Category: Film

Human Nature, directed by Michel Gondry from a script by Charlie Kaufman, was a box office flop and got mostly hostile reviews, but it’s a brilliant film. Basically, it’s a postmodern version of Kafka’s “A Report to an Academy”, which is a story about an ape who has been trained to become a human being. In Kaufman and Gondry’s film, the ape-turned-human is supplemented or mirrored by human beings who idealize (and want to go back to) nature; but the film’s sardonic reflections on humanness, language, and civilization are very much in the spirit of Kafka’s story. The man who was raised as an ape is “civilized” by being taught (along with language) refined table manners and the enjoyment of opera. He goes along with this charade because he presumes that becoming “human” is the only way he will ever be able to get laid; although his training includes brutal electric shocks every time he gives way to “animalistic” sexual urges. Of course, after learning language, he will never be able to go back to the wild, although he can make eloquent speeches about his desire to. Meanwhile, the twisted human characters are puppets of their own unanalyzed and out-of-control sexual desires, equally when they espouse the virtues of civilization, and when they seek to “return” to a more “natural” life. Kaufman, rather like Kafka, undermines and ridicules both sides of the nature/civilization duality, suggesting that high culture is in fact driven by base instincts, but that these base instincts, far from being animalistic, are only thinkable in linguistic human creatures.
By describing the film in these terms, however, I’m risking making it sound more like an intellectual, analytic exercise than it actually is. The script is definitely schematic in its outlines, but it comes across much more as a delightfully, cheerfully perverted comedy of manners. That is to say, it’s more late Bunuel than early Godard. Gondry’s direction is gorgeously anti-naturalistic, in a way reminiscent of his videos for Bjork, giving the movie the flavor of a fractured fairy tale. Or say it is as if Jacques Demy were recounting a tale that was a cross between an I Love Lucy episode and a short story by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. I’m flailing about here, giving absurd comparisons, because the film is quite sui generis, and can’t really be compared to anything less bizarre and ridiculous.

Steven Soderbergh’s Solaris is an impressive film, if not a successful one. Soderbergh set himself a difficult task in making Solaris, since he was competing against two undoubted masterpieces: not only Stanislaw Lem’s original novel, but also Andrei Tarkovsky’s earlier film version. The power of Soderbergh’s version comes from its claustrophobic visual style: harsh, quite dark lighting, mostly shades of blue and black; minimal, oppressive interiors; isolation of faces or bodes in the frame; brooding pace, with lots of waiting between the lines of dialog, slow pans, and painfully juxtaposed montages of past and present; and overall an emotional coldness, which was probably the main reason the film did poorly at the box office, but which is perfectly articulated and precisely right, for this story of failed connections and impossible confrontations with incomprehensible otherness.
The film ultimately fails, however, on metaphysical grounds. Where Lem’s novel was a meditation on the limits of knowledge and of human capacity, and where Tarkovsky’s film (much to Lem’s chagrin) was a spiritual meditation on loss and (heavily qualified) resurrection, Soderbergh ends up with a thoroughly unconvincing affirmation that love conquers all. The sense of otherness that is the main point (in different ways) of both Lem’s and Tarkovsky’s versions is evident in the early parts of Soderbergh’s films, but as the movie proceeds it drains away, without offering anything of similar weight in its place; the story is eventually diminished both intellectually and affectively. You might say that Soderbergh remains unimaginatively “humanist” where Lem and Tarkovsky both question the limits of humanism and the human (albeit from very different directions – Lem from an ironic socialist sensibility, and Tarkovsky from a deeply Christian one).
One thing, though: I don’t want to be misunderstood here. Soderbergh’s relative failure is emphatically not because he would have substituted a crassly American Hollywood mentality for a refined, reflective European one. I think it is almost the reverse: Soderbergh’s failure of nerve, his inability to push the story beyond human limits, as it were, so that he falls back on humanist banality, is precisely the result of his determination to make a pure “art film” rather than a crassly commercial one. I can’t help thinking that, if he had been willing to be less tasteful and more sensationalistic, he might have arrived at a powerful pulp-fictional American interpretation of Solaris, rather than, in effect, falling back on the mere external form of European art cinema without its philosophical depth.

Paul Schrader’s Auto Focus was pretty much a box office flop last year, but it’s a really good film. It’s a biopic about the life and death of Bob Crane, the actor whose one famous role was as Colonel Hogan, on the Nazi-POW-camp sitcom Hogan’s Heroes. (I used to love the show when I was a kid, both when it was originally on the air, 1965-1971, and later in reruns). Crane did dinner theater after Hogan’ Heroes ended its run, and in those early, pre-VCR days he was really into videotaping himself having sex with loads of women. He was murdered in 1978; the only suspect was his friend and associate, John Carpenter, who provided him with his video equipment and went out with him to pick up babes. But Carpenter was not tried until 1992, and then he was acquitted. The film extrapolates from these uncertain facts…
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Sogo Ishii’s Electric Dragon 80,000 V is a delirious, audacious masterpiece: 55 minutes of crazed rock ‘n’ roll theatrics in a demented duel between Tadanobu Asano, all heavy-guitar/dissonance/feedback rage, and Masatoshi Nagase, eerily calm techno-Buddha. Both characters command the forces of electricity, and the film is awash with montages of lightning storms, electric chairs, shock treatment machines, exploding transformers, and the like, not to mention reptiles, guitars, cell phones, fast tracking shots scurrying through the gutters, and enormous kanji trembling and vibrating across the screen. All shot in crisp, high-contrast black and white, usually at night, or if in the daytime, overexposed to the point of washout. With a screaming, pounding soundtrack, Hendrix meets industrial. Almost no plot, almost no dialog, nothing but an over-the-top amphetamine rush, and megalomaniacal rock ‘n’ roll iconography pushed well beyond the point of total absurdity. Pure, exhilarating cinema, in short.

