Uncle Jean in three dimensions: 'Goodbye to Language'

Older filmmakers are not big on innovation. Funhouse deity Jean-Luc Godard is not your standard older filmmaker, though. He’s an icon, a cinema-poet who has always attempted to engage and provoke viewers. His latest feature, Goodbye to Language (opening in NYC this Wednesday “with a national release to follow”), is a prime example of this — shot in 3-D, the film is an exploration of themes that have obsessed him for decades. It is also a sensory experience in which nearly every shot seems composed with the notion of “deep focus” in mind.

3-D is a mostly ridiculous gimmick, which re-emerged about a decade ago for the same reason it was invented in the Fifties, to lure movie fans back into theaters. It has primarily been used for big-budget action movies and kiddie features. Three filmmakers have used the technique beautifully for artistic rather than commercial reasons: Werner Herzog (in Cave of Forgotten Dreams, 2010), Wim Wenders (in Pina, 2011), and Martin Scorsese (Hugo, 2011).

 

Godard has always been head and shoulders above most other filmmakers in terms of bringing cinema “back to zero.” With his use of 3-D here (he already experimented with the format for a short included in the 2013 feature 3x3D), he toys with the nature of image-making, the notion of counterpointing silence and sound, and the idea that a series of narrative incidents can be assembled into a plot if the viewer wishes (if not, just enjoy the ride).

Goodbye isn't meant to be “received” like the average multiplex movie, or even the latest indie or arthouse hit. It fills – and sometimes confuses – the senses, as Godard toys with the “life-like” clarity of digital filmmaking by editing crystal-clear, jarringly beautiful images together with shots that are disorienting (even sporadically out of 3-D “focus”) and take a few seconds to process.

The characters here act out the “battle of the sexes” that has been one of JLG's main concerns since Breathless (1960). In this instance, the film's action involves only a few characters, but only two really matter – a couple who spend time in an apartment talking, fucking, and arguing. The man (Kamel Abdelli) looks a great deal like Serge Gainsbourg and indulges in some Gainsbourgian toilet humor (the sensory trip here does briefly include shitting noises, a first for Uncle Jean's cinema!).

Both the man and the woman (Heloise Godet) are seen naked, but Godard as always dwells on the woman's body, providing us with yet another painterly study of a nude (see Passion, 1982). In this case one can't help but think that the woman's one imperfection – a scar above her lip – holds another fascination, since the 3-D allows Godard to “explore” his actors like never before.

The “performer” who attracts the most attention here, though, isn't one of the human actors, it's Godard's dog Roxy (whose last name is Mieville, meaning he is co-owned by Uncle Jean and his partner Anne-Marie Mieville). He uses the dog as a sort of “anchor” for the film, as it wanders from place to place and is shown both in beautiful, bucolic settings and in the apartment, where the two lovers have presumably “adopted” it.

Roxy takes part in his master's playful spacial dislocation. One of the many eye-catching shots in the film finds the dog in the foreground as the background is switched using digital effects. As is the case with all dogs, Roxy doesn't care, but we are reminded once more that the life-like quality of digital video is just one more element in the modern filmmaker's bag of tricks. 

Godard could've delivered a visually intoxicating feature, filled with gorgeous landscape shots and beautiful 3-D images like the one we repeatedly see of a woman and man behind a barred gate. Instead, as noted, he mingles crisp, visually arresting sequences with ones that are somewhat indistinct or “off.” He returns frequently to a dark image where our attention is grabbed by a small white dot – as in an eye exam, Godard wants your eye to travel exactly where he wants it to go.

But the moments that stay with one most deeply are indeed Godard's gorgeously composed exterior shots (many featuring his pooch) and his “studies” of the couple. He plays with the parameters of 3-D throughout, and in one case “violates” visual logic by having a character move from one space to another, visually “rupturing” the image. In the two instances in which he uses this technique, a character moves quickly to screen right, with one eye's visual information remaining static while the other's continues to move, until different images are being transmitted to the left and right eyes.

The character who broke the image serves as the focal point, and the images in both eyes coalesce shortly thereafter. It's a bravura editing trick that underscores how receptive Godard is to technical innovation, and also to new methods of conveying how artificial and manipulative film and video can be.

   

The content of Language is thus so inextricably linked to its form that I'm not certain how it will play as a 2-D feature. As it stands, the film is yet another of Godard's cinematic poems (with distinct elements of essay) that revels in objets trouvés – snippets of classical music, film clips (including moments from Les Enfants Terribles, Only Angels Have Wings, Metropolis, the Frederic March Dr. Jekyll and Mister Hyde, and The Snows of Kilamanjaro), and a plethora of quotations from a host of writers.

