The Reverse Shot Top Ten of 2004:

10. Twentynine Palms
9. Time of the Wolf
8. Notre Musique
7. Crimson Gold
6. The Village
5. Goodbye Dragon Inn
4. Kill Bill 2
3. Dogville
2. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
1. Before Sunset

#10
Urge Overkill
Michael Koresky on Twentynine Palms

After viewing Bruno Dumont’s Twentynine Palms at a small New England film festival, I enthusiastically recommended it to a good handful of friends. The film had literally knocked the wind out me, left me at once grasping for and repelled by human contact, provoked, sickened, angry, exhilarated. As much as Before Sunset had created a hermetic dream world of interpersonal connection that seemed to plant seeds of furtive hope in my soul, Dumont’s expansive structuralist nightmare, also focused claustrophobically on a single man and woman trying repeatedly to connect, to cement their relationship in meaningful exchanges (yet here failing), left me feeling less in control of my own emotions than at the behest of an all-consuming cosmic condemnation. Both are ostensibly love stories, according to their filmmakers, yet both prove that the power of cinema lies in both its ability to either empower the viewer or steal their self-control, to either appeal to some sense of self or shatter illusions. Twentynine Palms is undoubtedly “Shock Cinema,” a primarily derogatory term, although in this case I can think of no greater compliment; Dumont’s sociopolitical allegory is designed to shock the viewer out of complacency, out of normative modes of thought on film, narrative, and especially, our own deepest internal recesses. Where most films that center on the relationship between men and women are ennobling, Dumont’s work is withering, cruel, and challenging. It left me horrified both by the sheer force of artistic exaggeration and the profound depths of human capability.

Naturally, these were all emotions I wanted to share with my friends. I had even gone so far as to tell more than a few that it was “right up their alley.” My momentary lapse of judgment here eventually created slight friendship wounds, as it turned out that I had perpetrated a mild form of abuse by unleashing Twentynine Palms upon them. My need to pass these challenges along was perhaps my own attempt at the very communication Dumont posits as an impossibility. Many of my friends disliked the film intensely—even if they had admired it on some nebulous level, they were antagonized and revolted, irritated and unappreciative. This is when I realized how truly great this film is.

The drastically polarizing nature of Dumont’s work comes not from any gleeful subversion, or insistence on rubbing our faces in putrescence (arguably Gaspar Noé’s admittedly intoxicating work falls more squarely here), but rather from its severe philosophical origins. In Twentynine Palms, like in L’Humanité before it, Dumont doesn’t create traditional characters or even let his actors fully inhabit them; he situates them within specific social parameters and then watches as they recede before the camera. Katerina Golubeva (as moody, cadaverous European Katia) and David Wissack (as aging American hipster photographer David) may be vivid onscreen, yet it’s their very opaqueness that seems to appeal to Dumont. The opening sequence, one of the first of many static shots of the tense couple driving in their ridiculous battering ram of a Hummer, provides all the backstory and narrative drive that the film will offer: they are taking a trip to Twentynine Palms to “check out the location.” Then we are left to watch helplessly, uncomfortably, as the two (communicating only in a simple, reduced French or an accusatory English) travel on and on, in and out of a dingy motel, back and forth between sessions of loud, cantankerous sex and irrational arguments and physical fights.

Just as they misunderstand each other in language and in body, they haven’t yet mastered the delicacy of their own flesh, their actions are lurching, unpredictable, lopsided. The only time Katia and David seem at peace with their own corporeality is when they leave their Hummer on a dirt road and, after exploring a field of gnarled Joshua trees and attempting to fuck against a large jutting granite surface, they splay their bodies out on top of large smooth rock, baking their skin under the burning sun, Katia’s hand cupped over David’s groin to protect it from the rays. Here, Dumont allows his characters to have a quiet interlude, albeit shortlived, and certainly the closest thing they will ever have to a moment of lucidity. To simply proclaim them as “one with nature” or “reduced to animals” is missing the point. David and Katia’s trip, an enormous project of stripping down of social constraints and expectations, doesn’t merely journey back to primitive state: it burrows further and further until it reaches an essence. Only here are the two as completely divorced from all they encounter on a daily basis. “I don’t want to go back,” whimpers Katia.

Yet they must return, and this is Dumont’s ultimate foreboding. Twentynine Palms is undoubtedly a horror film, one that locates the violent urge within all men by utilizing Hollywood genre conventions in their most basic, condensed technical form. From the opening sequence, there’s an uneasy sense of hovering and watching and waiting, a queasy ominousness that lasts throughout. Even on the inside of the vehicle, the dashboard stares back at the audience with two gaping circular black holes. Yet the point of view of this ever-watchful camera shifts continuously from scene to scene—from a great God’s-eye omniscience, to a Deliverance-style indigenousness, and then back and forth between Katia and David. The latter is depicted most dramatically in the bravura motel pool sequences, with its camera (taking the point of view of a luridly predatory David) gradually sneaking up behind Katia as she dead-man floats before us, the dull sound of large trucks passing on the adjacent highway the only musical accompaniment. Ultimately, the plurality of eyesight is generously unsettling and sets up a tense array of plausible outlets for some sort of final reckoning.

It’s easy to write off Dumont’s dark view as cynical, even delusional and childish, and it’s even easier to laugh off the film’s emotional catharses in order to create a safe distance. Yet I’ll put myself at the mercy of the irony-drenched cinema intelligentsia and admit that, despite David’s series of absurdly strident and garish orgasmic screams, I took this film as seriously as a heart attack, found its tedium engaging rather than soporific, and its distortion of human conduct as properly warped rather than forced. Contemporary American foreign policy, irrational in its violence, unkempt in its thinly veiled subterfuge, forces us to question just what we are capable of. By scaling it down to the individual, by locating the violent urge within two people, and quite specifically within socially conditioned male codes and irrevocably subsumed machismo, the film becomes unbearable in its implications, and nearly unrecognizable in its literal character manifestations. Its final 15 minutes, in ruins with apocalyptic mayhem and horrific jolts, is the final tectonic shifting below the film’s quietly rumbling surface. Behavioral narrative cinema is once and for all replaced here by something far more difficult to face, and the need for viewers to take it literally is perhaps what wrecks it—and furthermore creates a culture of denial. The separate rape and murder that culminate Twentynine Palms, each abrupt and almost incidental, are both manifestations of denial, repression rearing its very ugly head. Thus, the shielding instinct it unleashes in its audience is a doubling of that very repression. This is the essential aspect of this “cinema of shocks”: an investigation of violence at its roots, its base mortal essence. Dumont’s dissection of human capability makes the political personal: the violence so escalates that what once seemed motivated contorts into something unrecognizable. Through Dumont’s brand of shock and exhilaration comes the ability to see more clearly.

Of all the surfaces and interiors that Twentynine Palms serves up as oppressive and intransitory (chlorene motel swimming pools, jagged rock cliffs, dull beige motel rooms, the earth-devouring Hummer, oscillating windmills, human breasts, buttocks, and genitals) there is one that it never dares to show us: the inside of the bathroom. Much as Hitchcock refused to enter this dastardly place in his celebrated Psycho teaser, Dumont uses the motel bathroom as the final threshold, a Pandora’s Box we cannot return from once it’s been opened. Midway through the film, after a bout of passionate fellatio performed on David by Katia and a subsequent fade-to-black, Katia holes up in the bathroom and (irrationally) refuses to come out. Then after David repeatedly bangs on the door and (irrationally) screams and insults her, she rapidly exits. Dumont shows us a split-second of her point of view of David (handheld, remarkably opposed to most of the film) before she barges from the room to skulk in the desolate nighttime parking lot. This sequence is mirrored at the terrifying close of the film, except this time, David is behind that closed bathroom door. And what emerges is no longer David. All of the “dysfunctional conversations” and desperate stabs at meaningful interconnection are dashed in one fell swoop, usurped by the id. What’s behind the bathroom door is as irrational as a Norman Bates, yet perhaps more frightening in its implications: it’s from inside and not out. Twentynine Palms exposes a horror we swallow every day, one that is quite controllable indeed; yet Dumont unearths it onscreen, and he presents to us the mangled face of all we refuse to allow to burst into our daily lives.

