A Home at the End of the World

There’s a few things going through this that keep it all together. It may seem clumsy, and some parts are glossed over for the sake of economy, but it is conscious of its own faults.

All of these characters repress something of themselves in order to keep going. The film does the same. It selects its intimacy carefully. I am sure there is a 5 hour director’s cut somewhere. Maybe it is inside that house, at the end of the road.

If you decide to see this, you should prepare yourself to see a life unwind where the roots are always movable. Urges are attached to people and theses people are in shifting motion constantly. It is not about being gay or bisexual or straight. It’s about a certain comfort in the company of souls. A certain sharing and trust. It is rather writerly in that way, it is driven by loss.

Loss as a drive to build.

Along the way we have drugs as a means for clarity of vision. We have inward vision as a means to look outside. Everybody is infected, even our main observer (Sissy Spacek).

There’s a simple metaphor for all of it. A brother dies by running into a clear glass window which he failed to notice. Isn’t that how we hurt ourselves, all the time?

These films always have an emotional center that a facial expression needs to convey. Robin Wright Penn knows how to do this. It is near the end, before she leaves the house for good. If you get the DVD, play it over again. It’s all there.

The Savages

Here is something for you to take as a personal work. What that means is that the filmmaker has explicit ties to the situations shown here.

Regardless, there remained an attempt to enwrap her personal drama into a formula. I don’t fault this because her desire to get the film made was stronger than the want to show bare truth. And after all, it is not nice to curse the means which helped this come to me.

So as a defacto tactic, the principal character is a playwright whose plays borrow deliberately from her life. She has a brother whose philosophy of art differs from hers. He believes stories should overtly reflect their agenda, avoiding fabricated emotionality. She doesn’t agree but because he is an element of her life, she borrows some of his ideas. So as to avoid any missteps, she dates a director who is line with that same philosophy.

You can clearly see where their influence stepped in. It is a little clumsy.

But these two great actors are so full of lucid insight that they make the whole thing worthwhile. Linney impressed me the most here. There is a lie that she spews during the second act. Her poker face is so good that it remained undetectable the second time I watched it. Now watch her posture and then her eyes, they convey much of the same fumbling that the script does.

Hoffman struts. He’s in charge of conveying the intended emotional space of the story. Watch him cry at the end after seeing his sister’s play. She asks him if he likes it. He does. In fact so convincingly that we do too.

Caotica Ana – Julio Medem

I guess it had to come to this.

Umberto Eco with his Foucault’s Pendulum. Polanski with his Ninth Gate. Lynch with his Inland Empire. And now Medem.

It might just be natural if you have an interest in narrative to pass through kabbalah. My own knowledge of this comes from Borges who wrote short stories alluding to the notions of the tree of life found in the Zohar. Caroll’s “Alice” is supposedly based on this same structure (the 10 emanations) and so are the movies mentionned above.

I don’t know much about it, but I’ve seen enough films based around it to understand the notions of regenerating worlds. It is intricately linked with the creative process because it is a model for the mapping of the universe. Mystical, elusive, cosmical. It is about how reality is but an emanation of a previous reality which itself is an emanation of a previous emanation and on and on until ten emanations. These are structured visually to form three tryptichs. Symmetries and unlikely parallels can be deducted from this visual representation and that is why so often we find “temporal slippage and causal confusions” in such films.

Although the tree of life finds its roots in Jewery (but mingled with the Polish and Spanish), some symbols strikingly similar to those of the kaballah were found amongst Native American artifacts. It is thus interesting that Medem chooses to include Native mythology in this story.

Anyhow, that study is deep, and I only know very little, so you will have to look elsewhere if you wish to probe it.

But readers, I am unhappy to report that this film is a failure. It is too ambitious for its own good.

By now we know that Medem’s technique is to offer an engaging story all viewers can enjoy while still supplying all kinds of narrative innovations for the initiated. The problem here for someone like me (and possibly you) is the innovations are all in the narrative instead of being at the outer edges, molding the bends.

So the story itself is filled with beguiling ideas. Just imagine. A curious soul who lives in a cave with ten doors. A painter whose paintings are images that emanate from past lives. Charlotte Rampling, a seeker of souls, who takes her away from the cave and brings her into a “Wonderland” (an artist residence) where she is meant to discover the depths of these past lives.

Along the way she encounters a video-artist who tapes her hypnosis sessions and makes a film out of them, tying her past lives together.

A love story where motherhood is conflated with sexual affection and displacement, estrangement, loss, possibly redemption.

Heads roll (like in Alice), someone’s mother shrinks into irrelevancy, some characters reccur in different stories.

Sex sublimated in all creative forces.

