Movie Review: I Stand Alone (1998)

Seul contre tous (I Stand Alone) is a little too big for its britches, a baroque, explosive film heavier on style than substance, though purporting to contain much substance. The style likewise never cast a spell on the viewers, due to the continual jarring of the audience by over-the-top film techniques. Gaspar Noé's first feature film prides itself on its truthfulness and extremity, but it fails to impress much of either on its helpless spectators, leaving instead a distasteful aroma of cynicism.

The film is told almost entirely through voice overs by Philippe Nahon, an unsmiling, hardened older man who plays the film's unnamed main character, the Butcher. His entire life history is rattled off in an opening monologue accompanied by vintage photographs, a life history replete with abandonment, concentration camps, orphanages, fondlings by priests, adulterous lover, retarded children, nagging incestuous thoughts, wrongful indictment, prison time, bankruptcy, manipulation, and unemployment. The Butcher has lived one hell of a horrible life, but on January 3, 1980, he resolves to begin anew. Having moved with his pregnant wife from Paris to northern France, he looks forward to opening his own butcher shop and starting from scratch.

Within moments, however, this dream dissolves. The Butcher's vindictive wife (Frankie Pain), who controls the family finances, lies about putting down the money to buy a shop for him. Unable to afford the shop himself and unable to find suitable employment within his field, he takes on mind-numbing employment as a nursing home's night watchman. The job teaches him the ugliness of old age, the pointlessness of working, and the utter meaninglessness of life and death. He hates his job, he hates his wife, he hates his child in her womb, he hates his mother-in-law whom he lives with (Martine Audrain)--soon his hatred encompasses everything, and we learn about all of it through the vitriol that his internal monologue spouts.

I Stand Alone is a film about bitterness and how it spreads through the body and mind like an all-consuming poison. Bitterness has a way of taking hold of the thoughts and preventing any positive change in direction. How can the Butcher's luck improve when he constantly thinks about the horrible things he has witnessed and the horrible things that he wants to do in response? Unjust things have certainly happened to the Butcher throughout his life--he was thrust into poverty, the Nazis killed his father, a priest molested him, his wife cheated on him--but his inability to forgive or to forget ensures that he will never overcome the bad luck that dogs him. Negativity breeds negativity.

Rather than trudge forward hopefully--a path that seems idiotic and blind at first but that would yield infinite results in the end--the Butcher seeks to blame others for the failures of his life. And since in many cases he cannot directly retaliate against the real perpetrators (the Nazis are gone after all, and his wife is dead, and who can really be blamed for societal poverty or for children being born handicapped?), he instead directs his rage against easier targets: women, ethnic minorities, homosexuals, people with jobs, Germans, his unborn child, himself. He attacks his wife, beating her pregnant belly. He lashes out at strangers, calling them fags. He concocts elaborate, violent revenge fantasies. With nothing to hold onto and the conviction that life is nothing more than a cruel, selfish joke that goes on too long, he decides to end his life in a blaze of destruction.

He does have one small source of love that he still clings to, however. His daughter, a frowning, mute teenager with a mental handicap, is the only goodness he can still see in the world, and not wanting to leave her to fend for herself amongst the wild animals in the ferocious jungle, he decides that he will kill her out of mercy before slaughtering a sacrificial victim to represent all of his frustrations and then taking his own life. His love for her is not without its impurities, though. Obsessed with corruption and sin, he cannot shake the idea that he wants to have sex with his daughter. Would that matter in a meaningless world? Would it even be worth it, or would it ultimately be as joyless as everything else? Why would he really want to destroy the one pure love he possesses on earth by corrupting it in such a way?

The Butcher imagines the horror of shooting his beloved daughter. He imagines the difficulty of embracing his own violent death. And then, after an hour and a half of hateful sneering, accusations, violence, and drinking, he dissolves into tears, embracing his daughter and confessing that he loves her while "Pachelbel's Canon" plays. This moment of loving selflessness and complete surrender within a film mired down by ugliness and cruelty is deeply affecting, but even this final moment is evanescent, as the Butcher's thoughts return once more to rape and revenge.

I Stand Alone is a disquieting film, not just because it depicts murder and the beating of a pregnant woman but more so because it exists entirely within the mind of a pathologically angry man. The Butcher's diatribes are constant, and for the most part they are not nearly as insightful or interesting as the Butcher thinks they are. I know that's probably intentional on Gaspar Noé's part, but that doesn't keep the excessive cynicism from being obnoxious. Even more jarring about the film are the constant directorial intrusions--abrupt, deafening gunshots that accompany almost every rapid camera movement, title cards that emphasize abstract concepts like "morality" and "justice," extreme close-ups, and even a countdown warning that the viewers should leave the theater prior to the violent climax. These "anything goes" stylistic flairs might be fun in a more entertaining, upbeat film, but the bleak nature of I Stand Alone demands more serious handling. I Stand Alone has its moments and is certainly not a stupid film, but it falls far short of its successor, Irreversible.

I Stand Alone (1998)
d/w: Gaspar Noé
(Philippe Nahon, Blandine Lenoir)
6/10

Movie Review: Irreversible (2002)

Where can lines safely and firmly be drawn between pleasures, perversions, and outright transgressions? Are such lines possible, or have the boundaries between sexual acceptability and indecency become too dangerously blurred?

Gaspar Noé's beautiful yet nerve-shatteringly disturbing tragedy Irreversible examines this theme among many other insightful inquiries.

Throughout history, various periods have been marked by more or less accepting attitudes toward deviant sexual practices. In our present time, a long list of sexual fetishes have entered the common lexicon: sadism, masochism, bondage, coprophagia, water sports, fisting, electrostimulation, furrydom, and so forth into more obscure territories. These perversions in essence are harmless. Consensual, safe, democratic participation is sought on the parts of all parties, even when the playacting involves dangerous rape. Many people today (though certainly not all) will respect another person's desire to privately engage in consensual and legal though unusual sexual practices in private with their partners, even if they don't find those particular practices appealing. Kinks and fetishes, embarrassing and private as they are, are more widespread and thus less abnormal than the average person will admit, so a tolerant attitude is in part a reaction against hypocrisy.

Sexual pleasure is a peculiar thing. Who can say where and how it's hardwired in the brain? While some people--guided by religion or tradition or their own personal preferences--will maintain set, narrow guidelines for the circumstances under which any normal person should be able to derive suitable sexual pleasure, others will admit that what works for one person might not work for all. Conflicts over what makes good sex arise even within close, loving relationships.

In a late scene in Irreversible--which, chronologically, is an early scene since the film is told in reverse--Alex (Monica Bellucci) discusses with her current (Vincent Cassel) and her ex-boyfriend (Albert Dupontel) the conditions that allow her to orgasm. Ex-boyfriend Pierre was very loving but a failed lover, whereas present boyfriend Marcus is a selfish pig who achieves excellent results in bed. They have this loud and explicit conversation in public on a crowded Metro car, which seems oddly indiscreet to me being a southern American but which perhaps is more commonplace in Paris, where nobody even turns a head, pointing to a very sexually tolerant and permissible environment. Pierre talks to his dedication to lovemaking--his orgasmic self-sacrifice, his physical diversity, his poetic whispers, all of which were unsuccessful. At which point Alex admits that what is most important to her is the satisfaction of the man she's with. She doesn't want a man sacrificing his orgasms for her continued pleasure; she wants a man who is having a great time. If the man comes, then she will come.

This admission is eerily ironic given that later in the night (and earlier in the film) Alex is raped by someone entirely interested in his own pleasure. Needless to say, she does not enjoy this. The rapist, a bisexual pimp known as Le Tenia, "the Tapeworm" (Jo Prestia), is a sneering, ugly parasite who extorts money from transgendered prostitutes and spends his free time at The Rectum, a red-lit, underground labyrinth of extreme sexual deviancy. Accustomed to an environment where men willingly beg to be raped, tortured, tied up, and fisted and where exploited sex workers are more or less willing to submit to fantasies of domination and adultery, Le Tenia's perceptions of acceptable interpersonal behavior are, to say the least, warped. He compliments Alex as he rapes her, and as he holds a knife to her face he asks her if she is turned on by the sadism. His words hover somewhere between mocking derision and a genuine belief that this passing woman might actually enjoy the brutal sex act, like so many in the past who have enjoyed simulated rape with him while pretending to resist.

There is no forgiving Le Tenia, however, for his actions are rooted not in an attempt to share good sex with Alex but in a hateful, destructive derision. Le Tenia comes across Alex in a red-lit, filthy, concrete highway underpass while threatening one of his hookers. Alex cowers in response to the violence, a fearful reaction that titillates Le Tenia. Though he is not normally interested in women, he is motivated to rape Alex by a desire to punish her--first and foremost for having witnessed his indiscretion, but mostly out of jealous rage against her beauty, wealth, and normality. His gruesome crime is in part an act of class warfare, a violent revolt against the bourgeois morality that he imagines she represents. By raping her, by accusing her of enjoying it, and by ultimately destroying her physically with his fists and feet, Le Tenia attempts to taint the pure, white-clad Alex with his subterranean evil.

