Synecdoche, New York (2008)

Charlie Kaufman epitomizes 'quirky' and mostly I think he represents the good kinds of quirks. This is also true for Synecdoche, New York, a movie starting out as a quiet family drama about a marriage about to fall apart and an artist who agonizes over his lack of independent artistic vision but grows into a very idiosyncratic tale about the craving for control and self-involved hang-ups about identity. Actually, I think that Synecdoche, New York captures the problematic core in ideas about authenticity that can be found in for example the writings of Charles Taylor: the quest for authenticity plays out within an unhappy dialectic or tension between an attempt to find out who one really is and thinking about identity as a creation, an invention - what the movie shows is how these two aspect blend together in the melancholy worry that one is not somehow in control of one's own life.

I admit I lost track a few times, but that doesn't bother me - I will watch this again; both the form and the content are compelling. The form of depth in Synecdoche New York could have veered off into grad-student self-important musings about 'identity as construction' but luckily the film didn't quite go down that road.

The main person, a troubled playwright and director (oh no! not yet another film about a troubled artist, you might sigh, but hold on) is involved in this new project, some sort of story about his own life, and well, that story encompasses EVERYTHING - the meaning of life, reality, truth, identity, relations.... And so, one might say, does the film. The play starts out as one aspect of the director's neurotic life. The play is a mere idea, that is somehow to be realized. The location, a huge warehouse in New York, has been chosen, and it's here that the director is to form the perfect story about his own life. The actors play his friends and lovers, and himself. Months pass, years pass. The play remains at this preparatory stage while everyone become different people, while the director is at pains to pin down the story of his life. What the hell IS his life? This is the important question, a soul-searching one. Who am I? How do I related to other people? The director wants to tie it all together into a neat package, strictly defined roles and some sort of progression. But it goes out of hand, life can't be compartmentalized in that way.

If you've seen - and most probably you have - Adaptation, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind or Being John Malkovich you know what kind of mind-bending adventure you are in for. These all share some themes, and does themes also re-surface in Synecdoche, New York: most of all, it's about compulsion and the way life is not definable in terms of identity. Kaufman transforms the heady material into a beautiful, hallucinatory and sad cinematic experience. All of it doesn't work, there are a couple of scenes that try to encapsulate the 'message' in the film in a too explicit way, but most of the time, the surprising editing, the way the story collapses and picks up again, and the good acting works magic with this fragmentary story about what happens when we age and when we re-consider our place in our own lives. I was also surprised at how emotionally involving it all was: the sadness felt real, a sadness that manages to have a sort of progression to some kind of clarity while at the same time a whole world crumbles.

Almanac of Fall (1984)

I tried hard to like Almanac of Fall - it's a Bela Tarr movie (I usually love his films) and the use of colors and shapes was simply marvellous. But this was just not that good a movie, despite its aesthetic brilliance (which is a reason why you SHOULD watch it!). It seemingly emulates the gloom and cynism of Fassbinder, but there's little of Fassbinder's social critique in Almanac of Fall. That is, as far as I can see, but I guess one could read a critique of the capitalist unit of the family into it and perhaps one could say that Tarr shows a recurring set of relational formations in which paranoia and reality coalesce. Distrust is the order of the day. The claustrophobic feel of the movie - which takes place in one slightly dilapidated apartment - never reveals anything. As a viewer I'm thrown into that sense of crammed space, locked relations, plots and scheming. The characters all have tangled, often erotic, relations with each other. There's the ailing matriarch, her nurse, the son, the nurse's lover and an alcoholic teacher. The only glimpse we get of their lives is through their constant quarelling, their constant suspicion and bitterness - ceaseless consternation. The amour going on here is of the doomed sort and its center of gravity is the nurse, who is depicted as the leathal femme fatale - and believe me, there is more than a hint of sexism in how women's sexuality is treated here: female sexuality as dangerous, deparaved and voluptuous - female sexuality opens Pandora's box, yes we've heard that before. The existential sordidness - greed, mostly - on display churns and churns and churns. In that sense, the movie does not have much to offer, as Tarr seems to have very little insightful to say about these relations, or the characters' malaise. It's just there. In later films, Tarr's pessimism attains an altogether different level of communication, so that he lets the visualization itself conjure up an often elusive sense of apocalypse or social catastrophy.

