Motherless Brooklyn – review | an imperfect, monumental achievement

Motherless Brooklyn (dir. Edward Norton, 2019)

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It is a recurring trend amongst contemporary, American novelists – such as John Updike, Saul Bellow or Norman Mailer – that cinema has generally steered clear of their literature. Such fictions represent dense, philosophical moodscapes, following the quest of an individual as they try to make sense of an increasingly different world; a way of life, as lyricises Bob Dylan, where there’s every chance “you’ll sink like a stone/ For the times they are a-changing’.” Motherless Brooklyn, adapted by Edward Norton from the novel by Jonathan Lethem, is proof that such works can be flattened on the screen – even if waiting on the backburner since October 1999. Audacious throughout, Motherless Brooklyn drifts across its 144-minute length much like a Himalayan glacier, both epic and lumbersome.

Edward Norton stars as Lionel Essrog, whose undiagnosed Tourette’s syndrome – calmed only by gum, weed, or “something a little stronger” – impedes every step of his career, working under the wing of Frank Minna (Bruce Willis) in a small-time, detective agency. Living under the heights of Brooklyn bridge, similar to the poet Hart Crane (whose view provided much inspiration), Essrog drifts between existential musings (“it’s only the biggest city on Earth”) and his daily battles of involuntary tics. Failing to protect Frank during a business operation, Essrog later commits himself to find out what transpired, leading him between jazz bars and city halls, a world of capitalist expansion that appears to stem from the John Hughes-esque figure of Moses Randolph (Alec Baldwin). Amid racial tensions and the polarising gentrification of city ‘slums’, a story unfolds of a broken society; to quote Saul Bellow, a place wherein one ‘wanders about […] like a man who has lost many teeth’.

Norton’s picture beautifully reimagines a time and place, rewinding Lethem’s novel forties years back into the 1950s – evident from polished, chrome vehicles parked at every corner, or a headlining, John Osbourne play “Look Back in Anger” flashing above sidewalks. Elements of the original novel, however, do not survive the translation into cinema, characters speaking in a kind of theatrical prose – the script, for the greater part, appears recited more than it is learned. Lines as cliché as “everybody gotta find their way in the world” are delivered with staccato emphasis, slipping between sincerity and caricature.

It is remarkable to watch Edward Norton construct the identity of Essrog, moreover. Jazz functions as a kind of analogy to his way of thinking – its athletic, improvisatory surface concealing patterns of finely-tuned order (“a thing for numbers and words”). Norton himself emerges as the orchestrator of the picture, though it can be difficult to distinguish whether or not he is the character, director, producer, or screenwriter when present onscreen. (His inventory of roles, during the end credits, rival even Orson Welles).

Motherless Brooklyn is by no means a perfect film, its idiosyncrasies – similar to its central protagonist, Lionel Essrog – are hard to disregard. Yet it is confident and bold filmmaking, a giant of sorts in contemporary cinema.

21 Bridges – review | an overboiled, Scooby-Doo cliché

21 Bridges (dir. Brian Kirk, 2019)

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“For he is the servant of God, an avenger who carries out God’s wrath on the wrongdoer,” reads a minister, solemnly, at the closed-casket funeral of Reginald Davis, a former NYPD officer. His young son, Andre (Christian Isaiah), sits in the pews with every intention of one day becoming that “avenger” – a single, well-timed tear falling down his face; an accidental parody, maybe, to Anthony Hopkins’ teardrop in The Elephant Man (David Lynch, 1980). And so, from these opening scenes, begins a moderately immersive, limp narrative, whose predictability is only just supported by the performance of its lead actor.