On a certain level, Irreversible is a bellicose depiction of a clash between classes, an upper and a lower class divided not by economic status but by values, a division made trivial by being wrought with hypocrisy. In the opening scene, a fat, naked man confesses to his accepting friend that he went to prison for having sex with his daughter. Despite his own severe depravity, he allows himself the superiority of deriding the gay men who flock to the Rectum club in his neighborhood. He is an incestuous, pedophile rapist, but at least he's not a queer! Alex's boyfriend Marcus is an adulterous, immature drug addict, but when he launches on a reckless course to avenge his battered girlfriend, he allows himself to launch insults against everyone he passes, including those who help him. He beats a man at the sex club who is the only person who can identify the rapist for him. He chastises gay men in a restaurant, even though they can help him find the Rectum club where the rapist cavorts. He hurls racist insults at and steals the cab of a Chinese taxi driver who is driving him to his destination. Most tellingly, he assaults and threatens the transsexual prostitute who can tell him exactly who raped his girlfriend. His unnecessary violence is no different or better than the beating that Le Tenia gave to the very same hooker earlier in the night (later in the film), the beating that involved Alex in Le Tenia's life.

Marcus considers himself better than the trash he comes across during his vengeful journey into hell, but not only does he need this trash in order to continue his journey, he is also no different or better than the trash.

Even Pierre, easily the noblest man in the film, is not without sin. A professor and philosopher, he is reserved, mature, and calm, and he expresses a genuine concern for Alex's safety and feelings, but even he is preoccupied with sex, crossing boundaries to engage Alex in the explicit discussion on the Metro, which she tolerates even though she is obviously unhappy with it. Alex allows room for an indiscretion, and Pierre unashamedly takes it. A complex film about rape must also say something about personal space and consent, and Irreversible chillingly hints at these specifics. In the final scene of the film, a bedroom scene between Marcus and Alex, the nude and horny Marcus prods at various taboos, aggressively seeking new territory from Alex that she hesitantly relents to. There is talk of sexual punishment and of anal sex. The talk is gentle and consensual, but in what ways does it erase the boundaries between what Alex truly wants, what she's willing to give, and what she might be forced to give? Structured as the climax of the film--following the revenge, the rape, and the argument--these scene is charged with a power it otherwise wouldn't have if the film were told linearly. Given our knowledge of what will happen later in the night, we see the rape from within this scene as an explicit, external culmination of Alex's internal fears about her relationship--that she is losing control. She has just learned she is pregnant (the final revelation of the film, which adds a horrifying twist to the rape and beating), and she is unable to control her lover--the baby's father--in bed in ways that she should be able to control him. This powerless escalates at the Metro, where she is forced into an uncomfortable, indecent conversation by the one man she does seem to trust and where she feels subjugated to her man, who wraps his arm around her and cups her breast in a very possessive way. (It's easy not to notice her face during this scene, since Pierre and Marcus do all the talking at this moment, but the expression that covers her as Marcus wraps his arm around her torso is one of surreal horror and helplessness.) At the party, she loses complete control of how her life should be ordered. Her boyfriend, a future father who should be acting responsible and committed to her, abandons himself in drugs and attempts to seduce numerous other women. When she leaves the party and--unable to hail a cab--crosses through the underpass on the advice of a stranger ("It's safer!"), her life descends into complete hopeless chaos. She is anally raped and beaten into a coma. Her universe dissolves.

Gaspar Noé offers predestination as a consideration in the film. The title, the backwards structure, the spiraling omniscient camera, and the epitaph "Time Destroys Everything" encourage this thought process, as do a reference to 2001: A Space Odyssey and Alex's references to a philosophical book about time that she is reading. Premonitory dreams alert us to the future according to the book, and Alex indeed dreams about entering the red tunnel before it happens. (Marcus also dreams about being unable to feel his arm, which inversely foretells the fact that later in the night he will have that same arm broken.) Everything is written beforehand, the author claims, and fate cannot be changed. We experience this firsthand by watching the film, since we have already seen what is coming. Knowing that the future is miserable, we likewise feel the same helplessness that Alex feels, though we witness it in reverse. Gaspar Noé has made a truly discomforting and terrifying film, the most disturbing one I have ever seen, and this is fitting given that his two major themes are two of the ugliest elements of human nature: sexual and physical violence--or, more specifically, rape and revenge.

The early scenes of the film detail Marcus's revenge tragedy. When we first see him in the film, he is being hospitalized and Pierre is being arrested, so we know--as in any revenge tragedy--that things will end poorly. To explain things chronologically, after discovering Alex's comatose body, Marcus and Pierre are interrogated by the police. The police know nothing, and the best lead they are able to come up with is that Pierre did it. In the depths of their dismay, the duo is approached by two soft-spoken thugs who promise inside information and revenge. The police are for pussies, they claim. Revenge is for men. The two thugs exploit the tragedy, seeking payment, of course, but they deliver on their promise. Navigating the criminal underworld, Alex and Pierre are led underground to the cavernous corridors of the Rectum.

At this point Pierre insists that revenge is for animals. Men should derive their actions from the higher faculties. Rather than pursue a path that can only lead to ultimate destruction, they should go to the hospital to sit with Alex. Marcus refuses to listen. Though he could care less about Alex when they were at the party, now he must overcompensate to avenge his woman. Finding the man he believes to be Le Tenia, he starts a fight before a live audience of sex fiends. He is quickly overpowered, however, and the man snaps his arm in half.

At this point Pierre, who has maintained his cool throughout the hunt despite being profoundly upset by Alex's fate, knocks down the assailant with a fire extinguisher and then proceeds to repeatedly bash in the man's skull with the heavy, thudding instrument. The man's jaw quivers as his blood splattered face caves in. Though one or two hits would surely suffice, calm and passionless Pierre is overpowered by rage and revenge. He demolishes the man beyond repair. By showing this extremely brutal murder in one of the opening sequences of the film rather than at the end, we are forced to examine the outcome of revenge without regard to its incitement. The revenge is horrible, animalistic, primal, demonic. It unlocks something in Pierre that can never be covered up, and it kills an innocence in him that can never be regained. By seeing the revenge before knowing why it's happening, we have no desire to cheer for it or support it. We must examine it on its own terms and decide that there can be no justification for its brutality.

Even more unsettling--though this is not readily apparent on first viewing--is that they attack the wrong man. Le Tenia is one of the passive spectators of the fight, who smiles and snorts drugs while devouring the murder with his eyes. Though the thug informants promised results--that the rapist would be punished instead of, at worst, spending a peaceful life being cared for in prison--the consequences of reckless revenge are disastrous. The wrong man is destroyed, the guilty man will now probably never be caught, and the avengers will be punished instead. Not to mention that nothing can change that Alex was raped and beaten.

The men at the sex club watch the beating but in no way involve themselves in trying to stop it. Some of them even encourage grislier violence, like spectators at the Roman circus. Given the nature of film, we are spectators, too, though different in that we could not help or change things even if we wanted to. One of the most horrifying images in this thoroughly horrifying film is the silhouette of a man who passes in the background of the underpass while Alex is being raped. He takes a few steps forward, pauses, and then hurriedly leaves. Did he realize it was rape, or did he think it was consensual, perverse sex that he should just tolerate and ignore? If he realized it was rape, why didn't he interfere? Would we interfere--or, more importantly, would we interfere after having seen this film and this shadow of a passerby? By showing us this nightmare, Gaspar Noé prepares us to react heroically in the (hopefully never-will-happen) event that we find ourselves in the same position as the faceless passerby. Hopefully, we will not remain faceless, retreating in the shadows. Hopefully, we will know to distinguish between acceptable and unacceptable behavior. In a rare bit of heroism in the film, the prostitutes rise up with curses and sticks to defend their troubled sister when Marcus attacks one of the prostitutes. Courage like this is in short supply in Irreversible.

There is an infinite variety of sexual practices. Many of them are fine. Some of them aren't. The nude man's friend in the opening scene laughingly dismisses the man's incestuous rape as merely "the Western syndrome," par for the course. When Alex's mutilated body is discovered, some of the spectators on the sidewalk seem satisfied and entertained. "Some whore got raped!" one of them cheers, as though the fact that the woman may have worked in the sex industry makes it okay that she was nearly killed. Rape is never okay, but how can you tell when rape is actually rape in a world where some people genuinely want to be raped in a way that looks, feels, and sounds like rape yet isn't actually rape?

Irreversible is a clever and complicated film that operates on many levels. Though unsettling to the core, the film is a beautiful work of craftsmanship. Gaspar Noé's fluid, ghostlike camera (with cinematographer Benoît Debie) weaves in and out of cars and buildings, hovering and spinning, inducing vertigo and nausea in the viewer. Cuts are seamless, giving the impression of one endless (though nonlinear!) take, a feeling which increases the dramatic inertia and hopelessness of the film's story. The acting, largely improvisational, is flawless, with desperation pervading in the lives of normal people. Thomas Bangalter of Daft Punk did the score, a pounding, hellish, nerve-shocking techno soundscape that regulates the heartbeat in stressful ways. Visual effects by Rodolphe Chabrier are more extensive than they appear (a good mark of any special effects artist) since the impressive camerawork, cutting, and detailing received a thorough (though unnoticeable) digital makeover. The bashed in skull of the man in the revenge scene, one of the most unforgettable and macabre moments of cinematic history, was impressively fabricated using a combination of matte painting, latex models, 3D imaging, and acting. The attention to detail--a jaw that gasps for air even after the rest of the face has been rendered unrecognizable--turns just another murder into one of the most gruesome murders ever filmed, and Chabrier should have received more recognition for that.