But hey! Let's talk about the colors! As Tarr usually works in b&w, I was overwhelmed how good he is with colors - I wondered why he chose the b&w format later on? Tarr uses a palette of greens, blues and reds which are often contrasted in very striking ways, often to - and well, this may be cheesy - underline a certain tension in the situation. Camera angles are also used for a similar purpose, and here I once again think about Fassbinder and how he evokes a creepy social universe by tilting the camera or making us look at the character's from a strange perspective.

Departures (2008)

Departures (dir. Yojiro Takita) opens with a meaningless transphobic scene involving a funeral ritual and a bunch of bereaved relatives who fight about the deceased person's life. That didn't give me much hope about the movie. But the quality of the film improved for a while, so I watched the whole thing. It turns out that the main character is not the person in the coffin, but the young man, an unemployed cellist, who is preparing the body in the ritual. We learn that he has returned to his home town and applies for a job despite not knowing what the job is about - it has to do with "departures", maybe a traveling agency. When he is in the know, it's too late - he was hired on the spot by his elderly boss. In Japan, we learn, this profession is considered to be shameful and the young man doesn't even reveal the nature of his job to his wife. The film follows his initiation into the profession: this is by far the best part of the film where we stick to the work routines and the small workplace. The last part of the film takes a dramatic turn and the movie goes down the drain as there is an attempt to tie all threads together into a neat bundle. Departures is interesting while it observes the Japanese rituals of preparing corpses for death in the presence of the close family and it shows how gracefully and skillfully these two deal with the deceased. I start to think about the strange reasons for why their profession, undertaking, is taboo - in the ritual, death itself is not at all taboo as the corpse is prepared in front of people and they get to say their goodbyes. Here, the film was a quite subdued affair and kept close to its subject: the young man gets accustomed to his job and learns to develop a professional attitude towards it under the guidance of his wise and experienced boss (I liked their scenes together - moving, somehow). But apparently this topic alone was not relied on - something more dramatic seemed to have been called for (why? I don't see this) and at this point Departures assembles the Big Musical Score and the Panoramic Nature Images in order to drive home the points about family secrets and forgiveness.

In the Company of Men (1997)

If you want to watch a merciless, all-embracing critique of masculinity, you might want to give In the Company of Men (dir. Neil Labute) a shot. It's far from a perfect or even good film, but its unflinching criticism of sexism is praiseworthy. It's hard to come up with a film with a more detestable asshole than Chad, one of the two main characters: he's a guy with an enormous self-confident belief in himself and his own skills, both in the world of business and the world of, well, what shall we call it, men's pursuit of women. He teams up with his pal, the slightly more timid, and a lot more self-pitying, Howard, in a game of masculinity. They view it as an innocent, fun little diversion while working for awhile in another town: they will both pursue a woman in the office, but they will keep their secret. Labute places these guys in a sterile surrounding of offices, dull corridors, coffee-machines, anonymous hotel rooms and boring restaurants. The film brilliantly establishes the film's universe in the very first scene, in which we see a sparsely decorated airport-lounge. The men gossip and complain while planes rumble in the background. As the film develops, they find their victim, a woman who seems fragile and vulnerable because she is deaf, and they both start dating her. And then they laugh at her behind her back. The fun, obviously, will be that this is just a temporary thing, and they will then leave her, supposedly devastated. But of course reality turns out different. But the film offers no consolation: these are types who will not go through magical transformations of maturity or sensibility. Chad and Howard are supported by an entire machinery of gender roles and corporate power: their positions are safe, and if they don't get what they want, they turn bitter, self-loathing and hateful. The anonymous nature of the places they occupy is a backdrop of lives taken up by power and careers. Labute's film falls short in one sense: it gives a too one-sided image of these men's relation to other people. Now, we only see what one could call an instrumental attitude, people used for pleasure or for consolation. What we don't see, or what is only hinted at, is the way these guys repress and distance themselves from the way other people approach them. The power relations here are suffocatingly cohesive and all-encompassing. Even though the story prsents a very realistic image of two different responses to power - the ruthless guy and the guy who wants to convince everybody that he's 'the good guy' - I would like to see other sides still, what happens when these power structures are challenged. What we have here, and this is perhaps not a bad thing at all, is a film that shows how power is upheld in many guises, and how it is upheld and spread. It's a gloomy, but familiar, sight.