Nineteen-years later, Andre (now played by Chadwick Boseman) has grown up into a gaunt-faced, efficient killer of cop-killers – claiming the “DNA” of his late, influential father – whilst also caring for his elderly mother, Vonetta (Adriane Lenox). “You gotta look the devil in the eye,” she forewarns, coincidentally, on the night of a surprise attack. Events domino when an ugly cocaine raid, led by ex-Afghanistan veterans Ray and Michael (Taylor Kitsch and Stephan James), leaves eight cops dead, one-hundred pounds of uncut cocaine having been stolen (from an original three-hundred kilogram). Unable to continue with their identities, the two slip into hiding, acquiring new names before their planned getaway to Miami. Pressured by Captain McKenna (J. K. Simmons) to apprehend the duo before 5 am city-time, Andre, partnered with Detective Frankie Burns (Sienna Miller), initiates the lockdown of Manhattan island – closing all twenty-one bridges, waterways, and underground networks – before they dramatically “flood the city with blue.”

Chadwick Boseman, in his first role since T’Challa in Black Panther (Ryan Coogler, 2018), is excellent in the role of Andre Davis, despite low performances across a stellar, ensemble cast. Little can be said for J. K. Simmons, whose loud-mouthed performance (winning him an Oscar in Damien Chazelle’s Whiplash (2014)) is here loosely parroted, offering laughs where before we might have trembled. Other ancillary, male characters otherwise form a backdrop of overly-serious, chiselled faces.

21 Bridges, although competently executed, is delivered more like a weak, Dirty Harry sequel than its clear James Bond-esque ambitions. Over its 100-minute runtime, director Brian Kirk allows a leisurely pace to the proceedings, in which, surprisingly, there is very little substance or plot to carry things forward. A brief hiatus to the apartment of a suspect, Leigh (Jamie Neumann), for example, takes over two hours to complete – according to the onscreen countdown – deflating any real sense of pressure. Credited producers Joe and Anthony Russo – following their incredible success with Avengers: Infinity War (2018) and Endgame (2019) – lend comic-book qualities to Kirk’s drama, action sequences taking precedence over muddled, colourless dialogue. It might as well be another serial of ‘Scooby-Doo’.

Originally titled ‘17 bridges’ – did they somehow forget 4 in the original draft? – this is a forgettable and mediocre blockbuster. You will find more interest in simply looking at bridges.

La belle époque – review | rekindling the good times of marriage

La belle époque (dir. Nicolas Bedos, 2019)

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‘La Belle Époque’ (translated from French as “the beautiful epoch” or “the good times”) is a period in European history, dated approximately from 1871 to 1941, and typically characterised by its renewed sense of peace, wealth and optimism. It is also the neon-lit title of a café in Lyon, where, on the 17^th of May, 1974, a young man called Victor (Daniel Auteuil) encountered the woman he would one day marry, Marianne (Fanny Ardent).

All of this is learned in the present day, where the stagnating marriage is finally concluded, and Victor – no longer quite so handsome, possessing only “grey or black clothes” – is kicked out of the apartment by his wife. After receiving a gift from his son and the director of a theatrics service, Antoine (Guillaume Canet), who can promise a kind of playhouse ‘time travel’ (wherein “tailor-made, historical events” are meticulously restaged), Victor decides to pay and re-experience the moment he first came into contact with Marianne. If anything, as a final salutation to what has since been lost. “Nostalgia has become big business,” Antoine impresses, though Victor is yet to fully understand the implications of his subscription.

In a landscape reminiscent of the fake ‘Seahaven’ in The Truman Show (Peter Weir, 1998), Victor is swept into the rapturous, pseudo-realism of the day he first met Marianne, in 1974 – an atmosphere finely tuned, yet sometimes imperfect, to exactly replicate the details of the event. (“It was ‘big slut’, not ‘bitch,’” he corrects one actor; the alcohol thrown across the table must be “red wine”). On the other side of two-way mirrors, Antoine and his crew monitor the grand design as it unfolds: dimming or raising a light on cue, adding “music” where appropriate, or prompting a performance with the help of an earpiece. Marianne’s on-stage imitation, the dazzling Margot (Doria Tillier), is also undergoing a separation from Antoine, and, by her commitment to the role, unknowingly inspires a new love in each of the men. Inside this blossoming, hothouse environment, emotions are rapidly stoked, each metanarrative coinciding with and complicating the other.

