Gateway Cinephiles

Publish or Perish

The Ghost Writer
2010 (France / Germany / UK)
Director: Roman Polanski
Viewed: March 14, 2010
Format: Theatrical Print (St. Louis Cinemas Chase Park Plaza Cinema)

Roman Polanski’s thrillers pulse with their own curious rhythms, conveying a sense that everything—conversations, knowledge, even physical space—is ever so slightly out of sync.  Few directors possess his uncanny facility for pulling together all the elements of cinema, especially the selection of shots and music, to evoke a veiled, relentlessly sinister reality.   Whether he succeeds (Chinatown) or fails (The Ninth Gate), the result is unfailingly sumptuous and moody.  So it is with The Ghost Writer, a potboiler set in the rotten twin worlds of politics and publishing, executed with the auteur’s customary dramatic dexterity and passion for generic trappings.  Polanski makes no effort to conceal his personal fingerprints on the film: its politics are acidly suspicious of American power and yet also vaguely sympathetic to (ahem) public figures hounded by public outrage and the courts.  Yet the film remains relentlessly engaged with the noir-tinged plight of its nameless protagonist (Ewan McGregor), a man who, like Jake Gittes, considers himself a savvy mercenary, and whose pursuit of the truth is rooted not in airy ideals but in his resentment at being played for a fool.

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Innocence and Other Noble Lies

The White Ribbon (Das weisse Band)
2009 (Austria / Germany / France / Italy)
Director: Michael Haneke
Viewed: March 3, 2010
Format: Theatrical Print (Landmark Theaters Plaza Frontenac Cinema)

There is a mystery at the core of Michael Haneke’s Palm d’Or-clinching new film, The White Ribbon, but it is not a mystery that requires a solution.  Unlike the director’s brilliant splatter of post-modern mindfuckery, Caché, his latest feature does not wander outside the frame in the pursuit of answers.  The culprit who has committed The White Ribbon’s bizarre misdeeds is hiding in plain sight.  Set in the rigidly Protestant German hamlet of Eichwald just before World War I, the film presents the events of a single year, a year in which a series of peculiar and disturbing misfortunes befall the community.  Someone in the village is clearly responsible for these misfortunes, but sorting out whodunit is, at best, tangential to the film’s striking emotional and intellectual vigor.  Maintaining a mannered, somber tone that swathes the viewer in Old Testament dread, Haneke uses his setting and plot as portals through which he accesses a breathtaking array of themes.  Impeccably constructed and exquisitely shot in black-and-white, The White Ribbon will frustrate viewers seeking dramatic jolts.  This film is all trembling and lip-licking, a work brimming with the sour-gut sensation that something is wrong, just out of sight.

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Hurry Up and Wait

Police, Adjective (Politist, adj.)
2009 (Romania)
Director: Corneliu Porumboiu
Viewed: February 9, 2010
Format: Theatrical Print (Landmark Theaters Tivoli Theater)

Corneliu Porumboiu’s willfully staid and yet wholly absorbing new feature, Police, Adjective, operates on two interlocking planes.  On the one hand, it is a police procedural of the driest sort imaginable, an agonizingly attentive study of how peoples, objects, and information travel through a drug investigation in a small Romanian city.   In this city, the Eastern Bloc bureaucracy (and furniture) is still firmly in place, as are draconian narcotics laws that the rest of the European Union has discarded.  Strictly as a lesson in how dull police work can be, and specifically how dully absurd it can be in a former Communist dictatorship, Police, Adjective is an intriguing work, whose stifling realism serves as a direct refutation to the bombast of the Cop Picture (regardless of nationality).  Porumboiu, however, is far too talented and unruly a director to simply engage in a bit of genre revisionism and call it a day.  Accordingly, there is another, more impressive level to the film, one absorbed with language and the way it shapes, steers, and constrains us.  What truly fascinates about Police, Adjective is how easily Porumboiu grafts what is for all practical purposes an academic treatise on linguistics onto his police procedural, and how the two complement and fortify one another.