But the whole picture is tied together by the visual experimentation. In this regard, Goodbye continues the poetic and mostly non-narrative approaches of his recent films Film Socialisme (2010) and Notre Musique (2004). It helps, of course, if one has seen the recent work that JLG has been doing; his fragmentation of cinema started in his classic Sixties works, but he's been following a brilliant, very unique path since his best work of the 21st-century, In Praise of Love (2001), his first fiction feature to incorporate digital effects.

As I've noted before, we are very lucky to still have new Godard features coming out on a regular basis. It's rare than an octogenarian (Uncle Jean is currently 83) can continue to redefine the medium he's working in, but Godard does so with each new release, and will hopefully continue to do so for the foreseeable future.

His better half: Richard Ayoade's 'The Double'

There is something inherently cinematic about a lot of the best recent “alternative” British comedy, and yet none of the most likely suspects (Lee, Munnery) have branched off into directing feature films. One exception has been the brilliant Chris Morris, whom I interviewed when he was in the U.S. promoting his wonderfully dark comedy Four Lions.

Only one other British comedian has taken the plunge so far. In 2010, Richard Ayoade, a very celebrated (and very busy) comic actor and writer, directed and scripted the charming coming-of-age picture Submarine. Now he's returned with a nightmare comedy called The Double, based on Dostoyevsky's short story of the same name.

The film is a highly atmospheric piece, set in a near-future bureaucratic dystopia. Our anti-hero Simon (Jesse Eisenberg) is startled when his doppelganger (also Eisenberg) appears at his workplace and turns out to be a far more successful version of him. The double becomes his mentor and attempts to teach him how to con the people around him – bosses, coworkers, women – but it's evident from the start that there can only be one Simon in this creepy corporate universe.

 
Ayoade (right) demonstrated his cinephilia in Submarine, with onscreen references to Dreyer, Melville, and Roeg (and one rather obvious Godardian touch). Here the world he creates is clearly inspired by David Lynch (Eraserhead, Inland Empire), Gilliam (Brazil), Jeunet and Caro (Delicatessen), and Welles (The Trial).

The moody aspect of the film comes from the fact that Ayoade and coscripter Avi Korine (yes, he's Harmony's brother) wallpaper the Dostoyevsky scenario with Kafka-esque paranoia. Simon is a lonely, perpetually ill-at-ease individual who isn't so much an everyman as the guy we all don't wish to be. His double is impetuous, charming, and most decidedly criminal – clearly solid corporate material.

The influence of Brazil is seen most clearly in the fact that the dystopia Simon lives in is populated by a curious mixture of Brits and Americans. The company he works for is headed by “the Colonel,” a prim and proper Englishman, played by Ayoade's real-life father-in-law James Fox (The Servant, Performance). His immediate supervisor is an eager toady, played by the irrepressible Wallace Shawn.

Eisenberg excels in the dual lead roles, doing what amounts to an impression of Crispin Glover. Playing the girl of his dreams, Mia Wasikowska is the only performer whose accent occasionally “slips” from British to American and back (in real life, she's an Aussie). Making welcome cameos are Ayoade's comedy colleagues Chris Morris (who directed him in Nathan Barley), Chris O'Dowd (his costar from The IT Crowd), and Tim Key.

The Double may indeed be too bleak for multiplex viewers, but it is certain to acquire a cult as years go by. It's an odd, imaginative little picture that has evocative visuals and a moodiness that remains with viewers long after they have left the theater.

The film is currently in theatrical release, but can also be seen via Video on Demand on iTunes.

****

Bonus clips:

One of Ayoade's finest comic creations, the utterly untalented Dean Lerner, porn and horror novel publisher turned actor, from Garth Merenghi's Darkplace (2004):

Ayoade directed the superb rock-opera satire ADBC: A Rock Opera (2004). He cowrote the piece with Matt Berry and costarred with Berry, the Mighty Boosh's Julian Barratt, and Julia Davis (Nighty Night):

Ayoade's best-known sitcom character, “Moss” from The IT Crowd:

Tell us a story: Lars von Trier's 'Nymphomaniac'

Sex is the ultimate red herring in Lars von Trier’s masterfully cruel and compassionate Nymphomaniac, which is now available for “complete” viewing (read: the second half, dubbed Volume Two, is now in release). The real subjects of the film are depression and storytelling. The first informs the sequences in which our heroine Joe (Charlotte Gainsbourg) is degrading herself in the pursuit of release; the second is reflected in the film’s “Scheherazade” structure, in which said heroine recounts her life story to Seligman (Stellan Skarsgard), a sympathetic, know-it-all Swede.

