Category: Film

Seattle’s Grand Illusion Theater is one of only four theaters in the country showing a complete Aki Kaurismaki retrospective. I’ve written about Kaurismaki before; I’ll just add that tonight’s entry, Match Factory Girl from 1989, is a well-nigh perfect film. Minimal, deadpan, it’s about a young woman (Kaurismaki regular Kati Outinen) who’s abused by her parents and lover, and takes appropriate revenge. Every shot is perfectly framed, and every shot is a surprise. The icy lighting is a wonder to behold. And the film somehow combines world-weary fatalism with (dare I call it?) a sense of justice, and Fassbinderian melodrama with Bressonian intensity. All this, and the film is modest and unpretentious as well. I’d seen Match Factory Girl before, but seeing it again reminded me of why I love Aki Kaurismaki. (And it’s purely as a compliment that I named my dog after him).

Shion Sono’s Suicide Club is a very strange movie, which apparently has acquired something of a cult following. It’s one of those recent Japanese movies that pushes the limits when it comes to gore (which is sometimes ridiculously theatrical, as in the opening scene when 54 schoolgirls commit suicide by simultaneously throwing themselves in front of a speeding train, and blood splatters everywhere; and other times disturbingly visceral and difficult to watch, without the redeeming and distancing aestheticism of, say, Kill Bill). This is definitely not a film for the faint of heart. But it doesn’t seem to me to be very similar to sicko splatterfests like Takashi Miike’s Audition either; Suicide Club is less concerned to shock, more philosophical, and ultimately far kinkier in its subtlety.
(I’d never heard of the director Shion Sono before, but apparently he also makes gay porn flicks, as well as being known as an avant-garde poet).
In any case, Suicide Club is an oblique film, for all its gore. It seems to change genre every fifteen minutes: from grotesque social satire to police procedural to horror to Rocky Horror Picture Show knock-off to baroque tragedy to poetic meditation to feminist detective thriller to I don’t even really know what. Visually the film is also quite discontinuous from scene to scene; sometimes there’s a jerky handheld camera, other times the scenes are almost classically composed.
In terms of plot, the film is about a plague of suicides, mostly by young women, though sometimes by boys and men and older people as well. There are also chains of sewed-together pieces of human skin that are found at the scenes of some of the mass suicides.
The suicides seems to be orchestrated through the Internet and cell phones (one brief scene of cell phone fetishism especially got to me, probably because of my own predilections that way). At one point it seems that an insane death-glitter-rock band is behind the suicides, but that turns out to be a red herring. Apparently the blame really lies with a bubblegum-pop group whose singers are five 12-year-old girls who wear matching cute costumes and do coordinated dancing as they sing their relentlessly upbeat ditties.
The film ends on a ritualistic note that I didn’t entirely understand; but I don’t think tying up loose ends was in any way the point. Existential conundrums are also repeated in verbal formulas throughout, often by small children.
I don’t really know much about Japan beyond the level of cliche; but it does seem to be a culture that is as imbued with latent (and sometimes not-so-latent) pedophilia as contemporary American culture is. At least, that’s what Suicide Club suggests. It intimates disturbing links between the sexualization of young children and the hysterical insistence upon their innocence, and between both and the romanticization of death.
In short, I’m not sure Suicide Club is a great film, exactly, but it’s definitely going to stay with me for a while.
(I’d love to see an American remake, but that will never happen; this isn’t The Ring. Besides, the only way to do it justice would have to be as an unlikely collaboration between David Lynch and John Waters).

Lynn Ramsay’s Morvern Callar (after the novel by Alan Warner) is elliptical, opaque, and utterly gorgeous. The eponymous character (played with an almost alien blankness by the brilliant Samantha Morton) is a young, working-class Scottish woman (she works in a supermarket by day, and goes clubbing at night) who wakes up on Christmas morning (or the day before, I wasn’t sure) to discover that her boyfriend has killed himself. He’s left her a mixtape (which becomes the movie’s soundtrack, with music that ranges from Aphex Twin to Nancy Sinatra to the Velvet Underground to the Mamas and the Papas), and a suicide note with two requests: that she use his bank account to pay for his funeral, and that she send his novel to a publisher. Instead, she covers up his death, uses the funeral money to buy her and a girlfriend a vacation in southern Spain, and submits the novel under her own name.
That’s about it, as far as plot is concerned. And character motivation is entirely inscrutable.What we are left with, instead, is a film of atmosphere, drift, and escape. And it’s great.
Morvern Callar has very little dialog; besides the brilliant soundtrack music, there is lots of silence. Visually, there are lots of close-ups without establishing shots, odd angles, unexpected cuts, and continually varying lighting, which ranges from Scottish winter gloom to Spanish blinding sunlight, and from flashing neon and disco strobe lights to the fluorescent glare of the supermarket.
The start of the film looked almost Bressonian to me. (Interestingly, in an interview about the film, Ramsay speaks, not of Bresson’s framing and editing, but of his use of sound). But just as the light modulates from scene to scene, so the overall look and feel of the film modulate too. Morvern Callar simply drifts so beautifully, that it is not until a good way through that I realized that it was not in the least about aimlessness and anomie (which is how it seemed at first); rather, it is about escape. Morvern is looking for a way out, and she finds it. Although much of the movie is sad or disturbing, it is really a passionate and affirmative film. Though this affirmation-in-the-face-of-what-might-seem-to-others-as-deprivation is not spiritual in the manner of Bresson, but something even harder to give definition to. Morvern Callar is subtly, but powerfully, subversive, all the more so in that it never gives up its punk blankness and lack of direction, but turns these into positive qualities. What’s so moving about the film, finally, is something that I can only express oxymoronically: the way it gives palpable presence to the most evanescent of feelings, without them ever losing their evanescence.