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Late to the Game: Five Minutes of Heaven

2009 (UK)
Director: Oliver Hirschbiegel
Viewed: December 24, 2009
Format: DVD - IFC (2009)

Just as Oliver Hirschbiegel’s uncommonly penetrating Nazi epic Downfall pivoted on Bruno Ganz’ portrayal of Adolf Hitler, so too does his tale of the Irish Troubles’ aftermath rests on the shoulders of an actor.  However, Five Minutes of Heaven’s most riveting performance isn’t delivered by its most familiar face, Liam Neeson, whose repentant Loyalist now works in conflict resolution.  Leonine and haunted, Neeson suits the material well, but the film’s locus is unequivocally James Nesbitt, as the brother of a Catholic man a seventeen-year-old Neeson gunned down.  Goaded into confronting his brother’s murderer by a company that engineers reconciliations for television, Nesbitt is wholly mesmerizing as a frayed man who is utterly unapologetic about his hatred and his lust for revenge.  Hirschbiegel and writer Guy Hibbert never lose sight of the story’s essential theme of the futility of blood-for-blood, but they are unafraid of exploring other avenues, such as the insidious nature of indoctrination, the toxic effects of grief on families, and, most damningly, the manner in which the media exploits human tragedy and treats peacemaking as just another bit of niche programming.  It’s primarily some third act wheel-spinning and narrative goofiness that prevents the film from feeling like an unqualified success.

Quick Review: The Baader-Meinhof Complex (Der Baader Meinhof Komplex)

2008 (Germany)
Director: Uli Edel
Viewed: September 29, 2009
Format: Theatrical Print

Uli Edel’s blood-spattered marathon retelling of the Red Army Faction’s rise and fall succeeds at establishing a fitting mood of social disintegration and open intra-cultural warfare.  Feverishly tearing through two decades of history while piling on endless, brutal setpieces, The Baader-Meinhof Complex foregrounds thrills and atmosphere, while neglecting character and context.  Writer Bernd Eichinger, who scribed the captivating Downfall, at least acknowledges the notion that the RAF was the ugly endpoint of the post-Nazi generation’s recoil from fascism.  The violent radicals depicted in Complex, however, are caricatures of unquenchable rage, not the best proxies for psychological delvings or an exploration of the origins of revolutionary zeal in affluent societies.  What Edel delivers is a relentless film that works primarily as grim entertainment, albeit one that non-Germans may have difficult absorbing, as the historical arcana come fast and furious.  Yet even as a depiction of revolution as process, Complex falls far short of last year’s mesmerizing Che, which was both more artistically daring and more coherent.  While Edel is adept at conjuring the madhouse spirit of the RAF’s murderous glory days, Complex is undemanding globetrotting drama at bottom, a grueling thriller with a dash of chilly Teutonic style.

In the Very Temple of Delight

Bright Star
2009 (UK / Australia / France)
Director: Jane Campion
Viewed: September 27, 2009
Format: Theatrical Print

Jane Campion’s new film, Bright Star, is positively swollen with exquisite sorrow.  Unabashed and yet sober in her embrace of the romantic, Campion exhibits a shrewd talent for blending personal and cultural understandings of love, and Bright Star is further, devastating proof of her instincts.  In presenting the tale of the relationship between seamstress Fanny Brawne and the English poet John Keats, Bright Star relies on the viewer’s own romantic reference points as well as their understanding of generic tropes.  The film slathers on the components of a textbook romantic tragedy: a soul in creative torment, attraction concealed behind bickering, social barriers that suffocate the lovers, a meddlesome third party, emotions that quickly veer from ecstatic to distraught, and a world that seems almost malevolent to love.  Campion assembles these well-worn elements into a whole that is not only deeply affecting, but also visually and aurally compelling.  Bright Star does not ask for our indulgence.  It earns it, by sweeping us along into a world where poetry expresses what blunt declarations, and even physical intimacies, cannot.  It operates much like poetry itself.  To borrow a phrase from Campion’s masterpiece, The Piano, it is not so much an account of a chaste love affair as it is a mood that passes through you.

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Late to the Game: Hunger

2008 (UK / Ireland)
Director: Steve McQueen
Viewed: September 13, 2009
Format: DVD - IFC (2009) (Blockbuster Exclusive)

[I’ve been missing so many high-profile films in their theatrical release this year, I’ve decided to start reviewing new films recently released on DVD. Such “Late to the Game” quick reviews will cover the film itself, not the DVD presentation or features.  The addition of yet another review format will hopefully enable me to provide more content for relevant, interesting films that slipped through my fingers during their brief sojourn in theaters.]

