NYFF: Summer Hours (2008)

[This is the eleventh part in an open series of reports from the New York Film Festival.]

Olivier Assayas is a prolific auteur. Summer Hours is Assayas’s third feature in two years, following Boarding Gate, a muddled dimebag noir depicting an implausible relationship between the gravel-voiced Michael Madsen and the melodramatically languorous Asia Argento, and Eldorado, a television documentary chronicling Angelin Preljocaj’s efforts to choreograph Karlheinz Stockhausen’s imposing Sonntags-Abschied. Summer Hours, with a premise nowhere nearly as Chekhovian as the situation suggests, is a considerable improvement from Boarding Gate, involving three middle-aged scions in an artistic family attempting to corral a family legacy against their own financial needs.

It doesn’t quite live up to its full potential, but it certainly comes close. Mother, a cheerfully depressed and easily tired woman who we get to know in the film’s first half hour, dies. Father — a renowned artist named Paul Berthier — has been dead for some time. The Berthier home, built over the years into a summer retreat for the family and populated with expensive furniture and art, is ready for the auction block.

Assayas is on point here thematically. Charles Berling, who is looking more and more like Aidan Quinn with each movie, plays Frédéric, the most interesting character of the three. He’s an economist courting controversy with his books, but remains very much in doubt about who he is. He cannot connect with his teenage daughter, but attempts to reach out to her with liberalism, only to see these slippy efforts resisted. He lives very much in his father’s shadow, but Assayas is wise enough to keep this detail under the surface. (Indeed, Paul Berthier survives in this film largely as a memory.) We do see Frédéric break down in a car hours after he has learned that his mother has died: the suggestion here being that the responsibilities of being “adult” have led Frédéric to defer his emotions. This breakdown comes shortly after a radio appearance in which he has calmly duked it out with cultural pundits. (Later, when a major decision has been reached, he sits in a dark room staring out the window. He cannot confess to his understanding wife that he is crying.) The bookstores want him for readings and appearances. But Frédéric says in response to this success, “Writing this book has just brought me trouble.” But he insists on overseeing the family legacy. He wants the family to hold onto the home, but it’s largely because he’s incapable of seeing the developments in the present.

Frédéric’s other two siblings are Adrienne (a blonde Juliette Binoche who is given top billing here, but whose contributions are supporting at best), a fashion designer in New York now trying for Husband No. 2 in the dubious form of an “artistic director of an Internet magazine” (played, with a nod to Assayas’s next generation theme, by Clint Eastwood’s son) and whose feelings are often given the short end of the stick (even her engagement announcement is trumped by family news), and Jérémie (played by the striking Jérémie Renier), an industrialist looking for lucre with a shoe company in the Far East who has no problem rattling off such pronouncements as “The future is making cheap sneakers by exploiting cheap labor” in front of the family. So if Frédéric can’t pave his own way, then it’s either hard art or hard business for the next generation of Berthiers. But these respective overseas circumstances will certainly keep the other two from visiting the summer home.

Aside from these two siblings, Assayas suggests quite adeptly with his editing that time will march on despite Frédéric’s emotions. Months often pass by during the course of the film, but Assayas keeps his transitions quite muted, sometimes cutting directly to the next scene, which is set weeks later, and sometimes finishing up a scene with an unobtrusive fadeout. For example, at one point, we see that Frédéric has grown a beard. Fifteen minutes later in film time, the beard is gone. Cinematographer Eric Gautier, who also shot A Christmas Tale, likewise keeps his camera whipping and panning at the fleeting pace of the present. The camera frequently dollies up to a door, slightly ajar or open, but very rarely moves through it, as if to suggest the inability of these characters to make an active decision.

This intriguing visual psychology anchors the film thematically, but Assayas’s ending, which involves something of a handover of the home to free market forces and the next generation, suggests a stylistic imbalance between characters and theme. The cherry picking is intended to connote Chekhov, but it’s far more literal-minded in its execution. These characters are left sitting in museums, no more different from the caged objects that once presided in the family home. But Assayas’s inability to focus on how these people will move forward comes off as considerably disingenuous in light of the complexities he embeds beneath the surface. But if Charles Berling is Assayas’s DeNiro, perhaps he might find a more satisfying balance in a future offering.

NYFF: The Northern Land (2008)

[This is the tenth part in an open series of reports from the New York Film Festival.]

In considering The Northern Land (aka A Corte do Norte), adapted from a Agustina Bessa-Luís novel by director João Botelho and José Álvaro Morais (mysteriously listed in the IMDB as dead, which suggests an intriguing collaboration if you believe in the afterlife), I am compelled to present the following positive facts about Portugal:

  • Portugal has a high Human Development Index and is among the world’s 20 highest countries rated in terms of quality of life.
  • Portugal is ranked as the 8th freest press in the world. (This beats out the United States, quite a bit, in case you were wondering.
  • Portugal has its own form of martial arts called jogo du pau, in which fighters kick the asses of other fighters using staffs.
  • As we all know, Portugal’s capital is Lisbon. And as names for capital cities go, this is quite pleasant to say. Because it sounds much colder than it really is. And then after you’ve said “Lisbon” for the seventy-seventh time, you realize that this is a city name with some character.
  • According to the CIA World Factbook’s page on Portugal, “Azores and Madeira Islands occupy strategic locations along western sea approaches to Strait of Gibraltar.” I do not know the degree to which the Portuguese population itself is aware of these places of beauty as “strategic locations,” but given that The Northern Land is set in this area, I suspect that, on this level, filmmaker Botelho knew what he was doing.
  • You can expect to live about 74.78 years if you are a Portuguese man and 81.53 years if you are a Portuguese woman.
  • Portugal’s literacy rate? 93.3%!

And this is only scratching the surface. There are many good things that one can say about Portugal. I am trying to stay positive. This film’s muddled digital look did not help matters. (And should one call this a film if it does not look like a film?)

However, I am struggling to find something cheery to say about this film. (Let us be fair and aesthetically progressive here.) On a rather base T&A level, Botelho is to be commended for including one interesting costume featuring a single boob sticking out. No doubt the intention here was to bring a peculiar sartorial quality to the proceedings. But this is essentially a Merchant-Ivory-style film that will put any sensible person to sleep. I should note that I checked my cell phone five times during the course of this film to determine the time, and I am a very patient person. I should also note that this film attempts to express sympathy for a family that is squandering its considerable affluence over the course of a century. In light of the current economic disaster and the egregious bailout bill (a zombie in Congress?) that is currently scaring the hell out of anyone with money, this was not exactly a theme that floated my own particular dinghy.

Botelho also has a rather intrusive narrator describing the action for us. The narrator was so lifeless that I longed for a bon mot from Guy Debord. But here’s the thing. Botelho resists dramatizing this action. And what’s more, he has the characters on the screen frozen in their actions while the narrator continues her plodding narration. And the actors deliver their most impassioned performances while they are frozen. When they are released by the narrator, they became less interesting to me. And I was so disinterested in their lives that I longed for them to kill themselves. Fortunately, Botelho does kill a few of them off. But it’s simply not enough.