Although many pieces written about the film have, naturally enough, focused on the sex sequences, the storytelling frame device is key to understanding and enjoying the film (yes, the latter is possible), as they are reflections of von Trier’s pitch-black humor and his literary (modernist literary, that is) approach to telling a tale. The grimness of Joe’s story is counterpointed by the fact that her audience keeps interrupting (“this was one of your weakest digressions,” she informs him at one point) and that she is an entirely unreliable narrator.

This last notion, that of the “unreliable narrator,” is a cornerstone of Nymphomaniac that leavens the film and allow us to gain some distance from the severity of the sex sequences, many of which are moments of self-destruction rather than fulfillment. Normally we accept stories told in a film as being “true” (willing suspension of disbelief and all that) — here, in Volume One, Joe is interrupted at one key point by Seligman, who notes that there is a ridiculous coincidence in her story — thus causing us to wonder if she’s been embellishing, or if her tale is mostly fantasy.

The uncertainty that arises from the storytelling sequences make the film’s “extreme” moments even more effective, since we realize that the crazier the event, the more possible it is that Joe is making it all up. The two best examples of this are perhaps the most extreme sequences in the film, a humorous set-piece and Joe's most severe S&M moment.

The most humorous sequence – besides an amusing piece of physical comedy inspired by an old Harpo Marx routine – is the sequence where Joe and her married bedmate “Mr. H” are confronted by “Mrs. H” (Uma Thurman), a vengeful and oh-so-melodramatic wife. The sequence is beautifully played by Thurman, whose character says she doesn't want to cause any trouble, but that's exactly what she proceeds to do – humiliating her husband by dragging the children in to react to the fact that Daddy's leaving them, and assuring her husband and Joe (who does not want to become emotionally involved with H) that she will be just fine now that her husband has deserted her.

von Trier's critics accuse him of being “pretentious” because he often deals with angst and utilizes a bleak but exquisite visual style inspired by Tarkovsky (who is thanked in the credits here). These critics are mostly uncomfortable with von Trier's laser-like focus on the sort of odd behavior that depression provokes; what they overlook (or, more accurately, ignore) is the big amount of humor that appears in his films.

It thus makes perfect sense for the “Mrs. H” sequence to appear in a seemingly “bleak” film like Nymphomaniac because von Trier has been honing his dark, odd sense of humor since his breakout feature The Element of Crime (1984) and his superbly absurd horror TV miniseries The Kingdom (1994).

He has only made one film that is an out-and-out comedy (The Boss of It All, 2006), but his most peculiar film, the Dogma-inspired The Idiots (1998), contains a good deal of awkwardly humorous moments. Melancholia (2011) remains one of his most effective works because he brings the viewer into the world of Dunst and Gainsbourg's characters with the broad comedy contained in the first half of the film.

*****

In Nymphomaniac, Joe's sex addiction is so obsessive and self-destructive that von Trier clearly wanted us to both feel for her and to move outside her dilemma to see how truly bizarre her life has become – this is stretched in the film's final “act,” in which she becomes a story-telling debt collector for a wealthy criminal (Willem Dafoe). At that point the intensity of Gainsbourg's performance is what keeps the film from falling apart.

While the “Mrs H” sequence is one of the key moments in Volume One of the film, the most important moment in Volume Two is definitely the sequence where she is worked over by a violent gentleman (“K,” played by Jamie Bell) who conducts brutal sessions with submissive women.

Joe becomes addicted to the sessions and finally has her “ultimate” encounter with this gentleman when she is able to get herself off while he beats her (thus breaking his rule that sex should have no part in the sessions). The sequence is shot as a pretty standard moment of R-rated S&M, but, again, Gainsbourg's performance is so intense that we feel both her shame and humiliation, and the illicit turn-on she's getting from achieving something she has been formally “denied.”

The scene is without a doubt the most intense in the film, as it currently exists in its four-hour, two-part form (the “director's cut” running five-and-a-half hours will supposedly be released in the months to come). It successfully makes the viewer flinch, although Gainsbourg's narration and her release serve to remind us of the artifice that von Trier has introduced, the notion that this could merely be Joe's fantasy – the only thing that we know is absolutely true are the bruises on her face and body from a beating she suffered before Seligman found her in the courtyard adjacent to his apartment building.