Irreversible is an unpleasant film, and many will avoid trying to think about it too hard, if indeed they're even able to watch the whole thing. Though they may dismiss the film as sensational, the film has much to say, and the sensation is intended to moralize rather than glamorize (this boundary is never crossed). Irreversible treats horrifying, unsettling, and difficult themes with horrifying, unsettling, and difficult filmmaking techniques, and in this regard Gaspar Noé is an artist of the highest caliber. Though I can't recommend it to the faint of heart, Irreversible is one of the most important and life-changing films of recent years.

Irreversible (2002)
d/w: Gaspar Noé
(Monica Bellucci, Vincent Cassel, Albert Dupontel)
10/10

Movie Review: Cache (2005)

Our lives project from the stories we tell about ourselves and our worlds, not just to others but to ourselves, as well. We form routines and make assumptions to make our lives flow more efficiently and to give ourselves some inkling of understanding and intuition about our universe, and the foundation for these assumptions and routines are myths about what our world is like and who we are within it. Some of these myths are more dependable than others: something thrown into the air will fall down, a dark and cloudy sky brings rain. Some are less reliable: if I walk under a ladder then bad things will happen, or if I am nice to someone that person will be nice in return. And some are downright dangerous: I drive better when I'm drunk, or Japanese people should never be trusted. The assumptions, prejudices, and routines remove the thought process from our lives, freeing us up so that we can live lives of action rather than constant decision-making.

That's neither an entirely bad nor an entirely good thing. Certainly, it's good for our survival to be able to assume that a barking dog might be dangerous without having to experiment first. Many once-in-a-lifetime opportunities have been missed, I'm sure, by people who pondered first rather than leaping ahead. Too much thought can lead to self-doubt, insecurity, depression, laziness, fear, and second guessing. Too little can lead to tunnel vision, stereotypes, mistakes, and a lack of imagination.

Among other things, Michael Haneke's voyeuristic mystery film Caché (sometimes translated Hidden) is about the power of establishing a fact and moving on. Whether these facts are truthful is irrelevant in a complicated world where truth is a graduated scale rather than an all-or-nothing quality. What is instead important is our ability to accept the truthfulness of a fact and all that it entails--its consequences and correlatives--and continue on with life. An inability to move on is a plague on the mind that prevents further progress by calling into question the truthfulness of everything else we think we know. Truth is a frangible house of cards. When the strength that supports one piece of it dissolves, we realize that the entire structure is built on collapsible prayers.

At the center of Caché is Georges Laurent (Daniel Auteuil), a late middle aged, successful family man and television personality who may or may not have told a couple lies when he was a six-year-old boy. Faced with the possibility that his parents might adopt the orphaned son of two Algerian farmhands, the only child of this wealthy French provincial farm family fabricates two lies about the older usurper. First, he tells his mother than the boy coughs up blood, a rather strange lie suggestive of tuberculosis which, in my opinion, encourages sympathy for the orphan rather than repulsion. When that lie--which perhaps wasn't even a lie, since Georges's adult flashbacks of the incident seem rather realistic--fails, Georges convinces the boy that his parents want him to behead the grumpy family rooster. When the boy obliges, young Georges tells his mother that he maliciously slaughtered the cock in order to terrorize him. The mother takes the bait, and the boy is unwillingly hauled off to an orphanage.

Georges confesses these sins to his wife (Juliette Binoche) late in the film, after much denial and evasion, many nightmares and threats. What, however, is the nature of these sins? Are they really that unforgivable? Georges is six years old, a spoiled only child who quite naturally resists having to share his family and his life with another kid. His behavior is selfish, but it's understandable. It's also something that a little good parenting, communication, and discipline could easily solve. His first lie, like I said, is bizarre--not the sort of lie a child seeking to vilify someone would invent. Was it a lie? Was it something he saw in a bad dream that he somehow thought was the truth at one point? Did he really see the Algerian boy coughing up blood, and did this frighten him? Was his opposition to the Algerian not based in selfishness but in fear? A flashback of the rooster beheading scene--presented as one of Georges's nightmares--presents the possibility that maybe the boy was trying to scare him, yet Georges later confesses that these were his lies. The rooster slaying couldn't have caused too much damage, considering that an old rooster can't be that valuable, that the Algerian would be capable of explaining his side of the story, and that Georges would have to do an impressive bit of acting afraid in order to convince his mother that he was traumatized.

All this, plus consider that Majid, the Algerian, was the truly traumatized boy. At age eight, his parents are murdered by the French police in the 1961 Paris massacre. This is the event that causes the boy to be orphaned. Killing an old rooster, having tuberculosis--are these really crimes unpardonable enough to cause potential adoptive parents to heartlessly abandon a pitiful child to a flawed welfare system? Who is the greater sinner: Georges for accusing the boy, or Georges's parents for condemning him on shallow evidence?

Or is it more likely that when Georges confesses to his frustrated wife, he leaves out crucial information about his indictment of Majid? When he first mentions the childhood event after a long duration of feigned ignorance, he claims to have forgotten all the details. These details emerge only much later, after all threats have been removed and confessing is merely a choice rather than a necessity. Does he confess only to what he is capable of admitting? Are these two lies merely the tip of a vast, hulking iceberg of guilt? Or are these formative lies, which eventually destroyed a man's life, all that is necessary to plague a man's conscience?

Two lives emerge from the slaying of the rooster. Georges continues to be the spoiled only child of a wealthy, white family. He is cared for, well fed, looked after, and educated. He becomes an intellectual. He lands a high profile job as a book critic on public television, a successful, beautiful wife who is a publisher, and a luxuriant apartment in Paris. He barrels through life forming opinions, entertaining friends, and making decisions without doing much thinking. He darts out into the street without looking and is almost hit by a black bicyclist, who he then violently accuses of being an idiot. He passes through life telling unnecessary white lies to his friends and his wife. And when he walks by a man who is standing in plain sight videotaping him--the Algerian he knew decades ago, most likely--he doesn't even notice. He is all action, no thought. He needn't think because he already knows everything.

Majid's life follows a much different course. Hauled off to the orphanage, he must fend for himself, receiving bad food and shoddy living conditions. His education is poor. He has a son, but perhaps his wife leaves him or dies. He lives in a small, cluttered, subsidized apartment in an ugly hall. And regrets about what he could have had, pains about the education and life he almost received, unquenchable anger and nausea at the thought of Georges's misdeeds haunt him for the rest of his life, until the exhausted depression drives him to a bloody suicide.

On a certain broad level, Caché is a film about racism in France and its effects on a certain generation of whites and Algerians who are promised equal lives but receive quite different fates. Featuring the children of Georges and Majid, who cross paths in the film's unusual end scene, the film points to the legacy that the next generation will inherit. On a very specific level, Caché presents itself as a mystery about voyeurism. Though Georges lives in the public spotlight, his life becomes unsettled when he begins receiving extensive videotapes of his front door. The tapes point to the fact that he is being examined, and for the first time they force him to examine himself. This examination unleashes his memory of his long buried sins; a thoughtful pause highlights the crooked card on which his shaking house of cards is built--the fact that his life of privilege that he takes for granted is undeserved. The producer of the videotapes is never revealed, but the most likely culprit is Majid (Maurice Bénichou), who nevertheless denies guilt.

This crux is the thematic center of the film. More important than racism or voyeurism is the question of guilt, an obstacle which prevents us from plowing forward on our sure-headed paths of assumption and routine. Guilt forces us to admit that something in the way we perceive or once perceived the world is wrong. Guilt tells us that we do not always act according to truth. A mysterious childhood event creates one child who cannot stop pondering the numerous possible universes of truth and another who pigheadedly insists upon his way or the highway. When the child who thinks finally acts, the man who acts must finally stop to think.

Michael Haneke's style is a cinema of "insistent questions" and uneasy answers, and perhaps in no other film is this style more fluidly perfected--nor, perhaps, as frustrating. Caché is presented as a mystery, yet it lacks the evidence to firmly support any possible solution. The film achieves the provocation of thought that it sets out to accomplish, but it does so in the most purposely unentertaining of fashions. The acting is solid but unspectacular (Annie Girardot is most interesting in a very brief role as Georges's remorseful-looking old mother, who betrays no word of guilt despite the tears her eyes cannot hold back), and the cinematography is bright and antiseptic. There is no score or soundtrack. Caché is a thoughtful and intriguing film, but not a particularly stirring or enjoyable one.

Caché (2005)
d/w: Michael Haneke
(Daniel Auteuil, Juliette Binoche, Maurice Bénichou)
6/10

Movie Review: Time of the Wolf (2004)

Michael Haneke's Les Temps du Loup (Time of the Wolf or Year of the Wolf) is perhaps his least regarded and least discussed film for good reason. The movie mistakes pretension for seriousness, with a meandering, enigmatic plot that never begs any interesting questions, a large ensemble of loosely sketched characters, and none of the horror, suspense, or cinematic thrills that typically mark the post-apocalyptic genre. Michael Haneke believes that his film is the most meaningful of an overdone genre, yet none of its cursory themes ever take hold and at the most fundamental level it fails to resonate, entertain, or provoke.