More on Twentynine Palms

Back to Top

#9
If Looks Could Kill
Andrew Tracy on Time of the Wolf

One of 2004’s most potent cinematic visions of apocalypse was also its most disposable. The zombie-wreaked suburban carnage that made up the astonishing first 15 minutes of Zack Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead was nightmarish, horrifying, and shamelessly enjoyable. Romero, perhaps unknowingly, got it right in the first place: the laughs come first (pasty-blue zombie makeup and over-emoting no-list actors), let the horror gradually, relentlessly creep its way out. Apocalypse has become another language of entertainment, the comfortable box of genre safely confining even those films which attempt to return the notion to its roots in religious dread (Weir’s The Last Wave) or reveal its permeation into the cultural and technological mechanisms that have appropriated and commodified it (Kurosawa’s Pulse). What’s left for the apocalyptic imagination to do in a culture that has thoroughly assimilated the concept?

The real and filmic horrors channeled into our living rooms 24 hours a day, the instantly accessible physical reality (actual or simulated) of mass death has paradoxically pushed the apocalyptic further away. The key is to recapture the central concept of apocalypse—moral order and collective punishment—from both the increasingly intolerant language of religion and the increasingly pornographic imagery of the media by a harshly compassionate (tough love?) secularism and by a respect of the image which counters our visual glut with a meticulous selectivity. Apocalypse is not merely spectacle, it’s an injunction—and as the 21st century continues in the proud tradition of its predecessor, drawing people into ever-closer visual proximity while perfecting their atomization, that injunction turns ever more upon the transgressions and responsibilities of spectatorship. Moral parables, real or fictional, seem to have lost much of their power in our era of fragmentation, isolated instances lost in the tessellated grid of modern experience. Perhaps the only route left for parable is to plug directly into that grid, to get at the moral through the sensory—reawakening us to the weight of the things we see and hear, and the responsibility we bear in seeing and hearing them.

Michael Haneke’s unforgettable and unforgivable Funny Games was just such an attempt to alert us to the moral agency of spectatorship, and indeed it was so devilishly successful that it veritably negates itself: the immaculate perfection of its tail-swallowing structure makes it a containable, consumable product even as it lashes out at containment and consumption. Haneke’s own mastery worked against him, boxed him in. Code Unknown, one of the most prescient films of the Nineties, broke out of the box by relentlessly and brilliantly working against its own perfection, indicating its own limits even as it staked out further territory. Echoing the ease with which we flip through any variety of mediations—film, photography, our own blinkered daily experiences—Code Unknown’s dazzling array of perspectives alerts us to the moral burden inherent in this access. Beyond inability of communication is the far graver problem or, rather, accusation—of unwillingness to act; not condition, but choice.

It’s the strength of that injunction that keeps Haneke’s post-apocalyptic and post-humanist Time of the Wolf from succumbing to the dictates of its genre, even as it forgoes Code Unknown’s formal ruptures for an ‘invisible’ camera and presents a world bereft of the omnipresent technological media (apart from a radio and a Walkman) which so often serve to focus Haneke’s critique of modernity. Its dystopian near-future aside, Time of the Wolf is no more fable or allegory than any Haneke film. The repeated invocations of the Just—the 36 people whom God sent upon the earth to keep it aright, the loss of even one tilting it into chaos—announce themselves as red herrings by their very blatancy. This doesn’t mean that they’re irrelevant. Rather, they serve the film by revealing their own irrelevance, the meaninglessness of moral absolutes in a world that has defeated them, that has made the absolute obsolete. Haneke’s apocalypse chills because it ends nothing—it tells us nothing about what we will be but volumes about what we are.

Perhaps the greatest conceit of the apocalyptic film is the notion that the end of times will reveal, for better or worse, our “true” selves—a bastardized version of the biblical Apocalypse as act of revelation. On this note, crucially, Haneke is not forthcoming. His survivors neither decisively pull together nor fall apart. Their unions and divisions are merely fluctuations in an incessant state of desperation, ripples rising and falling in the landscapes of cruelty which man has made of this ‘natural’ world. That none of Haneke’s survivors can be classed as truly hateful only underscores the terrifying ease with which the violence we practice upon the world has seeped into our daily relations: in the bonds of kinship (the increasing estrangement between Anna (Isabelle Huppert) and her daughter Bea (Brigitte Rouan)); the bonds of love (Anna’s son Ben (Lucas Biscombe) places his canary under his jacket to keep it warm, suffocating it); and the bonds of ‘necessity’ (the killing of a horse and a goat, upon which Haneke’s camera lingers far longer than the few and scattered cruelties performed upon humans). “I thought you’d help me, but you just ruin everything,” says Bea to the vagrant boy (Hakim Taleb) who has violated the fragile unity of the refugee camp, in the most moralistic sentiment expressed in the film. The heedlessness of his action, the thoughtlessness (and, as will be shown, the waste), and the moving simplicity of Bea’s reprimand link Time of the Wolf’s future to our present—apocalypse does not sever our mode of relations, it maintains them. When the couple that murdered Anna’s husband in the shocking opening of the film arrives at the refugee camp, she accuses them in front of the camp’s self-made leaders. “What proof do you have?” they ask. “He’s dead,” she sobs. But physical fact has no place here; the confrontation ends in a stalemate, the dueling testimonies—the accused as genuinely impassioned as the accuser—cancel each other out.

Even in the realm of ultimate moral transgression, Haneke’s survivors are witnesses rather than actors, denying their agency even as they exercise it, making their world even as they refute their authorship. Reflexively, Time of the Wolf is not revelation but recording, and as such, a decisive action—for seeing is an action which habitually denies that it acts. Haneke’s apocalypse neither condemns nor delivers, it simply perpetuates, the self-exculpatory gaze which we disperse through our innumerable mediations continuing to issue its denials even as its refracted vision is reduced to the singular. The effectiveness of apocalyptic cinema (or apocalyptic news) resides in its distanciation: we watch ‘our’ destruction from a safe distance, visual immediacy transformed into abstraction. This is what gives the shock (and the perfection) to Haneke’s final, subtle visual switch, mounting his camera on a train upon which vaguely glimpsed, immovable figures had earlier passed by Anna and her children, deaf to their entreaties. The world will end with neither a bang nor a whimper but with a look, the time of images which we ourselves have conjured, making us mere spectators to the destruction or salvation that awaits us.

More on Time of the Wolf

Back to Top

#8
Amazing Grace
Matthew Plouffe on Notre musique

A few months back, I had a conversation with a Reverse Shot contributor on the subject of Jean-Luc Godard and our shared reticence to write about his work. Both of us admitted to resisting opportunities to comment in print on his films, not because we were unfamiliar with the work, but because we felt ill-equipped to do so. I’ve found that even among those who’ve considered the man’s oeuvre in entirety, the sentiment is not uncommon; the scholar is often quickest to deride any clear-cut critical opinion and least likely to offer his own. It’s funny that in my experience Godard remains inspiration for the hottest critical discussions post-screening or over dinner when many writers renege when asked to comment on his films in a thousand words or less—especially considering that Jean-Luc the young Cahiers scribe made a name for himself in the fifties with bold and sometimes radical considerations of incredibly complex work. This is not to say that he doesn’t receive his share of attention, but only to claim that between proclamations of his genius and the now-commomplace dismissal of his later work, there remains a chasm of enlightening considerations. How is it that so many of today’s critics, glad to raze deserving reputations and devote unending attention to the specious Tarantino genius, see Godard as slightly out of reach?

One of the reasons may be in large part due to the fact that his body of work has continually evolved and mutated in unprecedented aberration. The work for which he is most famed—that completed during French New Wave of the Sixties—gave way in the years that followed to films which stretch the expanse of the medium in both content and style. His artistic courage soon pierced the avant-garde where the plight of accessibility became a focal point for fans, and by the Eighties and films like his adaptation of King Lear (1987), many had basically given up on the man. In truth, some of this later work is so marked by esoteric jaunts and inscrutable hyper-cinematic formulae that one gets the sense intellectual fatigue has had about as much to do with the loss of admirers as anything else.