Raoul Ruiz’s Comedy of Innocence is an oddly disturbing film, creepy despite (as well as because of) its great degree of abstraction. In an icily haut-bourgeois Parisian home, a 9-year-old boy demands to be taken to the home of a complete stranger, telling his mother (Isabelle Huppert) that this other woman (Jeanne Balibar) is his real mother. An odd triangle develops, with the boy as the pivot and seeming instigator of a not-quite-conflict between the two women, equal parts underhanded seduction, implicit menace, and (if this is not an oxymoron, or – on second thought – even if it is) understated hysteria. Although Freudian overtones are suggested (the father is absent, on a business trip, while all this happens), and despite a (somewhat surprisingly for Ruiz) more or less coherent explanation of the mystery by the end, this is a film whose enigmas, and unsettling moods, are not so much psychological as ontological. Ruiz’s long tracking shots, explorations of empty deep space, insistent focusing upon odd details, and occasional defocusings, set against a deliberately over-formal acting style, make everything feel insecure because it is revealed as hollow. But the viewer’s emotional responses are not so much undermined by what I can only call an anti-revelation, as set curiously adrift.
I can perhaps explain this better by a few comparisons. When Godard calls attention to the fictionality of his films, he is actually affirming social reality as something that exists outside fictive representations; the result of undermining the film’s “reality-effect” is to reinforce the reality of the film as a social practice, and as a construction of images and sounds. But when Ruiz undermines his film’s reality-effect, the result is the corrosion, or de-solidification, of any sort of reality, that of the film, and that of the world as well. Again, when Bunuel, for instance, exhibits the hollowness of his bourgeois protagonists, the result is a kind of gleeful liberation into absurdity; Ruiz makes moves which on paper are equally “surreal,” but the effect is one of being sucked into metaphysical quicksand, rather than one of subversion and unconscious release through laughter. Ruiz is neither a Godardian constructivist, nor a Bunuelian surrealist, but (I’m reaching here) a queasily cerebral paradoxicalist, which is something far more unusual.

Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s 21 Grams is an indubitably powerful film in both form/style and content, even if I am not entirely sure how much substance there is behind its marvelous sleight-of-hand. Plus, I have to give it points for being the most relentlessly downbeat film to be given a major Hollywood release since at least Magnolia.
The look of the film is quite impressive. It’s shot mostly in closeups or near-closeups with a restless, unable-to-be-still, handheld camera, in grungy and grotty locations, in various varieties of ugly lighting and color schemes. The chronology is thoroughly scrambled, with the scenes arranged in what’s almost a jigsaw puzzle of fragments. And it only becomes clear a good way into the film how the three major characters are related: Jack (Benicio Del Toro), an ex-con who has become a Christian, and who is seriously trying to reform, but who kills a man and his two daughters in a hit-and-run; Cristina (Naomi Watts), the bereft wife and mother as a result of the hit and run; and Paul (Sean Penn), who receives the dead man’s heart in a transplant. The way the lives of these three come together might seem forced if the film unfolded in chronological order; but the tangled temporality is entirely appropriate to, and expressive of, the tangled nature of their relationships. The acting, of course, is great (I prefer Del Toro here to his Oscar-winning performance in Traffic; although Watts is excellent, she doesn’t equal – and couldn’t, given the nature of the part – her amazing performance in Mulholland Drive).
I can’t help feeling, in retrospect, that the film comes off a bit strained and pretentious: by which I mean that what it delivers is not quite up to the measure of its ambitions, which are vast. But moment by moment, 21 Grams is powerful and compelling, and – though I didn’t love it as much as I did Lost in Translation – I still have to say that few English-language films released this year come anywhere near it.