Of all genres, the post-apocalyptic fantasy is perhaps the format that carries the most symbolic weight. Night of the Living Dead is an intense examination of anarchy and how self-interest, survival, and teamwork do not always intersect. Serendipitously, it is also a statement about race relations. Children of Men explores xenophobia and the nihilism of having no future, and in a profoundly moving climax it juxtaposes the universal reverence of creating life with mankind's thoughtless pursuit of destruction. Dawn of the Dead and Shaun of the Dead both satirize mindless consumerism and lifeless routines. Day of the Dead, 28 Days Later, Starship Troopers, and 28 Weeks Later all present horrifying depictions of military rule, fascism, and war. The Road examines trust and sacrifice. The Road Warrior, and its most rudimentary, is a condemnation of oil dependence. I could go on, but the list would be very long. My point is that most dystopian films criticize some destructive element of society, be it mass media, group thinking, anti-environmentalism, drugs, or what have you. And most of these films also manage to be exciting, in fact some of the most exciting of all films.

Time of the Wolf offers no new insight, and it does so with a stillborn plot. The film has little visual flair, except for some haunting scenes of roving bands silently moving by torchlight in the distance. Haneke's depiction of the French countryside is misty and gray, but it's not far removed from present reality. It's his way of saying that for many people in other countries (say, Somalia) his depiction of the "end of the world" is their present world, a life of poverty, rape, anarchy, and hopelessness that they must live with daily. By not explaining the origins of the apocalypse and by having the conditions thrust suddenly and awkwardly on the film's central characters--a mother (Isabelle Huppert) and her two children--Haneke suggests that this dystopia is not as far off as we would like to imagine. Beyond this, he offers no clear message about what we must avoid in order to avoid destruction. We must imagine for ourselves what must be undone in order to change our fate (stop polluting? stop warring? end class inequality? end ethnic racism?), but why do we need to imagine this when there exist ample films that imagine these things for us? Since the writers of the Hebrew Bible wrote grizzly prophetic visions like those in Isaiah and Daniel, people have been imagining the end times, how rapidly they are approaching, what might cause them, and what we must do to avoid them. Time of the Wolf offers very little to this established train of thought, instead merely depicting outcomes that are far more resonant in other films.

A man who has had almost no prior screen time is randomly murdered, and when his killer is later accused before a crowd he escapes penalty since the crowd is incapable of justice without evidence and structure. A young girl is raped and then she is either murdered or she commits suicide; the rapist is never revealed or punished. People commit robberies that others are accused of, and stress and prejudice become controlling factors of some people's behavior. Characters are introduced and dropped, none of them ever reaching two or more dimensions. It's all very realistic, but ultimately drab and tedious.

Out of everything, few moments are memorable:

When a woman (Luminita Gheorghiu) asks another (Huppert) for a cigarette, she readily offers a tin of food in exchange. Later, out of some remnant of politeness, she offers the woman a puff of the bartered cigarette, then stares longingly as a lost-in-thought Huppert lets the cigarette turn to ash. Having been returned the cigarette, she smokes it to the filter, knowing that the exchange has not been fair and that she may never again have another cigarette.

A father's burial is edited over, but when his son's parakeet dies, the mourning ritual is highlighted, perhaps illustrating the child's attempt to confront the larger, more difficult issue by treating the smaller issue with excessive care.

And in the film's climax, that same son builds a fire and prepares to thrust himself into it as a sacrificial lamb. Having overheard a description of such a religious ritual from an old man who swore by its religious effectiveness, the boy attempts to solve the world's problems. The scene is an instant of genuine insight into child psychology, revealing the boy's inclination to believe that everything is his fault and his readiness to fix things with a superstitious gesture of no real value.

Yet despite these brief moments, the film is a pretentious bore, uninspiring, selfish, and forgettable.

Time of the Wolf (2003)
d/w: Michael Haneke
(Isabelle Huppert, Luminita Gheorghiu, Anaïs Demoustier)
4/10

Movie Review: Code Unknown (2000)

There were some parts of Code Unknown (Code inconnu: Récit incomplet de divers voyages) the specifics of which I did not understand. Some of these same parts, I think, were intentionally inaccessible. That's okay. Tonally, the film makes perfect sense. Though the title literally refers to an apartment building access code, the title more generally refers to the complex, unintelligible cipher of our emotions. Michael Haneke's film is about the emotional retardation of the present age, an era in which it has become increasingly difficult to understand our own emotions and their consequences and nearly impossible to interpret and respond to the feelings of others. Code Unknown is a complex portrait of various people unable to comprehend that they do not live in a void but within an interconnected society.

Suitably subtitled Incomplete Tales of Several Journeys, Code Unknown offers numerous snapshots of the lives of people from around the globe. At the center is an incomparable Juliette Binoche as Anne Laurent, a rising actress whose brother-in-law Jean (Alexandre Hamidi) is a sullen, rebellious teenager. Jean's aging father's dream is that Jean will inherit the family farm, a beautiful and prosperous estate, but though Jean has no dreams of his own and though he needn't continue to run the farm once his father dies, he refuses to cooperate. The father (Josef Bierbichler) bribes him with a motorbike and with soft words, and he quietly excuses himself to the bathroom so that he can cry alone in the dark while flushing the toilet. He does not want the family legacy to cease.

But Jean uses the motorbike to run away and disappear, leaving a terse note that he does not wish to be found. While walking the sidewalks of Paris on a drizzly day, he absentmindedly throws a half-eaten croissant into the lap of a homeless, older woman (Luminita Gheorghiu). Though most passers-by would probably not even notice or care about this rude treatment of a disheveled vagabond, and though the woman scarcely even responds herself--happy just to have food and not surprised at being treated with contempt--an astounded Amdaou (Ona Lu Yenke), a young man of Malian descent, pursues Jean, insisting that he apologize to the woman for his awful behavior. Jean refuses, a scuffle ensues, and the police arrive on scene. Handsome, white Jean is dismissed, black Amadou spends a night in prison, and the homeless woman is deported.

The film delves into the lives of all parties involved. We see Amadou's father, a cab driver, abandon his family to return to Mali. We see one of his fares treat him with entitled annoyance without realizing that the cab driver is a human being facing an emergency. We see Maria, the panhandler, in her native Romania, unable to tell her closest friends and family members that she was destitute in France and did not return of her own free will. We see Jean's father worriedly telling Anne and Anne's husband Georges (Jean's older brother, played by Thierry Neuvic) that Jean has disappeared. Stressed and depressed, he picks at crumbs on the tabletop with his fidgeting hands. When Anne tries to comfort him by placing her hand over his, he abruptly rises and leaves the room. Even when others do reach out to us, we do not know how to respond.

The beautiful, natural, and extremely talented Juliette Binoche is the focal point of the film, and we variously see her in all positions of the emotional divide. We also see her in the only three melodramatically, intensely emotional scenes of the film, three scenes in which she is performing as an actor: first in a thriller film, where she has just found out that she is about to be slowly murdered by a psychopath and responds (very convincingly) with confusion then desperation then tears, second in a stage comedy in which she laughs riotously while revealing her true feelings about a rival, and finally in a romantic drama in which she reacts with fear, tears, and love when her fictional son nearly falls off a twenty-fourth floor balcony. These scenes illustrate what we typically see in art and what we often expect from our own lives and relationships--passion, honesty, argument. The scenes in which Anne is not acting illustrate what we more often get in reality, such as the aforementioned scene where Anne tries to console her father-in-law but is cut off.

In another scene, a neighbor turns to her via an anonymous note for help in protecting a violently abused child. Earlier we witnessed the abuse second-hand. Anne is ironing while watching the television and hears agonized screaming in the distance. She mutes the television, worries over the screaming, but continues ironing. The screaming stops, some moments of silence pass, and Anne turns the volume on the television back up. She continues ironing. When she receives the note, she deliberates with Georges over how to respond to the worrisome note. This conversation turns into an argument; Georges doesn't want to think about the problem since the note wasn't addressed to him, and Anne accuses him of being heartless. In the end, Anne does nothing about the troubling situation, and the child is killed. Anne attends the funeral.

In the film's climax (though to call it a climax implies that the film has a plot, and Code Unknown really doesn't have a narrative-driven structure... when I say climax, I mean the most emotionally powerful scene, which is almost at the end of the film and which is also the last scene with audible dialogue), we see Anne in need of help herself. On the train, she is accosted by a suave Arab teenager (Walid Afkir), who presumes that she is a wealthy, racist, and arrogant bitch and then simultaneously flirts with and verbally assaults her while a friend stands nearby, laughing at the bully's antics. There are several other people on the train, but except for an old woman who disapprovingly looks at the boy and then turns away, nobody says or does anything. Anne remains silent, ignoring the boy as he belittles her, not wanting to acknowledge his rudeness with a response. She rises and walks to another seat, but he follows her. She continues to ignore him as best she can, and finally he sits beside her, silent, normal. The train comes to a stop, the doors open, and he spits on her face at close range. As he bolts out the door, an older Arab man (Maurice Bénichou) trips him. The boy responds with anger, calling the gentleman a fool. The gentleman calmly--though with obvious nervousness--removes his eyeglasses, wordlessly hands them to Anne across the aisle, and rises for a fight, yelling at the boy in Arabic. The boy backs down. The man sits back down and continues staring forward, as before, as though nothing has happened. Anne hands him back his glasses, then wipes her face. The train continues moving, with the boy off-camera, and all is silent. The train comes to another stop, and the boy exits with a loud and frightening threat directed toward the man. Crisis averted, Anne breaks into tears. All she can manage to say is a sob-choked "Merci" to the man who stood up for her, but he does not respond, does not know how to respond, just continues staring forward as people do on a subway.