Gainsbourg's thoroughly committed performance is indeed the glue that holds the film together. Like his heroes Bergman and Fassbinder, von Trier has given many of his lead actresses career-defining roles. Gainsbourg has gotten three such roles, all of which seem to be (if Charlotte's interviews are to be believed) manifestations of his own neurotic, anxious, depressed personality.

She is absolutely fearless in Nymphomaniac, imbuing Joe with an aching loneliness and a suicidal urge that makes her come to life. She's a person we can feel sympathy for, while we become increasingly disturbed by her extreme behavior. Gainsbourg's “posh” British accent makes Joe even more of an enigma – a woman with a ladylike demeanor and voice who wants men to hurt, fuck, and/or abuse her (with the exception of her true love, played by Shia LaBeouf). 

The film is not an “easy view,” but von Trier's work is always demanding and always worth the attention. Here he has assembled a terrific cast who lend dimension to their roles, whether briefly seen and vaguely scripted (Dafoe) or featured prominently but intended as a “reflection” of our lead character (Stacy Martin, who plays the “jail bait” Joe).

As for the scenes that are missing from the Volume One/Volume Two version: one can clearly see where a few of the edits were made. Sex scenes are about to occur and then don't, or conclude so quickly that one wonders why they are present at all (as with a scene where Joe has sex with two African men, which is led up to for several minutes and then ends summarily). 

What is particularly enjoyable about the “Volumes” version of the film is that editors Molly Marlene Stensgaard and Morten Hojbjerg chose to leave in most of Joe and Seligman's tangential conversations (about sin, anti-Semitism/anti-Zionism, PC language, and the double standard that rules women's sexuality), which don't “advance the plot” in any conventional way.

When one looks at the film's structure, though, it becomes apparent that these dialogues are the plot, just as much as any of Joe's memories. These tangents punctuate and sometimes blatantly interrupt her story, lending it balance and making Seligman a surrogate for the viewer. (How often have you seen a film where a character coincidentally bumps into the most important person in their life and wanted to note how truly unbelievable that is?)

It's hard to imagine what von Trier will do now that his “Charlotte trilogy” is over. One thing is certain: each of the films is a stylized masterwork that is both deeply disturbing and oddly, brazenly playful. In making the films, von Trier might have exposed much of his own darker side, but he has also provided Gainsbourg with the opportunity to show that she is one of the finest (and, again, most fearless) actresses around.
*****


The film's trailer, the one that is littered with review quotes on it. It's been considered “dirty” and has been labeled adult matter by YouTube (American companies pride themselves on their prudishness):

Lars hasn't been doing interviews for the film because of the “Nazi” problem at Cannes a few years back. Some of his older interviews are instructive, though, as is this one, where he talked about the film before he had shot it (audio only). He emphasizes that de Sade put a “lot of talk” in between his sex scenes:

Lars on battling depression:

Bonus clips: Lars in happier times, doing a music-video (!) for his film The Idiots.



A stunning little music-video made for The Kingdom in which Lars helps demonstrate the medical dance "The Shiver." If you think he's strange now, he was much stranger before:



Surely an odd cure for depression: the Rammstein song "Fuhre Mich," as heard in Nymphomaniac, Volume One:

Memories in the Present Tense: Terrence Malick’s “To the Wonder”

“Life’s a dream,” remarks one character to another in Terrence Malick’s To the Wonder, which opens today in theaters. As is this hypnotic film, which functions more as a sensory experience than a conventionally plotted tale of love found and lost. It is not standard multiplex fare, but you can expect nothing less from the filmmaker who last gave us the love-it-or-hate-it masterwork Tree of Life.

To the Wonder is overwhelming in the way few films are these days. Its plotting is minimal, but its visuals are a feast — and not in the green-screen manner of so many contemporary blockbusters. Malick used CGI in Tree of Life, but one can’t imagine him releasing a 3-D film — although his images often feel as if they may burst from the screen.

 

So what is the film’s plot? It concerns an American environmental inspector (Ben Affleck) who falls in love with a Ukrainian woman living in Paris (Olga Kurylenko) and brings her back to his Oklahoma hometown (the real town of Bartlesville). The couple break up, then get back together and begin to seriously wonder about their compatibility. In the meantime, the local priest (Javier Bardem) suffers a crisis of faith as he tends to the poor and sick in his community.

But, as in Tree of Life, the storyline is not the main ingredient here. Malick offers us naked emotions on screen — joy, anger, sorrow, love, betrayal — and the fact that he includes flashback images throughout clearly means the film is meant to function as a series of memories or, more accurately, as a dream.

