Author name: Blake Williams

RR (2007)

There is a world of metaphor that can be exhumed from an idea that is simple and elegant; reading the project description yields many of them. A film composed of 43 shots of trains, each beginning as the train is just about to enter in the frame, and ending a few seconds after it leaves the frame. And that really is all there is to it, save for some questionable audio choices. So, looking at that description, one gets the film’s sense of history, both in terms of early American trade, and film history with the Lumiere brothers. Then the film’s structure, with shots whose lengths cannot possibly be determined by Benning after he has decided on his rules. After Benning sets up the camera and begins to wait, the train, its conductor, and America’s demand for material and construction become the factors that decide the cuts. And the cars of the train, which visually mimic the progressing images of celluloid, following each other up, one-by-one in a stampede through time. And just as much as I thought I knew what I would see going into 13 Lakes, and did, there is still something impossible about these films’ brilliance that simply cannot be glimpsed in ‘plot’-alluded foresight.

There is a battle that takes place in the film between the landscapes and the trains. This isn’t a man vs. nature dichotomy, though, because the landscapes still include manufactured structures like bridges, homes, factories, and windmills. It is, instead, a competition between that which is still and that which is in motion. Benning’s extraordinary gift for composition of these landscapes makes the train into a kind of malevolent force, a timer that not only cuts that beautiful image that we’ve only briefly been allowed to swoon over right in two, but also tells us just how long we can look at it. I cannot recount how many times I internally pleaded with the conductors to slow down their trains, to please let me have these images just a little bit longer. And like the glimpse of an entire lifetime that might flash before one’s eyes before dying, so is the last, complete view of the landscape, post-train, that lingers for just a bit before the harsh cut to black. If I’m sounding excessively schmaltzy about all of this, it is only because it is all so moving that anything less would feel inadequate.

This is part of what makes the 43rd train so mindblowing. Running through what could inarguably be the film’s most beautiful image, the train grinds to a halt, with one car missing, creating a window in the perfect spot to see through to the windmills that stretch back to the mountains. The train is stubborn, and will not budge, much to the pleasure of anyone looking. The motion of the windmills no longer has to compete with the train, which has now joined in with the landscape rather than barging through it like so many times before.

Casting a Glance (2007)

The framing decisions in the film have the least substance of any of Benning’s films I’ve seen, since the shot selections, lengths, and quantities are arbitrary and inconsistent. The film instead, as I only detected after the film, is an interesting example of truth, documentation, and the cyclical patterns of nature. In a way, Smithson’s Spiral Jetty could be the quintessential James Benning landscape. Completely organic and natural in its materials and archetypal form, the intrusion of man is subtly, instinctively awkward in its surroundings, which collaborates with its scale to produce a moving and mammoth sense of awe.

Structurally, the film is like a log (an account, not a stump). A date shows up on the screen, followed by 5-7 shots of the jetty and surrounding landscape that each last about two minutes. The first date of April 20, 1970 is when the jetty was completed. The next segment is in the following September, then in December, and so forth for the first three years, documenting the physical and chemical changes of the lake and its interaction with this bit of land. As time progresses, the log becomes more and more spread out, beginning to jump years at a time. There are only two segments in the 1980s, and both of them could be outtakes from 13 Lakes; the jetty was, at this point, completely under water (12 feet under in 1988). In the 90s it begins to resurface, and in the 2000s it seems to be back to where it was when the film began. Like a parabola, the film begins to scrunch up again at the end, ending with three or four segments in 2005, 2006, and 2007.

What I initially thought was a well-kept and relatively consistent documentation of an important piece of art turned out to be only a recreated estimation of time and nature. The entire film was shot in about an 18-month period from 2005-2007, and merely matches up annual water levels and tide shifts with historically accurate dates and statistics, the equivalent to Brad Pitt performing his entire lifetime for a film, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, that was in the production for less than two years, minus the CGI.

Over the course of this film, Spiral Jetty became more and more of a natural creation, seemingly just as belonging as any of the near by mountains. To see it submerged made the locale feel hollow, and calls attention to climate change, and what defines a landscape. Often, Benning’s framing will mask the lake to where the asphalt and rocks are unrecognizable as the Spiral Jetty, which made the film feel even more like a pure study on climate and environmental shifts and balance.