This genuine and emotionally resonant scene is filmed in one long cut with the camera acting as an inactive eye witness. The point-of-view is that of someone riding the train but refusing to act, just as all of the other passengers witness Anne's dilemma but pretend to remain ignorant. The boy is just a boy and it doesn't take much to put an end to his hatred, yet no one is willing to offer the slightest assistance. They all pass the buck to fate or to more noble heroes. Would we do anything if in the same situation? How much injustice do we see daily that we pretend does not exist? How often do we convince ourselves that we are not the hero-type, that some crises are better left resolved by others? When the gentleman stands up for her, he seemingly does so before he even realizes that he has resolved to do it. Afterward, he remains speechless and uncomprehending, still unable to talk to or even look at the woman he has just saved, unable to share words at a time when words would mean so much.

Code Unknown speaks volumes about the war-torn landscape of our emotions; this review has only scratched the surface, without examining Georges's career as a wartime photographer of atrocities, Amadou's acceptance-seeking white girlfriend, Amadou's superstitious mother, or the deaf children who bookend the film with a guessing game of charades in which they act out complex, enigmatic feelings. One of Michael Haneke's best films, Code Unknown is a rich movie that perfectly captures our current crisis of disconnect.

Code Unknown: Incomplete Tales of Several Journeys (2000)
d/w: Michael Haneke
(Juliette Binoche, Luminita Gheorghiu, Ona Lu Yenke, Thierry Neuvic, Maurice Bénichou)
9/10

Escape from reality, but into what? Eight movies about children's imagination.

Albert Lamorisse's most enduring legacy may be his development of the game of world domination, Risk, in 1957. But almost as well-known is his 1956 short, mostly silent film Le Ballon rouge, which won an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay--the only time a short or a dialogue-free picture has ever won in competition with a feature film. The Criterion Collection released the short on a disc that also featured Crin-Blanc, Cheval Sauvage, a 1953 short by Lamorisse that is an interesting and perhaps depressing companion piece to the more well-known movie.

Both movies feature young boys who are cute, persistent, lonely, and innocent who form intimate bonds with non-human and likewise innocent friends against a backdrop of an insensitive and violent world.

In White Mane, (Crin-Blanc), young Folco (Alain Emery) is bathed in soft, radiant light, dressed in unblemished white despite his time spent fishing in the swamps of southeastern France, with cherubic blond hair, clean features, and a face betraying the calm and wisdom of many decades. From afar he watches the roping of White Mane, a vibrant all-white stallion whose strength and determination have made him the leader of his herd. The local ranchers--soiled, grizzled, loud, and harsh--have decided to tame his wildness, to make him submit to their ownership and authority, to crush his freedom and exploit his strength. To their chagrin, he defeats them and escapes. Several attempts fail, and a swearing ranger offers him up to hell in frustration. Folco, watching their struggles and in admiration of the horse, asks if he can now have the horse since they have given up, and they condescendingly explain that he could certainly have the wild beast if he could ever achieve the impossible task of catching it.

Small, harmless Folco armed only with a fishing net, a rope, and his implacable will manages to rope the curious stallion. White Mane cuts loose, racing at breakneck speeds through the watery marshes. Folco holds tight. He is dragged through the mud. His desire to be with the horse is greater than his humiliation, pain, or fear. He must prove himself of the utmost determination in order to gain the horse's respect. White Mane slows, halts, and glances back. This tiny, gentle creature, now slathered in mud but still gripping the rope, doesn't want to whip, conquer, exploit, or abuse him. He merely wants friendship, love, closeness. The bond is formed.

When White Mane suffers an injury from a competitive horse after returning to his herd, he seeks the boy's help. Folco gently bathes his hooves and uses his own clothing to bandage the bleeding wounds. Folco proves himself the best friend out of people and horses.

But men do not keep promises and they are not comfortable with being outshone. The ranchers return, and forgetting that they gave the rights to the horse to Folco, they attempt to take back the seemingly tamed animal. They use their greater size, numbers, strength, and weapons to intimidate the boy, cursing at him and threatening his life. Our two heroes, equally armed with their loving bond, their purity, their resilience, and their strength, flee across the beautiful, sun-bleached dunes of Camargue until they are blocked by the shores of the Mediterranean. Trapped between humanity at its evilest and nature at its most infinite and frightening, the film reaches its climax.

I'll return to the ending later. First, back to The Red Balloon. The plot is simpler: Pascal (Lamorisse's own son) discovers a large red balloon on the streets of Ménilmontant in Paris. The balloon is slightly out of reach at first, but he coaxes it to come to him and it does. Gradually it becomes clear that the balloon behaves in ways counter-intuitive to normal physics, that it, in fact, seems to have its own will and emotions. The boy and the balloon stroll together hand in hand, drawing wonder, envy, confusion, and irritation from passers-by. The relationship is not without obstacles. Soon a trolley conductor refuses to let the balloon board, and the boy walks with it in solidarity. The balloon's desire to be with the boy in the classroom elicits alarm from the teacher, commotion from the classmates, and anger from the principal. Despite adversity, they stick together. But soon the mob becomes unavoidable, society and the corruption it brings closes in, and an army of envy and prejudice rises up against the pair. A band of roaring bullies chases the frantic couple through dirty alleys and murders the balloon in a field of dirt.

But then the reversal happens: balloons of all colors from all across Paris are awakened by the unjust sacrifice and run to Pascal's aid. He grabs on and the enormous, colorful cluster ascends him to the heavens. As the small child floats precariously above the city, the film ends triumphantly.

At the end of White Mane, the horse plunges into the crashing waves of the sea with the boy holding tight. The ranchers know better and, finally expressing some sensibility and caring or perhaps just lying again, yell for the boy to turn back, that their current path in the treacherous deep can bring only death. As the horse and boy disappear into the waves, the storytelling narrator optimistically explains that the horse did not turn back and that the boy held on trustingly and that they eventually reached the "wonderful place where men and horses live as friends, always."

When you think of cluster balloon flights into the stratosphere, you tend to imagine Larry Walters, who in 1982 ascended three miles into the sky over San Pedro, California, in a lawn chair attached to 42 helium-filled balloons. His story is an oft-repeated anecdote about achieving the impossible, reaching your dreams, and overcoming human limitations like fear and gravity. Tellers of the anecdote tend not to mention that he shot himself in the heart in 1993 at the age of 44.

Lamorisse's films offer no practical outlet to his child protagonists. His boys are isolated, silent, unwatched. Pascal's parents, siblings, and nannies are completely absent, and while Folco has a family, the father is old and tired and unable to keep up and the brother is merely a baby. Their only friends are sentient, non-human beings that seem to be sent from heaven, guardian angels that offer protection and the promise of a safer haven--whether high in the sky or on the other side of the sea--that does not exist outside of the fantastical worlds of the films. Maybe the balloons will set him down gently in some nice courtyard. Maybe there really is an island with an equestrian utopia in the waters south of France. But more than likely the kids are about to die. In the world of Lamorisse, society grows increasingly bleak and destructive with time and experience. Children may be born with a tabula rasa, but their relationships with other humans quickly fill that slate with the ugliest ideas. The only way to escape corruption is to escape society altogether, which Lamorisse presents as a transcendent choice.

It's odd that this dark lesson is presented in movies with such beautiful settings, soaring scores, artful cinematography, and cute children. I find it unfair not to allow the protagonists any realistic escape, but Lamorisse is of course not alone in his belief that angelic children cannot escape harsh reality except through death.

In Guillermo del Toro's 2006 El Laberinto del Fauno (Pan's Labyrinth), young Ofelia (Ivana Baquero) is torn between two similar worlds: the brutal reality of Franco's post-Civil War Spain and the not-necessarily-true fantasies of her fairy tale books. The adults in her life--her pregnant mother (Ariadna Gil), her army stepfather (Sergi López), her family's housekeeper (Maribel Verdú)--tell her she's too old for make believe, that she should put down her books and face the real world, that such nonsense is only for silly children. These adults, of course, are miserable. Her mother is widowed, lonely, "sick with baby" in a troublesome pregnancy, and married to a man who belittles her and doesn't particularly care for her except for the fruit of her womb, which will provide him with a male heir. Her stepfather, the vicious and single-minded captain of an army outpost in the Guadarrama mountain range, is almost pitiful in his obsessive need to carry on his legacy through a son. And Mercedes the housekeeper, whose brother is one of the Maqui guerrillas fighting against fascism in the forest, is constantly in fear for her own life (she's a spy in the captain's household) and those of her comrades.