The exception to this is Bardem’s storyline, which adds a glint of reality to the proceedings. Since his perfect first film Badlands (the new Criterion of which I reviewed recently here), Malick has always had his locations function as “characters” in his films, and here he sketches Bartlesville as a beautiful if lonely suburb — but then Bardem’s plotline explores the “other side of the tracks” where the poor, the disabled, and the addicted live. Jarring images of real residents from the Bartlesvillle vicinity force the viewer to sporadically wake from the “dream” of Affleck and Kurylenko‘s relationship.

From its ornate title onward, To the Wonder is an exercise in disjunction that produces a primal emotional response in the viewer (thus the love-it-or-hate-it status). The visuals are so kinetic and gorgeously composed, and the editing — worked on by no less than five editors — is so fluid that the film creates its own sense of time and space. It is ultimately “about” emotion and memory and what’s left when a romance goes sour.

Malick has both literary and painterly instincts — here his literary side (which leans more towards poetry than fiction) is represented by a nearly nonstop voiceover narration in French by Kurylenko, with Bardem’s character contributing his reflections in Spanish and Affleck supplying a few lines in English. To add to the linguistic stew, out of a clear blue sky (and back into it) Kurylenko befriends a young Italian woman who encourages her to flee Oklahoma, all in Italian.

The voiceover keeps the film from being a silent picture, because although the characters do speak to each other, Malick rarely lets us hear both sides of a conversation — and Affleck and Kurylenko, when heard in fragments of conversation, are both speaking their native languages to each other.

One can readily see an avid fan of multiplex romances tuning out on To the Wonder for all the reasons that fans of arthouse cinema will be drawn to it. The film contains two idyllic-looking Hollywood stars — Affleck and Rachel McAdams — who are utilized for their looks rather than their acting ability. Malick’s films have contained great performances, but they have also contained plenty of actors who are “figures in a landscape.”

Those who want a straightforward love story will be turned off or even irritated by Kurylenko’s sometimes overripe musings in the voiceover narration (“Where are we when we’re there?”) and her character’s childlike giddiness when happy and petulant behavior when mad — but, again, these are “effects” (not fx) that Malick uses in the manner of control-freak filmmakers like Kubrick — a director he’s often compared to — and Bresson and Dreyer.

Those last-mentioned cinematic masters are excellent points of reference here, because Malick injects a note of (Paul Schrader’s term for Bresson, Dreyer, and Ozu) “transcendence” into both plotlines. The lovers are happy and blissful in natural surroundings, but miserable in the closed confines of their house (which always has a bare minimum of furniture — as in both Bresson and Dreyer). In addition to a sequence where Affleck refuses to pray with his temporary lover McAdams (who’s the film only “certain” Christian), we have the Bardem plotline, which plays like a modern, even grimmer take on Père Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest.

Those who liked Tree of Life — I was overwhelmed by it and needed several days to process what I’d seen — will embrace To the Wonder. For those who are uncertain about the new film, just consider the prospect of seeing a true “emotion picture," a work that is visually charged — at times remote in meaning, but exquisite in execution and absolutely wrenching on a visual level.

Take the ride: Leos Carax’s “Holy Motors”

Leos Carax burst on the film scene back in 1984 with his debut feature, Boy Meets Girl, a quiet, charming work that signaled that a major talent had arrived. In the 21 years since his exquisite third film, Les Amants du Pont-Neuf (1991), Carax has turned out only a short and two features, and each has been highly anticipated by his growing fan base.

His latest feature, Holy Motors, which opened this week, is an incredibly ambitious yet playful work that finds his immaculately talented onscreen alter-ego, actor Denis Lavant, assuming a variety of roles as a mysterious man who tackles a number of “jobs” (each requiring a different identity) in the span of a single day.

Carax structured the film so that his protagonist can move easily from genre to genre. The only information we're given about him at the outset (which may or may not be the reality of his life) is that he's a rich man who is picked up in the morning by a chauffeur (Edith Scob) who transports him to each of his assignments. Thus, Lavant slides into a number of different personas: a pathetic homeless man, an impossibly limber motion-capture model, an urban dad with a shy teenage daughter, an old man ready to die, a hitman, a forlorn lover and, most memorably, a sewer-dwelling troglodyte who terrorizes Paris and claims as his prize a hot model (Eva Mendes).