This, I would contend, is a bad cinematic strategy. When the most compelling visual that a filmmaker presents is a smug and affluent man sitting naked in a large bathing dish, waiting for servants to douse him with water, I likewise must suggest that the filmmaker has failed in some sense. Let me put it this way. I longed to revisit Bullet in the Head and Serbis.

But that’s just me. This is, after all, the New York Film Festival. And that cultural imprimatur will persuade enough misguided cineastes that The Northern Land is a beautiful film. And it certainly is beautiful in the same way that a particularly striking postcard purchased at Duane Reade is beautiful. The people who inhabit this film are not beautiful. Nor are they particularly interesting.

“This island is killing me,” says one member of the spoiled Barros family. And I suppose that this individual had a point. When your biggest worry in life is a bunch of people laughing at you, and when you declare such a common snafu to be an unmitigated “disaster,” and when the insult itself involves being called a “smelly Boal” (about as tepid an insult in any epoch), chances are that just about anything is going to kill your oversensitive soul. Such is the Barros family.

But if you’re the kind of person who genuinely believes that “I have never looked upon my father as a rich man” is the worst insult known to humankind, I suspect you’ll have a better time at this film than I did.

The Bat Segundo Show: Mike Leigh

Mike Leigh is the filmmaker behind Naked, Life is Sweet, Vera Drake, and, most recently, Happy-Go-Lucky, which is currently playing the New York Film Festival (among many others) and opens in the United States on October 10.

Condition of Mr. Segundo: Too unhappy and too unlucky.

Guest: Mike Leigh

Subjects Discussed: Vocational symmetries within Leigh’s films, Oscar Wilde, looking at a community, bad teachers, Leigh’s considerable frustrations about Poppy being “too happy,” the difficulties of filming Poppy’s jewelry, audience members misperceiving details, the confusion over Scott being a taxi driver, Bechdel’s Rule, depicting women who aren’t in relationships, the duty to portray life, Leigh’s problems with semiotics, collaborating with cinematographer Dick Pope, feeling the buzz of a visual instinct, devising Naked‘s opening shot, getting an Ozu fix, pursuing the issue of technology, flamenco dancing, MySpace, drawings and investigating domestic violence, “En-ra-ha,” Aleister Crowley, gloomy bookstore employees and literary references, shooting in High Definition, and film financing.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Leigh: But as to the jewelry as a symbol of cyclical anything, I don’t know whether I’d go along with that one.

Correspondent: Okay. Well, fair enough.

Leigh: (laughs) Nice try.

Correspondent: Well, let’s talk about another possible symbol. The back pain that she experiences. This to me suggests that here we have Poppy moving forward as her specific identity — “happy-go-lucky” — and yet there is this pain in the back. And, of course, she laughs it off while she’s at the chiropractor’s office. But the thing that’s fascinating about this to me is that, well, this is behind her. So it’s almost as if she has her blinders on. She’s so focused in on moving forward that she doesn’t notice what she’s feeling in the back. And I’m wondering again how much one should read symbols into these particular choices.

Leigh: I think as we progress into this conversation — I think you are plainly a fundamental, unreconstituted, top-rate intellectual. Which I’m not. I think it’s fascinating, your analysis. But I think it’s a load of old rope. Basically. And I can’t go along with it at all. I mean, the fact is, she gets a bend in the back because she pulls her back when she’s trampolining. And it happens to be her back because that’s what she pulls. The back muscle. I think what’s more interesting about that unfortunate thing that happens to her, which gets fixed by an osteopath, not a chiropractor…

Correspondent: My apologies.

Leigh: No, no, you couldn’t, you know. But I think what is interesting, I’ve found, is that, you know, a lot of people — this has nothing to do with your question, but it’s talking about the same part of the film.

Correspondent: Sure.

Leigh: The same aspect of what happens to Poppy. You know, people are conditioned — mainly, courtesy of Hollywood — into the inevitability that something terrible is going to happen. And a number of people have thought, “Oh! She’s got cancer of the kidneys! That’s what this film is about!” Partly because the last film I made was about an abortionist. The fact is that it’s not about that. People say, “Well, couldn’t something terrible happen to her in the film?” And then you think of that. And you say, “No. Because that’s not what it’s about.” Of course, this could become a film about a woman who dies of cancer of the kidneys. But so what? That’s not what it’s about. It’s about somebody who giggles at stuff and is positive.

Correspondent: You also quibbled in another interview over people identifying Scott as a taxi driver instead of a driving instructor.

Leigh: Yeah, people say “that scene with the taxi driver.” I mean, it’s amazing. The number of people everywhere — here, in Paris, in London, in Berlin, and we’re talking about international fests — who call him a taxi driver. And it’s very curious. It’s as though this is a film about an airline pilot and people are calling him a doctor. It’s very strange.

Correspondent: I mean, I’m wondering. Could it be the way that you actually shot him? Because I know that you and Mr. Pope actually used lipstick cams to get…

Leigh: No, no. Come on. You cannot construct any correlation between how the film was shot and the fact that, for some reason, people call a driving instructor a taxi driver. You really can’t do that.

Correspondent: So it’s the audience’s problem. Not yours.

Leigh: No, no. It’s just a weird thing. I mean, I don’t think it’s even a problem. It’s just a strange quirk. But I don’t think anything should be made of it really.

BSS #238: Mike Leigh (Download MP3)

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NYFF: Bullet in the Head (2008)

[This is the ninth part in an open series of reports from the New York Film Festival.]

Your intrepid reporter has lined up several interviews with filmmakers and has even braved a press conference. (I try to be spontaneous whenever I attend mammoth expositions of this sort, but I wasn’t entirely aware that there was a press conference component to some of the screenings. A good reporter, however, always comes prepared. Just don’t ask what essential items I have in my backpack. I’m sure that my arsenal is somewhat unorthodox. But among the ordnance was some equipment to perform a little experiment.) The press conference did not quite work out to my satisfaction, but I now have a plan in place that should work well for next week.

I saw two films today: one very, very good, the other very, very bad. And there’s still have another film (good) from yesterday that I need to cover. So let’s get the bad apple out of the way first, shall we?

Jaime Rosales’s Bullet in the Head, which by no means should be confused with John Woo’s entertaining 1990 action flick of the same name, is a sleep-inducing mess that should be avoided at all costs. If you’ve been reading the nearly 10,000 words (!) I’ve generated here, you may recall that I expressed certain reservations with Serbis. I was fairly certain that I wouldn’t see a film that could be worse. Much to my regret, I was proved wrong this afternoon. (It’s a strange coincidence that probably means nothing, but I must point it out. Both films feature a sound mix loaded with intrusive street traffic.)