The stepfather tortures, kills, and fumes, the housekeeper sneaks and prays and plots, and the mother collapses into a bloody, sedated fever. Ofelia remains unexposed to most of the violence and despair, but as she wanders her new house and its strange surroundings, escaping into her own adventurous imagination, her fantasies exhibit parallels to the violence around her. To prove her legacy as the daughter of an ancient underworld king, she must fulfill three tasks. First, she must destroy the fat, greedy toad that is choking the roots of a once illustrious fig tree (which may have to do with fascist choking the life and culture of beautiful Spain). Next, she must retrieve a dagger from the lair of a horrifying, child-eating monster who sits before a sumptuous banquet (which visually matches a scene of the horrifying, child-killing stepfather, sitting before a crowded dinner table at a party while discussing a new, very strict rationing program he is going to institute in town).

The world of the adults and Ofelia's world remain physically separate (though thematically similar) until the third task, when she is ordered by the eerie faun (Doug Jones) to kidnap her baby brother and take him into the ancient, dangerous labyrinth. Her mother has died. Her stepfather has gone on a murderous rampage. The housekeeper has been discovered and captured by the army. All hope for the real world has evaporated. Ofelia, in hot pursuit by her bloody and poisoned stepfather, steals the heir and flees to the center of the maze, where the faun presents the dagger and explains that the blood of the innocent infant (just a tiny bit!) must be spilled in order to unlock her magical kingdom. Only by sacrificing two drops of blood can she return to her ancient throne as princess of the underworld.

She hesitates. She won't let an innocent baby be harmed. The faun demands: cut the baby and be saved by magic or refuse and return to reality. Ofelia grows up. Fairy tales are for children, and now she must be adult enough to protect the baby. Sometimes, too, fairy tales can be just as ugly as reality. She refuses. Her stepfather catches her and kills her. But as her blood spills into the puddle of rainwater, an illuminated epilogue with a cheery faun and her mother and father resplendently adorned atop luxurious thrones explains that the final task was to sacrifice herself instead of the innocent. As her real body bleeds to death in the dark rain, her fantasy body is crowned and welcomed home, and so the film effectively combines a range of interpretations suitable for both those who care to believe in the redemptive power of imagination and those who see only the evil of the physical world, with an interesting middle range for those who realize that even in fairy tales horrible things can happen and that even on our miserable earth a noble deed such a sister selflessly protecting her brother can occur.

I suspect Pan's Labyrinth was to some degree inspired by Victor Erice's 1973 El espíritu de la colmena. In The Spirit of the Beehive, a young girl (Ana Torrent) in Franco's 1940s Spain is introduced to fantasy, death, disappointment, and fear. Ana's source of inspiration isn't a fairy tale book but a dubbed showing of Frankenstein, in which a pitiful but deadly monster mindlessly kills an innocent girl before being hunted and killed himself. The film, it seems, introduces her to the concept of death, and she begs her slightly older sister to explain to her what dying is all about. Her sister mischievously avoids the questions, insisting that nobody really dies in movies and filling her head with magical tricks she can use to summon the monster, who according to her lives in an abandoned building outside of town.

The days pass. Ana's father is cold and brooding and possibly connected to the Falangists. Ana's mother is miles away in her own romantic fantasies. Ana's sister continues to mess with Ana's mind, at one point pretending to be killed in a prank that terrifies the girl and brings her closer to a conception of death as the ultimate fate for everyone.

Eventually she comes face to face with death. While playing around the building that Frankenstein supposedly lives in, she meets a fugitive republic soldier who has been injured. She brings him food, a watch, a coat, and other gifts. When the watch she'd stolen from her father suddenly returns to his possession, she begins to worry. Returning to Frankenstein's house, she finds only blood, bullet holes, and her father, who has secretly followed her in order to reprimand her assistance to "the enemy." Deeply disturbed, Ana flees into the forest. She sleeps under the moon and communes with the ghost of Frankenstein. Eventually she's found and brought back home--mute, shaken, forever changed, but at least alive. Without asking for it, Ana has been forced into adulthood, into her coming of age which acknowledges the inevitability of death. The meditative, largely silent film does not end with complete despair, however. Ana still retains her hope and her sense of wondrous possibility as she calls out once more to the ghost.

Not all movies with the theme of childhood escape are so death-centric. Hayao Miyazaki's 2001 Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi, which was later released by Disney's Pixar as Spirited Away helping it to become the largest grossing non-American film of all time, depicts an escape into fantasy land that results not in death or brutal despair but uplifting enlightenment. I won't go into the plot because I think it's mostly nonsensical, with illogical occurrences spinning widely out of control, unexpected obstacles springing from nowhere and just as unexpected solutions being presented just in time. In the end, a supposedly sullen, stupid, and whiny young girl is transformed into a courageous, caring, and vibrant young woman. But I don't think the film, however captivating its animation, is effective. In the too brief exposition we get at the beginning, Chihiro doesn't seem exceptionally whiny or rotten or stupid, though plenty of the ugly adults around her tell her so, so any character development of a character whose real world existence is only loosely elaborated upon is, well, minimal. The movie is a lot like Henry Selick's 2009 Coraline, which at least did a better job of delineating the title character's flaws, strengths, and desires even if the fantastical plot lacked parameters and structure. (And, again, eye-popping animation.)

And then there's Spike Jonze's 2009 Where the Wild Things Are, which may be the only film where the protagonist willingly rejects the lonely world of unreality. Based on Maurice Sendak's popular picture book, the film stars the talented Max Records as Max, a lonely, imaginative kid who's being abandoned by all those he loves. His friends, though never specifically mentioned, bail out on him to hang out with newer, cooler friends. His father, whether through death or divorce, exits the picture. And at the beginning of the film, his teenage sister--his best friend--abandons him for a boyfriend and cool kids with a car. Sad and angry, Max marches his snow-wet boots into his sister's room and wreaks havoc, specifically destroying not her CDs or her cool new things but the loving gift he once gave to her, the symbol of their bond. If he can't have it perfectly, unceasingly, at all times, whenever he needs it, he doesn't want their friendship at all, doesn't want even to remember that it ever existed. He destroys the gift, but he instantly regrets it. As strong and independent as his rage might make him at moments, he needs the love of others, however frangible.

When his exhausted, lonely mother (Caroline Keener) invites home a new potential boyfriend (Mark Ruffalo), the last straw is broken. Max erupts into an animalistic rage and flees to the forest (it's always the forest where magic happens, any kid can tell you), where he discovers a boat and sails off to the land of the Wild Things. Jonze handles the camera artfully, allowing more of the imaginary world to seamlessly blossom with each cut. There needn't be any logic, order, or believability because we realize that the world exists entirely within Max's mind. When the Wild Things speak, they are aspects of Max's conscience speaking to other parts of his subconscious, trying to reason out solutions to his problems, trying to figure out why the world is so messed up. In reality, we can picture Max sitting under a tree, playing with sticks, tossing pine cones, kicking the dirt, and talking to himself.

In the movie, however, we see the world of the Wild Things, overgrown, impulsive beasts who say the first thing that pops into their monstrous heads. Insecurity, anger, and the demand for unrequited love boil over. When he makes mistakes, people should still be able to love him. Even if he's not all that special, people shouldn't just abandon him. When people make promises, they should keep them. His nagging doubts and most troubling fears are diced and strewn.

Amongst the Wild Things, Max is elected king. With the new responsibility, he attempts to impose his version of utopia, a world of perfect, eternal love where nobody foreign and unpredictable can enter and nobody can ever leave, where everyone sleeps in one jumbled pile at night, where fun is a requirement, and where friendship is an unbreakable commitment. This works only for a few hours, and soon the messiness and complications of reality start to break through. Utopia means nowhere, and no such perfect world exists. People make mistakes. People grow apart. People need space. Sometimes people can't forgive. Sometimes new people enter the picture who may be scary at first but aren't always bad.

In the end, Max bids farewell to his island kingdom and returns to his home, where his relieved mother feeds him chocolate cake and, in a touching moment, falls asleep smiling at him at the kitchen table. Racked with anxiety by his disappearance, she can finally rest now that her baby is home. In a perfect world, they'd stay up talking and playing and eating cake all night, but in the real world she's exhausted and all she can offer right now is a smile, the unspoken fact that she'll always love him, and a piece of cake. And, in the end, maybe that's better than any imaginary world.

A powerfully effective, emotionally raw, well-acted, and lovingly filmed movie, Where the Wild Things Are was my favorite picture of 2009, having affected me in a manner deeper and more truthfully than most things in my life, along the same lines as In the Aeroplane Over the Sea (which also has similar themes to this blog).

I'll close with Le voyage du balloon rouge, a 2008 feature film by Hou Hsiao-Hsien, a leader of the New Taiwanese cinema who shot this film in France. Flight of the Red Balloon is not a remake of The Red Balloon; in the first few minutes, the short film is specifically referenced and explained. The red balloon has only a few cameo appearances, there is no mob of angry bullies, and in the end the young boy (Simon Iteanu) isn't whisked away to his imminent suicide. At the very most, Hou's film is a homage. The reflective, real-time film, with mesmerizingly slow scenes where nothing really happens yet emotions are evoked (in my favorite scene, a blind man tunes a piano--a toneless, non-melodic plucking that becomes its own atmospheric score--while the exhausted mother (Juliette Binoche) negotiates a divorce on the phone and Simon, talking to his sister about video games, tries to focus on the positive, with the long scene culminating in the mother drawing herself out of her anxiety to smile at her son, reminding him that she loves him--a scene in which possibly nothing or possibly everything happens all at once as the camera meanders around), is perhaps about a lot of possible things or perhaps about nothing at all. The same dichotomy between the purity of escapist imagination and the frustration of reality is present--here, the bleakness of reality is only a divorce, an obnoxious roommate, stress from work, and so forth (no torture or war crimes, for a change). What's important, though, is that even though the real world isn't always pretty, it's no cause for suicide. Unlike Lamorisse's unsupervised loner, Simon has a mother, a nanny, neighbors, and a sister who love him and care about him. He may be Pascal's spiritual descendant--a good kid who has inherited sadness--but he's not going to be chased through alleys or dangerously dangled miles above the Paris streets. And just knowing that is a powerful calmative.