Johnny To’s Fulltime Killer is a deliriously operatic gangster movie, about the conflict between two rival hit men. (I mean “operatic” almost literally, since there is opera on the soundtrack during the most insanely deranged action sequences). Though I suppose it could just as well be called a love triangle of sorts, with the female lead (Kelly Lin) as the pivot between the two hitmen: one Chinese, and a flamboyant maniac, played by Andy Lau; the other, Japanese, secretive and reserved, played by Takashi Sorimachi. As these two vie for supremacy, chronology is scrambled, subjectivity is multiplied (as there are at least four first-person voice-over narrators), and the frequent digressions seem to follow a logic of whim and obsession rather than one of narrative (though, surprisingly, everything is pulled together with rigorous coherence by the end, though this coherence includes a Borgesian twist). Language is also tangled, as the film repeatedly switches between Cantonese, Japanese, and English (and, I think, Mandarin as well?). The frequent gunfights are hyper-stylized, but in a far more oblique way than is the case, for instance, in John Woo’s Hong Kong thrillers, which look utterly classical in comparison. That is to say, To’s gunfights are spectacular, but also oddly distanced. The slaughter is so cool and detached that you can’t really identify with the assassins as you do in Woo’s melodramatic, romantic films; nor is it in-your-face, both tongue-in-cheek and over-the-top, calling attention to its own virtuosic excess, in the manner of Tarantino’s Kill Bill. Rather, To creates a cinema of quicksilver, vertiginous displacements, with no stable points of view either in the action sequences or in the overall narrative. Affectively, Fulltime Killer is neither cool and ironic (a la Tarantino) nor hot (a la Woo); I would call it lukewarm, but only if you can imagine a lukewarmness that is a positive quality, pushed to an extreme, rather than signifying not much of anything one way or the other. Fulltime Killer is slippery rather than adhesive, which means that it wears its delirium lightly, making it a thing of gliding surfaces. I’m not sure I am grasping it rightly with this description, but “grasping” probably isn’t the right way to approach it. In any case, it’s gratifying to see genre filmmaking that is at once artistically ambitious and utterly unpretentious, in a way that you never see in American film anymore.

Claire Denis’ Friday Night is the story of a one-night stand. It’s a film in which almost nothing happens: a woman meets a man, they spend the night together, she leaves. The actors and characters are middle-aged and non-glamorous; as the film takes place mostly at night, and mostly in close-ups, there’s very little to see. (There are no establishing shots; the camera roves about restlessly, but always within a very constricted space; cuts to new angles tend to emphasize visual configurations that would be striking if only they were able to emerge more clearly from the darkness). There’s also very little dialog, though there is a nearly omnipresent musical score, which varies from techno abstraction to a tone of what is not quite melancholy or longing or excitement, but somehow a sparer analogue of such feelings.
Denis thus stylizes and abstracts things to the extreme, while at the same time she dwells relentlessly, and exclusively, on the banal, the ordinary and the everyday. It’s this (seeming) contradiction that accounts for the power of her films. You have to watch Friday Night with a kind of rapt concentration, if you are to watch it at all; precisely because there is so little to see. Your attention is focused on tiny details, and on emotions and sensations that are barely above the threshold of awareness. And you realize that there is nothing here but these tiny details. Watching the film is almost a kind of spiritual discipline – albeit one that is focused on the body, and not the soul. Bare flesh, mere flesh, is really all there is. A hand grips another hand, or moves down a thigh. A face is enigmatically lost in thought; or is it fantasy? The more we register the intensity of its expression, the less idea we have of what the person is actually thinking. Denis pushes to the limit of sexual feeling and desire: not a Bataillean limit of excess (that would more be the case with her previous film, Trouble Every Day, which I wrote about here), but a limit of near anonymity. Friday Night is a passionate film, but not an emotional one – I don’t mean that its passion is cold, but rather that it is so nearly anonymous, so impersonal or pre-personal, so nocturnal. Not the dream of an ultimate orgasm, or a life-shattering experience, but of an event that is so singular, and so evanescent, that it has no significance: it cannot be incorporated into your personality, your identity, your ongoing sense of yourself.

I have almost nothing to say about The Matrix Revolutions. Instead of upping the ante on the comic-book metaphysics of the first two films – which is what I had hoped for – the Wachowski Brothers give us basically a straight action film. The attack on Zion by the machines is exciting (for a while) and state-of-the-art, but it can’t compensate for the almost complete absence of the conundrums that fueled the previous installments. It’s almost as if the Matrix itself didn’t exist, so little attention is paid to the virtual-reality theme. And despite (all-too-brief) reappearances by the Merovingian and the Architect, almost nothing of philosophical import is said by anyone. We are left with some treacly utterances by the Oracle (now played rather ineffectually by Mary Alice, replacing the late Gloria Foster) about love and belief. (You have to snort in derision regarding the “love” between Keanu Reeves’ Neo and Carrie Anne Moss’ Trinity, who must be the most robotically affectless couple in movie history). What’s more, the climactic fight scene between Neo and Agent Smith seems utterly perfunctory in comparison with their battles in the prior two films; and the overall plot resolution is a complete cop-out. Second parts of trilogies are often problematic and disappointing; but when has the concluding installment of a trilogy ever been so lame a letdown? I still find Nona Gaye sexy, but that is about the only positive thing I can say about this film.