Despite copious quantities of coffee that were ingested very carefully in the morning, your intrepid reporter was forced to slap his cheeks in order to stay awake. Not just once. Four times. Unfortunately, I was not armed with a large trout that could probably wake me up in one slap. So I had to settle for palms that needed to do it in four. I caught a glimpse of my mug in the mirror about an hour ago and espied a slightly pinkish mark from these pelts. Let it not be said that your intrepid reporter nodded off on the job. I cannot say the same for some of my colleagues.

Let us be clear. Within Rosales’s film lies a perfectly interesting concept for a good 15 minute short. This is a film determined to tell its story without a line of dialogue. And with the exception of a character yelling “Fucking cops!” twice, it clings quite devoutly to this credo. I presume that this “artistic” choice was made so that the film would stand a better chance of being accepted into film festivals around the world. Or maybe the idea here was to cut down on the subtitling bill. Whatever the motivations, Rosales’s approach shares much in common with the flawed but interesting 1952 film, The Thief, which starred Ray Milland as a physicist and did not feature a single line of dialogue. But The Thief, for all of its problems, at least gave us an FBI agent pursuing Milland and featured the Empire State Building. Rosales’s film, by contrast, features not a single distinguishing landmark. Nor is there an FBI agent.

I would have liked an FBI agent.

There are, however, two cops. But they don’t really look like cops and they don’t really offer what one might identify as cop-like behavior. Instead of the character shouting “Fucking cops!,” he might have yelled “Fucking nondescript guys around thirty!” I contend that this would have been a slightly subversive and more entertaining line of dialogue for Rosales to deploy. And if Rosales had inserted this line into the movie, I would have been the first to declare Rosales a genius. But “Fucking cops!” is what we have to work with here. So “Fucking cops!” it shall be.

Bullet in the Head, for its first hour, doesn’t clue us into the possibility that there might actually be a bullet fired into someone’s head. The film saves this violent moment for later. So if you’re looking for a bullet in the head, you’ll get one. Just don’t expect anything spectacular. And I may have spoiled the film a bit by pointing out the cops. But maybe I’m not really giving anything away because the movie is, after all, called Bullet in the Head. So there’s a certain promise here in the title that the film has to live up to.

We see characters talking behind windows, across the street, at the other end of a restaurant, and at pay phones. Strangely enough, nobody in this movie seems to own a set of blinds or drapes. Which strikes me as damn curious and damn convenient, especially since we see the stoic Ion (played by a burly guy named Ion Arretxe, which suggests that Rosales is quite lazy in naming his characters) getting it on with his girlfriend/wife. Rosales, to his credit, does occlude our view of the events quite frequently, having people pass while the camera pans, thus deliberately mangling the camera move. He does sometimes choose interesting and incongruous audio to play over the visuals, such as a basketball court in the film’s establishing shot of Ion’s apartment. The actors don’t overexpress with their hands too much. And there is one amusing moment at a restaurant in which three people try to look over at another table without suspicion, and their body language indicates how obvious their efforts to be sneaky are.

But this film isn’t called Views Through a Window. It’s called Bullet in the Head! And your intrepid reporter, being a patient man, eagerly awaited a payoff. But there was none. There was indeed no compelling narrative to speak of. No particular detail within the apartment decor that might have said something about the characters. But I can assure you based on the number of eating shots that Ion is a character who likes to eat.

I suppose I would have enjoyed this film if I could (a) read lips and (b) read lips that spoke Spanish. But I am only slightly competent in (a) and utterly incompetent at (b). And if Rosales really wanted us to know what the characters were saying, he would have provided us with audio and/or subtitles.

So what we have here is a pretty disappointing film — indeed, one so disappointing that there was an audible hiss from the critics when the credits rolled. And while I’m not a guy who likes to fall into critical consensus, I will admit that the hissers had a good point. I certainly hope that Rosales’s misfire doesn’t hinder other filmmakers from making films without dialogue. There is much within our body language and our actions that is interesting without silly lines getting in the way. But these future filmmakers may want to consider including an FBI agent.

NYFF: Four Nights with Anna (2008)

[This is the eighth part in an open series of reports from the New York Film Festival.]

(Our podcast interview with filmmaker Jerzy Skolimowski can be found here.)

Much like American filmmaker Terrence Malick, Polish auteur Jerzy Skolimowski spent a large chunk of time out of commission. But he now returns to cinema after a seventeen year absence with Four Nights with Anna (now making the film festival rounds and emerging next week in New York) and America, a film currently in production. That Skolimowski never quite received the laurels awarded to the likes of Roman Polanski and Andrzej Wajda is something of an unpardonable oversight. For Skolimowski demonstrated with 1982’s Moonlighting that he was an adept and muted iconoclast. In that film, he took aim at the Polish government’s assault on the Solidarity movement through a very straightforward premise: a group of Polish workers, recruited because they can work for cheap, remodels a London house for a diplomat. But the central Polish figure (played by Jeremy Irons) begins to steal food and desperately hits on women. And his behavior offers the audience a Rorschach test about the degree to which Irons’s personal plundering is politically motivated, also raising questions about the responsibility Westerners have to take care of immigrants.

A house likewise figures into Four Nights with Anna. It is a ramshackle and nearly uninhabitable domicile assembled together with stray bits of lumber, and it is occupied by a clumsy, middle-aged man named Leon (played by Artur Steranko). We learn early on that Leon has served some prison time. He wears an ill-fitting jacket that barely confines his chunky frame. He circles around other people, as if terrified of the possibilities of social interaction. He is clumsy, frequently slipping into the mud. He is also quite a creepy protagonist, reminiscent of the protagonist in Ross Raisin’s novel, Out Backward, and it’s not just because he works for a crematorium and keeps malodorous body parts in his shack just before disposing of them. For he also spends his spare time peeping at his neighbor — the titular (in more than one sense of the word) Anna, a nurse who we likewise obtain sparse details about and whose house Leon frequently wanders into through the window. Anna has plenty of friends who will come to her birthday party, but she spends much of her time alone. We see her purchasing bottles of wine and cigarettes with a friend. But she doesn’t notice Leon at the store. Indeed, she doesn’t seem to be aware of his presence next door. Or so we are led to believe.

It was something of a brave gesture on Skolimowski’s part to present Anna largely from Leon’s perspective. We know almost nothing about her, aside from her avocation and (in flashback; or is it flashforward?) the horrible fact that she was raped. This presents Kinga Preis, who plays Anna, with a scenario in which she is objectified by Leon and therefore the camera, which could not have been an easy thespic sell when Skolimowski was casting. Anna, however, was not necessarily raped by Leon. Leon stumbled upon the rape in progress and, if we are to believe him, did nothing and ran away. He then served a prison sentence because he was unable to recall quite what happened, although his account, if we are to rely on it, involves a dead cow floating down a river and a siren timed either before or after.

Skolimowski’s central question here involves what Polish society should do with a person like Leon. And he wisely avoids a full explanation about Leon’s backstory. We learn that Leon was raped while in prison, but I felt this, and a few other details, were needless efforts to capitulate to the audience’s empathy. After all, should we not accept Leon for who he is? The degree to which an audience member is likely to demonize Leon reflects the degree of empathy that an audience member is likely to feel for the less palatable members of society. To suggest this, Skolimowski’s camera frequently tracks along the windows of houses and down streets, and this visual decision affords us a sideways glance that doesn’t even begin to delve into his tortured psyche. Leon may be a creepy voyeur, but we are just as much voyeurs when it comes to people like Leon. For we have only superficial ideas about their lives to go by. And Skolimowski suggests that there’s something sadly contemporary about this moral hypocrisy by placing two specific items in Anna’s house: (1) an old clock that Leon tries to repair and (2) an artificial waterfall landscape confined within a box that lulls Anna to sleep. The wry imputation here is that Anna, much like many seemingly well-adjusted members of society, prefers to ignore the reality of passing time, itself a more quantifiable measure, for a false atmospheric screen that blocks out the more troubled members of society. As we learn later in the film, she is indeed very aware of Leon. Perhaps more aware than we ever anticipated.

The film, however, has grave problems. As I’ve suggested, Skolimowski tries to have it both ways. Leon is someone we should empathize with based on sketchy information. But Leon is also someone we should empathize with because he is ordered by a tough police officer who has asked Leon for a statement to pick up an ashtray that he has knocked to the floor. There is the suggestion of cyclical behavioral patterns with one deadpan joke involving Leon being accused of stealing a ring from a disembodied hand. Later, after this scenario has been resolved, we see Leon purchasing another ring, which he wishes to give to Anna. While this is an interesting semiotic, it doesn’t entirely submerge us into the ethical quandary of Skolimowski’s central question. Thus, the film doesn’t quite live up to the complexities presented in Skolimowski’s other films.

But it is good to have Skolimowski back in the saddle, even if this latest offering offers decidedly mixed results. Perhaps Skolimowski’s next film, which, like Moonlighting, deals with a Polish emigrants attempting to find an identity in another nation, might see Skolimowski achieve another masterpiece in his autumn years.

NYFF: Serbis (2008)

[This is the seventh part in an open series of reports from the New York Film Festival.]

I suspect that Brilliante Mendoza’s Serbis will make suckers (although certainly not in the head-bobbing sense we see here) of those looking for an “authentic” depiction of the underworld. Every open-minded “critic” needs a film that suggests a depiction of life that the critic has no experience in, but can vicariously “understand” because he has seen it represented on cinema. Therefore, by way of the “different” perspective, narrative fallacies that wouldn’t be accepted in a more conventional story are somehow protected. Serbis (meaning service, as in “A cheap blowjob, sir?” although this may very well translate into the equally applicable “Would you like fries with that suckoff?”), is fervently dedicated to fellatio, rent boys, ruptured men’s room pipes, and other seemingly sordid imagery. I found it to be a bore and longed for a William T. Vollmann book. The film’s problem is not just that we have nobody to really care about, but that there is simply no contextual investigation into the realities that keep these characters toiling in a porn theater.

“I’m a certified nurse,” says the stern Nayda, “What the hell am I doing here?” I likewise hoped for an answer to that question, particularly since we see later on the wall that Nayda has actually earned a Bachelor of Science. Which would suggest that she’s a bit more than just a certified nurse.

The Pinedas are a dysfunctional family operating the Family Theater, a movie house (the last of three apparently; the other two have closed down) dedicated to such offerings as Seedling and Frolic in the Water. Every week, there’s a new set of reels delivered with a new movie. But the man delivering the goods doesn’t offer any small talk. He simply says, “See you next week.” The Family matriarch, Nanay, is busy in court, suing her husband for bigamy and the folks who work this movie house, adorned with posters and paintings of half-dressed women, await text messages on the verdict. A smart kid named Jonas (who is also bespectacled, living up to the nerdy cliche) runs around, playing Minesweeper on his computer and dazzling various family members with his apparent math wizardry. You’d think the kid’s math skills would come in handy for counting change, but one episode demonstrates that the Pinedas are easily duped. Then there’s Alan, who has a boil the size of a nipple on his ass. Subtlety, as we can see, is not a strong suit for screenwriter Armando Lao and Mendoza.

This is all shot in a Dogme 95 style, with the sounds of the street blaring over key pieces of dialogue and what little emotion we’re permitted to espy, along with shaky handheld camera work that now seems something of a visual relic here in the 21st century.

But any movie featuring a slightly surreal moment with a goat running around a theater’s filthy floors and nuns falling down in the street can’t be all bad, can it? I latched onto these two images because I found myself desperate for some larger framework, some visceral inroads that would help me to parse the poverty beyond the film’s simplistic dichotomy (sex workers and family members) occupying the same premises. I was struck by one moment in which a mother holding a small child asks Nayda if her son, who is sixteen, might be inside. Nayda insists that the theater doesn’t let minors in and brushes her away. But it is quite evident that underage sex workers are getting some pocket money on the inside. Nobody cares to observe.

Lao and Mendoza, however, don’t offer us any complex motivations that might make us more fascinated by this tragedy. There’s one interesting moment in which a prostitute is teaching another aspiring streetwalker how to walk down stairs to attract johns. And the handover of this very basic body language is somewhat stunning to take in, particularly as other sex workers surround these two figures without a trace of empathy. It’s just a simple business transaction.

I paid attention to the porn music just to stay remotely interested, and discovered that one piece playing over pumping bodies bore a striking resemblance to Taxi Driver. I wonder if Bernard Hermann’s estate received a check. Probably not.

But like most failed artistic efforts to find the real, this film presented more disinterest than interest. The problem boils down, so to speak, to one simple maxim: If there isn’t a narrative, atmosphere ain’t enough, no matter how noble the intentions.

NYFF: Shuga (2007)

[This is the sixth part in an open series of reports from the New York Film Festival.]

Film adaptations of the Russian literary greats have, for the most part, been disastrous. One counts Martha Fiennes’s wretched 1999 attempt to transform Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin and King Vidor’s bland 1959 version of Tolstoy’s War and Peace as two primary offenders. (For my money, the campy Dostoevsky transmutation, Crime and Punishment in Suburbia, with its superficial teen angst and a chunky Michael Ironside cast slightly against type was, for all of its considerable flaws, far more engaging than these two turkeys. And that’s saying something.) And when one confines this relationship to the problematic Anna Karenina, discounting the protracted television adaptations (some not bad, but one 1985 version preposterously casting Christopher Reeve as Count Vronsky), it should be observed that not even the talented and literary-minded Bernard Rose could make a worthwhile Karenina in 1997. Perhaps Anna Karenina is, like Don Quixote, not really intended to be adapted. And while the fates have tilted against those tilting at windmills (including Orson Welles and Terry Gilliam), they have kept a more laissez-faire with regard to this Tolstoy masterpiece.

