Reverse Shot

Why otherwise sensible critics have seen fit to valorize this unnecessarily obscure, politically unintelligible film as some kind of virtuosic, late-career bellwether of Bellocchio’s mastery is something of a mystery. Auteurist sentiment is partially to blame: his 1965 Fists in the Pocket was a stunning debut, after all, and in the decades since, Bellocchio has taken square aim at bourgeois values with an impressive chain of angry salvos, at times resorting to bald provocation (Devil in the Flesh), at others exhibiting great sensitivity to history’s saints and sinners (My Mother’s Smile, Good Morning, Night).

Neil Young Trunk Show, which is the second entry in Demme’s proposed trilogy on the Godfather of Grunge, starts off with the same helplessly melancholic folk and country-rock that dominated Heart of Gold, taken from the artist’s most commercially successful albums in the early Seventies. These are the pretty melodies that first piqued the interest of most of Young’s casual fans, including myself, and it’s during these quieter performances that Demme favors uncomfortably tight close-ups with almost no cuts.

Every era has its own claim on ennui and spiritual dislocation, especially trendy topics when paired with youthful hesitation and sexual confusion. But often such umbrella terms give unambitious artists license to justify their artistic lethargy on philosophical and aesthetic grounds—if the characters mope, so can the camera; if they’re inarticulate, then why bother writing dialogue? The tenets of realism become a black hole in which one can bury unnecessary details like story, momentum, motivation; staying on the surface equals ambiguity.

The film is in fact structured as a descent into increasingly bleak cases of family separation. But one of its tiny miracles is that this downward emotional trajectory reverses itself, turning more hopeful, open, and life-affirming as the situations become more desperate. In the film’s opening third, we encounter a father and son, both Christian ministers, disagreeing about the Bible’s policy on dancing and playing instruments. Later, when the son is alone he seems eager to draw the camera into a conspiratorial relationship, as if starved for the invisible confidant on the other side of the screen.

In its achingly precise mise-en-scène, its deeply affecting elegiac tone, its finely calibrated performances, and, yes, its straight-up knee-slapping silliness, Mother represents the work of an astonishingly talented narrative filmmaker at the height of his abilities—the precise ratio of restraint and exaggeration is expertly calculated in every scene.

Now that the World Cinema Foundation’s newly restored print of the 1991 epic A Brighter Summer Day is finally making its stateside debut as part of this year’s Film Comment Selects slate, Yang fans will get a stronger dose of the anger that only occasionally disrupted Yi Yi’s chastened world-weariness and Ozu-like tranquility. Where Yi Yi was dominated by brightly lit compositions contrasted with a handful of melancholy nighttime sequences, A Brighter Summer Day traps its audience in a permanently murky atmosphere—one that seems intended to precisely capture the political anxiety of its historical moment, but that also renders our relationship to time and space unstable.

We needed another delicate, comedy-tinged American independent drama about a socially awkward, emotionally stunted creative guy who has a hard time communicating with girls like a hole in the head. At the very least, what immediately sets the new film Easier with Practice apart from many recent installments in this ever-ready subgenre is that first-time director Kyle Patrick Alvarez knows where to point a camera.

At a time when individualist cinema seems to be experiencing a resurgence (see the Coens' A Serious Man and especially Tom Ford's A Single Man, in which Colin Firth's character's only aim is "just [to] get through the goddamn day") A Prophet is a piece of red raw, stripped-down existentialism in the mold of Bresson's A Man Escaped, wherein the protagonist, who starts with nothing, provides meaning to his life only in his fight for survival.

Argott remains so intent on mounting a case against those who wish to move the Barnes collection and on presenting a chain of increasingly nefarious corporatized and political villains, that he doesn’t allow room for both sides of his argument. The contention of these “villains” that art should be made available to the public, regardless of the owner’s original intentions, is given short shrift in favor of a succession of Barnes followers positioned as the little guys holding fast against a vast coterie of powerful institutional evildoers including Ed Rendell, the Governor of Pennsylvania, and the Pew Charitable Trust.

Of late, many of Scorsese’s most ardent admirers have been dubious, and his detractors have been able to add coal to their furnaces, perhaps because Scorsese’s relationship to genre seems to have altered. In the past decade or so, the auteur—who’s as renowned for his indefatigable cinephilia, extensive movie knowledge, and his ability to turn that love of cinema into preservation as he is for his own filmography—has been taking on familiar themes and classic movie molds, but staying fairly firmly within the parameters established for them by decades of cinema. We know he knows these types of films down to the letter, so no one seems surprised that he continually pulls them off.

Jessica Hausner’s Lourdes, a starkly designed inquiry into the nature of miracles, exists in a lineage of films that includes Alain Cavalier’s Thérèse, Jacques Rivette’s The Nun and professed inspiration, Carl Dreyer’s Ordet. In each, purity of form (often lazily labeled “minimalism” or even more erroneously “transcendentalism”) dovetails with the main character or filmmaker’s intensity of belief. Aesthetically, Lourdes, with its often unadorned and static compositions, fits in with this group nicely. Yet Hausner, for all the honesty of her investigation, approaches the idea of miracles with a detached, quizzical eye.

Larger questions than how successful the film is as art enter into the equation; assessment of the film’s aesthetic merits shouldn’t be avoided, but it’s clear by now that Avatar represents something important, something very big to the industry—in the sense of how films are made, distributed, exhibited, and received—but what that is remains unclear. It feels likely at this point that we’ll look back on the last major release of the aughts as a watershed moment and feel that big budget entertainments were different post-Avatar. But how?

I never read Alice Sebold’s novel The Lovely Bones, possibly because I didn’t spend enough time in airport bookstores in 2002. So I can’t say whether or not Peter Jackson’s film version fails out of excessive reverence to its source material, or because it’s not faithful enough. But I can say with total confidence that it is a failure, and a conspicuous one at that. Arriving near the end of an Oscar season already flush with egregious offenders, from the glibly pandering (Up in the Air) to the earnestly dull (Invictus), Jackson’s film stands out in its strident commitment to bad ideas.

Why do we put ourselves through it? Why relive those moments and movies that made us question our very livelihood? As usual, the most puerile, rancid films largely were not tepid genre flicks or bloat-budgeted blockbusters but prestige pictures with inflated senses of their own (nonexistent) importance and cynical, audience-baiting hits that commentators and mindless critics like to claim really "tapped into the zeitgeist."

Summer Hours foregrounds the “domestic” in domestic drama: the family estate as home, museum, sanctuary, birthright, locus of secrets, and repository of tradition. That tradition doesn’t end with the death of the estate’s matriarch but with the growing geographical and psychological distance of two of her three children, and Assayas views this rift not with sentimental nostalgia but with a mature awareness of passing time and vanished inheritance.