Naked Island (1960)

It's always risky to re-watch a film that has made a great impression on you; will it hold up, will it let you down, will you be abhorred about your own bad, bad judgment? Watching Naked Island (Kaneto Shindo) again was not painful at all - the film is as marvelous as it was the first time: repetitive, strange, beautiful. Even though a description may make this film seem like a formalist experiment (a slow study of work and habits), there is nothing studiously experimental about Naked Island, nothing self-important, nothing contrived.

The basic set-up of the film is the daily toil of a family of four who inhabit a small island on which they have crops that need tending to and water needs to be fetched from another island. Without sentimentality or overblown emphasis on scarcity, the movie follows the family members' everyday life, the rowing, the fetching, the carrying of water, preparing food, etc. All this is chronicled in flowing images that place the human being in her environment. We start to look at the environment, the sea, the island, the city, from the perspective of the character's active gaze, from the perspective of their activities. But we also start to focus on the way these human beings lives are formed by and conditioned by the environment. Few films contain this meditative attention to methodical action - the only comparison I come to think of is Akerman's Jeanne Dielmann, but that film is done in a completely different spirit and the latter film gives us a very different image of the role of routines in human life. In Naked Island, routines never seem soul-crushing or monotonous. The camera follows the woman and the man carrying water in buckets. We learn to recognize the paths they laboriously have to climb, and we see them gently pouring the water on the crops (these images do not conjure up the illusion of real time, but they make us feel the duration of what is done). The same chores are repeated over and over again, but through a cinematic technique that all the time shifts angles and perspectives, we sense that their toil is a way in which their life continues, and life is never the same.

Its interesting how work and repetition is rendered so radically different on film, depending on what angle the director chooses and more importantly how work is conceived, or rather, in which connections work is placed.

Shindo pays close attention to survival, not as a primitive mode of merely "living" in a naked sense (the island may be naked, but life is not), but as a form of life, a form of life that is contrasted with the life of the city which is hinted at as the family members sell a fish, dine out on a restaurant, look at a dance performance on TV, and take a trip with a ropeway (the life on the island is hard to pin down in terms of historical periods, but the city life reveals specific models of cars, technology and fashion). Up till now I haven't mentioned one of the peculiar traits of Naked Island: it is a silent film. Not in the sense of music-and-intertitles but in the sense of there being no dialogue. I am surprised that this doesn't appear like an eccentric ploy a desperate director comes up with trying to think of something new to sell his latest flick. The silence is almost always an organic part of the film; instead we hear the rain, the thundering wind, steps, flowing water and so on - or the distant chatter of city-folks. And then there's non-diegetic music, a beautiful score that frames the on-screen drudgery magnificently. We learn to know these people, the family of four, on other terms, and I never experience the lack of speech as a lack, or as something that forces me to guess at what is going on. I don't think the point is to make the islanders' life look 'primitive' or 'changeless' - we see their lives changing, there are sudden breaks in the everyday rhythm of work (one scene in particular is a jolt) and we see subtle strains in their relations, and speech is not needed to convey that. 