And there I dispense with plot, as I'm sure Carax wanted to do in the creation of this picture. The list above leaves out an absolutely wonderful musical interlude where, apropos of nothing, Lavant leads a motley (but killer) accordion band through what looks to be an abandoned church. Throughout the picture, Carax connects with a number of movie genres, from Jacques Demy-like romance to Ishiro Honda-inspired city-trashing, having fun all the way. The main virtue of Holy Motors is its wild unpredictability.

Although this is his first feature shot on digital, Carax puts his love of film at the forefront, starting the proceedings with a Lavant-less prologue in which he, Leos, makes up and wanders in his pajamas into a movie palace filled with immobile, seemingly sleeping, patrons. When a filmmaker acknowledges at the outset that the film we're watching is his dream, absolutely anything is possible.

Like the anthology features made in recent years by Wong Kar-Wai, Jim Jarmusch, and Takeshi Kitano, the film plays at first like an “interim” work, which has fortunately spawned some bravura set-pieces that rank with the best of Carax's work. The vignettes each have their virtues, with the troglodyte segment (spun out of Carax's contribution to the anthology feature Tokyo!) being the most feverishly weird and entertaining, and the sequence in which Lavant plays a dying old man feeling the hardest to wade through – especially since its dour tone is shortly followed by two broadly comic moments.

As noted above, the film provides a tour-de force showcase for Lavant. We see him applying and removing makeup in the limo, but once he appears in each vignette, he is fully transformed and demonstrates that he’s a character actor extraordinaire (who can also be a very unconventional leading man). There is literally nothing out of the range of his small frame and visage.

As a further homage to the glories of cinema past, the supporting cast has some very familiar faces. Besides Eva Mendes (whose job as “Beauty” is to simply attract Lavant’s Beast), Carax has scored a cameo by the legendary Michel Piccoli, who costarred in his terrific evocation of silent cinema and the French New Wave, Mauvais Sang (1986). Piccoli is one of the few actors still alive (besides, obviously, Moreau and Leaud) who carries with him a wealth of French cinematic references – from Le Mepris to Belle du Jour and on and on.

Also offering cinematic echoes of her own is the actress playing the dutiful chauffeur. Edith Scob dons a white mask in one of the film’s final scenes, evoking her unforgettable starring role in George Franju’s horror classic Eyes Without a Face (1960). On a lesser level, Kylie Minogue appears in the segment intended to evoke Demy, bringing with her a pop stardom that echoes that of the ye-ye girls and “dollybird” singers who appeared in Sixties comedies and pop fantasies.

What some sour souls may see as the deficits in Holy Motors — its jumps in tone, its expectation that the viewer will follow along from scene to scene, its very odd payoff(s) — makes it one of the most adventurous films to appear in some time (from a director not named von Trier) and a very rewarding head trip.

*****

I’ve been talking about Carax’s work on the Funhouse TV show for several years now. The first episode I did about him was back in 1995. Foremost among the items shown at that time were his musical moments, beginning with this lovely visualization of a number by the “Anthony Newley-era” David Bowie from Boy Meets Girl (1984):

Carax does indeed do miraculous work visualizing pop music (yet has never made a music-video yet, bless ’im). One his best-ever moments is this mega-kinetic celebration of the joy of love, enacted by Lavant in Mauvais Sang (1986):

The film that “broke” Carax in France, but has since become a beloved cult film (and is thus far his masterwork) is the very unique love story Les Amants du Pont-Neuf (1991), aka “Lovers on the Bridge” on American DVD. Here is the trailer (and, yes, that is Juliette Binoche waterskiing on the Seine):

Pola X (1999) was his return to filmmaking after the difficulties caused by Les Amants. It’s the most difficult of his five features (the whole film is available in French here) and contains several moments that are intended to be highly jarring, like this dream sequence:

I interviewed Carax in conjunction with opening of Pola X in 2000. Here is a slice of him meditating on his inability to get films made:

Here is the trailer for Holy Motors:

And I can’t resist adding the German trailer, which is structured around the band-in-church musical sequence:

"Hugo": a love letter to cinema (and respite from Leo!)

I’ve already noted on this blog my great disappointment in the beautifully crafted but soulless work produced by Martin Scorsese in the years since Kundun. His latest film, Hugo, contains several elements that would seem to make it yet another venture into multiplex-land: a massive budget, a kid protagonist, a “heartwarming” promotional campaign, and 3D. Instead, the film is the best thing Scorsese has made in a decade and a half, and the first time his holy cinephilia has been “smuggled” (his phrase from Personal Journey) into a fictional narrative.

The film is a few minutes too long — Scorsese can't really answer his own question to young filmmakers, “is it as tough as Bresson?” (read: lean) — and is also incredibly sentimental. In this instance, though, the sticky-sweet sequences are evenly spaced out, and in the latter half they are hooked securely to the love of cinema in a way that makes them quite touching.