Kill Bill is gorgeous and ice-cold. Pure formalism. Where Tarantino’s earlier films were filled with humanity, with unforgettable characters and genius dialog, Kill Bill reduces these to an absolute minimum. Nothing is allowed to interfere with the pure kinetic beauty of the fight scenes. That is to say, Kill Bill is to Pulp Fiction as Kubrick is to Howard Hawks. In fairness, Kill Bill never feels anal or constipated the way all of Kubrick’s films do. Nor is Tarantino doggedly repetitive, the way Kubrick insists on being.
All the set-ups, all the elements of cinematic form in Kill Bill are fantastic: the decors, the camera angles, the editing of the fight scenes are so brilliant that they reveal in comparison how lame and unimaginative nearly all other English-language action cinema is. Even Lord of the Rings, powerful and lyrical as it is in bringing to life its (admittedly) dubious source material, can’t hold a candle to Kill Bill in terms of sheer visual inventiveness.
As for the citations and allusions: I got the sense that nearly everything in the film was sampled from one or another obscure samurai or martial arts film that I don’t remember or (more likely) haven’t seen. The effect was like the best hip hop: the film is rich in its web of references, and this works even if you don’t know what the references are to.
But Kill Bill‘s formal mastery and meta-cinematic referentiality comes at a price. Near the very start of the film we read the title: “Revenge is always best served cold” (which Tarantino, with characteristic cinephile in-joke wit, tags as an “old Klingon proverb”). And this story of Uma Thurman’s revenge is indeed served cold. The film is so utterly devoid of emotion it feels reptilian. (Perhaps I am slandering reptiles?). The fight scenes are awe-inspiring, but they have absolutely none of the sense of fun that makes Tarantino’s models, the Hong Kong fight scenes, so exhilarating. Nor is there any of the sense of fatality that imbues Leone’s (and others’) spaghetti Westerns, another obvious source of Tarantino’s iconography.
Even Tarantino’s racial obsessions are cut to the bare minimum. Uma Thurman gets the people of color out of the way in Volume One, killing Vivica Fox and Lucy Liu; in Volume 2, to be released next year, she will get to go after the white villains, Daryl Hannah, Michael Madsen, and David Carradine (unless Carradine is a fake Asian, as he was in the frequently-Tarantino-referenced Kung Fu).
So Tarantino has proved that he is as brilliant a visual director as he is a writer/director; but at what cost?

Aki Kaurismaki‘s most recent film to date, The Man Without A Past (2002), is as good as anything he’s done. I’ve gradually come to realize that Kaurismaki’s films are inverted melodramas. That is to say, they are just as stylized and anti-naturalistic, just as reliant on music and decor, and just as socially critical as the melodramas of Douglas Sirk or anybody else; only Kaurismaki’s films are stylized by restraint, where traditional melodramas are stylized by excess. Kaurismaki’s deadpan minimalism – the way the characters are stoic and restrained, and do not indulge in any emotional displays; but also the way the scenes are framed, and the way the camera lingers on desolate details, or pauses while a melancholy song is being sung, but elides determinate action almost completely – all this formal restraint is almost Bressonian, although Kaurismaki is a humanist, and has none of Bresson’s spiritual severity.
The Man Without A Past is about a man (Markku Peltola) who suffers amnesia after he is attacked, and beaten severely on the head, by a trio of punks. He slowly and patiently rebuilds his life, although he has nothing. That’s just about it. As in more conventional melodrama, the characters are crushed and betrayed by social forces beyond their control — here, as usual in Kaurismaki, by the bureaucratic uncaringness of the state, and the ruthlessness of big Capital. But in this film, as in Floating Clouds and a very few others, Kaurismaki even allows himself a bit of hope at the end, which would be sentimental were it not so wry and understated. (Well, in a sense it is sentimental — this is a sort of melodrama, as I said, rather than Bressonian tragedy — but it is an entirely justified, “earned” sentimentality).
The film is devoid of the gorgeous youth you see in Hollywood movies. The female lead and love interest, as so often in Kaurismaki’s films, is played by the utterly sublime Kati Outinen, who has never looked so worn and haggard. (She’s older now – a decade older than she was in Match Factory Girl – and it shows).
Great soundtrack: the music is a mixture of 50s-ish rock (Finnish imitations) and more traditional melodies; usually a song is introduced diegetically, and then continues non-diegetically, which was neat.