Nicolas Bedos writes and directs La belle époque (his second endeavour behind the camera) with entertaining and brilliant gusto, frenetic energy that lends itself to the make-believe past. Seriousness is balanced with levity in many instances, scenes toppling from graveness (Marianne confessing her unhappiness) to scatological farce (drinking vodka whilst sat on the toilet; Victor stood patiently nearby). It is an abrasive style of comedy, unremitting and often unapologetic. Elements of David Fincher’s 1997 mystery-thriller, The Game, are married to the kind of narrative blueprints we might anticipate from Charlie Kauffman (the scripts of Being John Malkovich or Synecdoche, New York). Confidence exudes from every performance, notably in the violent duet of Antoine and Margot, which, ultimately, makes for quick and pleasurable viewing.

“It’s fake, but enjoyable all the same,” the imitation of Marianne comments, leading Victor between memories, intoxications, and recollections: “I’d forgotten about you!” His trip down memory lane (if we can even label it a ‘memory’) is one that pleads for the rekindling of his marriage – the essence of which has been lost to bitterness and dissatisfaction – and to place exactly where it all went wrong. Their lives, however, cannot be mapped so easily. The café, ‘La belle époque’, outside of time and reality, is shuttered into a comfortable refuge for Victor to replay the romance of before; though how many times can the feeling be experienced? 

La belle époque is a deft and hilarious romance, one highly imaginative in its reach.

Modern Love: Falling in Love in 21st-Century Cinema

Cinema has always been a playground for love affairs, whether fulfilled or frustrated. It is easy to fall in love with the movies, but easier still to watch others do exactly that. Since the beginning of the 2000s, the act of falling in love could not be further removed from its roots in “Golden Hollywood” – to disagree with Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1942), ‘[it is not] the same old story/ A fight for love and glory’ – modern couples instead preoccupied by the changing times. It is possible to understand love as now being filtered through technologies, often dependent on it, and, as a result, patterned to its digital freedoms. Outside of this, lovers ruminate in ways that never occurred before – either swept into the political, the conceptual puzzles of post-modern cinema, or simply illustrative of greater representation. To quote Laura Jesson in Brief Encounters (David Lean, 1945): “oh, Fred, I've been so foolish. I've fallen in love. […] I didn't think such violent things could happen to ordinary people.”

Across ten pictures that I have loosely selected, the way people fall in love – its conventions, sex, friendships, and infrequent break-up – are viewed from the perspective of the modern stage.  

1. Catfish (Ariel Schulman and Henry Joost, 2010)

Questions of inauthenticity do not dim this documentary feature from Schulman and Joost, the brother and friend to a young photographer, Yaniv “Nev” Schulman, who is inadvertently caught in a deceptive, online relationship. It is via the cupidian platform of Facebook that Nav is unknowingly cajoled (or ‘catfished’: ‘to lure (someone) into a relationship by means of a fictional online persona’). Catfish, more than anything else, is a unique recasting of the traditional love story – one whose realisation has no chance of being completed. Angela, whether online (posing as one of 15 profiles) or as a person in the flesh, illustrates an open vulnerability to what the internet can afford: an escape into an artificial reality.

2. Amour (Michael Haneke, 2012)

Old age is not exempt from the experiences of love in modern cinema, not least in the relationship of Anne (Emmanuelle Riva) and her husband, Georges (Jean-Louis Trintignant) – octogenarian piano teachers, comfortably living in Paris – whose shared existence is quickly interrupted after Anne suffers a silent stroke. From here, Georges watches the collapse of her body with impassive agony, a quiet bystander to the process of death. (I am reminded of the recurring, nameless observer (played by Artur Barciś) in Dekalog (Krzysztof Kieślowski, 1989) who sees each tragedy unfold and yet never intervenes). Sensitively realised by the deft script of Haneke, Amour – or “love”, translated from the French – is in many ways a displacing of what love traditionally represents. Similar to Georges' tender handling of a pigeon that flies into the apartment, coaxed back to where it came from, so does his understanding of Anne require a certain approach; the nature of death distils a shared lifetime of love into a basic, elemental care between two people. 

3. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Michel Gondry, 2004)

What if you could forget about somebody you loved – every single moment of pain and happiness experienced – whilst retaining your sunshine for all eternity? And, what if you accidentally met that person again? Such are the quandaries of a Charlie Kaufman-penned script, whose authorial presence – much like with Adaptation (Spike Jonze, 2002) and Synecdoche, New York (Charlie Kaufman, 2008) – is undeniably visible, as if spun from the same thread. Forgetting is not synonymous with escape, as Joel Barrish (Jim Carrey) and Clementine Kruczynski (Kate Winslet) unwittingly realise, whose compulsion to reunite (and reunite again) does not transcend their fracturing memories. Everything about love to the peculiar, imperfect couple is messy – but just as love is accepted with happiness, so should it also be with pain. A truly mesmerising picture from Kaufman and Gondry.

4. Valley of Love (Guillaume Nicloux, 2015)

Undoubtedly my favourite film of 2015, Valley of Love is the story of two actors – played by Gérard Depardieu and Isabelle Huppert, reunited in life as well – whose paths converge around the spectral writings of their dead son, Michael, entreating them to be at Death Valley on November 12^th. “It might sound like a bad joke, but I swear it’s the truth,” reads the letter, and so beginning their programmatic journey across the sun-bleached, Californian hinterland. Late in their lives – “[do you] remember how we met? […] you were handsome,” – the two recall their old love whilst searching for their son, unable to reconcile their past with the present. Touches of David Lynch texture this deeply profound, and often impenetrable, picture from Guillaume Nicloux; it is never solely one thing. It is unclear whether the couple will fall in love again, or if they will accept their shared tragedy – the fantasy of hope is ever-present.

5. Her (Spike Jonze, 2013)

Somewhere, in a near-future metropolis, the everyday spender can purchase an operating system – fitting snugly into your ear, much like a translucent hearing aid – that, above all else, includes a virtual assistant with artificial intelligence, designed to learn and grow with you. Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Phoenix) – whilst divorcing his childhood sweetheart, Catherine (Rooney Mara) – chooses a female voice (Scarlett Johansson), and she promptly names herself Samantha (in the Aramaic language, it connotes ‘Listener’). Theodore falls in love with Samantha, taking refuge in her assurances, intelligence, and logic; she is at once a disembodiment of his own need for desire, but also, as Theodore is inevitably led to realise, a way by which to enlighten his existence and find acceptance. Her epitomises love in the modern age, a visionary glimpse into what technology can satisfy and enable for those who choose to live with it. “Falling in love is kind of like a form of socially acceptable insanity.”

6. Solaris (Steven Soderbergh, 2002)

Indie veteran Steven Soderbergh revisits Stanisław Lem’s classic science-fiction novel, Solaris – initially adapted by Andrei Tarkovsky in 1972. After having journeyed to a space station plagued by unusual phenomena, Dr. Chris Kelvin (George Clooney) discovers that most of the crew have committed suicide – the few who remain on board, moreover, are persistently haunted by the physical presences of their dead loved ones. In consequence, Kelvin reunites with his dead wife, Rheya (Natascha McElhone), who despite knowing of their relationship is otherwise empty of any kind of feeling, unable to fully remember what she has not lived. Experiences of love focus and unfocus as Kelvin struggles to recall his former wife: does the idea of love exist more strongly in the present, or the dream? Solaris – both the nebulous, blue planet and the film itself – offer no immediate answers, and neither should we expect to receive them from a single viewing.