And the shape of the thing is ten chapters, conflating with a hypnosis-like countdown, ten to zero, but by now we know these are actually the ten sephirot.

And last but not least, an opening sequence on a dancefloor that so subtly references The Saragossa Manuscript, that you might miss it if you blink.

So how could he have gone wrong? Why is it that this fails where Arctic Circle succeeds and Lucia triumphs?

Because he began with an overt agenda of making a film about his deceased sister. In fact the wonderful layered paintings we see in the film are hers. As such, the project morphed into a dissemination of the notion that natural creative power is inherently feminine, and opposite of this we find the dumb masculine vicious tendacy towards violence and death. Our protagonist’s supposed “past lives” are all of great historical female figures (from Hypatia to Riefenstahl), who were tragically abdicated from life because of their defying creative powers.

That’s fine. But why draw it all throughout in such unsubtle terms? Why mention the Iraq war and offer a caricatural Bush-like figure on which to execute a symbolic punishment? Why literally dub this punishment a “poetic act”?

I don’t know.

Although, in good humour, Medem writes in a male character who regards women as goddesses, yet is constantly made fun of for doing so. This tells me that Medem was perfectly aware of the obtuseness of what he was doing. But then, why do it? Why is enlightenment nothing but a simple-minded awareness of patriarchal tiranny?

My guess is this. This film is a woman who will be chastized, abdicated, sacrificed, but eventually give birth to an “army of good sons”. And I have read good things about Medem’s next project.

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Watch for the Kieslowskian camera and see how it works wonderful effects when it comes to confounding realities (lookout for the first “conscious hypnosis” scene in the desert as lovers escape on horse).

Eastern Promises – David Cronenberg

This came as a surprise to me. After seeing “History of Violence” and seeing Cronenberg falter I thought this would dissapoint in similar ways. But it is tagged with such engaging devices that it is reinvigorating.

The plot concerns a diary which could incriminate a Russian Mafia boss and get him ’sent home’ for good. Simple enough. This diary was written by a teenage girl who was left impregnated after a rape and subsequently fled from the underworld. The girl is dead, but her baby was born. The interest in the diary is extended through the baby’s fate. Very clever, and tragic.

I have to point out that the diary is read in voiceover by the dead girl. We have several characters convey their need to read it. There is also some crucial business about translating it. Another device to deepen engagement with text.

Cronenberg is about the embodiment of stories. Text on flesh. His trademark is to visually annotate this enbodiment with textural visions of the organic. So in ‘Videodrome’ a man rams a videocassette into his gut. In ‘The Fly’ Goldblum engages in organic decay and mutation. In ‘Crash’, flesh clashes with steel. Here, it’s only hinted at, and we’re all a bit poorer because of it, but stay with me, the engagement is elsewhere.

It’s all in the narrative and the placeholders within it. Viggo playing a Russian is a show in itself, but to layer it with an undercover cop schtick is an understanding of a singular engineering. There’s a young prostitute who reflects the dead one, I wonder if the same actress played her. She is salvaged by Viggo in a way that predicts and nuances his own engagement with the story of the diary.

And we have Naomi. First she is presented as a nurse, a sort of caretaker of horrible organic visions. But soon enough she becomes a watcher in the story. But a sort of commited watcher. Her uncle has a past history with the Russian criminals she’s up against. It is something sentimental that she is also envisionned as a surrogate mother for the dead girl’s baby: a caretaker of new life spawned by story.

There is a scene after Viggo gets severly cut and wounded where he is taken to the same hospital she works in. I gulped, because by the time it happens all the layers are already there. There is something about watching these two agents of the layered narrative in a situation that seems entirely circumstantial, yet their positions in the story belie a deep deep involvement.

This is one of those films where the story is not in the actual story but in the way it is structured.

Superbad (2007)

I want to start out by saying that my adolescence was nothing like this. I had no trouble talking to women (I used to work as a walker), buying alcohol was never problematic (I had an older brother), and I always conducted open and trusted friendships.

I am exagerrating of course. Most adolescence is indeed spent on trying on costumes and picking the best one to negotiate emotional circumstances. Any clever teen movie screenwriter knows this (and many shamelessly exploit it).

But cinema is big business and its core audience are indeed teenagers. So when a teen movie comes out, it is always a gamble. That’s because there is already an established vocabulary to borrow from. But you can’t only borrow, you have to circumnavigate. That’s because teens are quick to pick up on when they’re being fooled with. So there’s the challenge to innovate while still maintaining interest.

