no direct consequence on the rest of the story, yet this passage stood out, I suppose, because it rings absolutely true: an empty building becomes anxiogenic precisely when you don’t fully believe it to be empty, when you sense a presence whose intentions are, at best, unnervingly ambiguous. And this passage lingered in my mind just long enough for me to notice how it flowers fully in an altogether different text, Ghosts (New Directions, $14.50), César Aira’s wonderfully strange, characteristically taut and yet irreducible 1989 novel, translated by Chris Andrews and now published for the first time in English. The novel takes place largely within the confines of a Buenos Aires apartment building still under construction. The building, still without doors, flooring or even windows, is ostensibly empty, yet the family of a Chilean immigrant worker is squatting there—along with a company of phantoms who typically appear during siesta, naked, and covered in dust. The ghosts are all male. Are they immigrant workers who died on the job? Aira doesn’t say. The date is December 31st. The heat, we’re told, is supernatural.

Was Bolaño thinking of Ghosts when he wrote ‘Dentist’? It’s certainly possible, since Ghosts was first published long before ‘Dentist’ and Bolaño was a vocal admirer of Aira’s work. As well, there is the curious coincidence regarding the Chilean origins of both Aira’s central characters and of Bolaño himself. In fact, Ghosts, in its ebulliently playful, frequently funny way, is somewhat obsessive in its cataloging of the distinctions between the Chilean and Argentine characters and mores. In any case, the way the dentist’s digression on anxiety and empty buildings speaks to Aira’s novel made the reading of it that much more pleasing. However, until well into the novel’s final third, when they make a proposal that will put a character’s life in mortal danger, Aira’s ghosts are not necessarily rendered as terribly frightening. Actually the living squatters seem perfectly at ease with the daily apparitions of the dead squatters. Raúl, the family patriarch and building’s nightwatchman, even stores wine in the thorax of a ghost to keep it cool. (Maybe this is a Chilean thing?)

Though it drifts between a multitude of characters for the first half or so, Ghosts does ultimately settle on a single protagonist—Raúl’s daughter, Patri—and while Aira tends to subvert traditionally coherent storytelling whenever possible, there is an identifiable dramatic climax. But Ghosts is also a kind of jazzy essay, which performs its jig with one foot in vividly detailed, more or less realistic people, places and behaviour, and unfettered, often dazzling abstraction. The in-between state of a partially finished building evokes the purgatorial or transitory. “The architectural key to the built/unbuilt opposition,” Aira writes, “is the flight of time toward space. And dreaming is that flight. While habits, whether sedentary or nomadic, are made of time, dreams are time-free. Dreams are made of pure space, the species that arrayed in eternity.” So seen through Aira’s lens the novel’s setting, like its personage, is both material and rather less than material, And the presence of the ghosts, like that of the Chileans, calls into question the way we feel about architectural space, and—especially in places like my home province of Alberta, which draws so many with its promise of expansive, neatly contained and unsullied property—about the value we place on the seeming newness of newly built or renovated homes, places offered as a sort of tabula rasa upon which we can identify as exclusively ours, places we can gradually forge the imprint of our own experiences on and invest with our dreams of the future, unburdened by the psychic complications engendered by a history.

These thoughts lingered with me as well as I continued to read Barry Curtis’ Dark Places: The Haunted House in Film (Reaktion Books, $19.50), one of the most intriguing recent movie-related books I’ve come across in a while. Curtis has an especially deft hand with examining how a wide variety of cultural influences, from the Gothic to the Surrealists, converge to shape the 21st century notion of the ghost story. And he articulates is crisp, precise language the power of historical burdens on place and the numerous expectations we place on homes, even as out notions about what constitutes a good home evolves in an age simultaneously characterized by the conflicting lures of nostalgia and ecological awareness.

The discovery of Dark Places, which is an essay primarily concerned with architecture and ghost stories, at the same moment that I discovered Ghosts, an essay-like ghost story deeply interested in architecture, has made for one of those deeply pleasurable coincidences a reader comes across now and then, when books come into your hands almost by accident only to then start speaking to one another, while you just sit back and take it all in, picking up one book to continue from page 91 just as the other is being put down on page 129. It’s like literary tag-team wrestling. As soon as I’m finished writing this I’m planning on going back and digging into Dark Places again… Except I’m alone, here in my apparently empty house, and it’s a little bit, I don’t know… creepy.