7. Lost in Translation (Sofia Coppola, 2003)

One of my favourite films of all time, Lost in Translation is the crowning achievement of Sofia Coppola’s prolific career – a beautiful ode to friendship, loneliness, and the silent, unsayable love affairs. Bob Harris (Bill Murray), an ageing actor (now resigned to whiskey commercials) briefly encounters Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson), a newly-wed, young woman unsure of her future (adrift in ennui and insomnia). The two strike an unlikely friendship, experiencing the Japanese nightlife and culture, quietly falling in love with each passing day. Lost in the neon-lit wilderness of Tokyo, in their respective lives and marriages, the two find consolation in displacement by regularly talking and confessing, similar to the exchanged qualms of Jean-Luc Godard’s 1963, new-wave drama, Contempt/Le mepris. Heart-breaking and comedic in equal measure, Lost in Translation is a modern classic of post-romance cinema.

8. Before Sunset (Richard Linklater, 2004)

Before Sunset is the centrepiece to Richard Linklater’s decades-spanning trilogy (preceded by Before Sunrise (1995) and followed by Before Midnight (2013), reuniting Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Céline (Julie Delpy) in Paris, who had previously met and fallen in love nine years before. Taking place in cinematic real-time – eighty minutes of the film is equivalent to the same duration in their day – the two wander, ambling between streets, gardens, and find themselves tripping between conversations that become increasingly personal. Slowly, we understand that they have changed as people, even if their intimacies radiate as strongly as before; with the benefit of hindsight, reviewed memories are now imbued with a sense of destiny. It all culminates at Céline’s apartment – persuaded to play, she strums a self-composed ‘waltz for a night’: “one single night with you little Jesse/ Is worth a thousand with anybody.” “Jesse” (spoken after a brief pause) rings like a small, musical bell in the room, bringing them together in a moment of realisation. Ordinary life has never been more romantic, more beautiful.

9. In the Mood for Love (Wong Kar-Wai, 2000)

Wong Kar-Wai achieves new levels of exquisiteness, of gorgeousity (to quote Anthony Burgess) and rhapsody with In the Mood for Love, a slight tale of men and women and the passage of time. All of the improvisatory skill that defined his previous works – Days of Being Wild (1990) and Chungking Express (1994), for example – is here replaced by smooth, gliding shots of corridors and roadways, a patience reflected in the measured pace of Chow Mo-wan (Tony Leung) and Su Li-zhen’s (Maggie Cheung) fulfilment of love. Wong and regular cinematographer Christopher Doyle stage scenes of dialogue in humid, neon-lit alleyways, in smoky interiors, or deep in the shadows of a taxi. In the Mood for Love is a story of love but also of how easily it is evaded, both Mo-wan and Li-zhen pledged to their own, unhappy fidelities.

10. Blue is the Warmest Colour (Abdellatif Kechiche, 2013)

Unanimously winning the Palme d’Or at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival, Abdellatif Kechiche’s Blue is the Warmest Colour is undoubtedly one of the most singular, fierce and painful depictions of love conceived in modern cinema. An intense, erotically-charged relationship forms between Emma (Léa Seydoux) and Adèle (Adèle Exarchopoulos), beginning in the years of high school and continuing into later life; the two, crowded by Kechiche’s camera, are viewed at every stage of their emotional development. Onscreen intensity, however, was likewise matched to its offset environment, its director shooting approximately 800 hours of footage, whilst forcing the actors to undergo tortuous shooting routines, notably with their graphic and protracted sex scenes. Blue is the Warmest Colour is not a film that has survived the #metoo movement, and nor should it be viewed independent from its controversies – in many ways, it constitutes an abuse of cinema and to the profession of acting. Léa Seydoux and Adèle Exarchopoulos’ searing, impassioned performances, moreover, shine through its ugliness and are deserving of all the praise they received. It is a magnetic, devastating onscreen dynamic.