And though it’s true that prior to the millennium, excitement surrounding Godard’s films steadily waned, at press conferences and in the rare interview, the aging auteur has invariably made waves with redoubtable and often ribald opinions, most recently demonstrated in his castration of the critically beloved Michael Moore at Cannes 2004. “Moore doesn't distinguish between text and image," Godard argued, "He doesn't know what he's doing.” The ultimate effect of this artistic and personal split from the intellectual mainstream is that the quintessential French auteur’s influence has essentially fallen by the wayside and the unfortunate repercussions can not be overstated; with once-great auteurs either in retirement or directing The Dreamers, we are in dire need of sound-minded masters.

In 2001, just when it seemed too late, Godard gave us In Praise of Love, a shocking return to (comprehensible) form which put him back on the festival circuit and on the forefront of everyone’s mind. In Praise teemed with off-putting Godardian hyperbole but found an audience nonetheless, providing an ideal stepping stone back to the top spot he once commanded and may have begun to regain with this year’s remarkable Notre musique. The triptych, which begins in the dregs of Hell and climbs an artisan’s ladder to Heaven, seemed not only a divine cinematic hymn sung from above but most importantly, an inspired missal for all of us youthful filmmakers and film lovers who still believe the medium of cinema possesses both profound gravity and the power to change the world (this may seem a grand endeavor, but if Notre musique is anything at all, it’s unabashedly ambitious).

“Hell,” an onslaught of collaged clips culled from recognizable cinema, newsreel, and stock footage, depicts successive acts of war in an unforgettable jeremiad for and about the human race. A piano pounds out discordant marches as individual second-long stories quickly blend into a singular visual wail. On Godard’s terms, Hell is simple and infinite, a pounding drum of death that echoes itself until building into an indistinguishable mass of destruction with allusion to the depreciation of our race into animalistic proclivity.

The by-product, a war-torn modern-day Sarajevo, is where Godard situates “Purgatory” (“The Second Kingdom”) and we find the man himself sitting at an airport on his way to a conference in which he is to lecture appropriately (listen up, Michael Moore) on the subject of “le text et l’image.” Judith and Olga, a pair of young women both connected in their heritage to war, become co-protagonists in this, the longest portion of the film. A journalist and student respectively, the latter is among the small crowd of youths staring up at the grumbling auteur as he elucidates the inability of Howard Hawks to formally relay the difference between the sexes in a shot/reverse shot sequence, and begins to evince the essence of a recurring Notre musique motif: the relationship between history and the way in which it is recorded. Not surprisingly, the lecture is steeped in many themes which concern the film itself, and Godard’s lesson resonates through Notre musique’s fragmented narratives from end to end. As an aside, this short segment may offer more to the study of Godard’s later work than any bevy of critical interpretation.

While Olga is there to attend the conference, Judith’s mission is more difficult to grasp—she wanders the ruins of the city and maintains a sense of hope in political resolution in her homeland that those she interviews are utterly without. Indeed, there are few hopeful adults inhabiting this faded anathema and the pair of young women constantly battle the undertow of concession that characterizes the city. In the facades of run-down buildings and the cattle-like movement of market-goers, Godard illumines the sense of defeat and disillusionment here. Dappling the stasis with bouts of stunted philosophical musing, Notre musique’s older characters spend most of their time drinking and smoking and spouting despondent table talk like “we always discuss the key to the problem, never the lock.”

Notre musique might seem merely another playground for this kind of dead-end philosophy were it not for an offering of youth as its radical antagonist and progress’s most vital lifeline; though many have commented that one of the films funniest moments occurs when a student asks Godard if “the little digital cameras will save cinema”—what amounts to a cinematic sigh follows—Olga goes on to make a film with one of those cameras and finally commits an actual act of political rebellion when not long after the conference, she asks a theater full of moviegoers in Jerusalem if one Israeli in the crowd will die with her for peace. The act takes on particular power considering an early scene in the film in which she asks why peaceful people don’t start revolutions. “They start libraries,” Godard answers with devastating lassitude.

But it is the young people that are the only inhabitants of Godard’s edenic “Heaven.” In a short segment which closes the film, Olga—who ends up there as a result of her political stunt—walks amidst a forest of lustrous foliage that stands in stark contrast to Sarajevo’s concrete confines, past a young man reading, a few youths playing and laughing, before she shares an apple near the water. Godard’s disinterest in conventional narrative strategy piques in this final segment which features a tracking shot sure to be added to the list of his greatest. Heaven most resembles a peaceful commune in which the simple act of someone offering another a seat or a bite of their food becomes profound rebuttal to the selfish apathy of the film’s cynic-ruled midsection, and in its formal properties alone, is appropriately antithetical to “Hell.” That is, until one recognizes that even its borders are guarded by gun-toting military. Heaven is not pure, it’s protected.

Godard has never shied away from making movies about movies and his own rigorous pursuit of transcendent cinema in the face of corrupted politics and societal artistic malaise. And like his 1963 masterpiece Contempt, Notre musique’s rigorous examination of cinema as fallible super-medium builds subtly into a powerful wave of hope, even despite itself. What makes this treatment doubly remarkable, however, is the implicit sense that Godard is handing over the reigns to a younger generation. Where his previous work held up a mirror to his own struggles, there is in Notre musique a filmmaker that has stepped out of that professional ambivalence into the role of master teacher—a moniker most obviously sallied by the lecture scenes, but confirmed in Godard’s positioning of himself in the narrative: having a drink with friends, chatting to a traveler alone, and most remarkably, tending to his flower garden at home when he gets the news that young Olga has attempted her act of revolution. The students are the ones making bold moves and movies in Notre musique, and who better than Godard to offer his wisdom to the next generation in search of the political in cinema, the cinema of politics, and the beauty of film that is for filmmaker and film-lovers alike, “our music.”

There is little to say in the face of Notre musique but that Jean-Luc Godard was never lost and has a lot more to teach us about the medium we love. Perhaps that is why we find his work so fascinating to debate and so impossible to elucidate in a few insubstantial paragraphs. And in the end, that may be the beauty of writing about the master filmmaker. In its impossible scope, the work of Jean-Luc Godard is a constant reminder of cinema as everything it can be: simultaneously acute and transcendent, a medium spanning mediums, the essence of which—like Godard’s ouevre itself—will forever remain just slightly beyond our grasp.

More on Notre musique:
On Reverse Shot
On indieWIRE

Back to Top

#7
Pizza Deliverance
Erik Syngle on Crimson Gold

I suppose it’s somehow fitting that one of the Top Ten films of 2004 comes from the pen of a man who’s into making lists of his own these days. But for those of us who fear (perhaps secretly) that the recently digitized and numerically obsessed Abbas Kiarostami is starting to yield diminishing returns in his own films, at least we have his occasional scripts for other directors to remind us of that great decade of work we still haven’t finished processing yet. This one, his second for his onetime protégé director Jafar Panahi, may not be the best thing either of them have put their name on, but it’s definitely their most immediately accessible narrative, and socially observant in universal terms that some might imagine impossible from a country like Iran. This may be why critics kept noticing the similarities to more familiar and Western tropes and genres—and indeed they are too striking not to notice. Hussein and Ali’s semi-comic deadpan banter on the back of a motorcycle does call to mind Laurel and Hardy, while Hussein’s fully-clothed swandive into a swimming pool could easily have been performed by the drunk from any Chaplin film. Much more importantly, the suspended flashback structure, petty criminal milieu, and doom-laden, borderline fatalist atmosphere obviously owe a lot to American film noir and its worldwide neo- crime film descendents. (I can’t recall another Iranian film in which somebody shoots a gun.) The working class point of view and naked class resentments exposed in Crimson Gold have also been attributed to neorealism. In fact it isn’t hard to imagine a film that follows a pizza delivery man (played by a real non-actor pizza delivery man) throughout his nightly grind as something emanating from the first wave of Italian neorealism in the Forties, but that obscures the tangled and innovative path that neorealist cinema has taken through modern Iranian film. Perhaps the most useful element in all of these comparisons is to point out that what could easily have been an impenetrable story of alienation instead feels recognizable and familiar to all kinds of audiences. This is an accomplishment.