The writers here are clever. They essentially maintain the same teen formula but they riddle the narrative with distractions and make it seem like those distractions are the story. But no, this is not about the self-deprecating jew (what Woody gave us), although that’s what the main characters are. If you really look at it you’ll see that it exploits the tried and true elements. You have the excessive house party (as pioneered by Sixteen Candles). And you have the boy meets girls, boy loses girl, boy gets girl back, of romantic comedies.

But oooohh so clever what they’ve added to distract us! The story has dual protagonists. So as they go through the party/love clichés, we are distracted by their disconnect. Suddenly the center of the story is relocated in the tension between their friendship. What this does, is that it establishes a distance between us and the cliché events, so we sort of just accept them as they are because we have something else to feed on.

To reinforce this initial distraction, they use another dual set of friends: the cops. What is the most common movie genre that exploits the general theme of friendship? The cop buddy movie of course. By overlaying this template over the already established principal thread, the enthusiasm over a hopeful resolve between our main protagonists is heightened.

You’d think they’d stop there. That it was already clever enough. But no.

There is usually only one big party in a movie like this. Here there are two. The first one is a similar teen party like you’d find in other movies of this type, except these teens are older and our protagonists find themselves there to “steal their booze” for their own party.

Do you see how the genre is momentarily turned inside out? How the mechanics are revealed for a slight second? Suddenly, in this specific movie, getting alcohol for a party is a problem. But although you can tell it was simply a clever writer trick used mostly for the effect (it is handled a little sloppy because when they get to their party there is already alcohol there), it still works.

Now on to the comedy. Here, it’s mostly verbal. It is not puns like the Marx Bros of course. It is more modern. It’s in the stand up comedian tradition, Lenny Bruce. It is about saying outrageous things and getting away with it. It works. There is also some situational bits, mostly embarassment, which work well too. There is one scene in a super market with alternate realities which will probably be copied in future films of this kind. Yes, it’s good.

But surprisingly, the element that impressed me the most apart from the writing was the actual filmmaking. It is not common to have a camera that understands the comedy. A camera that knows how to place itself in the perfect spot to convey the comedy. It is nothing new of course. It’s just sheer competence.

And my theory on part of why it’s so well done: one of the writers is in it.

Cria Cuervos – Carlos Saura

I have some Spanish blood in me. So I imagine I am somewhat related to Cervantes. If you don’t know what Cervantes did with Quixote, I won’t spoil it for you. You should read about it. But what you should know is that Quixote started a narrative tradition that has become associated with a certain Spanish intelligence. It is not overtly intellectual, but it is intricate. It has to do with narrative engineering. Almodovar gives and takes from it, Medem and Innariatu do too. It deals with unrooted reality. Usually you have a story set in a reality and things unwind inside it. What the Spanish do is give you simultaneous realities. That’s pretty simple, but it is more complicated: they riddle the story with delicate mechanisms that generate these realities. Sometimes it’s a character, sometimes it’s extraenous to the individuals like an overruling fate, sometimes it’s done in the editing like in Innariatu’s case. It varies.

Why does this interest me? For a few reasons having to do with how we integrate narrative. Sometimes it’s the simple contemplation that I find captivating. Other times it’s the quantum leaps between realities that seem to stand delicately on needle heels. Often it’s because the narrative is self-referential so it alludes to its making and if you can detect that then it’s sort of like an ultimate meditation on the act of creation. And sometimes it can also simply be musical, and make your mind dance. There are many types of the same model and each will come to you open and available, like an honest stranger.

This film here is a strange meditation on the waif musicals, like Oliver Twist or Annie. I am not familiar enough with those to really understand all the bends, but it’s not too important. You have a big house, you have the severe disciplinary Nanny, and you have the wonderful children escaping to their little imagined worlds.

But the imagination here is muted. It is not as a kid would see it. It is more adult, more delicate, more concerned with the pain of loss.

I see it as rememberances of intimate interactions. But an intimacy located in the ordinary. A woman brushing her daughter’s hair.

To this, inserted are all kinds of levels of reflection. Mostly reflection about the act of remembering and how that intertwines with the act of creation. One of them is the little girl as an older woman presenting this story, claiming she does not remember it (yet we see it all). There is a character who is old, invalid, and mute who spends her time “watching” pictures–and a point is made about her never dying. A segment is a re-enactment of a domestic drama done theater-like by the three sisters. It seems like posturing but the wounds are clearly there. Other small games have to do with sight; one especially involves something that dies once seen, and our little girl sees her dead parents wallow in and out of situations.

You might want to excuse me for not reading it as a childhood drama or the political allegory it is often described to be. I did not connect with those allusions here. Childhood is about harmed potential, the gradual restriction of ambitions, and this film here is quite the opposite. It is no ‘Zerkalo’ either. It is another exercise in the Spanish narrative tradition.