Hypercube, or Cube 2, is (of course) the sequel to Cube. The films share a minimal, elegant SF/horror premise. A bunch of people are trapped in a series of cubical rooms. The rooms are basically empty and featureless. Each room has six exits, one in the middle of each side (including the floor and the ceiling) which lead to similar empty cubical rooms. Various murderous threats appear in certain rooms; the characters also get tenser and tenser, and somtimes break down, or turn against one another. You have a combination of abstract mathematical patterns – a sort of modernist architecture theme gone mad through its own excessive purity – and psychological tension, people pushed to the point of nervous collapse. In Hypercube, the sadism of modernist geometry (everything white, with no irregularities or distinguishing features) is multiplied by the cruel unpredictability of quantum weirdness (postmodern? quantum theory is modernist, early 20th century; but here it is invoked, not very rigorously, as the justification for all sorts of twisted and trippy – as in a bad trip – video effects) as the victims find themselves in a tesseract (the equivalent, in four spatial dimensions, of a cube in three dimensions, or a square in two). Space folds back on itself, time contracts and dilates, and people encounter alternate versions of themselves. There’s no way out, of course, but only interminable waiting, or else actual death; both Cube films could be described as pulp versions of Beckett, and all the better for their mixture of high intellectual concept and trash TV psychology. The affect of Hypercube is an odd combination of icy distance and a sort of free-floating dread, too unfocused, abstract, and impersonal to be existential angst, but too palpable, too tactile, to be dismissed. A chillingly creepy experience; low-budget trash-art at its best.

Steven Soderbergh’s Traffic (which, for whatever reasons, I never managed to see before now) is a brilliant tour de force–in terms of the performances, and especially Soderbergh’s direction: intense, gripping, and visually compelling, with the multiple plot lines and locations beautifully orchestrated together. As a commentary on the “war against drugs,” however, it is mostly hokum. While it is (properly) cynical enough to recognize the futility of our current “zero tolerance” policies, and while it is well done in the gangster/corruption aspects, it shows no understanding about drugs themselves, what they do (including their profound differences from one another), and why people take them. Instead, we get cliches (the black drug dealer who Michael Douglas’ daughter has sex with in order to get her fix) and melodramatic posturing (not that I have anything against melodrama, just against tasteful melodrama) about the nuclear family. Though Michael Douglas is marginally less loathsome than he is in most of his other roles, and though Soderbergh thankfully doesn’t lay on the family values with anything approaching Spielbergian hysteria, it all still rings hollow. Give me R-Xmas any day, rather than Traffic, when it comes to films about drugs and their effect upon families.

Sexy Beast is a clever British gangster film from 2001, noteworthy for Ben Kingsley’s performance as a menacing, psychopathic gangster who is trying to convince or bully a former associate, now “retired” to a villa in Spain, to come back to London to pull another heist. The film focuses on surreal touches and uncomfortable psychological undercurrents, rather than action or suspense, which makes for a refreshingly different take on what would otherwise be a familiar genre study. And Kingsley is amazing: he is probably the only actor who could give such a performance, over-the-top and yet understated at the same time: which sounds like an oxymoron, but which is literally true.

Laurent Cantet’s Time Out is an effectively creepy film about work, business, and emptiness. The protagonist is a management/consultant/financial type, who can’t bear to tell his wife and family (or even emotionally admit to himself) that he has lost his job; so he drives around all day, fantasizing details of his busy work schedule in calls home to his wife on his mobile phone, then finally shows up late in the evening, exhausted, to play his role as husband and father & fall into bed. As this film goes on, all this escalates, as he fabulates about new jobs for which he even seems to be writing business reports and proposals, pitches fake investments to his friends, and digs himself further and further into a hole of debts and fabrications. The film is almost terrifying in its evocation of an uncanny emotional blankness that could just as well be the actuality of work in the business world, as it is the protagonist’s self-deceiving simulation of such work. Cantet convincingly imagines the affect of privileged bourgeois life in late capitalism, and it isn’t a pretty sight.

28 Days Later, directed by Danny Boyle and written by Alex Garland, is a vivid horror film in the mode of George Romero (the Living Dead trilogy, of course, but also his excellent, although lesser-known The Crazies), but updated for the new century, in terms of its cinematography (lots of shock cuts in the violent sequences) and overall attidutes (a bit more sentimental than Romero, but also more, how do I say this, pragmatic). A plague turns nearly all of England into zombie-like enraged maniacs, bent on spreading their disease by biting others. A small group of uninfected people try, against all odds, to stay alive. Horror is both the most visceral and the most intellectual of film genres, and 28 Days Later succeeds on both counts. The film works largely because of its pacing: Boyle understands the rhythms of dread, anticipation, and surprise, and he captures those scary moments when nothing is happening, but for that very reason it is impossible to feel safe, because something horrible might happen at any moment, and especially at those moments when you finally do relax, and don’t expect trouble. There’s also the visual poetry of London, and the British countryside, strangely devoid of people, though filled with their garbage and other detritus; it’s more disturbing in its way than scenes of outright ruin (destroyed buildings, etc) would have been. Though the film does have one eerie, almost apocalyptic moment, when our fleeing protagonists see Manchester burning in the distance. In terms of intellectual content, the film rethinks our post-AIDS ideas/dreads/paranoia about contagion, and also uses the aftermath of catastrophe scenario to reflect on our contemporary remakings of gender. (It’s hard to be more specific without giving things away, but let’s just say the film both gives a positive account of a new sensitive heterosexual masculinity, and reflects quite gruesomely on the laddie backlash that has been strong in both the UK and the US in recent years). All in all, I cannot say that this is a ground-breaking horror film, but it is a memorable and affecting one.