Blackboard Jungle (1955)

So, I watched Detachment a week ago, a film about a not particularly healthy school system. Richard Brooks' Blackboard Jungle (dir. Evan Hunter) is a superior film (its not fantastic, but its not terrible - but its DATED) about a similar theme. The main character is a youngish teacher who lands a job at a school with a bad reputation and we all expect him to turn the rowdy kids into art-appreciating saints. These kids are their teachers' worst nightmare: they belong to gangs, they beat their teacher up, they break a teacher's jazz records (rarities!) and though the new-comer tries to make the best out of the situation, but most of the time he has a scared and desperate look on his face (when he goes to a bar with his colleague and the colleague wants them to have another drink, the newbie dryly asks whether many teachers end up as alcoholics). Sadly, the film seems to go nowhere. It self-importantly reports the crimes and misbehavior of the young hoodlums, trying to elicit reactions from the viewer: how horrible, horrible! An interesting aspect of the movie is its treatment of race. The students come from different backgrounds and the teacher explicitly states that he is no racist. Hunter's agenda seems to be to denounce certain racist ideas about social problems: the big problems seem to be --- oh well, it's not very clear. That the parents were not around when the kids were small, perhaps due to the war? Maybe. But Hunters focuses more on the problems than the solutions. The classroom is a place of assault, protest and violence. The film seems to long for discipline, tranquility and harmony, but it's not sure how that could be achieved. And maybe that's the merit of the film that it abstains from scratching out a blueprint for how social problems are to be dealt with. There are moments of respite, moments of connection between students and the new teacher, but this is only temporary. Most scenes opt for melodrama rather than social critique (even though I really felt for that teacher who got his records destroyed....) and perhaps there are too many copies of Marlon Brando tough guys in there. Blackboard Jungle is not overly "inspirational", it tries to be rough and edgy - but what does it want to say? .... And yeah, this is the film in which Bill Haley's "Rock around the clock" was used - I must say I am not really convinced that this song conveys the toughness it was perhaps meant to give you an immediate feeling for. Perhaps the contemporary audiences opined differently.

Next Stop, Greenwich Village (1871)

Paul Mazursky's Next stop, Greenwich Village is nothing to write home about - it's a film that seems to have one goal: to capture a certain time and a certain place, Greenwich village, New York, the mid 50's. But somehow, I couldn't stop watching the movie, perhaps because of its scruffy look, its haphazard plot and the characters (a gang of New York outsiders, most of them wanting to be artists). Mazursky wants to show a time where kids felt that they were very different from their parents, they wanted to be independent, drink beer, listen to jazz and have free(r) sex. The main character has just moved from his parents in Brooklyn to The Village. Not a long way, one might think but for this young man, having an apartment of his own implies freedom, independence and time and space to figure out what he wants to do with his life and his relation to his girlfriend. He pursues a career as an actor but ends up making juice in a sleazy café. (I might have had a bad day or something, but the scenes in which the mother barges into her son's flat unexpectedly were surprisingly funny - one couldn't help recognize some of the tensions in the parent-kid dynamic blown up into huge proportions.) Next Stop, Greenwich Village is a cozy, good-natured movie, a movie for nursing a hang-over or a boring Sunday.

Le passé (2013)

Asghar Farhadi made the brilliant A Separation a few years ago and now he returns with Le passé which even though it has much in common with the breakthrough film, is inferior to it because of what I consider to be an over-dramatized story. Farhadi is a capable director and there are a couple of stunning compositions where Farhadi strays from his usual social realism and hints at something more poetic. Farhadi is interested in human psychology and relational twists but in this movie this interest turns into soap opera, unnecessary plot embellishments and well, in general, too much stuff. A man goes to see his ex-wife in France. She lives with three tense kids and a new boyfriend. From the get-go, there are numerous tensions and we instantaneously realize that theirs must have been a bumpy relationship. The beginning of film is rather captivating because one knows so little and Farhadi skillfully makes us guess, wonder and re-think: what's going on with these people? Why are they so angry? What has happened to them? Here, the small details of people who don't get along are focused on, and many times it works. The second part of the movie is a mess of new threads, Big Feelings, Big Secrets & Revelations (Farhadi shows how social technology can be easily integrated into melodramas), and none of this feels very real. My attention went all over the place and maybe my erratic psychological set-up is not to blame exclusively.