In the end, there are two key elements that make Hugo vastly different from the last decade of Scorsese “pictures”:

— it was made in England with a predominantly British cast, thus ensuring that no wildly miscast American star (Cameron Diaz, Gangs of New York), comatose lead (Nicolas Cage, Bringing Out the Dead), or preening wonder boy (Marky Mark, The Departed) shows up to utterly disrupt the narrative.
— no Leonardo DiCaprio (hosanna)!

The greatest joy of Hugo is that it seems to exist for an actual reason (was/is there any reason for The Departed to exist — and be 151 minutes long?), and that reason is for Scorsese to use state-of-the-art technology to conjure up the most primitive cinema there was, and the most magical: the works of Georges Méliès. It’s a perverse decision to be sure, but one that succeeds beautifully.

3D is a gimmick, one that was created in the Fifties to combat television and has been reintroduced into the marketplace to combat movie downloads. It has held no interest for me, as it has been used to gussy up the kid-centric fodder that occupies every multiplex everywhere. However, if this resurrected and improved technology is used with an experimental purpose in mind — as in Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams and Wenders’ Pina — the effects can be remarkable.

In Hugo Scorsese first creates a clockwork universe that seems derived in equal parts from Tati and Jeunet, and then takes us into the less intricate but more riveting world of magician-turned-filmmaker Méliès (right). Though chronologically “primitive,” Méliès’ films remain far more impressive than the computer-crafted flicks that currently flood into the multiplex.



So, as Herzog used the third dimension to convey the nuances of prehistoric cave paintings and Wenders spotlighted the spaces between dancers, Scorsese uses the current technology to underscore the hard work and surplus of imagination that went into Méliès’ handcrafted films. Hugo may have a young protagonist (two in fact), but it aims quite higher than the usual raft of anthropomorphic animal (or doll, or car) movies that are being presented in 3D (oh, and that nightmare of tedium that is “motion capture” — just make a fucking cartoon, guys, or a live-action feature!).

Here Scorsese draws on the tradition of French films about children leading independent lives (Forbidden Games, Truffaut’s work, and a healthy dash of Zazie dans le Metro). The constant succession of chases in Hugo does parallel what goes in most kid-centric H’wood pap, but here it evokes the races-against-time that distinguished silent cliffhangers from the likes of Feuillade and Griffith.

As noted, I detected the influence of Jean-Pierre Jeunet throughtout Hugo, and this is just as it should be, since, as I’ve noted on the Funhouse TV show, the most interesting uses of CGI effects in the past decade has occurred in French films (Rohmer’s The Lady and the Duke, Vidocq, every film in French by Jeunet), creating distinctive period pieces, but also fashioning interdependent universes in the Metro, a bar, an apartment building, and so forth (take a glance at Amelie, or Jeunet and Caro’s Delicatessen, and you’ll see the blueprint for Hugo).





Scorsese demonstrated his debt to the French New Wave in his sublimely rough-edged Seventies masterworks (think of the Alka Seltzer scene in Taxi Driver, evoking Godard’s Two or Three Things…). Here he openly pays tribute to Godard and Truffaut by having an “expert” (Méliès, played by Ben Kingsley, above) supply an entertaining lecture on the beginnings of cinema, looking straight at us. Kingsley’s Méliès is every expert Uncle Jean introduced to explain something in detail to a character, as well as every Truffaut character who spoke directly to us rather than another character, to tell a story from the past.

A few quibbles aside, Hugo is the film that older Scorsese acolytes of old have been waiting for — giving us a respite from the deadening central presence of Leo. It’s a film that reminds us exactly how expert a filmmaker Scorsese is, putting his technical proficiency at the service of a storyline that evokes genuine emotion and wonder.

I can only hope that Scorsese continues to make British or European-themed films, as it can reinvigorate him as it has reinvigorated Woody Allen. Never forget that European and British funding allowed Funhouse deity Robert Altman to survive when he was out of favor in Hollywood (which was quite often).

I’d love to see “le grand Marty” produce another picture that is “as tough as Bresson”; I’m not sure that’s ever going to happen again, now that he’s infatuated with big, large, massive, colossal budgets. I’ll settle in the meantime, though, for something he really cares about, that isn’t a star vehicle and is worth rewatching. Merci, MS.