13 Lakes (2004)
Update on 4/30/2009:
Not much to add here, other than obvious tweaks, like the film looks much better projected from 16mm in a theatre than a TV rip on a computer. The grain and dust is even more of a factor here, becoming like the birds and cars that intrude on the perfect half-and-half compositions.

Originally posted on 3/17/2009 @ 11:51pm after viewing a bootleg of the film:
The initial prospect of sitting down to watch this film, or any James Benning film, or any structural film for that matter, can almost be comically rebarbative. The film is exactly what one would imagine from its ‘premise’: thirteen uncut ten minute shots of thirteen different lakes from around the United States. While what you see over the 2 hours 15 minute running time is predictable based on this description, its effects on the viewer are very much not. In the first glimpse of each lake, acknowledging that the next ten minutes will be devoted to staring at this near-photograph, I searched for idiosyncrasies of the image, for some reason, starting with the more detailed very bottom of the frame, the part of the lake that is closest to the camera, then skipping immediately to the sky, and finally the ‘top’ of the lake. In the drawn out blackness that separates each shot of a lake, the anticipation is more than noticeable. ‘What will aesthetically separate the next lake from the others?’ ‘Will it have enough substance (wind, rain, manmade motion, rolling clouds, dynamic sound) to sustain my interest for 10 minutes?’ In some cases, like the show-stopping, heart-dropping 9th lake, the answer to the latter concern is a resounding ‘Yes!’ And others, I greeted the first few frames with, basically, disappointment, before I settled into it, zoned out, or it developed into something more complex than I’d first expected.

Formally identical to 13 Lakes, Ten Skies has the added bonus of being originally conceived as an anti-war film, inviting all kinds of metaphors and meaning. I tried to ignore this, though, and the main question on my mind during this film was the definition of ‘sky.’ According to Dictionary.com, the word is defined “the region of the clouds or the upper air; the upper atmosphere of the earth,” but I think this is silly. Why should clouds define the sky if the sky still exists without them. There is no mention of stars, either. And if clouds can be low enough to roll through hills and still be in the sky, then it should just be ‘the space above the earth.’ If the camera is placed on the ground pointing straight up, and a person is standing at the base of the camera, stretching up into the blue, then I think he is part of the sky. And so are the birds and the airplanes and the smoke and the sun and the moon. Benning claims that he wanted to make Ten Skies after making 13 Lakes because he was frustrated that the sky was only half of the frame, and he wanted a film with the sky as the central subject. As if the lakes weren’t also shafted out of the other half of the frame hogged by the sky (which, in my book, got two films), Benning never felt the need to make a film where the water took up the whole frame and didn’t have to share with the skies?

Where looking out at the Lakes felt like a study of composition and rhythm, Skies yields an interest in subtle movements and a search for something. To look up, craning one’s neck, is to exert energy for a purpose or a goal. Watching 13 Lakes could be mistaken for looking through a window cut out in the cinema wall, but with Skies, gravity tells us that these images must be reproduced; we know that we are not looking up and feeling the pressure that that entails. This is a spiritual allegory.

I was surprised by this film, because I didn’t think it was possible for Werner Herzog to take such ripe material and turn it into such a flawed product. That flaw is a conceit that calls for an ‘alien,’ performed by Brad Dourif (who is pictured in the poster), to whine about astronauts and the human race while Herzog shows a compilation of NASA footage that he obtained. Dourif, delivering some of the worst dialogue of the decade, speaks as if he were performing slam poetry for a day care center for astronauts’ children. While the effort toward infusing a space/underwater documentary with an air of magical realism is appreciated, I don’t know how Herzog didn’t pull the plug on the idea when it was so obviously falling flat. For an idea of the performance, look at the film’s poster, with Dourif glaring at you, and imagine that as he is glaring he whispers, angrily, and with a voice not far from that of Christopher Lambert, “we aliens all suck.” And no, it doesn’t have any camp value.