Le balloon rouge
d/w: Albert Lamorisse
(Pascal Lamorisse)
7/10
TSPDT? #432

Crin-Blanc, Cheval Sauvage
d/w: Albert Lamorisse
(Alain Emery)
7/10

El Laberinto del Fauno
d/w: Guillermo del Toro
(Ivana Baquero, Sergi López, Maribel Verdú)
9/10
TSPDT? #739

El espíritu de la colmena
d/w: Victor Erice
(Ana Torrent, Teresa Gimpera)
8/10
TSPDT? #204

Sen to Chihiro no kamikakushi
d/w: Hayao Miyazaki
(Rumi Hîragi, Mari Natsuki)
6/10
TSPDT? #495

Coraline
d/w: Henry Selick
(Dakota Fanning, Teri Hatcher, Keith David)
7/10

Where the Wild Things Are
d: Spike Jonze w: Spike Jonze, Dave Eggers
(Max Records, Catherine Keener, James Gandolfini, Catherine O'Hara)
10/10

Le voyage du balloon rouge
d: Hou Hsiao-Hsien w: Hao Hsiao-Hsien, François Margolin
(Simon Iteanu, Fang Song, Juliette Binoche)
9/10

Four great films about WWII that feature neither Jews nor American soldiers, and one not-so-great WWII film that features Jewish-American soldiers

(As always: spoilers....)

At the end of Elem Klimov's 1985 war epic Иди и смотри (Come and See), teenage freedom warrior Florya finally fires the rifle he scavenged off of a dead soldier buried in the sand in the first scene. He's seen his share of Nazi atrocities in his travels through Belarus, from the slaughter of his townspeople to the burning of his old, harmless father to the wholesale incineration of an entire community. He has transformed from a bright-eyed and goofy-grinned boy, eager to do his patriotic duty and boldly fight for the national cause, to a withered husk of a human being, his clothes dusty, his eyes glassy, his face ashen, a permanent, wrinkled frown carved into his horror-stricken face.

The war is not over at the end of the film, but the Belarusians have won a small but important victory over the Nazi invaders, who consider Eastern Europeans beneath the level of human dignity, incapable of rehabilitation and undeserving of mercy, fit only to die quickly. As Florya and his comrades regroup and move on to bigger battles, Florya passes a puddle with a portrait of the Fuhrer lying abandoned in it. He opens unceasing fire right into Hitler's face, a cathartic moment, and the film ends with newsreel footage of the war and history in rewind. Florya takes out his aggression--violent yet harmless--on the idea of the ruthless dictator, on all the atrocities of history, and on war itself, and finally we see Hitler's baby picture, swathed in a nightie, no mustache, no swastikas, and we are reminded that even Adolph was once an innocent child like Florya.

His energy and ammunition spent, Florya rejoins the good fight. He's been through hell on earth, but he has somehow remained pure.

Throughout most of human civilization, war was a topic to be treated with dignity and honor. War turned boys into men, tested mettle, and bestowed honor. War protected ideals, chivalry, and nobility. War offered either great rewards--riches, land, political power, cultural victory, slaves--or an honorable death, to courageously lose one's brief life defending something greater than oneself. Despite the violence and tragedies of The Iliad, Homer offers no criticism of war itself. The Roman poet Horace wrote some time around 20 BC:

Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori:
mors et fugacem persequitur virum
nec parcit inbellis iuventae
poplitibus timidove tergo.

"How sweet and fitting it is to die for one's country:
Death pursues the man who flees,
spares not the hamstrings or cowardly backs
Of battle-shy youths."

From Biblical wars to the Crusades to Lancelot and his fellow knights, never was war seen as anything other than a sometimes-tragic means of achieving grand goals. The titular character of Shakespeare's Coriolanus, the invincible Roman general, finds peace only on the battlefield, and when he refuses to put his wounds on public display in order to win a political victory, audiences for perhaps the first time met a living casualty of warfare, for war had changed Coriolanus, making him beastly, short-tempered, and arrogant, and he could no longer exist comfortably in a society at peace. Centuries ahead of his time, Shakespeare may have been the first artist to realize that war was not just a temporary condition but a damaging illness that left its mark even on the survivors.

By the American Civil War others like Stephen Crane with his Red Badge of Courage were beginning to promote a new war genre that was more critical and realistic, and after the modern horrors of trenches, gassings, and machine guns in the First World War, anti-war art became as prominent as pro-war propaganda, from Erich Maria Remarque's brutal All Quiet on the Western Front to the horrifying expressionist paintings of Otto Dix to Wilfred Owen's reworking of Horace's ode:

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,--
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

Pro-war film continued through World War II. Among the Allied films starring the likes of Erroll Flynn, Ronald Reagan, and John Wayne was a series of seven documentary films entitled Why We Fight, commissioned by the United States government and directed by the lovable Frank Capra. The first of the series won the very first Academy Award for Documentary Feature, and none of the films did anything to discourage enlisted men, to challenge the concept of war, or to humanize the enemy.

On the Axis side was director Leni Riefenstahl and Joseph Goebbels, with his doublespeak professional title "Reich Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda," who churned out narrative and documentary films that highlighted the beauty and unstoppable courage of the Aryan race and culture while illustrating the many flaws of inferior Semitic and anti-socialist villains. Among these films was, of course, Triumph des Willens (The Triumph of the Will), considered a masterpiece of editing and innovative cinematic techniques.

All of the outright and empty-headed propaganda coupled with the many deaths and horrors of World War II eventually took their toll on audiences, though, and in the latter half of the twentieth century, anti-war films became much more common. The year 1957 saw the releases of both Stanley Kubrick's Paths of Glory and David Lean's The Bridge on the Rive Kwai. The grisly, full-color, live photojournalism of the Vietnam War was the final nail in the coffin for the glorification of war, and now very few realistic war films exist that don't in some way illustrate that we are all members of one human race, that war destroys us all, ruins families, endangers society, and forces men to become monsters.

At least not until now with the release of Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds, which features at its heart a movie theater, Joseph Goebbels, and a soldier-turned-actor. Beyond espionage killings, there is very little combat in this war film--the bulk of the battle footage is depicted within the film's film-within-a-film, a propaganda piece directed by Goebbels entitled Nation's Pride, starring a young, somewhat handsome Nazi sniper (Daniel Brühl) who survived three days in a clock tower behind enemy lines and in that time killed hundreds of enemy combatants and won the city for the Axis. The once humble young man is now doing his best to put his lethal past behind him and enjoy his new celebrity as a war hero and film star. The clips of the film, as watched by a packed theater of Nazi elites--among them Adolph Hitler--, reveal something that is hardly humanistic or well-rounded. The sniper shoots one nameless Allied victim, then another, then another. A victim loses his head. The sniper says something patriotic and reloads. A victim falls from a window. The audience in the film laughs and rejoices. The real audience is reminded that such glorification once existed.

And then the climax of Inglourious Basterds comes, nameless Nazis are killed by Jewish heroes, and the final scene of Come and See is reenacted, only this time it's not a framed portrait of Hitler but the real deal and there are no baby photos to distract us. Tarantino has placed us in an uncomfortable position--he wants us, with our cultural relativism and our sensitivities, to relish in the glorification of war. He wants us to rejoice that Nazis are being slaughtered. It's not too much to ask for--at this point, "Nazi" is synonymous with unsympathetic--but to someone (like me) who's prone to overthinking things and who has a penchant for compassion, it's a difficult moment.

My first response was: he hasn't earned it! The Nazis are just nameless and faceless caricatures! He doesn't give us any hope of possibly understanding them. But that's a dangerous thought. They're Nazi elites; they did countless horrible things, some of the worst things in history. What's there to understand? And besides, two of the most well-developed, nuanced, and complex characters in the film--the sniper and a detective Hans Landa (played by an Oscar-worthy Christoph Waltz in one of this year's best performances so far)--are Nazis. If anything, it's the Allies and Jews who are one-dimensional. With the revenge tragedy (in which the avenging hero loses his own life and sanity in his endless, escalating, cycling quest for revenge) dating back thousands of years and the anti-war theme firmly established, can a viewer in the year 2009 abandon those ideals and simply admit that sometimes reckless, bloody, unmerciful violence is a good thing?

I haven't been able to answer that yet. It's been three days and I still can't decide if I absolutely hated Inglourious Basterds or somehow secretly loved it. My boyfriend despised it but isn't quite sure why. I've read reviews by people claiming it's phenomenal, mature, bold, and exciting but who provide little explanation as to why it's all those things. On the one hand, the film is the very definition of "self-indulgence." Tarantino has become a parody of himself, of self-referential pastiche, of post-modernism. The soundtrack is anachronistic, with most of the music taken from the Ennio Morricone scores of Spanish and Italian Westerns from the 1960s and 1970s, with orchestral tracks lifted from 1980s horror flicks, with a prominently featured David Bowie song and one memorable motif that Tarantino already used in Kill Bill. It's a constant reminder that we're not watching anything that actually existed in 1944. In one scene a hepcat Samuel L. Jackson, sounding like he's stepped out of the Harlem Globetrotters cartoon, narrates some exposition about nitrate film while archival footage plays, once again reminding us that this is all fake. Scenes drag on for much too long. Michael Myers makes an unnecessary appearance with a bad British accent and a veiny, alcoholic's nose.

There's a concept of good fiction being a sustained, dreamlike illusion, where we forget that we're reading or watching something, where we forget that we're passively receiving some fictional, carefully arranged information and surrender ourselves to the world, its structure, its time, and its rules. We forget ourselves and our world. Our surrender is seamless. Tarantino says, to hell with that.

At the same time, some of the scenes are quite suspenseful, the dialogue quite clever, the characters quite memorable. There are genuine surprises and laughs. Hans Landa, the famed "Jew Hunter" who fluently speaks German, English, French, and Italian (and possibly many other languages) and never allows a subtle detail to slip from his grasp, is a fantastic character ranging from an intelligent conversationalist to a charming flatterer to a boyish jokester to a ruthless killer in sharp and spontaneous instants. He's a delightful character--both frightening and admirable; if he were on our side we'd give him a TV series and root for him every week.

Someone has suggested that one of the film's themes is the loss of personal peace, that the film creates a world where tension is constant and unyielding, where secrets are always being exchanged and withheld and where lives are always at stake. This is true, and the best scenes in Inglourious Basterds are the ones that most effectively achieve this suspense, but for non-stop anxiety in Vichy France I point to Jean-Pierre Melville's 1969 masterpiece L'armée des ombres (Army of Shadows), a spine-tingling, nail-biting, foot-shaking, edge-of-the-seat thriller about undercover resistance fighters trying to win back their country.

In Melville's war-haunted France, one's never sure who's on one's side. Anyone could be carrying death, and trust is a rare commodity. After a suicidal escape from a concentration camp, the political criminal Philippe Gerbier (Lino Ventura) ducks into a barber shop for cover. With the sirens blaring outside, Gerbier conceals his escaped convict status by casually requesting a trim and a shave. In a deliberately paced and nerve-racking scene, we stress over whether the barber might slit his throat with the straight razor. Instead he saves his life and gives him a free coat to conceal himself.

At one point two brothers (played by Jean-Pierre Cassel and Paul Meurisse) attempt to have a normal conversation. Cassel's character has just joined Gerbier's resistance and completed his first mission, but he doesn't mention this nor anything else about his involvement in the war. Instead they chat rather lifelessly about rations, the weather, the past, and food. Afterward he reflects on his educated brother's pathetic, helpless role in the new occupied France, alone and useless, wasting away. Only later does he learn that his brother is actually a high-ranking member of the Resistance, who likewise was concealing his dangerous private activities and probably thinking the same thoughts of his younger brother.

The incredible Simone Signoret plays Mathilde, a dedicated mother and housewife who engages in life-threatening espionage in her free time. She keeps the two different worlds completely separate--for her comrades to know her family's identity would threaten her family's well-being, and for her family to know of her secret involvement in the Resistance would endanger her comrades and their success. In a world where compassion is a costly affliction--where close friends can turn on you, where impostors and rats must be brutally silenced, where the lives of your friends and families can be used as a threat against you, and where too much emotional involvement can destroy your clarity, will-power, and determination--Mathilde makes a dangerous gamble by living both lives simultaneously.

In a chilling scene, the three spies, disguised as Nazi soldiers, learn that their comrade and friend--who they have come to rescue--has been tortured beyond relief and is close to death. No matter how shocked, saddened, and outraged they must be by this information, they must conceal it all, guarding their disguises as disinterested Nazi soldiers or else endangering their own lives.

In Melville's war, victory, logic, swift-acting, and determination cannot coexist with love, friendship, and compassion. Though the successful end of the war may reintroduce these most human of elements to society, they cannot continue while the war wages.

Roberto Rossellini's Roma, città aperta,(Open City) is another film (from 1945) about resistance fighters who must conceal their most important desires and thoughts while pretending to lead normal lives in fascist Italy. A central figure in the underground movement is Don Pietro Pellegrini (Aldo Fabrizi), a Catholic priest whose role of authority allows him certain freedoms to help the resistance (such as being out past curfew) and whose religious convictions assure him that the fight for freedom and equality is the most Christian path. His actions are dangerous, and he loses all sense of normality--even whistling a pop tune becomes a charged action--but the film lacks the suspense and emotional depth of other films, and most of the scenes are never quite as engaging as they should be. Maybe it's because I watched a dubbed instead of a subtitled version--the unsynchronized sound and the strangeness of the American voices speaking in bad Italian accents was distracting and took away from the otherwise realistic filming of the movie. I discount the film now, but reserve a firm opinion until I see it as it was originally made.

I want to circle back from occupied France and fascist Italy to the final (often forgotten) frontier of World War II: Eastern Europe. Nazi fighting in Belarus and Russia was ruthless. Whereas Nazis thought of Jews and non-Aryan Westerners as profoundly evil people, they thought of Eastern Europeans as less than human, an unsalvageable, populous race of dim-witted and dangerous beasts who needed to be exterminated before they could cause too much trouble. Germans killed Eastern Europeans quickly and in large numbers, murdering women, children, and old people and destroying entire cities at once. No prisoners. No occupation. The Russian army required all the help it could muster, and so child partisans were a common occurrence, hence Florya in Come and See and the twelve-year-old Ivan of Andrei Tarkovsky's 1957 Ива́ново де́тство, (Ivan's Childhood).

Played by Nikolai Burlyayev, a skinny, blond boy, Ivan is a tiny scout who acts and speaks like an adult and expects to be treated like one. Ivan became an orphan when Nazis murdered his mother and sister. He would have been killed himself except that he was hidden at the bottom of a well when the attack occurred--not because he was seeking refuge from the war but because he was caught in a moment of childlike wonderment, transfixed by the reflection of the sun underneath the well's water. Many flashbacks fill Ivan's Childhood, showing us a tan, smiling, giggling, exuberant twelve-year-old boy. In a beautiful scene, a joyous Ivan, bursting with love and life, rides with his sister on an apple cart during a rainstorm. In the present narrative, however, Ivan does not smile. His innocence has died with his family, left at the bottom of that well. Now he does his duty, makes his advances, and is prepared to die for the freedom of his country. He is deeply offended when superior officers patronize him, and he proves himself to be more mature, serious, and experienced than a soldier who is at least ten years his senior.

In a subplot, this older--but still quite childish--officer falls in love with a young nurse. It's an impossible romance; they can't possibly achieve any lasting happiness given their circumstances. The scenes illustrate how maybe we're all too young for war, regardless of our age. Only once we've either lost all hope or experienced war first-hand can we truly be old enough to handle its ravages.

Ivan's Childhood is a leisurely paced, expressionist film about the perils of growing up. The mournful, nostalgic film need not be seen as just a war film, but as a solemn reflection on the loss of childhood beauty and happiness. Even without war, we sometimes lose sight of the joys of the sun reflected in a pool of water, of a drenching rainstorm, of a ripe apple, of a run down the beach, of a beautiful piece of music. Vadim Yusov's cinematography is incredible, and even in scenes of despair it reminds us that beauty abounds.

Come and See, made almost three decades after Ivan's Childhood and building upon a very similar plot and themes, is a superior film, often referred to as the most realistic and powerful war film of all time. It subtly references the previous movie--at one point Florya stares at a star at the bottom of a well--while introducing us to some of the most disturbing images of war atrocity: charred, talking corpses; distantly seen piles of corpses; slaughtered livestock; Nazi heartlessness. The title of the film comes from a verse of Revelations, and while the film maintains a level of complete realism, it manages to achieve the most startling depiction of the Apocalypse ever captured on film. Even the eating of lobster is given a horrifying, nauseating charge.

Klimov's film, with cinematography by Alexei Rodionov, is perhaps the most important World War II film of the ones I've just discussed, somehow managing to remind us of both the need for retaliation, the horrible unjustness of Nazi occupation, the high cost of war, the occasional necessity of war, and the fact that even Hitler was once an infant.

Come and See (1985)
d: Elem Klimov w: Ales Admovich, Elem Klimov
(Aleksei Kravchenko)
10/10
TSPDT?: #312

Inglourious Basterds (2009)
d/w: Quentin Tarantino
(Christoph Waltz, Brad Pitt, Daniel Brühl)
5/10

Army of Shadows (1969)
d/w: Jean-Pierre Melville
(Lino Ventura, Simone Signoret, Paul Meurisse)
9/10
TSPDT?: #490

Open City (1945)
d: Roberto Rossellini w: Sergio Amidei, Federico Fellini
(Aldo Fabrizi, Marcello Pagliero)
4/10
TSPDT?: #98

Ivan's Childhood (1962)
d: Andrei Tarkovsky w: Vladimir Bogomolov
(Nikolay Burlyayev)
8/10
TSPDT?: #591