On a purely sensory level, Hunger functions as a grim, riveting depiction of humanity’s capacity for depraved indifference to others and to the self.  In portraying the conditions inside a British prison during the IRA’s “blanket strike” and “no-wash strike” in 1981, first-time director Steve McQueen conveys a searing sense of place through texture and sound, especially minute details such as a single snowflake melting on skin.  Hunger is a film of pregnant silences and violent outbursts, but the fulcrum of the film is a mesmerizing conversation where IRA zealot Bobby Sands (Michael Fassbender) explains to a priest (Liam Cunningham) why he is about to start a hunger strike.  In this peerless sequence, which consists mainly of a single shot and lasts more than fifteen minutes by my count, McQueen drills down into the humane essence of the film, beyond the spectacle of the grueling battle of wills between guards and prisoners.  Hunger ‘s concerns are ethical, even transcendental, conveyed with the authority of a supremely focused and confident film-maker.  With disturbing intensity, McQueen asks us to consider the meaning of sacrifice, and whether it is morally superior to dehumanize oneself rather than suffer the cruelties inflicted by others.

Quick Review: Lorna’s Silence (Le Silence de Lorna)

2008 (Belgium)
Directors: Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne
Viewed: September 9, 2009
Format: Theatrical Print

There’s something inexplicably chilly in the Dardenne brothers’ most recent film, the urgently observed and somewhat confounding Lorna’s Silence.   At the center of its narrative is a complex and thoroughly indecent proposal.  Albanian drycleaner Lorna (Arta Dobroshi) has married Belgian junkie Claudy (Jérémie Renier, compelling even as a derelict) at the behest of gangsters in order to obtain citizenship.  Their plan is to kill Claudy with a fake overdose and for Lorna to marry a Russian heavy, in a kind of murderous immigration two-step.  Naturally, the enterprise comes apart, partly due to Claudy’s shaky resolve to clean up and partly due to Lorna’s flickering conscience.   The brothers shoot with their customary vérité ruthlessness, leavening the gravity with sparing mirth and bringing tragedy down abruptly like a hammer.   However, the film fails to develop much psychological detail within the confines of its style, which dampens the potential drama.  Doboroshi’s performance is engaging, but perhaps too inscrutable, and the film never achieves the emotional depths necessary to move it much beyond thriller tensions or crude sympathy for its heroine.  Still, the conclusion veers into intriguingly unexpected territory, posing stinging doubts about the absence of human connection in an increasingly mercenary world.

Little Blossoms Adrift

Treeless Mountain
2008 (USA / Korea)
Director: So Yong Kim
Viewed: June 17, 2009
Format: Theatrical Print

[Treeless Mountain was recently featured in a limited engagement on June 17-19, 2009 at the Webster University Film Series.]

Films about childhood abound, but So Yong Kim’s delicate, affecting Treeless Mountain is a rarer thing: a film whose principal psychological attribute is its profound empathy for children, in a manner that never condescends or romanticizes.  Painting in short strokes, Kim establishes an emotional wilderness of school-age loneliness, anxiety, and disillusionment.  Seven-year-old protagonist Jin (Hee-yeon Kim) stands at the center of the film’s story and visual language, but Kim, evincing a masterful talent for understated characterization and narrative, maintains a prudent and slightly saddened distance from her subject.  She plumbs Jin’s inner life by observing her face’s restless contortions and her responses to the exasperating dilemmas that vex her and her little sister, Bin (Song-hee Kim).  Kim’s approach gently elevates the film from a poignantly observed tale of childhood, which would have been enough to satisfy, to an astonishingly mature examination of the ways in which naive expectations shape one’s day-to-day habits, emotional topography, and interactions with others.

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The Spoils of Life

Summer Hours (L’heure d’été)
2008 (France)
Director: Olivier Assayas
Viewed: June 2, 2009
Format: Theatrical Print

The genre of family drama comes prepackaged with certain expectations regarding the rhythm and features of the narrative.  The story will periodically spark and flare under the pressures of conflicting personalities, unresolved angst, and outright toxic behavior.  There will be tragedies, often several of them, and secrets will emerge from musty closets.  Invigorating cinema can be made from such dross—witness Jonathan Demme’s Rachel Getting Married from just last year, which did Deliciously Ugly quite well.  Rare, however, is the film that discovers drama within a family experience without reference to the genre’s usual, ruthless patterns.  Here is such a work: Olivier Assayas’ delicate, dauntless Summer Hours, a marvelous film that will upend the viewer’s expectations time and again.  It is not the sort of cinema that offers smug familial warmth, or a free-fall of despair, or awe at the “boldness” of its directorial vision.  It is, however, a work of profound beauty, with a meticulous awareness for time, spaces, objects, and emotions.  It invites us to spend a year or so with an extended clan of educated, cultured people and witness their wary navigation of life, especially the parts that make the heart ache.  Sound dull?  Perish the thought.

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