Detachment (2011)

An interesting and challenging theme doesn't necessarily result in a good movie. Detachment (dir. Tony Kaye) tries to address an important topic - how do we respond to a person who obviously needs help? - but it does so in a way that I thought was both clumsy and a bit insensitive to what it appeared to be saying. Detachment revolves around the messy but strangely sterile (yes, it's a paradox) life of a substitute teacher. The school he works in is a mess: we get the sense that the public school is going down the drain, the teachers being a tormented bunch and the students enduring the school-day in a state varying from rowdy protests to glass-eyed disengagement. The substitute teacher is used to work in a place for a short term only. A merit of the film is that it abstain from portraying the teacher as some sort of social hero that saves the fate of the young generation by sermoning a few lines of classical poetry. What makes Detachment a not-catastrophic film (admittedly, it's a border-case) is that the teacher remains a sort of mystery. Most of the time, he is sympathetic, trying to help, trying to do his best. But all the time there is something aloof about him, his engagement always somehow held in check. Maybe the film is a portrayal of what depression may be like. On the downside, the approach to the material is at times incredibly heavy-handed and some scenes are so eager to deliver Message that it is almost painful to keep watching. Most characters remain paper dolls (extremely dramatized and obnoxious paper dolls, it doesn't help). There are so many things that go wrong in this movie - the attempts at artistic imagery are pretty embarrassing and the moments of "social realism" don't feel exactly authentic. Detachment tries so hard to wring out Emotions that it ends up making this viewer quite resistant to feeling anything; instead of images that somehow overwhelm in bringing about an emotional turmoil, Detachment seems to have calculated its ratio of pessimism and optimism very pedantically. Try to conjure up an extremely stereotypical image of Miserabilist "Exististentialism" in your head. Ultimately, We...  Are... All... Alone.... Falling..... Detachment resembles that mental image to quite a great extent.

McCabe & Mrs Miller (1971)

A few weeks ago I reviewed Monte Hellman's existentialist anti-western Riding through the whirlwind.  I have watched another film in this slight and odd sub-genre: Robert Altman took a shot at making a western without most of the recognizable western themes with McCabe and Mrs Miller (even though one significant western theme is tackled: change). Not a bad movie (I keep thinking about the Coen bros grim and sometimes a bit elusive approach to movies) despite the rather obnoxious soundtrack by Leonard Cohen (Cohen croons a sad, sad song that adds yet another layer of sadness to the movie which is not exactly a sunbeam).

The film tells a story about small town in which McCabe, a rugged entrepreneur and gambler with some sort of bad-boy reputation, starts a business, a saloon and a brothel. The location speaks to me: its rawness, the drastic changes - and the weather always seems inhospitable (wait for the ending scenes and that landscape will get to you). The role the locations play here is not as a mere backdrop. Altman's approach to light enhances this sense of place. The camera drifts over cloud-heavy days and very dimly lit interiors. People's faces are barely seen, much of the action takes place among the shadows - and Altman's attention is sprawling in all kinds of directions, this is not the kind of movie that lets you into the main characters' heads. Strange jokes are told, sneers are made, people dance to a music box tune, somebody throws down a cat from a table. McCabe & Mrs Miller has Altman's personal style, the film is somehow drifting in some direction or other, not aimlessly, but not with a linear story either. We have to figure out what is going on and what we perceive to be central. Altman broods over business and entrepreneurship in a way that takes us a long way from the American dream. The growth and development of the town is not seen through the lens of hard work and heroic accomplishment - Altman adopts a mournful, slightly ominous tone. The film's plot is placed in the relation between McCabe and his partner Mrs Miller and the hookers they get to work in the brothel. These are broken, eerie human beings who don't seem to have much going for them. Altman takes his time to show us who these people are, and how they relate to one another. And many things remain obscure. There are business propositions and there are plenty of tragedies: in the end, everything seems to be about money. McCabe & Mrs Miller is about small fish trying to make a living, a bit of money perhaps and then the big fish with the power to destroy everything. Here's the mining company which can do what it wants to get the piece of land it has set its eyes on. But maybe this is not the worst enemy McCabe and Mrs Miller have: there's naivety, paranoia, dizziness, and strange, unexplained human need to appear in a certain way to others.