The film is otherwise well-lensed, and the soundtrack by Mola Sylla is pretty but doesn’t match or enhance the imagery, and makes it feel like a Discovery Channel for Kids program (which, if it were, would explain a lot). This film should have been completely scrapped and skipped in favor of his more mature Encounters at the End of the World. As evidenced in For All Mankind and, to an extent, Picture of Light, well-composed documentation of celestial subjects doesn’t need to be dolled up with phony alien rants in order to have a mysterious and ominous aura. I appreciated the film towards the end for it’s comparisons of the depths of the ocean to deep space as equally foreign spaces, despite one being light years away and the other being right here on our planet, but I was so angry about Dourif’s alien that most of this was immediately dismissed while the credits rolled. Herzog should bend the truth in his non-documentary documentaries all he wants, but he can at least realize when he is treating his audience like ridalin-starved juveniles.

It’s rare to see a film that is sucessful simply because of its subject, but this film fits that bill. The Cruise, a film by Capote’s Bennett Miller, is successful entirely because of the strength of Timothy ‘Speed’ Levitch’s personality, and Miller’s wise decision to hand the film over to him. I’ve seen this film many times now, and it is the only film that I own on VHS (which I’ve retired since the DVD came out); and it is one of the first films that comes to mind when I am in charge of putting on a movie night for a group of individuals which I am unfamiliar with their tastes. It feels as if I am introducing them to a friend of mine that I am sure they will get a kick out of rather than a film. Every reaction that I have heard from the film is along the lines of ‘I love that man!’ to ‘that guy is hilarious!’ and hardly ever ‘that was an film!’ So anyway, yes, Levitch is great, insightful, eccentric, addictive, et al; and the film captures this almost perfectly.

I was pleased when Levitch admits that everyone has moments of narcissism, because the manner in which Levitch is hoisted during a good chunk of The Cruise, if not all of it, is extremely self-indulgent, and the worst instances of this are so glaring because of Miller’s inexperience, such as a shot of Levitch, standing on the edge of the sidewalk, cautiously tapping his foot onto the street before crossing slowly and aimlessly, while the camera sits back and watches. While much of the film has the camera following Levitch around, this scene self-conciously screams ‘look how strange, yet fun, this guys is!’ The film works best when Levitch is giving his tours, calling out his unimaginably rich knowledge of NYC landmarks as if it were the alphabet, engaging in repartee with the driver, and letting his personality out more candidly and spontaneously.

As a film focused solely on Levitch, it naturally calls many decisions into question, such as the narcissistic tendencies, and it makes me wonder if the film would have functioned better if it had followed other bus tourers, too; even if only three total. Levitch’s personality still would have stood out from the others’, no doubt, but it would have offered a nice point of reference as to just how much more Oomph there is in his tours than anybody else’s, instead of Miller deciding this for us by choosing only him to be the subject of a feature-length film. Either way, this film is very engaging from start to finish, and I’m glad that Levitch hasn’t been exploited too much since this film’s release other than the occasional Linklater cameo; it retains this film’s charm.

While this is, as usual for Guerín, a lovely experience unlike most in cinema, I had trouble with it in its role as documentation. Too real to be fiction, but too staged to be reality, there is a constant tension while watching this film that relates to how it was shot and how genuine it is, which distracts from the lyricism of the film’s conversations, philosophies, and imagery. It is quite an obvious comparison, I think, to call attention between this film and Zhang-ke’s recent 24 City. Both films’ subjects are modern high-rise residencies which are being built to replace a piece of each respective city’s history, and both films walk a tightrope between fiction and reality. Zhang-ke interviews about eight subjects, and roughly half of them are actors who are acting out scripted material for their interview, while the other half are genuine, unscripted interviews with actual civilians. En Construccion has a more subtle conflict with reality, in the sense that I believe that all of the film’s subjects are non-actors who are simply acting out their daily routines, similar to the characters in a Pedro Costa film. Certain moments, especially the young worker who flirts with a woman who hangs her clothes to dry, lose credibility for the entire film because they are so obviously set-up, including reverse-angle shots and cuts to accompany the already far-fetched possibilty that a confrontation this theatrical could be simply stumbled upon; it feels like an homage to Romeo and Juliet. Earlier scenes in which it seems like we are eavesdropping on the conversations of resident’s and passersby are reconsidered at this point. A dialogue between a little girl and her friend, discussing something like whether or not she wants to have children when she grows up, becomes slightly awkward in retrospect. Is this just an actual conversation that they were having at the site, or did Guerín script this, and if so, why? Did Guerín hear the conversation and ask them to repeat it for the film, and again, why? Not to mention that most of the dialogue that seems to be spontaneous sounds so well recorded that I wonder if these people were mic’ed, and if so, who got a mic and who didn’t? What other juicy material am I missing from those who weren’t mic’ed? Needless to say, the formalities of the film took center stage with me, and I can’t tell if it was intentional or not, nor if it benefited the viewing experience; my hunch is ‘no.’ A film like Close Up gets away with this blurring of reality because, among other things, it embraces the confusion and mixing of fiction and non-fiction.

The flaws of En Construccion affect 24 City as well in much the same way. One wonders if Zhang-ke couldn’t find enough subjects to fill out a feature length film, or what the staged interviews add that he couldn’t get from the real interviews. I believe that he was drawing parallels between the natural and articial depictions of the interviewees with the buildings before and after 24 City was constructed, an artistic sacrifice on par with Adaptation‘s butchered third act for the sake of its concept. I think that Guerín is best when he is working either within the realms of fiction (In the City of Sylvia) or actually commenting on it (Train of Shadows). Like I said, though, En Construccion still has plenty of what makes Guerín’s films so watchable: the joys of voyeurism, lucious imagery, a brilliant sound design, et al.

This will contain some spoilers for Rosetta and Mouchette
The epitome of someone that I would hate to meet or encounter, much less get to know, Émilie Dequenne’s Rosetta never manages to win over my sympathy, and that’s perfectly fine. The Dardennes employ a, literal, in-your-face cinema-vérité style of camerawork in which the camera spends much of the film no more than a meter stick’s distance from the hot-tempered protagonist, creating a claustrophobic and rebarbative environment for the viewer to participate in her tribulations. The film seems to be, at least partially, modeled after/homaging/critiquing Bresson’s Mouchette. As an exercise in improving a supposed masterwork, Rosetta gets gold stars all around, besting the overrated Bresson film in nearly every department. Filmed in the latter half of the 1960s, there is no excuse for Mouchette, unrealistic and unsympathetic as it is, to fall as flat as it does, with terrible acting, obvious and choppy editing gimmicks, and simulated tears that are so glaringly fake primarily because of the lead’s complete lack of emotions.

The big difference between the films, though, other than quality, is the concluding theme of each film. Where Mouchette seems to turn its protagonist into a harbinger for the cruelty of humanity, Rosetta depicts dual acts of cruelty, both received and given by the lead, which finally culminates in the more optimistic and affecting expression of forgiveness. While Rosetta threatens to suffer the same collapse of character and shameless surrender to death that Mouchette does, Rosetta avoids mimicking Mouchette’s successful second attempt at suicide thanks to the unlikely arrival of compassion in Riquet, the man who was coldheartedly betrayed by Rosetta in the film’s middle act, which I found heartwrenching. The love and forgiveness shown here is such a thematic reversal of the conclusion of Bresson’s film that I could easily be convinced that the Dardenne brothers made Rosetta for the solitary purpose of correcting the misanthropic outcome that Bresson unleashed on Mouchette.

It is this act that also shifts my entire perception of the film, to the point that I believe Riquet to be the most important character of the film. Without his act in the final moments of the film, Rosetta’s hostility, selfishness, and sado-masochism would serve no purpose other than as a portrait of a troubled individual. I thought that I could have argued that the film would still be able to function as a vision of the struggles of the working class, but this is incorrect, as Rosetta is the only person who throws tantrums and is consistently irate despite her luck and social status. Riquet gets laid off and cordially walks out, no security guards required. Rosetta’s mother may be too sedated from alcoholism to fight back against Rosetta, but she still comes across as a victim to a girl who would be hot-tempered in any environment or lifestyle. While following Rosetta, learning about her behavior and relationships, is, fortunately, rivetting, it serves no purpose without Riquet, who saves not only Rosetta, but the film itself.

This being Kiarostami’s first feature film, it lacks much of the post-modernism from is Koker trilogy onward that makes his films multifaceted masterpieces of realism, but it still contains the prime characteristic that makes his films so remarkable, which is a giant heart. The film is founded on a mission to preach didactic morals on child behavior, not uncommon for a Kiarostami film (which almost certainly budded from his early educational shorts). This is not a negative trait, but is mildly detrimental only because it makes the plot somewhat predictable. The 1st act will be recognizable to anyone who has seen his Where is the Friend’s Home?, as both begin almost identically by focusing on two boys/friends at school, and follows one of them home from school where his mother badgers him about not doing his homework before he leaves to go out and play. Where Ahmed in Friend’s Home only wanted to leave to return his friend’s notebook, Qassem actually only wants to leave to go play soccer with his friends. He is the complete opposite in character from Ahmed except that they are both guided by their intuitive wills to go against the authorities’ wishes, to do what they want to do rather than what they should do.

Qassem wants to attend a soccer match in Tehran where one of his idols will be playing in a big game. After mapping out the expenses of this two-day trip, and arranging the lies that he will tell his mother, he must find a way to raise (read: steal) enough money to afford the transportation fees. After he fails to barter an old, gutted camera to a pawn dealer, he ingeniously decides to pretend to use the broken camera to take people’s portraits for money, promising them printed photographs that they will obviously never receive. For more money, Qassem steals from his mother, and sells off his soccer team’s equipment. In every conceivable way, Qassem is the sort of kid that makes people hate children; that he still manages to earn my sympathy in the end is a testament to Kiarostami’s brilliance and skill at directing children.

I was surprised, and, frankly, impressed, that Kiarostami left Qassem in much pessimistic circumstances at the end of the film. Out of money, alone, hungry, and unsatisfied by the event that caused all of this mischief, Qassem may as well have been left for dead when the film fades to black. In leaving his protagonist, just a little boy, in such a wary and empty limbo, he really hammers home his morals and beliefs: You want to steal, cheat, slack off, and be an asshole to your friends? Get ready for a life of solitude and suffering. Kiarostami believes in the good and bad of his characters. Everything that could go wrong does go wrong for Qassem, but those characters who do deserve redemption are rewarded with some of the most blissfully happy endings that the cinema has to offer.

One would hope that a film about searching for northern lights in the far corners of Canada would look better and have better food for thought than this documentary by Peter Mettler; but then again, maybe it’s just that no medium can do justice to this most elusive and ethereal natural phenomenon. The film captures the magnetic light show in hazy time-lapsed film, which the filmmaker attained by exposing 1 frame every twenty seconds (so 1 second of motion takes 8 minutes to capture). The product is pretty much akin to every other video or film you’ve probably seen of an aurora borealis. Worse than the footage, though, is that Mettler frequently goes off on various psychological and meteorological tangents that cause the film to drag, and can grate on the nerves. He tells the viewer, in voiceover, facts that are neither profound or new, like the Inuits have close to 170 words for snow and ice, as if we are supposed to be in awe of the information all over again. The narrator (who I believe is Mettler but was left uncredited in the closing credits) sounds like Kevin Spacey’s Lester from American Beauty; not only his voice, but his tone, too, with a relaxed, borderline cynical acceptance of the beauty of our world’s hidden treasures and mysteries. I’d all but given up on the film by the time he recites this gem while presenting footage of a pile of snow: “the first thing ever filmed was a train pulling into a station; the audience ran in terror. Cold yet?”

While it is obvious that the northern lights are only visible near the pole, thus making the experience of looking at them in person pretty damn frigid, the film spends far too much of its time concentrating on the well-below 0 temperature. In addition to the aforementioned 170 words tidbit which included a recitation of many of the words and their definitions), we are also treated to a fun, but again extraneous, experiment of how to create a snow drift in your hotel room (drill a small hole in the door before a snow storm, wake up next to a mountain of snow). Not to mention many many shots of snow, most in the daytime. A years ago, I went to Iceland to try to get some video footage of some northern lights. Little did I know, though, that January, while the darkest month, is in the middle of one of the worse viewing seasons for the lights (they are much more visible near the equinoxes). I managed to get a grainy digital photo of a barely visible green blob that was very far away. I know this is a deviation from the review, but if Mettler is allowed to go off topic, then so am I.

The film does get much more interesting in its last third, finally (mostly) abandoning the lame voiceover and time-lapsed films of the sky, and explores the northern lights from perspectives that are not as familiar. Mettler shows some brilliant NASA footage of a space crew observing the northern lights from outer space, and the film’s final moments has us flying into an aurora, which caused some camera malfunctions, but it was intense nonetheless. The film, in these moments, actually follows through in showing the awe and grandeur of these lights, which had so far only been poetically pondered and blandly filmed. Better late than never, but this should have been a shorter, more focused film; one made by a man as curious as the viewer is, and less satisfied with banal facts and pseudo-intellectual musings.

The debut feature from Alain Resnais picks up with a comparable tone and style to his well-circulated and effective short Night and Fog. The opening fifteen minutes of Hiroshima mon amour has, among its scenic imagery and a dramatically photographed couple in arms, archival footage of Hiroshima after the bombing attacks in WWII, as well as similar footage of the aftermath extracted from feature films. The audio during this montage is a back and forth dialogue/poetry spoken by the film’s leads, French actress Elle and the married, Japanese Lui. The dialogue, which reminded me quite a bit of the voiceover poetry spoken in Terrence Malick’s recent work, seems too bizarre to be an actual conversation between the two, although it is responsive. The female voice states certain things which appear to be facts, such as that she visited a hospital, or she went four times to the museum dedicated to the Hiroshima bombing, affirming herself that she knows the suffering that the residents of Hiroshima have suffered. A male voice retorts, “you know nothing of Hiroshima.” This voice is stern and authoritative, belittling the woman’s naive delusions of the knowledge of suffering. But, of course, the suffering she speaks of is only symbolic. The woman, who turns out to be Elle, lost the love of her life when she was younger, and draws parallels between the lovesickness and heartbreak that she experienced to the mass death, 10,000 degrees of heat, and subsequent physical deformity which struck Hiroshima. The film isn’t focused on this dichotomy of love and physical suffering; to make such a comparison with the still fresh tragedy of Hiroshima would have been irresponsible, insensitive, and embarrassingly inaccurate. The film is, instead, interested in the importance of the memory/forgetting of these things; a woman’s lost love, and a nation’s lost everything.

After this bravura opening fifteen minutes, the other major event of the film involves Elle telling Lui about her past love. The film’s logic and sense of time becomes shaky at this point, supposedly to mirror the mental trauma of living with the memory, and task of forgetting such a circumstance. In her recollections, Elle refers to Lui as dead. I suppose to not know someone in the past is similar to not knowing them in the future; if you’re not here with me, then why should you exist at all? Solipsistic, eh? The film’s most satisfying moment occurs when Elle is on the verge of complete hysteria and Lui does what we all want to do, and gives her a good smack.

The film often reminded me of some of Antonioni’s films, especially L’Eclisse. The photography of the architecture, pacing, and music in the closing minutes of that film were, in general, pretty evocative of Hiroshima, and I thought that the elliptical finales of both films suggest a deeply disturbed psychological displacement of the characters, and an attempt at accomplishing that effect in the viewer. While the last bits of dialogue between Elle and Lui could be the ultimate no-no in giving the audience too much information, saying out loud the subtlety and symbolism laid down in the rest of the film, it somehow bypasses this and closes in the moment that it is its most enigmatic.

I’ve long been one of this film’s most ardent supporters ever since I first saw the Cannes cut in 2006, although anyone who graced it with even a slightly dismissive ‘it was alright…’ would fall into that category. Proving that ambition which misses its mark is far more offensive to people than films that succeed in their attempts to accomplish absolutely nothing, the reaction to Southland Tales is so disturbing because it promotes the censorship of filmmakers indulgences. The film is a mess and tries to be subversive, campy, and a spectacle in every frame, to be the ultimate cult film. After the unreasonably wet blowjob that fanboys gave Donnie Darko, who could blame him for wanting to be the next big geek favorite?

My only true disappointment with the film is that Kelly falls, once again, to his hero complex (or, for him, messiah complex). End-of-the-world and hero films have been a huge draw since long before the trend caught fire with disaster films like Independence Day, Mars Attracks!, and Armageddon cleaned up at the box office. The trailers promised the world in peril, on the brink of apocalypse. While most of the film delivered, the endings all cop out and an unexpected hero saves the day. In these cases, it is less the characters than it is the writer and filmmaker who seem to be taking the role of messiah, sacrificing the advertised doom and gloom for happy endings where everything goes back to normal. But these are such downers because we actually want to see the world destroyed. Why else would the films with cliffhangers be the crowd favorites? It’s not the hope of a sequel, but the prospect that there is still danger in the film’s universe when it comes to an end. A master filmmaker like Stanley Kubrick can overcome such a complex in Dr. Strangelove, ending the film with the world in a nuclear meltdown, and Werner Herzog can cite the end of days in film after film, including his latest Encounters at the End of the World.

Kelly fell victim to this in Donnie Darko, and exponentially recreates the mistake here. Southland Tales is so thrilling to me for most of its running time because the society he is portraying is on the verge of such a spectacular annihilation. I should have seen the redemption coming with the oft ‘Revelations’ citations, but the ending, revealing a ‘new Messiah,’ never fails to irk.

The film’s supposed downfalls are its juvenile humor, trite satire, bad acting, and, as already mentioned, unconstrained ambition. I forgive most of these because they feel intentional rather than like misfires, like exaggerations of the conventions and bad decisions that it is aiming to critique. While these things which are bad for the sake of being bad do begin to wear thin about halfway through, it is taken over in the film’s final third by pure cinematic spectacle. The zeppelin, election, apocalypse, and looming war all pile onto each other in a fluid, futuristic, and euphoric way. If it ever misses the mark, it is still, at the least, a representation of an amibitious filmmaker’s ideal vision. It might not be a great film, but it is essential that films like it continue to exist.

Update 4/6/09, 12:32AM: Or maybe the world does end? I’ve seen the film four times, and I always thought the world was saved at the end, but maybe not? I think it could go either way, it’s not clear.

The length of Melancholia is the default point of interest when I describe the film to people. It is also one of the least important aspects of the film. Running somewhere between seven and a half to eight hours long, it is still only Diaz’s fourth longest film. An amazing thing, though, is that it actually needs to be this long (Okay, it could probably lose an hour and still retain everything that is so magical about it, but the point is there). Diaz often cites his frustration with journalists and press who, when given a rare opportunity to discuss the film with him, only bring up the length, and even worse, to ask ‘why so long?’ His response? ‘Next please.’

The easy summation for the film is that it is about all of the sadness in the world, how every person has so much sorrow and melancholia, and we all have our ways of cloaking this sadness, even though it is always there. But this is to ignore all of the beautiful allegories of art, personas, interpersonal connection, and transformation that are just as prevalent, if not more so. The film is unofficially divided into three distinct ‘chapters’: The first is the Sagada segment in which Alberta is the protagonist, the middle segment primarily focuses on Julian after Sagada (Alberta is important here, too), while the final few hours follows three men through a jungle, all three on the brink of insanity and death. Despite the fact that Diaz has shot the entire film on HD video, the lengths of the shots felt like they were equal to the length of an entire film reel (much like Benning’s lake and sky films). In reality, they were probably a bit longer, probably averaging 13-15 minutes per shot, I would guess. Also, most of these shots are static and fairly distanced from the characters; I don’t think Diaz ever allows a close, clear look at any character’s face. By never distinctly revealing the physical identity of the characters, it keeps them in a constant state of development limbo; there is always something unknown about them.