Just as big an accomplishment is Panahi’s visual style, which seems a cross between a slightly less rigorous version of Kiarostami’s minimalism and a highly mobile urban realism. The former is most in evidence during the film’s extended opening take, depicting a jewelry store robbery, shooting, and suicide. The most fascinating as well as most puzzling thing about it (aside from the obvious shock of placing it context-free at the beginning of the film) is its inescapable allusion to one of the most famous long takes in art cinema, the penultimate shot of Antonioni’s The Passenger. Both feature the camera gradually tracking through a shadowy room towards a barred window, offscreen sounds of struggle and an offscreen murder, and a gathering crowd of people in the street peering in. But where Antonioni’s camera literally transcends its boundaries and takes flight to the outside, Panahi’s is stopped dead in its tracks by the hulking mass of Hussein Emadeddin, who pulls the trigger on himself. We spend the rest of the film trying to make sense of that one moment, and even though nothing can, the tour that Panahi takes us on from the bottom to the top of Tehran reminds us that we’re all citizens of an increasingly desperate world.

More on Crimson Gold

Back to Top

#6
The Village People
Jeff Reichert on The Village

It never hurts to state the obvious. And when dealing with politics it’s often necessary to do so repeatedly. In any crowd there’s always someone who’s not paying attention, someone who at the slightest nudge might look up from their iPod, laptop, sitcom, or ‘zine and realize that there are issues and tragedies that might require their attention more urgently. It’s impossible to quantify the possibility inherent in a simple, obvious statement, which is why the irony feels so cruel that, especially in this cinematic and civic landscape, a film can get dismissed for wearing its political intentions on its sleeve by writers who probably agree with its sentiments through and through. Spike Lee is a regular recipient of such criticism (read Michael Koresky’s piece on She Hate Me for more here), and this year an unlikely suspect in M. Night Shyamalan took up the banner of political critique draped in allegory and waved it around, hoping someone would notice what he was up to, only to have his The Village shot down again, and again. But why? For being too obvious, it seems. But where else in 2004 could we look for a film that tried to deal directly with post-9/11 America in a fictional context? And in the end, was The Village really obvious enough to turn its “#1 Thriller in America” tag into a spark for political activism? If Shyamalan wants to present us with a society bound by a fear of the unknown fostered in its populace by leaders paralyzed with denial and hint that this vision is not too far—hell, is—what we’re living through in the United States these days, then, like the film or not, the work at least deserves to be taken seriously beyond knee-jerk reactions. Stepping outside of the theater, is there anything silly about the course our country is currently on?

To be honest though, ever since The Village was met with distressingly dismal notices last summer, those of us here at REVERSE SHOT who loved the film (a slim majority) have circled the wagons, questioned ourselves, and wondered if maybe we got things wrong this time. Unless you’re Armond White, being the only critic keeping the light on for a film isn’t terribly fun work, and the difficulty of the position only increases in relation to the passion for the film in question. There’s certainly a disconcerting pack mentality amongst major critics (especially with limited releases that allow a handful of writers from New York and Los Angeles to browbeat the rest of the big dailies into line) that makes dissent admirable, but sometimes it gets awfully lonely out in the wilderness of “yeah, sure” glances, and conversation-killing exclamations. Some of us saw The Village repeatedly, reporting back that, yes, the film still held the same curious power, even perhaps deepening in resonance across viewings. One of our newest staff writers just caught up with the film a few weeks ago—in Russia, no less—and telegraphed in a resounding call of support. Another will be questioning our praise of it in this very issue. A total non-event in the critical community at large, the zombie-like response to The Village has come, for many of us, to represent a host of problems with the practice of film reviewing today. Too idiosyncratic to be solely and easily pleasurable, yet wrapped in the easy-on-the-eyes trappings of major studio monies, Shyamalan’s latest is a nether-film, a point where the system seemed to break down, and nowhere was anyone reviewing what was actually on the screen.

It didn’t help that constructing a teleology of Shyamalan’s works that ends with him lodged firmly within his own anus is all too easy given a trajectory that ends (so far) with a film as willfully bizarre and off-putting as The Village. You could start by criticizing the director for taking the critical and financial success of The Sixth Senseand indulging his youthful passion for comic books and superheroes, and not his audience, in his second film Unbreakable, if that film weren’t the most overlooked, most unassuming of the recent spate of enhanced-human adventures. You could then argue Signs as a blatant, and mostly successful, attempt to re-win the $150 million dollars worth of audience members Unbreakable lost, if not for the curious (ok, a little silly), aliens ‘n’ faith mash-up that accounted for its weakest, yet most fascinatingly personal, elements. With The Village Shyamalan supposedly made his least successful thriller, with the least successful employment of his signature twist, even though the film makes only peripheral stabs at fitting into a genre, and one only truly encounters this supposed “signature” in only one of his other films (The Sixth Sense). Marketing materials led people to expect a “return to form,” but that’s what marketing materials are supposed to do: sell things. Viewers who were unable to check their desire for visceral scares (Shyamalan is more interested in an operatic vision of horror here) and mindless thriller narrativity (all of his films are thrillers in name only, there’s always much more bubbling underneath the surface) ended up seeing the wrong movie.

Like Wes Anderson’s The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, The Village seems acutely aware of the relationship between filmmaking and mythmaking, an inquiry all too welcome in the face of society’s current desire to dead-end culture into the morass of reality television. Yet both works are suspect of the power of myth to elide those aspects of the real more comfortably ironed over by a good yarn. As in the films of Atom Egoyan there’s a festering rot at their core. But where Anderson lightly pulls Steve Zissou out of the mire of self-absorption to a bossa nova beat, Shyamalan seems focused on those instances in which myth wins out. As his village’s elders solemnly vote to continue their “way of life” even in the face of shattering evidence of their inability to truly do so, one can’t help but be reminded of the constant stream of bad news coming from Iraq, and the “Hey it’s not so bad!” assurances of our government’s replies. But as his blind protagonist Ivy (Bryce Dallas Howard in one of the overlooked performances of the year) confronts the world outside her tiny hamlet, realization sinks in—even if given the opportunity to know, most in the village might be completely unable to comprehend the truth, and others might choose to stick with the fiction. Call it obvious or silly if you like, but one need look no further than our last election for illustration of the massive, comforting power of a lie.

Even if you don’t buy into Shyamalan’s allegorical superstructure, it’s impossible to ignore how effectively he crafts his tale from moment to moment. Shyamalan may be second only to Spielberg amongst commercial filmmakers working today in successfully branding his films as his own while adapting to fit the needs of the particular project. Having nearly completely eschewed standard shot/reverse shot patterning in previous films, with The Village he’s made his most radical formal departures yet. Consider the first 20 or 30 minutes of the film, and how he moves from a quietly unsettling opening shot into a series of disconnected vignettes of daily life among the village’s denizens, revealing a narrative control and fluidity unseen in earlier works that focused on a small, tightly knit group of characters. Shyamalan moves easily between segments and his large cast of characters, yet in this very motion he’s already introducing a feeling of constructed-ness to his community, setting the stage for the “twist,” that’s more important to pay heed to than the intermittent moments of portent inserted only in homage to the genre he’s busily subverting. Capping this opening movement with a trembling Jesse Eisenberg lit by firelight, arms outstretched with his back to the forest and capped by a ridiculous, incongruous bowler only heightens the sense that some kind of circus act is at play around the edges of our awareness.

Throughout the film, moments of emotional reveal or dramatic import are often seen from afar or from the wrong angle as if to suggest with his camera that something in the foundation of the way this story is being told has gone awry. But it’s in a single shot, from a stationary, resolutely placed camera that Shyamalan reveals his grandest theme. As Ivy and Lucius (Joaquin Phoenix) confess their affections on a barely lit porch, mist roiling in the darkness behind them, the sense of wonder in the face of this expression of love is palpable. Later, Ivy’s father (William Hurt) declares that world “kneels before love” as he defends his decision to let his daughter leave the village and venture to “the town,” and you’d be forgiven for suspecting the line was ripped from a D.W. Griffith intertitle. I recently read an article which misguidedly attempted to link The Passion of the Christ to Griffith’s films through supposedly shared earnest emotional qualities. Gibson’s film is earnest and emotive, but in horrible, frightening ways; here Shyamalan more successfully captures the underpinnings of films like Intolerance and Orphans of the Storm and even manages to turn his abstractions and discontinuities into an early 21st century update on Griffith’s clockwork dramatic pleasure mechanisms. Maybe it’s naïve of Shyamalan to offer mere “love” as a combatant to fear and repression, but you have to admire his devotion to the course. It’s a thread running through all of his movies, yet in The Village finds it purest expression.