But I will warn you. It moves slowly. It is a tad dull in its pacing. It merely bubbles. It is studied, but unremarquable. But that’s beyond the point by now I believe.

Mandatory Alice reference in these multi-layered projects: there is a white rabbit our little girl keeps feeding throughout.

Conte d’hiver – Eric Rohmer

I wanted to get involved with people at a deeply emotional level. But I didn’t want the kind of pre-programmed experience of engineered drama. So I had to go see someone who knew how to channel this deep involvement with the internal in a way that would be penetrating but not automatic, engaging but not all-encompassing.

Rohmer is my choice, and he is deep. Although he could appear to be casual and nonchalant. He defines a world that is as banal as the one you and I live in, but places at its center the most unbanal of urges. His stories are centered around the dialog and in that way they can be seen first as essays on the nature of being, and then only incidentally movies. But oh dear reader, you must truly listen to what is said. The talks are like small choreographies. They dance about the edges of an amorphous outline of an existential truth. They convey an insightful understanding of caprice. It all seems to graze fixed meaning but somehow offshoots to contemplation. There is a scene inside a car at the end of the second act that is probably the most intense emotional moment a film has given me.

I see that people brush this off as another of his talky dramas. You really must listen to understand. That’s why the action is so minimal. People move from place to place, then come back. They enter a room and then leave it. They take the bus, or go do groceries. Because he has to anchor a dull naturality. It is all about the words and their undefinable visions. But not like poetry with symbols, not music. Something more like the animation of an undefined spirit within. Something like scriptures.

The narrative introspection comes through a play, Shakespeare’s, which carries the same title as the film. It was actually a real performance, directed by someone other than Rohmer. In true introspective fashion the play is about the re-animation of a dead person. That’s because the movie is practically about the same thing.

Actor Needed – Student Short Film

Hello,

The role is simple: a writer is married to a painter who is pregnant. When the painter goes into labor, she suffers complications and dies. He then commits suicide.

I’m casting for the writer. Mid-twenties to mid-thirties. 5″5-6″1. Any kind of facial hair, or no facial hair is fine. It’s a non-speaking role. No experience necessary.

Shooting will take place this Sunday November 18th 2007 in Montreal during the day till late afternoon.

Message me on here, or email me at hugo AT notesoncinema.com

This is England – Shane Meadows

I can only imagine what it would be like to experience Tarkovsky as a Russian. Beyond the language, I would certainly feel the inherent Russian qualities of his films. It would speak to my soul the same way members of the same family speak to each other, with an assured sense of common values and history. It would certainly diminish the distance with which I experience all foreign films, obliterating the intuitive attraction to the remote, exotic, world that can falsely enhance appreciation. It’s never the same experience when one watches a film seated in the same world depicted on screen.

This film here by Mr. Meadows is for the British of which I am not. But it has a few problems I recognize that even as a Brit I would huff at. It ends with a gesture that is so literal it is offensive.

But overall, I have to admit I liked some of this. It has inherent cinematic qualities. Part of it is about the becoming of a child, his “making into”. It’s hard to go wrong because it’s so blatantly what the story is supposedly about. All the director has to do is slowly unveil this becoming, engagement is warranted.

It is clumsy though, you will see. The small kid is receded into a watcher as the bully takes over. The whole thing ends with a sense of interrupted consumption. But I guess it makes sense, it’s a sort of “home movie”, about a place where I don’t live.

Kid Auto Races at Venice – Charlie Chaplin

I’m surprised this even has a poster since it’s only 6 minutes long!

You can view it here if you would like to read my comments afterwards (better): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gFVgIpWSgIo

I am aware Chaplin didn’t ‘direct’ it according to the official credits (IMDB). But back then it didn’t mean much, all you had to do was push the right button on the camera. However, despite the ‘writing’ credit, I am positive this was his own idea.

What do you want? The man had an instinct for the craft. He knew right away that in order to stand out he would have to toy with the way story and form relate to each other. He would have to wallow in self-reference. I assume this is his first true experiment.

The idea is very simple. There is an event, an auto race. A camera crew is looking to get the best footage from the sidelines. But Chaplin’s ‘Tramp’ character is there, and he keeps getting in front of the camera, posing, wanting to be filmed.

The way he keeps interrupting the cameramen is funny in itself. But the real joke here is the acknowledgement of the camera. That way you can laugh at what he’s doing but also at how it reflects back on the nature of what you’re watching. It is even filmed in front of a real crowd!

What better way to start a carreer in filmmaking than making a film about wanting to be filmed?

This is so funny and so intelligent that If I had seen it in its day, I would have become a filmmaker first thing the next morning.