Speaking of limbo, one of the film’s big ideas relates to purgatory (Diaz even released a short film in the last year or so titled Purgatorio). Characters are caught between locales, personas, and states of mind, and they all realize it. Faced with their sorrow, Julian, Alberta, and Rina all make a sort of pact with each other to assume the roles of completely different people. When we first meet them, Alberta is a prostitute named Jenine, Julian is a pimp named Danny Boy, and Rina is a nun roaming the roads of Sagada begging for ‘charity for the poor.’ The illusion of these characters’ false personas is breached when a man recognizes Alberta and confronts her at a restaurant. She assures him that she is not Alberta, he swears that she looks just like her except for her clothing, but he seems to take her word that she is just a whore named Jenine. Later, when the same man asks ‘Jenine’ for her services, he stops her mid-way through her stripping, finally convinced that she couldn’t be Alberta, because Alberta would never strip like this for a stranger. Of course, though, it is Alberta. That he has become so convinced by this gesture gives an idea of the complete unlikelihood of these roles changes, and the commitment beyond all of their morals that they have agreed to. It’s the ultimate example of method acting.

Post- ‘persona adoption’, the middle segment of the film finds the characters in a deeper ‘purgatory’ than before. Julian seems to be employing performance artists to stage didactic and absurd performances in his living room, as well as a thrash jazz/metal band, who wail on their instruments for a good twenty minutes as Julian wanders around them, grinning and sipping a beer (this part lost the largest chunk of my audience, though it takes place five hours into the film). Alberta, returning to her day job as a school principal (but is it her real day job?…), puts her emotional sterility on hiatus to conduct a new search for a missing loved one, this time for her adopted daughter Hannah, who has, coincidentally, begun pursuing prostitution to ease her troubles over her dead parents. Diaz uses this segment to express his passionate views on various aspects of filmmaking. Julian has a wonderful, extended visit with a writer friend to discuss his new book, ‘The True History of Filipino Cinema’ (I think this is what it was titled; if not, it’s close). Julian asks the friend to tell him a synopsis of the film, and, seemingly representing Lav Diaz himself, the friend becomes irritated that he should have to shrink the content of his work into an abridged form. “Just read the book!” he says. He gives in, though, for the sake of communicating more anecdotes on the problems with Filipino cinema, such as their reliance on big stars, tidy lengths, and heteronormativity.

Julian and Alberta meet in a cafe shortly after this scene, because Julian wants to discuss his irritation with her that she compromised truth and the illusions of their personas in the first segment when she addressed ‘Danny Boy the pimp’ as Julian. This was an intense dissection of what truth actually is when you are acting as someone else. How long do you have to ‘pretend’ to be a whore, actually having sex with strangers, telling people your name is Jenine, before they become your actual identity? We gives ourselves these names, and we dictate our moral boundaries, so why should Alberta the innocent widow still be Alberta the innocent widow? If we completely change our environment, names, morals, troubles and worries, and sources of happiness, then shouldn’t we cease to be who we once were? Beautiful stuff, this film offers.

Following the thrash/noise mind eraser (and exit music, for many), the music abruptly shifts to a jungle, and stays there (this segment is very reminiscent of the second half of Tropical Malady). At first, the three men that the film is now following are unknowns. Eventually, though, we see one of the men writing a letter or poem, with his writing translated in voiceover. He is writing about Alberta, and, thus, his identity is revealed to be Renato, Alberta’s missing husband whose absence has caused her so much grief. This also shifts the time of the film, as our sense of where we are goes back to about ten years earlier than the rest of the film is set. The next two hours shows, in snail-paced detail, the mental and physical disintegration of the three men, who are being hunted by unseen militia. When these scenes shift to night, the images on the screen are impenetrable for well over half an hour, more difficult to dissect, even, than the night scenes from Birdsong. The duration of this time with these men is, frankly, exhausting; their insanity and hopelessness arguably contagious.

The film has a coda, which both summarizes much of the film’s ideas, and also blasts it into hyper-spiritual incomprehension. Alberta has shifted her hunt from Hannah to Julian, who has inexplicably gone missing. Civilians have been replaced by performance artists/meditators/yogis. Alberta encounters a man who tells her that sadness is the source of all art; he is an actor because he has sadness; sorrow is how poets write poetry, and filmmakers create cinema. Alberta finds Julian, who is now God, or at least thinks he is, and accredits himself (God) as the source of all sadness and suffering. He assumes the ideal persona for overcoming his melancholia, by becoming the one who gives it.