*****
Méliès' work is available in profusion all over the Internet because (unless the film in question has been wildly tinkered with), it has fallen into public domain. Thus, you can see numerous copies of his most mind-warping films, but I would recommend these as a “starter kit.” First, the “greatest hit,” featured heavily in Hugo, “Voyage to the Moon”:



“The Man with the Rubber Head,” from 1901:



“The Merry Frolics of Satan,” from 1906:



“Fantastic Butterfly,” from 1909

Herzog gets emotional in “Into the Abyss”

Werner Herzog remains one of the true originals in world cinema, a filmmaker who began as a teller of bleak tales about madness and social alienation, and then became a busy documentarian crafting “ecstatic truth” (read: his slant on real events). He qualifies as one of the few arthouse filmmakers that the average plugged-in American viewer might have heard of, and in the last few years he has indeed traded quite often on the deadpan, eccentric persona he has fashioned in his documentaries.

His latest, Into the Abyss, is different from his recent work in that, while it depicts a colorful, dangerous environment, it is laden with raw emotion and finds Herzog stating his central message very early on, in an interview he conducts with one of the film’s central figures, Michael Perry, a young killer on death row in Texas.

The film has been likened to In Cold Blood, and the crime that serves as its pivot is even more trivial than the one in the Capote classic. In 2001, Perry and another young man broke into a house to steal a red Camaro and wound up killing the mother of an acquaintance in order to steal the car. They later encountered the acquaintance and his friend, and killed them in the woods, again to cover up their theft of the Camaro.

Though Herzog has ordinarily avoided assigning a specific message to his work — and of course there are several “messages” in this film — here he states at the outset in his first (and only interview) with the young man on death row, “I don’t think human beings should be executed.”

The film’s structure is thus contested by the fact that he introduces a message right at the outset, and then much later in the film cleverly elides the principal event in the narrative, namely the execution of the young man on death row. He accomplishes the latter by including a clip in the last third of the film in which the event is referred to in the past tense by one of his talking heads (one of the victims’ relatives who attended the execution), thus alerting the viewer to the jump in chronology.

These stylistic deviations from the norm ensure that Into the Abyss cannot be a thriller, and yet Herzog still toys with that form by using a foreboding musical score by Mark Degli Antoni (with David Byrne on guitar) and probing, handheld camerawork that seems to signal grisly discoveries (that, of course never come). Herzog uses the story of the murders to do several things, most successfully sketching a portrait of a community where life is cheap and crime is commonplace.

Most of the people he speaks to know people in prison, or have lost relatives or friends to violent crime — the most jarring instance has a murder victim’s daughter offering a laundry list of the sad and violent ways her family members have died in the preceding six years.

The film resembles the work of onetime Herzog student Errol Morris (Gates of Heaven, The Thin Blue Line), since it as much about America as it is about a specific crime. The Rashomon-like prism through which Herzog views the crime is intended to show that the matter of who committed the murders — both young men deny they pulled the trigger on any of the three victims — is secondary to the after-effects and the fact that several states in the U.S. feel that killing a murderer will somehow “compensate” the relatives of the victims and deter future criminals. (Herzog answers both arguments in the film.)

The striking thing about the film is that it is Herzog’s most touching picture in some time. He has never used Spielbergian devices to manipulate his audience — for the most part we have experienced wonder and fascination at the unusual locations and situations he has spotlighted in his documentaries, or studied the “mad” protagonists in his fictions, from a comfortable remove.

Into the Abyss removes those screens, and for the first time since select scenes in Grizzly Man (and mind you, he’s made six films since that arthouse hit), Herzog takes the time to study individuals feeling sorrow. I am the very last person who’d want to get into a discussion about the “race for the Oscars,” but the emotional component of this film is so strong that one wonders if it will net Herzog a Best Documentary award — if not, no harm done, because the Academy Awards rarely reflect true quality and are more often than not a popularity contest.

Not that Herzog hasn’t acquired that kind of popularity in the last few years. His eccentric onscreen persona has made him a crowd pleaser on both Conan and The Colbert Report. These “rollicking” appearances (where he plays along with the host’s image of him as a wild and crazy German filmmaker) put me in mind of the moment in Les Blank’s Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe, in which he acknowledges that a filmmaker has to play a “clown” to attract the public to his film:



Herzog’s documentaries have all been works of quality and depth, but perhaps Into the Abyss resonates so deeply not only because it tells such a serious tale, but because it is the work of a very serious filmmaker.

*****

A few clips from the film are available online, but a key one, of Herzog discussing with Michael Perry the fact that only a healthy prisoner can be executed in the U.S., is available at Herzog’s site.

Here is the official trailer: