The Week in Cinema: 15/04 -- 21/04

-- a selection of short-form reviews of the films I have watched this week --

I, Tonya (dir. Craig Gillespie, 2017)

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A ferocious, enthused performance from Margot Robbie leads this mockumentary biopic of American figure-skater Tonya Harding – a prodigy of the sport, winning (and later stripped of) her 1991 and 1994 championship titles – whose rise into the national limelight was as reviled and tempestuous as her own public profile. Composed out of faux interviews, I, Tonya flirts between the pre-fame kid-on-the-block and the kinetic, fame-entranced star of the present. In style and approach a love letter to early Scorsese classics (cue: breaking the fourth wall, charged rock and roll music (ZZ Top, Supertramp)), I, Tonya is an electric romp through the politics of American class and sport, unafraid to stomp or cut its way forward. Anti-princess, with a face stricken by joy, showbiz and a perpetrator’s guilt, I, Tonya is a blaze. 

Halloween (dir. David Gordon Green, 2018)

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Jamie Lee Curtis returns yet again to the inexhaustible Halloween franchise, now headed by David Gordon Green (acclaimed indie-director of George Washington), in what constitutes a self-conscious, blundered retelling of the 1978 slasher. None of the original terror and flourish is regained in translation, Carpenter’s masochistic tract here indulged – with the exception of its gratuitous nudity – to a baseless, uninventive outcome. Laurie Strode’s post-trauma from the events of Myer’s prior excursion is, however, uniquely confronted – the violence of the past realised in her fortified, alcoholic isolation. Halloween, despite ignoring its ten prior incarnations, leaves itself open for more (as of course, it would) but there is little left to inspire, or renew, and perhaps it too would be safer ignored.

The Sisters Brothers (dir. Jacques Audiard, 2018)

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Audiard delivers a nuanced and quietly-intelligent western in The Sisters Brothers – his first work in the English language, yet filmed entirely in Europe – chronicling the joint career of cowboys Eli and Charlie Sisters, poignantly acted by John C. Reilly and Joaquin Phoenix. Out of time, loose figures of the landscape, the brothers signal a portrait of America that is fast-slipping into the past, where in California flushing toilets and toothpaste supplements register a shift in worldly ideals. Quick wit finds itself balanced against numbing violence in Audiard and Bidegain’s adaptation of Patrick deWitt’s novel, yet over the course of its narrative – a brutal quest for the chemical designs of gold-enthusiast Hermann Warm – the film achieves something far more profound, an emotional subtlety cradled at the heart of two, fragile men (as if Hemingway-esque, they are men without women, cold and loveless). Unexpectedly beautiful.

Phantom Lady (dir. Robert Siodmak, 1944)

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Classic film-noir tropes craft a “wrong man” narrative in this Hollywood jewel, a monochromatic peer into the corrupt doings of contemporary New York – led by a killer whose ordinariness is the ultimate, shrouded charm. Siodmak’s classic is a highly-wrought, implausible tale of deceit, psychological truth and artifice, navigated by the tireless passions of Carol “Kansas” Richman (enchanted by actress Ella Raines) and an off-beat, police force. Enigmatic and jazz-infused, Phantom Lady is a unique beginning point for the genre.

Ratcatcher (dir. Lynne Ramsay, 1999) and two short-features: Kill the Day (2000), Swimmer (2012)

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Scottish-born director Lynne Ramsay gives voice to disenfranchised childhood in her debut feature Ratcatcher, set in Glasgow, 1973, a meditative pursuit of the lyrical wonders and cruelty of growing into the world. Mid-90’s shorts – the elegantly photographed Small Deaths, Kill the Dayand Gasman– summon the tone and preoccupations of Ratcatcher’s own, shimmering vision, childhood youth at once an opaque, uncertain station in life, whilst, in other instances, thick with the devastations of quotidian violence. Individual plight and absurdist imagination chime in the masculine presences of Ramsay’s later work – in particular, You Were Never Really Here– where purgatorial existences find themselves rooted in abusive, boyhood trauma. Haunting, anti-pastoral beauty.

I Vitelloni (dir. Federico Fellini, 1953)

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Five post-adolescent, Italian men daydream through sedentary lives in their seaside hometown of Rimini, Northern Italy, trawling vacantly between summertime pleasures and the deep-rooted frustrations of provincial life. Compassionately realised as Fellini’s own, neo-realist self-portrait, I Vitelloni sketches a wide array of troubled, Dionysian youths and their own private odyssey of self-realisation. Tragedy held in the smallest of places.

Lyric in Cinema: the fallen stars of Marlon Brando and Nicholas Ray

In the documentary-feature Listen to Me Marlon (2015), chronicling the life, career and opinions of acclaimed Hollywood actor Marlon Brando (1924 – 2004), tape recordings (in particular, recordings he conducted himself) navigate and calcify the impressions that were acquired over the course of his life. Uniquely subtitled as ‘the definitive Brando. In his own words’, the film is composed out of ‘over 300 hours of audio material’ that were recorded by Brando himself, privately – whether personal messages, executive business meetings, hypnosis, or words spoken during press interviews – the documentary assembling a collaged texture of his own voice, at varying ages, that function as a type of self-commentary to his own experiences (each tape is addressed to himself: “Listen to me, Marlon …”). ‘I didn’t know the tapes existed,’ spoke Rebecca Brando in an Observer interview, ‘he didn’t talk about his personal life to us children ever. So a lot of it was a just a therapeutic way to find some kind of truth.’ Listen to Me Marlon, nonetheless – in its staged, visual reconstruction of memory, moving through old rooms, photographs, as well as the clips of recording selected – projects a ‘truth’ of voice mediated through tape, the director, as well as that of Brando himself. In ‘talking to and about himself […] [as] a kind of confession work’, as writes Mark Kermode, the recordings achieve a reality beyond the sound of its own voice. Truth, coincidentally, is a prime concern of the tape recordings: each tape presents an effort of seizing what it means to be alive, in the present, somebody with responsibilities toward family and the natural world. In addition to the posthumous voice, a blue, digitized map that Brando made of his own face in the 1980s is drawn on to animate its spoken recordings. One such gallery remarks, at the beginning:

Okay, now, listen, let me tell you something that I did. I’ve had my head digitized. And they put this laser and they put it around you like this and they digitized my face. And I made a lot of faces and smiled and, and, made a sad face. So they’ve got it all on digital.

Out of words does the image of Brando appear, pixelating at the edges. In attending to what we hear spoken in the tapes, we receive a non-linear timeline of life, (it is difficult to discern at what points in time the sound is being recorded,) transitioning forwards and backwards in recollection and experience, whilst equipoised against the fixed moment of his own, sculptured face; the tape recorder, in regard to what is selected by the documentary, qualifies a form of time travel for the listener to participate. ‘You are the memories,’ Brando reflects, and yet it is important that we consider which ‘memories’ in particular are being remembered, perhaps imagined, or at least edited for the purpose of the documentary to deliver its specific narrative. In tape we receive a portrait of the voice in the act of remembering:

Now let your mind drift way back in time […] it is like a wonderful, soft dream, and that soft wind blowing, that’s a wind that you can trust.

The tape ‘is a soft, semi-imaginary space’, confers Steven Connor, ‘soft, and ‘live’ in a sense that the groove of the record [is] not’, a quality of sound that captures, much like a photograph, an aspect of time in the moment of its happening. Tape is predicated on taking voice, as well as its eventual loss – the semblance of a former voice, dream or thought – enabling us to recall what can no longer be remembered, or at least an effort toward such a state. Similar to Listen to Me Marlon, the essayistic documentary Nick’s Film: Lightning Over Water (1980), directed by Wim Wenders, is also one ‘created in the cutting room’, the assemblage of its material ‘functioning on a principle of shifting levels of reality.’ Lightning Over Water navigates the final days and memories of the life of Nicholas Ray – the director of films Rebel Without a Cause (1955), King of Kings (1961)– whose production of We Can’t Go Home Again (1972 – 1979), and attitude toward his own, impending death, is traced by interviews, VHS and select tape recordings. Lightning Over Water is less a documentary and more a thinly-fictionalised, collaborative exposé of the real-life relationship between the two directors, a document of suffering and tragedy as much as an essayistic self-portrait of a fallen American icon. ‘Like other Wenders film,’ writes Timothy Corrigan, ‘the confrontation is the subjective one between a lost body and a consciousness attempting to retrieve it’, a revival secured in the various chemical and material formats employed by the feature. Early in the documentary, an aged Nicholas Ray wakes and picks up a tape recorder:

I had a dream …[singing]I had a dream the other night, sing on, brother, sing … [normal]I had a dream about a goddam musical, in Venezuela.

Out of recollection is lyric found – the phrase ‘I had a dream’ replayed by the speaker, only now to unheard music (‘I had a dream the other night’) – loose fragments of song in slippage to the state of memory; in such music we locate ‘the other night’, otherwise that which can only resurface to the individual once sung. After the second command to ‘sing’, the lyric trails off, an interruption to the informed experience and yet one that is crutched on absence: the ‘brother’ sung to, and the remote, exotic landscape of ‘Venezuela’ are reduced to silence, captured only be the lyric and tape itself. Voice finds no company in lyric, and nor does Ray seek to replay the words spoken. After the words are spoken the tape recorder is paused, not to be heard again for the remainder of the film. In preservation of tape so is lyric vulnerable to being forgotten.

Over the duration of Listen to Me Marlon, (in likeness to Ray in Lightning Over Water,) the image of Brando as a youth (the bold presence in A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), or the charming under-dog of On the Waterfront (1954)) is suspended against the aged, tired voice that we receive in tape – voice is superimposed upon voice, age upon youth, phantasmal layerings of time and experience. The relationship of voice to tape, it can be argued, stages ‘the phenomenon of ‘print through’, caused by the fact that, when wound on top of one another, the magnetic patterns deposited in one part of the tape could print themselves by induction on a neighbouring part of the tape’, a behaviour of ghosting that ‘embodies a spreading and thickening of the present moment’. Not dissimilar to Krapp’s Last Tape, voice and body do not match in performance – the pockets are ‘capacious’, size-ten boots ‘surprising’, and the voice itself is a ‘quavering’ display of unease – the afterimage of Brando, likewise, out of sync to his youthful, beautiful voice. Lyric does not compromise or seek to balance, in either example. In tape survives the afterimage of a happier Brando, or the dream-like lyric of Ray, only now mismatched to the fading body with which we are presented, sound in friction to its remembrance. ‘Just think of all the good things that you like, like apple pie and ice cream, and brownies and milk,’ Brando whispers, comfort associated with the past and the consuming of food, a tense of memory that is carried forward to influence the present. It is uncertain, much like in Krapp’s Last Tape, which is in fact the final tape, and what recordings are absent from the documentary itself. Tape lulls us its own immortality, it is the ‘wonderful, soft dream’, but to what end the recordings will be played, re-heard or recollected is unknown, the blue afterimage of Brando’s digitized face felt even as the credits roll onward. Listen to Me Marlon is as much a testament to pain and sufferings as is it to greatness. [Since its release, the documentary has garnered much critical praise (Vulture review: ‘the greatest, most searching documentary of an actor ever put on film’,) and yet it is difficult not to feel that our access to the recorded tape is unauthorised, exploitative in its resurrection of memory.]

The Week in Cinema: 08/04 -- 14/04

-- a selection of short-form reviews of the films I have watched this week --

Volver (dir. Pedro Almodóvar, 2006)

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Headed by a tour-de-force female ensemble, Almodóvar reconjures familiar motifs of trauma, melodrama and intergenerational womanhood in this captivating, magic-realist piece. It is joyous, dazzling cinema, even with the grotesque nature of events depicted, but – in particular – a cinema of women, of all ages, nationalities and classes, a bringing together of one powerful, female voice. Volver stands out, alongside The Skin I Live In and Julietta (my own, personal favourite) as one of Almodóvar’s most ebullient, haunting features.

Three Short Films from dir. Agnes Varda: L’opéra-mouffe (1958), Black Panthers – Black is Honest and Beautiful … (1968), Salut les Cubains (1971)

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Images craft a display of interior thought, in the short films of Agnes Varda, a portmanteau consciousness – whether in sensitivity, appreciation or warmth – found in the frame of almost every scene. Across the triptych of these works, the relationship between viewer and viewed is a fixed preoccupation to Varda’s wandering eye: various faces occupy the screen, unaware of the camera, whilst, in other moments, the odd one becomes conscious of its presence – irritated, bemused or simply uncertain – and, in rarer moments still, notice it only to then pretend they haven’t. No single view or viewer is prioritised or predictable. I discovered these short documentaries by accident, on MUBI, whilst staying for a brief period in Germany, and am incredibly grateful for it. Varda, once again, shimmers with curiosity and pleasure for the craft.

Los Abrazos Rotos (dir. Pedro Almodóvar, 2009) 

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Signature brilliance and colour is brought to yet another Almodóvar feature, a fluently-uncoiled noir of erotic passions, guilt, and the hyper-fixations of filmmaking itself. After a visit from a figure of the past, blind scriptwriter Mateo Blanc – otherwise known as “Harry Caine”, a fictional alter-ego – is forced to re-tread the tragedies of a former relationship (artfully teased by the ultra-sensuous Penélope Cruz) and its eventual collapse. Arguably predictable in layout, Almodóvar’s feature moves not unlike the roving, Hitchcockian eye at the onset to Vertigo (winding over Kim Newman’s profile), or the floundering Tippi Hedren, in The Birds and Marnie, a cinema in love with its female subject, if troubled, only here with bold and renewed intelligence.

Napszállta (dir. László Nemes, 2018) 

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Translated from Hungarian as “Sunset”, László Nemes’ follow-up to his Oscar-acclaimed debut, Son of Saul, is an arresting spectacle of tragedy, dream and false consciousness, one that traffics the final, paralysing moments preceding the beginning of WW1. As demonstrated with his prior work, little, if any, dialogue is spoken throughout the course of narrative, feelings instead pronounced by shallow-focused closeups (the opening, for example), weighted forms of lighting (gaslight, fireworks) and drawn-out tracking shots across elaborately designed set pieces (the garden banquet, for example). It is a film reminiscent of nightmare or dreamscape, only a type of somniloquy from which no figure can be woken – nobody appears to be able to leave the city, despite persistent requests, and faces revisit the screen, only deepened in contour – and by this does its history adopt an otherworldly, imaginative optic (not dissimilar to the performance of lead Juli Jakab), time seen from a future, over-the-shoulder perspective of terror. At once led as dramatic mystery, Napszállta point us into a pervasive, ideology-driven society at the heights of its fury and inner damage. Stunning, evocative cinema. 

Peeping Tom (dir. Michael Powell, 1960)

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Vivian: ‘Now what are you doing? Mark: ‘Photographing you photographing me.’ She replies: ‘Mark, you’re wonderful …’ Such wonderful ‘doing[s]’ in photography, or film, are fundamental to the self-reflexive camera that observes all in Peeping Tom, whilst also, perhaps, the most unknowable, most terrifying of acts. It is interesting to consider the ways in which our understanding of the camera – from a lumbering, mighty object, to a hand-held mobile of ease – has changed, a blind acceptance that a camera simply sees what we wish and nothing more. (One may see the rise of iPhone-filmed movies – such as Sean Baker’s Tangerine, or Steven Soderbergh’s Unsane and High Flying Bird – as products of this change, with varying success.) Michael Powell wishes to feel the weight of a camera pressed into the most dangerous of places, in particular, that of our own reflection (notably, in the moments before death). Aspects of this horror classic grind onward, and at other times – much like the tiresome expository at the close to Pyscho– does its dialogue over-explain or needlessly clarify. Peeping Tom, regardless of these slights, artfully reminds us of our own, morbid fascination with looking, and the hesitancy of having the camera turned on ourselves. 

Belle de Jour (dir. Luis Buñuel, 1967)

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Unforgettable, lyrical cinema, Belle de Jour is truly unlike anything else, an effortless carnival of lust, imagination and mounted shame. Catherine Deneuve plays Séverine Serizy, the eponymous, Parisian “Belle de Jour”, whose call for masochistic pleasure begins in nocturnal wonderings – for example: tied to a tree, beaten and assaulted – before transferring into daytime employment at a high-class bordello, 11 Cité Jean de Saumer. To Buñuel, the nature of transgression sits (all too comfortably) at the centre of entrenched, bored norms in society – such as marriage – which, by the escapism offered through sex, lull its population into new realms of physical experience. A piece of contradiction, scandal and craft, Buñuel’s classic of modern-French cinema is an uproarious journey into the deepest valleys of our passions.

Incendies (dir. Denis Villeneuve, 2010)

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Tough and confident filmmaking drive this beautifully-visualised thriller from rising director Denis Villeneuve, its theme and style otherwise prototype to what has since been refined in his wonderfully-unusual, later Hollywood works (Arrival and Bladerunner 2049). Incendies does suffer, nevertheless, in its sequence of concluding events, as narrative implausibility finds itself married to melodramatic, contrived stupor. This aside, Villeneuve strikes his audience with the sheer skill and flourish of his ability.

L’intrus (trans. The Intruder), dir. Clare Denis [2004] film review

Loosely adapted from an autobiographical memoir by Jean-Luc Nancy, Claire Denis’ L’intrus chronicles the retired life and career of ex-mercenary Louis Trebor (stolidly played by Michel Subor) in what constitutes a visually arresting – albeit glacial in its storytelling – meditation on age, living, and the fact of growing estranged from the world.

Spun over the countries of France, Japan and Polynesia, the narrative undulates between the lives of various, disparate people, many of whom are only touched upon briefly. Centrepiece to the film is the figure of Trebor, a grizzled semi-mute, whose pastoral livelihood in the French mountains – activities of swimming, cooking, and attending to his dogs – is uprooted by the timely need for a heart transplant, loosely evolving (as noted by the late Philip French) into a type of ‘metaphor’ for the film itself. Around this transplant (itself a foreign, intruding object) do ideas of intrusion pivot, carefully captured in the illegal border crossings nearby, the unwanted kindness from those closest, and in the brief moments of surveillance that take place over the rolling countryside. From here, Denis’ traffics into the industrial, polluted landscape of Japan, where a black-market offer is available for a price. It is taken (despite the source of money never being accounted for), before the narrative finally segways into Tahiti, in Polynesia, where a futile search is taking place for a long-forgotten son. Each frame of Denis’ obscure triptych feeds into the next, as evident, yet in its slow progression so are things forgotten, people somewhat evaporating into the narrative much like its coherence and sense of time.

It is a journey – if perhaps that is the most accurate way of describing it? – that, whilst navigating the traumas of the past, also appears to forget what has occurred, people, events and motive appear in the narrative only to then disappear. “You’re worst enemies are hiding inside you, in the shadows, in your heart”, opens L’intrus, a first clue to this ambiguation.

It is unlikely that every viewer would discern the same details in the film, or that, on re-watching it perhaps, they would necessarily understand things in the same way. Not dissimilar to the later, poetic works of Jean Luc-Godard – chiming to the inaccessible Hail Mary, In Praise of Love, or the portentous Film Socialisme – so is there a lumbering, philosophical weight to each moment of Denis’ picture, one that never truly pays off in its dialogue or characterisation. Scenes are long, images half-muffled, and whatever relationship is delineated between each third is gradually reduced by its cold, frigid tone. Following a screening at the Toronto film festival, Denis remarked on the imbalanced nature of her film output: “They have a limp, or one arm shorter than the other, or a big nose”, an anatomic discrepancy that translates (not intentionally, I would imagine) into the wayward, collapsing sense of L’intrusand its narrative of loss and no retrieval.

Nebulous, free-floating, with moments of wonder and brilliance, L’intrus is a challenging watch, yet ultimately worth the time.

The Week in Cinema: 01/04 -- 07/04

-- a selection of short-form reviews of the films I have watched this week --

Ginger & Rosa (dir. Sally Potter, 2012)

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Written and directed by British auteur Sally Potter, Ginger & Rosa is a nuanced, coming-of-age tale of two young girls (subtly played by Fanning and Nivola) in 1960s England and their changing friendship whilst haloed by nuclear threat. Softly focused on the troubles of young age, the playground damage of adult relationships, and sex, every moment of its drama lights the screen in ways that are impossible to forget.

Dumbo (dir. Tim Burton, 2019)

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Again returning to the ever-broadening Disney empire, Burton’s latest remake is a sanitised, mundane retelling of the classic story of the elephant that could fly – and more. Certain moments shine, it must be noted – our discovery of baby Dumbo under the straw; or, whilst in flight to Danny Elfman’s choral score – but plastic, stilted acting, a weighted dependence on CGI and irregular pacing leave this nothing short of a misfire against its original.

Såsom i en Spengel (dir. Ingmar Bergman, 1961) 

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Loosely included within a spiritual trilogy of films, Bergman’s cold drama returns again to an island backdrop from which to conduct his investigation of deluded, psychotic lovers and familiars. The central premise of understanding God enthuses the dramatic exploits of three men and the woman who they each love, albeit in different, confused ways. Ideas typical of Dreyer and Tarkovsky chime throughout. Spellbinding, existential work.

Jamaica Inn (dir. Alfred Hitchcock, 1939)

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Glacially stumbling between horrendous set pieces, Hitchcock’s last British feature marks the first of three du Maurier adaptations he would produce over his career (later: Rebecca (1940) and The Birds (1963)) – this, unfortunately, is without doubt the worst. Cornish smugglers swoop back and forth across moorland, eventually landing their smug conspirator (played by Charles Laughton) in the timely hands of the law. Jamaica Inn's conclusion later foreshadows the ending of the far-superior Saboteur (1942), Laughton’s descent from the ship’s rigging repeated in Frank Fry’s fall from the Statue of Liberty – Hitchcock, in both features, choosing a singular, diegetic sound (the ripping thread of a coat sleeve, or wind in the ropes) as the only noise to be heard in its closing moments.

Detour (dir. Edgar G. Ulmer, 1945)

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Newly restored by Criterion, Ulmer’s no-budget ‘pre-noir’ noir, is (as phrased by the late Roger Ebert) ‘a movie [...] filled with imperfections’, such that it quickly soaks into the very fabric of the melodrama. Detour reminded considerably of Charlie Kauffman’s Synecdoche, New York with its restless, un-moulded material – a film that demands a certain type of viewing for it to be truly appreciated.

The Portrait of a Lady (dir. Jane Campion, 1996)

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Nicole Kidman holds her gaze throughout as wealthy heiress to another’s fortune, only to find her radiance eclipsed by the Machiavellian ‘quiet’ existence of Gilbert Osmund (demeaningly portrayed by John Malkovich). Campion’s film is as beautiful as it is unquestioning, the original novel merely a stepping-stone from which to continue her career-long concerns about femininity, tragedy and the observation of the female body.

At Eternity’s Gate (dir. Julian Schnabel, 2018)

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A gentle soul lies at the heart of Schnabel’s latest feature, one whose life amidst the momentous beauty of Nature (a ‘God-given’ state) holds contrast against the volcanic turmoil of his own existence and mental strength. Highly affecting in its portrait of the artist as unnoticed sufferer (a well-used genre, yet here freshly-coloured) the film inspires mood and feeling with every sunlight-flooded shot, despite its overdrawn, indulged and often digressive dialogue. 

Le Journal d’une Femme de Chambre (dir. Luis Buñuel, 1964)

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Filled with the typical plethora of misanthropic, bourgeois figures, Buñuel’s early 60’s masterpiece is as challenging as we might expect – the film, in essence, a bedrock to the personalities, study and conflict which later mark out his later, matured works. Exploding butterflies, a leather-shoe fetish and the death of an innocent mark this as an integral piece in the dazzling career of the Spanish exile. Note: aspects of his surrealist roots emerge in stormy clouds at the close, briefly. Darkly brilliant.