Now for my surprise ending: I’m not going to address the relative success on failure of the “signature” twist. To do so would be to validate all those critics who reviewed a 108-minute movie on the basis of eight of those minutes, and possibly ruin the experience for those out there who haven’t seen it for a first time. (Trust me, though, it’s even more heartbreaking during a second viewing.) There is plenty more that could be said about those qualities of The Village that landed it on this list, but it’s the actual experiential factor that’s the hardest to convey. It begs to be seen, with an open mind of course, and hopefully something of what I’ve said about this film that I regard so highly will convince those who stayed away to give it the chance that it never received. Forget what you’ve heard—The Village isn’t a bad film, silly, obvious, any of that rubbish. It’s actually a great film that stands apart from just about anything that came out this year. Unfortunately, the reasons why it isn’t being lauded as such are all too easy to see, given that the taste-making community exists in a village of its own, all unto itself.

More on The Village

Back to Top

#5
Sans Soleil
Elbert Ventura on Goodbye Dragon Inn

Set in the halls and caverns of a haunted movie palace, Goodbye Dragon Inn doesn’t afford its audience a glimmer of natural light throughout its slender 81 minutes. But it is not altogether sunless—every once in a while, the windswept vistas of the King Hu classic Dragon Inn playing on the screen radiate into the theater’s empty spaces, staving off the night and captivating its ghosts. That recurring image of a sun-splashed movie infiltrating the dark evokes nothing less than our need—both personal and collective—to absorb in the reflected glory of the moving picture. A tattered tribute to the movies, Tsai Ming-liang’s latest summons the same ardor that it celebrates.

Proudly plotless and uneventful, Goodbye Dragon Inn may well be the purest distillation of the Taiwanese director’s cinema of urban solitude, pushing Tsai’s minimalist art to near abstraction. Mood, atmosphere, and form reign supreme. The meager action comes in the form of the aimless peregrinations and poker-faced poses of its largely mute gallery of loners. So withholding is this near-silent movie that when the first line of dialogue comes—a dryly delivered, “Do you know this theater is haunted?” at the 43-minute mark—it arrives with the impact of a Bruckheimerian detonation. The delay of gratification and the confounding of expectations are certainly hallmarks of Tsai’s cinema, but the rigor here—contrasted as it is with the kinetic splendor of King Hu’s Dragon Inn—is laced with a touch of perversity. (Not for nothing does he give one of the main characters a limp—the better we feel the distance of those hallways, the passing of those minutes.)

Tsai has never been shy about invoking his inspirations, and this movie is no different. If King Hu is the recipient of an explicit tribute, Jacques Tati may well be Goodbye Dragon Inn’s patron saint. No other movie in recent cinema has expressed so vividly the musical quality of movement and composition. In what qualifies as a setpiece in a Tsai movie, a succession of men come and go in a restroom, one washing his hands, another coming back to retrieve a forgotten item, a wry dance held together by the bassline of a trio of men awkwardly standing side-by-side-by-side at urinals for an impossibly long piss. As much about loving movies as watching them, Goodbye Dragon Inn foregrounds form. The medley of movie language—camera placement, blocking, lighting, composition—becomes the subject itself.

Like Tati, Tsai isn’t interested in form for its own sake. He realizes that art is simply another way of reconfiguring sight. Goodbye Dragon Inn is perhaps his most radical restatement of that idea. For all the sadness and delicacy of his movies, there is something of a rebuke to them. They represent gentle scoldings of the modern sensibility; they remind us of our unparalleled capacity for complacency and myopia. When Tsai fixes his gaze on a ticket booth attendant crouching over a forlorn steamed bun, it recalls Edward Hopper’s young usher, leaning against a wall as a theater-full of people enjoy the show. Both are stunning portraits of isolation because they look where no one would think of looking. In Tsai’s case, his patient regard for his characters, keeping the camera fixed when others will have already moved on, if they even look at all, attests to his humanism.

That reverence for the overlooked extends beyond people and into places. Dead time litters his movies. In What Time Is It There?, a drab kitchen, freshly vacated by the protagonist’s father, is held in our sight for a prolonged moment, as if to soak in its every detail and essence. When the next cut shows the son clutching an urn of ashes, we realize that we have just been in the presence of a consecrated space. I haven’t seen What Time Is It There? in years, but that shot of the kitchen still lingers in the mind, an effect that Tsai pulls off with regularity. The impulse to memorialize the blessed inanimate is evident in Goodbye Dragon Inn, with its protracted gazes into empty halls across listless minutes. Privileging us with a new way of seeing, Tsai literalizes the conceit and takes us into the bowels of theater, certainly as unimagined and neglected a concept as there is. He gives us glimpses of the decrepit corridors and dilapidated hovels that zigzag beneath and behind the movie palace. Lest we forget, he seems to be saying, these are the drab, forgotten spaces that comprise our shrines to our dream lives.

Also on Goodbye Dragon Inn:
Tsai Miang Ling Interview
Tracy's Goodbye Dragon Inn
Pinkerton's Goodbye Dragon Inn

Back to Top

#4
Kill Me Again
Suzanne Scott on Kill Bill Vol. 2

There’s something downright Shakespearean about Kill Bill Vol. 2. You know, I’ve always liked that word “Shakespearean.” I so rarely have an opportunity to use it in a sentence… useful here because Tarantino films are the rarest of cinematic entities, juggling diverse genres, tones, and aesthetics with imperceptible ease, reviving the need to employ words like “sweep” and “scope” into the one’s cinematic post-mortem. Critics have seemingly cooled on Tarantino’s pop culture patchwork technique over the years, mistaking cleverness for ironic detachment and his singularly innovative mode of theory-to-practice film geekery for plagiaristic slapdash kitsch just as Tarantino is reaching personal heights as an auteur, and it begs the question: did Shakespeare have to deal with cooler-than-thou backlash from his detractors? Probably.

For all the cinematic dreck currently peddling disorienting editing as “action,” no one in good conscience could deride Tarantino for his indulgence in split screens or extreme close ups or smash zooms or any other mode of cinematic gimmickry, when it affords us hauntingly sparse centerpieces such as The Bride’s live burial, an aural choir of oppressive dirt, panting whimpers, and futile struggling set to the visual accompaniment of pitch black confinement that stretches on well past any spectator’s comfort level. Or the comparatively chaotic girl-on-girl trailer rumble, from which one can only garner appreciation for Tarantino’s attention to detail, as the white trash production design is deconstructed (and demolished) into an array of impromptu redneck weaponry, television antenna and spittoons included. Wes Anderson might garner acclaim for shoving bits of quirk into every spare corner of mise-en-scène, but Tarantino knows how to utilize them for maximum effect.

Say what you will about Tarantino’s loving appropriation of B-movie tropes, grindhouse thematics, and kung-fu culture, but don’t be so quick to overlook the second installment’s characterization, a cagey evolutionary leap from the frenetic, hack-and-slash avatar development of Vol. 1. Vol. 2 is an anomaly, a cathartic sequel comprised almost entirely of backstory, in which the characters (and they can only be called characters: no middling everyman or woman composites reside in this filmic universe of bittersweet revenge) can engage in the most contradictory of human acts. Perhaps the ur-example of Tarantino’s ability to balance his characters as though on the blade of one of his mythologized Hanzo swords is the titular corpse himself, embodied with such vicious restraint by David Carradine.

Looming over the first film as little more than a shadow and purr of shiver-inducing intimacy free of association (Has any character in recent memory had a more memorable introduction than Bill’s matter-of-fact “this is me at my most masochistic,” before unloading his gun into his pregnant ex-lover’s head?), Vol. 2 presents Bill as terrifyingly human. His collective patriarchal idiosyncrasies standing in stark contrast to the rest of his familial brood of henchmen (each worthy of their own comic book series, deliciously surreal if occasionally one-note in their depiction), Bill deftly evades definition: is he a murderer? Unabashedly so. But he’s the sort of cold-blooded killer who carefully cuts the crusts off of his daughter’s sandwich, his particular brand of laid-back malice all the more off-putting for its adherence to fatherly tradition and a warped sense of propriety. Carradine (giving every bit the comeback performance as Travolta did in Pulp Fiction, all subtlety without a reliance on showy posturing) portrays Bill as a father, a brother, a lover, and a mentor first and foremost. He is the true nucleus around which even Uma Thurman’s Beatrix Kiddo revolves, a villain that is blissfully banal and endlessly elusive all at once.

If the vengeful violence of Kill Bill Vol. 1 seemed somehow inconsequential, good giggly FUN, Vol. 2 provides sobering context. Case in point: The Bride’s grueling training under kung fu master Pai Mei, a standalone chapter that initially seems out of context with the weathered Western aesthetic Tarantino evokes but quickly comes to illuminate just how desensitized we’ve become as spectators in our downloaded “I know kung-fu” era. Not only does this grueling montage cheekily lend resonance to the easy violence of Vol. 1, it seems to respond directly to Tarantino’s detractors, who continually lambaste him for his reliance on “empty” postmodern pastiche without ever acknowledging his sincere deployment of it. In a year where the aesthetic and thematic tropes of the training montage had been reduced to fodder for Team America: World Police, Tarantino brutally and pointedly puts Beatrix through her paces, refusing to discard such sentimental notions as “honor” and “respect” even as he basks in retrograde modes of storytelling.

Too often, films aim (and routinely fail) to excel in one capacity and one capacity alone- as an adequate genre film, or a diversionary star vehicle, or a thought-provoking character study, etc. And, given the relatively slim picking on the modern film landscape, even marginal success on any one level is enough to keep the average moviegoer sated. Tarantino, by contrast, chooses complexity over easy delineation, often to polarizing effect. This brave tendency can be perfectly encapsulated in two diametrically opposed moments from Kill Bill Vol. 2. The first comes in the gory climax of The Bride’s down ‘n’ dirty brawl with Elle Driver, as the camera lingers giddily on Elle’s plucked eyeball as The Bride’s bare foot squishes it flat and its sightless owner flails hysterically in the background. The second is Bill’s quiet death, five simple, poignant steps concluding with a crumpled corpse on a pristine manicured lawn. The former evokes squirms and sadistic chuckles simultaneously, the latter an aura of dignity and gravitas that few other films attain in the presentation of life’s quietest mystery, deflating Bill’s intangible nature into a lifeless mass of unanswered questions.

Not unlike Tarantino’s dichotomous protagonist, The Bride/Beatrix Kiddo, Kill Bill Vol. 2 seems to inhabit a series of dualistic planes concurrently and comfortably without ever boiling itself down to easy binaries. Good/Evil? Ruin/Redemption? Love/Hatred? Tarantino’s universe of assassins, their destructive tendencies (towards humanity writ large, their own included) and their efforts to claw their way out of a vicious cycle might seem outlandish, but it is in no way hermetically sealed. By contrast, its incongruities only make it more striking, and resonant well beyond its conclusive (and, arguably, misleading) nod to nature’s savage law, which optimistically posits that “The lioness has rejoined her cub, and all is right in the jungle.” It is this solitary moment of euphoric release in Tarantino’s constructed jungle of human viciousness that is ultimately the most heartbreaking, encapsulating life’s little triumphs in a sea of overwhelming trials on a truly epic scale.

More on Kill Bill

Back to Top

#3
Star-Spangled to Death
Michael Joshua Rowin on Dogville

I’m sick and tired of hearing about “America.” Not the country, but the word, as it stands now as a meaningless adjective. Like the dollar, it isn’t worth much anymore. Notice how what gets depreciated is thrown around like so much cheap dirt—not only in tastemakers’ and politicians’ unoriginal, cynical appeals to “American values” and “American democracy” (in the face, of course, of “un-American” dissent), but also in the lazy titling of recent movies purporting to parody traditionalism or, to bring up another outmoded phrase, “the American Dream”: American Beauty, American Psycho, American Movie, Team America: World Police. The attempt to critique our society and its phony patriotism becomes compromised in the mere use of this obsolete word. Because to take this insidious word for granted in its usage—even in irony—is to reinforce assumptions of what “America stands for,” a facetious appeal to ideological collectivity.

If I seem to be overemphasizing semantics in what should be a paean to one of the year’s best films, it’s because I’m through with worn-out epithets and manipulative euphemisms. Which, yes, brings me to Dogville. Say what you will about Lars von Trier—I won’t deny that he can be an obnoxious self-promoter, and at times, as in the case of a wreck like Dancer in the Dark, a bad director—but he absolutely does not unthinkingly mimic the hand-me-downs of artistic expression. Does this automatically ascend von Trier to the realm of political filmmaking? I still don’t think so—there’s too much shock-the-bourgeoisie silliness remaining in his creative instincts—but it does make him capable of producing some brilliant social commentary.

Let’s start with the title: Dogville. A village of dogs. That’s what von Trier curtly deems this great nation of hucksters and hypocrites and religious fanatics. Sure, it ain’t subtle, but when expressing rage no one should be. So with the aptly named Dogville von Trier initiates a new trilogy which deals with the American question—but this isn’t the same American question posed for easy irony’s sake by the aforementioned artistic statements. By confronting the Good Samaritan community-based myth upon which the United States is built and prides itself on, Dogville exposes America’s current global role as a hollow sham in light of its projected image as the democratic ideal. That so many people got it wrong and took von Trier’s allegory as an affront to the American citizenry only affirms how deeply and stubbornly this myth is embedded in the national consciousness.

In a year of so much ridiculous, bombastic nonsense (and I’m only referring to political campaigns), I love how von Trier found the perfect visual corollary to his streamlined, though epic, allegory. While it’s not quite a local experimental theater exercise (can von Trier ever fully abdicate his showmanship?), Dogville’s construction on a soundstage, with chalk-lines and meager décor forming its parameters, certainly lent it the most enduring mise-en-scène, or anti-mise-en- scène—one that was etched in my mind all year round. Just watching von Trier’s actors navigate this space, make it their own, and then, for a grand finale, burn it all to the ground was thrilling. Being part of a New York Film Festival crowd that reacted so viscerally to von Trier’s turning of the tables on his well-documented misogynist leanings and Dogville’s own moral universe was even more so.

Even the most enthusiastic cinephile falls into ruts when it seems as if filmgoing is merely an endless series of hermetically sealed, comfortable viewing experiences. I’ll never forget how at its aforementioned NYFF screening a certain gentleman stood up and cursed Dogville as “hateful shit” during the film’s now infamous end credits montage of impoverished, destitute Americans down through the ages, scored to Bowie’s “Young Americans.” It doesn’t impress me that Mel Gibson jerked tears from a Christian populace with a bloody Passion play; it does impress me that, after all the empty, complacent discourse on “America,” a director got underneath the skin by contesting the validity of America the Myth. Granted, that end credits sequence is not von Trier’s finest moment, and given some of his previous gimmicks, that’s saying a lot. But I’m willing to forgive it due to the three hours of cinematic bliss preceding.

I don’t want von Trier to practice restraint. There are too many safe artists with access to way too much money to wish for such a thing. Similarly, there’s way too much partisan bullshit on both ends of the political spectrum to wish for filmmakers who, like Michael Moore and Mr. Gibson, rile up their loyal bases, doing away altogether with dialogue and rumination. Dogville makes it clear, or transparent, that any such base is a threadbare collection of fear and paranoia; the film refuses to pander to any constituency, or any straightforward political persuasion. Von Trier’s didacticism isn’t simple, but a challenge to anybody without a pulse on 21st-Century groupthink, a gut-punch statement on the erosion of liberty, community ethics, and instruction with society’s pursuit of well-intentioned exploitation. I’m not unaware of the difficulties of, and contradictions within, his instigations. But because of his iconoclastic intelligence and uncompromising experimentation, when von Trier speaks about America through his films—as he thankfully will in the next few years—I’ll listen.

More on Dogville

Back to Top

#2
A Song to Remember
Nick Pinkerton on
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

It’s worth noting that I only know one person who didn’t like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Usually such uniformity of opinion—especially among ostensibly artistic twentysomethings—would be enough to make me extremely uncomfortable, but in this case I can only nod in assent with the crowd: there just weren’t many sweeter, smarter American movies this year. The scattershot Armond White, writing in the New York Press, got it righter than most when he compared the workings of Eternal Sunshine to the logic of a pop song. Here is a movie that declaims universality in the way only good pop can, boldly pronouncing words like “We” and “All” and “Everybody” with enough conviction and melody to make them sound like “Me” or “I,” like cosmic absolutes. Charlie Kaufman builds his script around a premise that seems too good to have gone unused for so long: what if we could, when the memory of someone becomes too painful, completely erase it? It can happen in the cluttered offices of Lacuna, Inc. What would the ramifications of such a process be? What would one stand to lose? It’s one of those out-there conceptual set-ups that justifies science fiction’s existence as a genre, and make no mistake, Eternal Sunshine—with its jerry-rigged garage sale technology—is nothing if not a gem of low-fi sci-fi.

It’ll be interesting to see, with the passage of time, how Eternal Sunshine’s reputation fares, and if all the people who once misted up on hearing “Meet me at Montauk” will wind up defensively rejecting the movie like last summer’s radio anthem, embarrassed to ever have been caught on that hook. After a second viewing I still quite like the movie, and all the more because it’s the product of a totally unexpected creative alchemy: Michel Gondry, a music video director (I don’t care how legit of a jump this may have become or how great Gondry’s video work might be, for me this cross-over will always prompt post-traumatic flashbacks of Spun, Charlie’s Angels, The Cell…), Kaufman, the snide author of underfunny hipster arabesques, and Jim Carrey, a great screwball comic whose insistent forays into Academy-respectable multiplex drama have consistently obscured every quality that made him a star. I bought my ticket with extra reserves of vitriol in stow.

Kaufman had struck me as a too self-impressed writer done a grave misservice from the very beginning of his film work by cult pampering. His career started with awesome, profoundly fucked-up work on the writing staff of FOX’s short-lived but much remembered Get a Life—a flatly nihilistic little show which dynamited the domesticated comic universe of the sitcom, and which became template for a decade of absurdist American comedy to come. In his big screen cross-over Kaufman kept intact a gift for what Get a Life star Chris Elliott called “moments that are uncomfortable but funny at the same time,” but until now Kaufman’s screenplays have seemed like the work of a sketch writer out of his element, a sprinter trying his hand at a marathon; they hinged on scanty, one-joke premises that blew their comedic loads as prematurely as their titles and descended into hollow paroxysms of quirkiness halfway through their runtimes. Hints of genuine feeling were preemptively snuffed by a snarky distrust of sentiment; it’s a conflict in Kaufman’s writing that was pretty obvious in—in fact was the centerpiece of—his screenplay for Adaptation. That film was a tedious prank, a punk-assed joke that challenged the viewer to feel, then razzed anyone silly enough get involved. Eternal Sunshine has guts enough to make penance.

Kaufman’s great non-sequitur lines are still present here: David Cross, a petulant stoner on the film’s periphery, makes his little screen time count, delivering a perfect, pissed-off reading of “I am making a birdhouse.” And the movie still leans heavily on one of Kaufman’s blurb-friendly set-ups, though in this case I’m not sure you could call it a joke; he’s landed on a central idea of remarkable resonance, and finally one with enough variations to play through a whole movie. The thesis writ bold across Adaptation—that of sentiment vs. resolved cynicism, in life and in art—has been worked into the story rather than over it in Eternal Sunshine. When the half-amnesiac Clementine (Kate Winslet) and Joel (Carrey) reconcile—or does it count as a new courtship?—against the backdrop of recordings where they express previous domestic dissatisfaction, it’s a really elegant expression of the way “I should know better” doubt runs cross-current to attraction in those irresistible, lovely doomed romances—though is there any other kind? Kaufman still veers wide of hackneyed mush by focusing on a weirdo relationship that’s folding up on itself in doubt, but the writer’s obvious trepidation and fatalism never discounts true love or backs off of big feelings with a superior smirk. So if Eternal Sunshine sometimes errs on the side of the maudlin (it does), isn’t that more forgivable than a movie that counterbalances itself into nil?

As seductive as the film’s catchy premise may be, one always has the feeling that its characters are as important as its ideas. Scenes with Lacuna, Inc. employees played by Mark Ruffalo, a hobgoblin-creepy Elijah Wood, and Kirsten Dunst are sporadically funny, but they often feel like they’re marking time—it’s a measure of the strength of the movie’s central romance that we always want to come back to it. Winslet handles a tough character assignment beautifully; her Clementine would be probably be wince-inducing in real-life, but she’s too recognizable not to fall for a little bit through the safe conduit of the screen. Watching her you feel protective and irritated and potentially embarrassed to introduce her to your friends—and there’s a flash of a magnificent ass! Carrey’s work is just as good; despite more than a few flat-out awful films, he’s inarguably the great American screen comic of the last decade-plus—I think most people who grew up with In Living Color, when being perfectly honest, would have a hard time naming anyone who’s provided them with more straight-up laughs in bulk. A big part of that success is the actor’s working-overtime screen presence; like prime Martin Short or Jerry Lewis, he gives every tic and gesture a little extra flourish, hyper-stylizing characters into busy abstraction. This made his ambitions toward serious drama seem pretty ill-advised; any number of actors could’ve carried The Truman Show, but who else in Hollywood could play Ace Ventura? That said, Eternal Sunshine is the first of Carrey’s non-slapstick roles where he’s not straining for emotional effect just as hard as he strained for laughs as Fire Marshall Bill. Gondry’s loose-feeling dialogues, shot with a restless, re-positioning camera, seem to have caught the actor off-guard; without a lens to play up to he’s working smaller, turning inward. Joel Barrish as we first meet him is crabbed, passive, convincingly complex, and quiet. But there’s no doubt as to why Carrey was brought onto the film; the movie takes advantage of the actor’s distinct physical qualities while expanding him into heretofore-unexplored territory. In memories of playful intimacy with Clementine we see the Joel’s clenched frame loosen into something lank and clownish; for all the personas and props he has to play with while running fugitive through Joel’s headspace, it’s probably the most impressive transformation that Carrey makes in the film.

Eternal Sunshine’s centerpiece is the imagistic marvel of Joel going on the lam through the memory of his relationship with Clementine, increasingly panicked as he realizes the scope of what Lacuna, Inc. are disposing of; it’s a really epic chase sequence. Here the film risks running head-on into to that most creaky of romantic comedy conventions, the post-breakup highlight reel montage of “good times.” But instead of losing himself in lovelorn mooning, Joel recruits his memory of Clementine in his attempts to preserve and hide one of their privileged moments, lying low amidst the back archives of his life’s little traumas. Their retreat through his psyche provides an intimacy impossible in their shared life, where “you can spend so much time with someone only to find out she’s a stranger,” and Gondry’s unparalleled visual imagination creates indelible combinations with Jon Brion’s downbeat score: the spines of books in a Barnes and Noble fluttering blank, Clem and Joel’s shared life passing in diorama-style scenes viewed through a back-seat car window…

Most affecting, though, is the scene where a nervous young Joel is egged on by his peers to smash a disabled bird with a hammer, then is led away and comforted by a kid Clementine. It’s wrenching stuff—the child actors speak with Carrey and Winslet’s adult voices, conflating childhood and adult trauma just as Dennis Potter did in Blue Remembered Hills. And baby Joel’s odd declaration, “I wish I’d known you as a kid,” recalls the sentiment of the strangest love song I know, Mott the Hoople’s “I Wish I Was Your Mother,” whose narrator is jealous of his beloved for all the moments she had before him, and who wishes he “Would have seen you/ Would have been you as a child.” There’s plenty of determinism ingrained in Eternal Sunshine, with its final shot an image of skipped groove repetition, but it expresses deeply felt regrets: there’s palpable yearning for impossible closeness, for an end for the troubling, unbreachable gaps which exist between us and the people we love, and the impossible dream of sharing everything. All of this exhibits a sensitivity that’s far removed from Adaptation, a film whose trailer made ham from the melodrama of Freddie Mercury’s crescendoing vocals in “Under Pressure,” sneering at that song’s ability to move us. In fact the heart of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, though it borrows its title from Alexander Pope, actually seems quite close to that of Mercury’s frantic appeal: “Why can’t we give love one more chance?”

More on Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind:
Rowin's Eternal Sunshine
Chen's Eternal Sunshine

Back to Top

#1
The Fundamental Things Apply…
Michael Koresky on Before Sunset

“You better hurry, or you’ll miss that plane…”
- Rick’s final words to Ilsa in Casablanca

“Baby, you’re gonna miss that plane…”
­ Cèline’s final words to Jesse in Before Sunset

How Before Sunset deeply affects so many people can’t be so easily defined. For each viewer who exits the theater swooning, claiming that Richard Linklater’s masterwork is the ultimate depiction of an idealized romance, there’s another that claims its impact is based upon its shattering of those very same ideals. Whether its gently radical real-time linearity firmly grounds it in our world or in some ethereal movie netherworld is the real trick of the film; Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke’s insistent outpouring of conversation occurs in such a sustained current of generosity and ever-deepening complexity that “realism” ultimately seems beside the point. The honesty, compassion, and profound necessity of interconnection in Before Sunset is so fruitful that words such as “poignant” and “bittersweet” don’t really cut it, nor do strict generic reductions, such as Romantic Comedy or “Rohmer-lite.” Arguably, Linklater’s reliance on his deceptively meandering, increasingly urgent 80-minute structure helps the film ascend to a higher plane of human consciousness rather than entrench it in mere beat-the-clock suspense gimmickry. Before Sunset may feel like no other love story if only for its pruning down of all the tangles of relationship and movie romance to one terrifically ominous conversation, yet the emotions it dredges up, lovely and fearful, bond with the audience in an almost classical manner. The great conceit that unites Sunset with its gorgeously naïve predecessor, 1995’s Before Sunrise, is the imminent travel which will tear its lovers apart, quite possibly forever, within the span of the narrative: before the plane or train rips their idyll assunder, they must convince themselves whether or not one night of human connection can represent a lifetime of certainty and therefore face their own mortality. It’s been pointed out many times that the Sunrise/Sunset duo has become the narrative equivalent to the Michael Apted Up series, the most eloquent non-documentary evocation of aging onscreen. Jesse and Cèline’s repartee in the café about the visible lines of aging defines the essence of not just Linklater’s ongoing artistic mission to condense and expand time and human consciousness (Tape, Waking Life, Slacker) but the Bazin-articulated inherent ability of film to represent the moment of human conception. Cracks and wrinkles appear in the skin, and love deepens.

If we are to believe then that the acknowledgement of a finite love implicitly evokes the specter of mortality, then perhaps cinema’s only true expressions of romance are those that couple love and death. 2004 was an especially strong movie year for expanding the boundaries of how love can be represented, that its evocation onscreen doesn’t have much do with meeting cute, arriving at the all-important first kiss, and overcoming the doubts of whether opposites indeed attract. Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mindforthrightly reconfigured love itself as a combination of psychotic spare parts, an endless stream of subconscious ones and zeroes just waiting to be deleted from the hard drive of human misery; yet Before Sunset’s supreme act of whittling, its reliance on long takes rather than millisecond blurts, makes an even more prophetic statement on the fragility of memory. How can we deem which experiences will ultimately define us? Jesse and Cèline must quickly decide which memories will be worth saving. For all of Eternal Sunshine’s high-concept aspirations and artistic accomplishments, why does Linklater’s seemingly effortless gabfest reach heights of ardor the other could only make claims for in a written case study? Before Sunset taps into reservoirs of mostly unarticulated spiritual longing, it wrestles with notions of existence and legacy, it fights the urge to solipsize everyday experience, it localizes a world of romantic uncertainty within two naggingly dissatisfied thirtysomethings. It’s 80 leisurely minutes that feel like a whirlwind.

Perhaps its only true American counterpart is Casablanca, classically structured in inimitable Hollywood gloss yet primal in its ability to so thoroughly touch upon the mortality of romance, the disappointment of idealism, the anger of missed opportunity. The sheer heart-caught-in-the-throat wreckage of Before Sunset’s final 20 minutes—as we move from the cathartic emotional vomitting in the back of the taxi to Cèline’s singularly enchanting and reassuringly cozy apartment—feels fully earned as Jesse, casually rubbing his wedding ring, surprises himself by uttering “I know” to Cèline’s Nina Simone-accompanied concern that “Baby, you’re gonna miss that plane…” If he does indeed get on the airplane back to the United States from Paris, can the two of them put up with another nine years (a lifetime?) of uncertainty? Cèline’s revelation that she lived in New York for a while, at the same time Jesse was living in the city as it turns out, is perhaps the film’s true shock to the system; everything after is an attempt to set the cosmos back in place. Likewise, Bogart’s Rick and Bergman’s Ilsa, both ravaged emotionally by the terrible nostalgia of their splendid pre-Occupation love affair, cannot help but witness the rejuvenation of their love as an impossible odyssey: the world is too changed, their lives have led them in seemingly opposed directions. Thus, the flashback sequences to their brightly lit, idealized escapades in Paris years earlier function in Casablanca much like Before Sunrise does for Before Sunset. Linklater’s earlier film now seems to merely be an elaborate backstory, a blissfully ignorant daydream that exists only in hazy, filtered flashback. In Sunrise, Jesse and Cèline decide outright to not exchange phone numbers or last names, just let their apparently profound attraction speak for itself; likewise Rick and Ilsa’s sun-dappled idyll (complete with a drift down the Seine on a Parisian tour-boat, mirrored in Sunset’s solemn glide down-river) is defined by how little they know of one another and how they feel it practical to keep it this way. It’s this pragmatism, this sense of doing the right thing, either in the name of love or principle, that is ultimately both couples’ undoing. And the site of their naiveté, or their inability to fully realize their passions, of course ends at train stations, to Marseilles or to Brussels, improbability the overriding emotion as the engine chugs off into the great unknown.

Yet is a brief passionate romance, admittedly couched in nostalgia and years of outsized expectations, worth jeopardizing a long-term, more comfortable yet rewarding relationship? The greater question of infidelity hovers over both works. Ilsa’s marriage to the Czech Laszlo (Paul Henreid’s stand-up likability is only slightly sexier than that of a Ralph Bellamy due to his alleged underground resistance fighting) seems to fit like an old glove; meanwhile Jesse’s marriage has seemed to conveniently hit the skids, the passion has drained almost irretrievably, yet the relationship’s magnificent offshoot, his devotion to his son, Henry, takes center stage in his life. Sex is secondary but looming. Jesse’s dogged attempts at sexual interplay, which truly spring forth during some awkward moments on a bench in a blooming garden, seem like the ploys of a sexually deprived married man; Rick’s increasingly alchoholic bitterness seems also a byproduct of a similar frustration. Both romances were marked by a lack of climax, both have left their male counterparts sexually stunted.

That the question of which relationship is to be maintained and which is to be re-sparked depends so heavily on impending air travel doesn’t merely create tangible urgency, it makes grandiose the seemingly petty matters of just two people on Earth, the first couple caught in the crossfire of WWII, the other bridging a contemporary political gap. Importantly, both films also take place in their respective here-and-nows, their political allegiances and social awareness helping to prop up minor characters as something greater. Casablanca’s freedom fighters and Before Sunset’s evocation of “freedom fries” are both symptomatic of their times rather than outrightly dogmatic; both manage to locate love itself as shockingly resilient, no matter how dubious the surrounding climate. Jesse stays, Ilsa leaves, yet both conclusions could end the years of doubt and longing, infinite dreams suddenly replaced by tangible goals. Time—of the years spent apart, of the hours left in their meeting—only intensifies regret and expectation, ever widening the gap between illusion and reality; ultimately one has to take refuge in the illusion to risk facing reality permanently. Which do the final ten minutes of Before Sunset represent? Once we enter the nearly magical, casually sacred realm of Cèline’s impenetrable castle walls, we fall back into a sort of otherworldly complacency. The only way for Rick and Ilsa’s love affair to continue on even after they’ve been parted is for them to revel in the illusory nature of their meeting (“We’ll always have Paris.”). Likewise, Jesse and Cèline will always have Paris, yet the stability of their future depends on the willingness to stay in their dreamworld or the choice to face the realities outside and what lies waiting for them if and when they choose to board that plane.

More on Before Sunset:
Richard Linklater interview
Scott's Before Sunset
Rowin's Before Sunset
Plouffe's Before Sunset
Reichert's Before Sunset

Back to Top