Filmmaker Darezhan Omirbaev, however, has no such qualms attempting to beat the rap with Shuga. With the deck firmly stacked against him, he tries to tackle Tolstoy in a mere 90 minutes, which is the creative equivalent of the All-England Summarize Proust Competition. He chops whole sections of exposition, but in the process he also chops much-needed moments for character development. As a result, Alexei Karenin appears here as a laconic and gloomy man who smoothly picks up his cell phone at the coat check and casually orders thugs to beat up Vronsky (the violent suffering here in lieu of the steeplechase). This simplistic character might have worked if Omirbaev was working the yakuza genre. But for a film with such narrative heft to live up to, one is left here with superficial strands. The country that Shuga and Vronsky leave here is actually Paris. And while there’s an interesting undercurrent involving how cameras capture reality (Kostya here is a budding photographer and, at one point, the happy adulterous couple pass by a film crew shooting a scene in which a man sings his heart out into an apartment building’s buzzer) and children of all ages are often parked in front of televisions and GameBoy Advances, none of these thematic possibilities can atone for the film’s considerable blandness, perhaps best summarized by Omirbaev’s endless concern for birch wall paneling and a bland visual palette suggesting a close attention to the flooring section of the Home Depot catalog. “Fate will always win out,” says a philosophical pal of Kostya’s. But fate was much better captured in Tolstoy.

It also doesn’t help that Alnur Turgambayeva’s Shuga — the Kazakh Karenina — is about as interesting as a dessicated cucumber thrown into a tasteless salad. The smooth-cheeked Turgambayeva comes to us not with that allure and complexity that would make a man leave his betrothed, but with a bag of tricks that includes one ineptly commanding glare and an ability to turn her head while wearing colorful sweaters (for those curious, these sweaters come in purple and orange). Now this talent might get you somewhere if you need to grab someone’s attention at a cocktail party, but if you’re a canonized romantic figure that a film needs to hang its weight on, you probably should step aside and let someone else handle the job. Aidos Sagatov is not much better as Vronsky. He wears an isthumus-like soul patch to impart some nobility. And Omirbaev’s idea of wealth is talking on a fax machine from 1987. (For all I know, fax machines from 1987 may very well be cutting-edge in Kazakhstan. But if this is the case, what of the GameBoy Advance?) One naturally expects this douchebag to attempt suicide, as he does in Tolstoy’s book, but the closest he comes to self-oblivion is watching a video made by “friends” of the three thugs who beat the tar out of him.

There is one section right before Chuga’s inevitable trip to the train station where Omirbaev has the principal characters involved with Chuga closing a door and staring at the camera. And while again, there’s something here to be said about Omirbaev’s concern for how the camera sees, without that pivotal human behavior that Tolstoy wrote about so well, even a heavy-handed theme along these lines is useless.

I was far from the only one who grumbled about this movie. Most people after the screening were not happy at all, although I did encounter one friendly gentleman in the industry who was blown away by it. (As it turned out, our cinematic tastes were diametrically opposed.) When I pressed him on why he had enjoyed this film, his affinity was predicated largely on the film’s technical qualities and the motifs that I have outlined above.

And while I can appreciate technical qualities as much as the next film geek, I nevertheless demand emotion and engagement from a film of this type. And I think it’s safe to say that Omirbaev’s film did not cut the mustard with me. Omirbaev’s camera may be interested in walls, doors, and a blue sky painted on a ceiling dome in an opera house. But these are not the places that a camera should drift when dealing with the tortured hypocrisies of the human spirit.

NYFF: In Girum Imus Nocte Et Consumimur Igni (1978)

[This is the fifth part in an open series of reports from the New York Film Festival.]

Several people who are much smarter than I am have written plenty of words about Guy Debord’s 1978 film, In Girum Imus Nocte Et Consumimur Igni, a title which I must confess is rather difficult for me to type without looking at another browser window (currently open, right next to a minimized Explorer window urging me to search through “My Computer” and presumably my soul) and ensuring that I am not making a spelling mistake. (Yes, I could cut and paste the title, like your typical hack journalist would. And I suspect, given the thin crowd I observed, very few will actually write about it, claiming the film to be too difficult or too sophisticated. But I wish to respond to the more troubling typing gaffe at hand. Speaking only for myself, I retain some small hope that I might actually type in this Latin palindrome correctly with repeated effort. Incidentally, in case you might be wondering, this phrase stands for “We Turn in the Night, Consumed by Fire.”) And several people who are much smarter than I am will indeed be discussing this film on Friday, October 3. But I don’t believe Debord, the man best known for his Situationist activities (and if we mere consumer slaves take this film at face value, Debord was one of the finest egotists that mid-20th century French philosophy had to offer) would have approved of this staged commentary. The film, after all, ends with the subtitle: TO BE GONE THROUGH AGAIN FROM THE BEGINNING. Which I think is a pretty clear instruction. So would it not have made more sense for the good people at the Lincoln Center to simply play the film twice for the benefit of any party who may not have parsed Debord’s words correctly the first time around, rather than to have talking heads attempt to explain the film for the audience? The assembled parties, last I heard, had no intention of excusing themselves.

And I certainly don’t believe that Debord would have approved of some balding blogger, who is, at present, clutching a copy of the film’s script that was kindly handed out by the good people at the Lincoln Center and is now again getting lost in Debord’s considerable thoughts, their relationship to the images, and is wondering why very few people make films quite like this anymore and what possible “take” I might offer.

For that matter, I don’t think that any reader (and especially French philosophers) would approve of these last two paragraphs, which are mired in needless clauses and parenthetical asides, and don’t really get anywhere close to conveying my rather amazing cinematic experience on Saturday morning, in which I was barely awake, peering around desperately for a caffeine drip, greeted in the dark by a dry and bitter French voice unloading a steady stream of anti-consumerist language, followed by personal adventures in the Left Bank that were truly not that different from the usual n+1 ravings (i.e., douchebag entitlement), but becoming, nevertheless, quite fascinated by the images of pilfered trailers from mediocre films, endless tracking shots across water, and assorted stills of overhead shots of Paris, various grids, and crummy-looking buildings.

This was indeed Paris, ten years after the riots and the failed experiment. And Debord, in 1978, did not like it one bit:

It was in Paris, a city that was then so beautiful that many people preferred to be poor there rather than rich anywhere else.

Who, now that nothing of it remains, will be able to understand this, apart from those who remember its glory? Who else could know the pleasures and exhaustions we experienced in these neighborhoods where everything has now become so abysmal?

Now the degree to which you can accept the veracity of this statement will probably inform the degree to which you enjoy Debord’s film. This is a man, knowing very well that he has enslaved his audience for 100 minutes, who proceeds to kvetch even grander than Jean-Paul Sartre. He often removes the images entirely, giving us either all-black and all-white for several minutes, so that the audience will be reminded of who is in command. (The film was made in an epoch before the remote control offered us the mute button.) He prides himself in his voiceover for being an intolerable gadfly. He regrets nothing, saying to us, “I remain completely incapable of imagining how I could have done anything any differently.” He suggests that he and his fellow gadflies are somehow superior because they did not apply for grants and did not go on television. Those who have not begun to live in some individual (and presumably Debord-like) fashion “are waiting for nothing less than a permanent paradise,” which might be identified as a job promotion or a total revolution. But Debord’s purpose was actually quite simple: “For our aim had been none other than to provoke a practical and public division between those who still want the existing world and those who will decide to reject it.”

I’m making Debord come across like an insufferable asshole. And while this may be somewhat true, the salient point I took away from this film was that there is now nobody like Debord who is telling the truth like this — even if Debord himself only half-believed it. It seems that something terrible has been lost in the last twenty years. A dessication of identity. A capitulation. I am not aware of anybody using the great possibilities provided to us by YouTube making a film like this who doesn’t care about the audience and who doesn’t care about how their offerings are perceived. It’s all about giving into the slim possibilities of fifteen minutes of fame, rather than living a lifetime of unapologetic infamy.

So Debord’s film comes at us forty years later reminding us that there was an altogether different type of provocateur who held various mediums hostage and used this to extort an audience into challenging their assumptions. Tout à fait brillant! If anyone will now listen to the man, his words are perhaps more important than any of us anticipated.

NYFF: Tokyo Sonata (2008)

[This is the fourth part in an open series of reports from the New York Film Festival. For related material, you can read my interview with screenwriter Max Mannix or listen to a podcast interview with director Kiyoshi Kurosawa.]

Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Tokyo Sonata sees the Japanese horror director shifting gears to a more internal terror: the tendency of passive-aggressive men to prevaricate, pretend, and otherwise put on an act as they lose their jobs, watch their sons shipped off to Iraq, and capitulate to a wretched consumerism that promises to be their future job security. Kurosawa’s conceit (cooked up in collaboration with Australian writer Max Mannix) is that nearly every individual is as disposable as the newspaper blown into a home that we see in the film’s opening shot.

Numata Sasaki (Teruyuki Kagawa) is an administrator who is downsized. He does not tell his wife. As far as he’s concerned, if he just hands over the money every month and spend the working hours out of the house, she’ll never know. As he attempts to find work, he cannot tell anyone what his job skills are and, in one terrible scene, he mumbles something about being a good karaoke singer and is humiliated before a middle-manager half his age, asked to use a pen as a microphone. He meets up with a high school buddy, another out of work man who is likewise all dressed up with no place to go who is now reduced to wandering around with a cell phone that automatically goes off five times every hour, pretending that he’s about to close a deal or attend a meeting. “I do it to calm my nerves,” he says.

What makes Tokyo Sonata‘s first deadpan hour, in particular, work so well is how Kurosawa depicts this madness like a grand Ozu parody. He regularly crosses the 180 line with his cutting, adopting Ozu’s 360 degree rule. He even has a subway line running right behind the Sasaki home, evoking Ozu’s trains, as if to suggest that this is the kind of warped film Ozu would make if he had had the misfortune to be born four decades later.

Kurosawa frequently has his side characters hiding their private moments, such as a piano teacher who takes a call concerning her divorce, but who hides halfway behind a wall. We don’t see the phone, even though we clearly hear her terrible reality. Kurosawa also takes great advantage of the organization men walking in precise lines to their jobs, their trains, and their lives as a whole. This is a world in which a teacher can be easily accused of reading porn manga by a kid and the teacher won’t be fazed by the accusation. “I’m an adult,” says the teacher of the accusation, “so it hardly bothers me.” But this “responsible” adult is quick to accuse the kid of owning a graphic novel that he had the misfortune of passing in class. In the end, the inauthentic nature of these charges puts an end to his authority.

Numata’s younger son wishes to pursue piano. But with his father putting his authoritative foot down, the son is forced to steal his monthly lunch allotment and dig through the trash for a keyboard he can approximate his finger dancing on. Never mind that he might very well be a musical prodigy.

Numata’s older son, just about an adult, spends his time handing out flyers. But he’s eager to do something meaningful. And with the United States looking for fresh military recruits, there’s always the armed forces to fall back on. As to Numata’s wife, despite possessing a few more smarts than the men in her family, her role is merely a homemaker who has obtained a driver’s license.

These existential dilemmas unfold at a snail’s pace. But the slowness permits one to get the lay of the land, to see this terrible terrain common to all developed nations with a fresh eye. Unfortunately, Kurosawa and Mannix don’t quite trust this premise and a jarring moment of violence kickstarts an array of dei ex machinis, threatening to completely undo the film. But this unwise drift into needless coincidences and Godard-like shenanigans that don’t really suit Kurosawa’s talents so well is redeemed by a moment near the end in which people are forced to stare deep into the heart of beauty. Kurosawa’s terrible conclusion is that one routine simply replaces another. Reality has become a terrain in which shell-shocked awe has overcome effusiveness. Even when some turn to crime, it is only because they aren’t capable of doing anything else, and, even here, the efforts are bungled badly.

So Kurosawa’s sonata, lacking the vocals of a proper cantata, dares to show us our own voiceless world. Without our identities, we’re reduced to pretending that things will work out, bandying about in service sector jobs, and ignoring the heartfelt passions that can be readily observed in others. This film is a damning indictment of humanity’s position in the present age, and it didn’t sit too well with some of the pretentious types I heard bitching and moaning in the back of the screening room about how slow the film was. In an age in which we’re become accustomed to easily digestible (and easily forgettable) entertainments and MTV cutting, Tokyo Sonata is a film which demands us to slow down and look at what we’ve become. It doesn’t present any solutions. But then answering the question of how we get out of this mess is not the filmmaker’s job. It’s the work of those who speak up and dare to live.

NYFF: A Christmas Tale (2008)

[This is the third part in an open series of reports from the New York Film Festival.]

Arnaud Desplechin’s A Christmas Tale, despite its wintry title, is more A Midsummer Night’s Dream than Shakespeare’s Sicilian family saga, and the propinquitous tipoff here involves the 1935 film adaptation with Olivia de Havilland playing on a television set. However, at one point, a character informs family patriarch and dye manufacturer Abel Vuillard (played by the gravely-voiced Jean-Paul Rossilon) that his cologne makes him smell like Italy. The film is set largely over the course of four days, as fractious family members gather for the Christmas holiday. Desplechin’s film then is something of a cross between Home for the Holidays and Gosford Park, but without the former’s more pronounced domestic nightmares and the latter’s chessboard approach to unexpected connections between people. This is more of a light drawing room comedy, but avoids Noel Coward’s witticisms and, thankfully, manners. One keenly follows these many characters over the course of two and a half hours and feels, at times, as trapped as the family, contending with Desplechin’s dissolve-happy transitions and some wildly melodramatic backstory.

To wit: Catherine Deneuve plays the matriarch, Junon Vuillard. But unlike the Sean O’Casey play, this Junon does not work. Her drama involves a genetic condition that will lead to an early death. And a question is posed over which family member has the compatible bone marrow that will offer her a few extra years of life. (At one point, the family gathers around a blackboard, ferociously scribbling the mathematical odds with transplant or without.) Will it be the hard-drinking and prodigal son Henri, fond of getting into fistfights with in-laws and climbing outside windows jut for the hell of it? Or will it be grandson Paul, a mentally troubled teenager who sees random images of black dogs?

I’m making this film sound wilder than it is. If anything, the film could have used more hallucinations and more eccentric characters to round out this family. The manic-eyed Matthieu Amalric, who plays Henri, nearly steals the film. And because of Henri, the surrounding characters, such as a quietly tortured painter named Simon, never really get a chance to breathe. One suspects that Desplechin doesn’t entirely trust the natural impulses of his characters. Aside from the aforementioned dissolves, he regularly has the camera iris closing in on characters, much like the old silent films, and inserts homages to Vertigo and Pulp Fiction. While I realize that the French are more adept in depicting adulterous affairs than Americans, one such “midsummer” crush near the end of the film is emotionally unsatisfying, particularly since it involves an intriguing backstory of three men arguing over the woman.

I liked spending time with the Vuillards and sometimes felt as relaxed as the house guests. The house is a great depository of paintings, books, and records. The Vuillards are very tolerant with the family’s eccentric behavior, which involves daughter Elizabeth constantly sulking about the house and son Henri knocking on the door in the middle of the night, appearing with a Jewish woman who has no desire to partake in the Christian festivities. It should be observed that years before this Christmas, Elizabeth, in fact, brokered a deal in court to bail out the debt-ridden Henri. The terms involved Henri being banished from the family. But if Christmas is the seasonal panacea that brings the family together, the larger question of Henri’s long absence isn’t pursued nearly as rigorously as one might expect.

I was also unnerved by Melvil Poupaud’s close resemblance to Colin Farrell. This is certainly not Poupaud’s fault. He was no doubt born looking this way. But like Farrell, Poupaud’s character has forgotten to shave, and I kept expecting an eleventh hour sex tape to show up. It doesn’t help that Desplechin reminds us of this physical similarity by having Poupaud stand next to a film poster with Farrell’s name on it.

Desplechin, incidentally, is capable of wry subtext, such as the vulgar play-within-a-play on Christmas Eve, itself suggesting Midsummer‘s staging of Pyramus and Thisbe. The difference here is that Desplechin’s play-within-the-play has profane words shouted by young children. I can also report that, in France, The Ten Commandments plays on the television during Christmas. And it’s interesting that the French herald the birth of Christ with this televised opus while America contends with Charlton Heston’s fake beard and booming voice upon celebrating Christ’s resurrection. I was not aware of this.

But despite the unslain Abel playing Cecil Taylor and Charles Mingus, A Christmas Tale is neither particularly jazzy nor especially groundbreaking. This is somewhat surprising because Desplechin does have a few interesting ideas. When one character reads a letter, we see the man who wrote the letter reading the words against a blue backdrop. (Later in the film, when another letter is received, the light around that letter fades to black, suggesting Time stopped. But nobody ages sixteen years.) A Christmas Tale is the French cinematic equivalent of a cozy, okay in its own right, but there isn’t really a mystery and there certainly isn’t an able sleuth to delve into the modest behavioral conundrums kept ever so slightly at bay.

NYFF: 24 City (2008)

[This is the second part in an open series of reports from the New York Film Festival.]

“Chengdu / Home of the lotus-eating life” — Wan Xia

Chengdu, a city in Southwest China with a population of 10 million and a name translating out to “the country of heaven,” was once proud home to an industrial complex called Factory 420, a dry and bureaucratic cognomen that certainly does not translate out to a number lauded by those with certain recreational preferences. The factory employed numerous workers to forge munitions between the 1950s and the 1990s, before being demolished and transformed just recently into luxury apartments. Like the small towns and mid-sized metropolitan areas of America that once relied on military bases and steel mills before cataclysmic economic shifts, Chengdu was likewise dependent on this state-run factory. But Jia Zhangke’s documentary, 24 City, which chronicles the dying days before this microcosmic handover, has an altogether different lotus in mind. This is very much a film depicting how the actions of China’s government affected those who toiled in the factory in the proud name of the state, and how efforts to live while being left in the cold led to the workers developing unexpected capitalistic instincts. But it juxtaposes these very real figures with actors (such as Joan Chen playing “Little Flower”) who portray characters that “fit” within this narrative.

Jia’s opening montage sees workers occluded by the great machines, a grey industrial backdrop, and even the bright orange glow of a freshly forged rivet. As the film unfolds, windows in the factory begin to break, landscapes become more dilapidated, pop songs began to replace the melancholy orchestral score, and the film’s smooth dolly shots and stationary long takes acquire an indelible connection with the surrounding circumstances that Jia is depicting. In other words, while Jia is questioning how ideology is now changing in China, he’s likewise engaging in wry cinematic semiotics. We see a middle-aged man gulp, and then Jia cuts to a swinging light bulb. Has the man hanged himself? No, he’s just fine, as we learn a minute later. But he’s rattled from being left in the cold by his government.

At times, Jia simply films his subjects standing directly in front of the camera and he often cuts off the sound. The suggestion here is that what we’re seeing before us is real. But when one considers how the film itself is tinkering with this reality, one ends up distrusting this film as ardently as the grand authority of the Chinese governmental regime.

Indeed, one of this film’s biggest problems is that the actors aren’t nearly as compelling as the real people. There’s one nearly heartbreaking moment of Hau Lijun, a middle-aged woman describing her life as she sits in the back of a bus. She is let go from her job as a repair worker at 41. No reason other than downsizing. Her chairman tells her that she’s never been late to work and that she’s never made a mistake. She tells us about a going away dinner at a restaurant with the other sacked workers. Nobody wanted to eat. But she decided to eat just to encourage the others. She has three people to feed. She hangs a banner in her apartment reading, “Come rain, come shine, I must go forward and look for work every day.” But nobody will have her. Soon, she’s selling contraband flowers. Eventually, she does get a job. Today, she’s retired. But she sews for a little money these days because it’s something to do. She then tells us, “If you have something to do, you will age more slowly.” (And to emphasize this ironic last line, Jia flashes this in text against black, suggesting one of Godard’s title cards about Communism.)

Now how can Joan Chen compete with that? Well, she can’t. But then the film’s more fabricated “characters” tend to have more problematic ironies going on. We’re expected to believe that the still quite attractive Chen is having difficulties finding a man. Her character tells us she’s happy being single while she cries. And her character, Little Flower, was named so because she resembled Joan Chen in the 1979 film of the same name. There is also Tao Zhao as Su Na, born in 1982 and employed as a professional shopper for the rich. Her goal is to acquire as much money as possible so that her parents might live in one of the luxury apartments being erected where the former factory was. Her credentials? She is the “daughter of a worker.” But she’s not just a daughter. She plays one on TV.

Here are the problems with this postmodernist trick: (a) if one objects to it, one is assumed to not be “in on the joke” and therefore not hep to the larger game that the film purports to play, (b) if one chooses to believe in it, then one is duped and the sufferings of the real people are considered trivial, and (c) if one discards it, one dispenses with a part of Jia’s elaborate puzzle. The wise cinephile can veer without too much guilt towards option (c) and avoid the ethical dilemma of options (a) and (b), but this then forces us to come to terms with the grand whole of the narrative. If one part does not quite feel true, or is not quite authentic enough, then why is it there?

This type of manipulation is hardly new to documentaries. Perhaps the most infamous early example is Luis Bunel’s Land Without Bread, which involved Bunuel shooting a goat so that it could fall off a mountain for the camera. But Bunuel was making a satire — however brutally he employed his efforts. And if 24 City is intended as satire, then it certainly didn’t receive a laugh from the screening crowd I was with. (There is, however, a cute moment in which Jia addresses a young girl rollerskating around a patio, suggesting that however troubled Chengdu’s future is, there will indeed remain a lotus. But will it be eaten?) And I now wonder if my objections to Jia’s film are similar to those who quibbled with Bunuel in 1932.

Can it be then that distance from current events is required to fully appreciate 24 City? I don’t think so. The difference between Land Without Bread and 24 City is that the former establishes a tone that holds up through the film while the latter is an ambitious and atonal fusillade that offer several sideways glances about a development now in progress, but doesn’t quite have the guts to look at the sham of heaven straight in the face.

NYFF: RR (2007)

[This is the first part in an open series of reports from the New York Film Festival.]

“You know, I have a copy of The Rape of Europa.”

“The lineup this year was so predictable. It was almost as if they knew how to control my reactions with the programming.”

“I’ve seen so many trainspotting books. So I know what to expect from this film.”

“He’s very enthusiastic about writing for the Web. Yes, it’s not print. But it’s still something.”

These were some of the astonishing sentences that trickled into my upturned ears during the first day of press screenings for the New York Film Festival. And while I plan to cover as many of these films as I can on these pages in a quasi-gonzo style, supplementing these reports with podcasts, I feel the need to declare a few things at the onset: (a) I enjoy writing for the Web and consider it more than just “something,” (b) I have no intention of going into a film and judging on what it might be before I have seen it, and (c) if New York Post film critic Lou Lumenick tries to pull some shit with me, I will kick his ass.

Ozu, of course, loved his train shots. And one of the lengthiest shots in Godfrey Reggio’s Powaqqatsi involves a freight train rolling past the camera, gradually speeding up, for about two minutes. But James Benning’s RR, part of this year’s avant-garde series falls somewhere between a Situationist cinematic exercise and an Andy Warhol film. The film is composed of nothing more than static shots of trains, the camera serving almost as a surrogate driver waiting at a railroad crossing (hence the film’s title, which, if you are a trainspotter, could likewise stand for “rest and relaxation”). Each shot begins with the train arriving and ends with the train leaving. The film, containing nothing more than visuals and sound, intercuts these long takes with a few seconds of black leader. And the film’s 16mm format lends it a grad school feel that admirably deflates its artistic pretensions. I don’t know if it could work as well on 35mm. But it is a rather interesting cinematic experience for anyone fascinated with everyday minutiae.

It is a film that requires patience. I certainly don’t believe that this film quite warranted its 111 minute running time. And RR‘s nearly unwavering commitment to landscape over humans does cause one long for a few souls ambling around in the distance. (Near the end of the film, Benning does give us a gentleman emerging from camera left, walking well into the distance and staring at a passing train to share our vicarious passiveness.)

But the trains, rolling through plains, rusty bridges, snowscapes, and dilapidated freight yards, do cause us to dwell on interesting details. I became acutely aware of vegetation and plant life slowly dying and wildly overgrowing close to the tracks. The multihued boxcars and the rolling shadows frequently overtake these sometimes dull landscapes. But as the film progresses, Benning does something quite interesting. In the film’s early shots, there is a sense of anticipatory timing. When will the train first appear? This offers a brief moment to fixate on a beautiful scene of, say, trees and rivers, before the train occludes the view. When the train does arrive, the viewer is left to fixate her attentions on the scrub weed, abandoned blue plastic bags, and dessicated goldenrods that litter “our” side of the tracks. But as the shots continue to come, Benning gives us less time to get our bearings. And when Benning cuts early, the trains begin including a few vacant boxcars that offer hollow recesses and/or hollow frames. And the train’s recurrent bifurcation becomes so imposing that we then start to focus more on the landscape on our side of the view, only to begin ignoring the train itself. In fact, I became so accustomed to doing this that, at one point, I began to fixate on croaking frogs and almost completely overlooked the fact that the train in question was composed of only one car. There are surprises here. But you have to have an attention span.

As the film began to adjust the camera’s relative distance from the train from shot to shot, I also found myself shifting in my seat: moving forward when the train was too far and moving backwards when the train was too close. I found it quite alarming that there was a set distance in which I was comfortable perceiving the train. And I must express some gratitude to Benning for making me aware of this programmed tendency. Who knew?

When the film juxtaposes radio snippets over its visuals, such as “This Land is Your Land,” some religious nut on the radio, and Eisenhower’s military-industrial complex speech, to impart a bogus significance, I felt the film failed. The film is more true and intriguing when it concerns itself with the unexpected sounds that the train decimates or succumbs to — whether wildlife whooping off-screen, profanity-laced hip-hop blaring from trailers hitched across the tracks, or a loud motorboat speeding beneath a bridge. Benning has claimed in an interview that this film “came to be about consumerism and overconsumption.” But this suggests great political import that really isn’t here. This is a film specializing in the American relationship with landscape. But if it were about the goods transported within freight trains, surely we would have been permitted a glimpse inside? An occasional shot of a bulldozer tied down on a platform or a car bogged down with lumber simply doesn’t cut it. The relationship here doesn’t seem that political to me, even with the film’s final shot in a wind farm. But depending upon how patient or open-minded you are, it may or may not be your kind of ride.