Author name: Blake Williams

The lasting effect of Lifshitz’s most recent film (five years now and still nothing moving? sad.) is empty compared to the breezy and often lovely act of watching it. The cinematography is lush and the music calmly swells through its duration, but I was ultimately unsatisfied with the time that I spent with these characters. Into Wild Side (a shorter film than his more layered Almost Nothing), Liftshitz crams a great deal of nudity and sex which is consistently unconventional (no vanilla here) but hardly unheard of, and, sometimes, in latter scenes, boring. As liberal-minded as I like to think I am, I would have enjoyed the film much more if it had aimed to focus on what motivated the three main characters, Pierre, Mikhail, and Djamel, to participate and enjoy their polygamous relationship, especially considering Pierre’s transsexuality. Lifshitz might be expecting his audience to just go with the flow, which I did, and not ask questions, which I am. More frustrating is that the film might be making an attempt at developing Pierre, via shots of his childhood, dreamily photographed but only superficially nostalgic, focussing on his relationship with his sister, which was cut short, and getting bullied and beaten by other kids, which is the simplest and cheapest way of developing an un-straight character, and frankly not sufficient for a character who partakes in a lifestyle such as Pierre does.

As unilluminating and unfortunately forgettable as the film is, it was still formally engaging, brilliantly acted, and, again, aesthetically lulling. The film zooms by, feeling much shorter than its ninety minute running time. A lot of the time spent watching it, especially in its former half, is devoted to identifying the characters and their relationships to one another, and to sensing Lifshitz’s timeline, which is more complex than the also non-sequential narrative of his Almost Nothing. Threads of the plot go unexplained and untied for much of the film, and many remain so. Lifshitz seeming fixated on making films that do not contain typical queer film stereotypes and lack of ambition. And he succeeds, even in relation to non-queer cinema, but I got the feeling here that he still uses the queer themes as a bit of a crutch, as if the unconventional sexuality is supposed to be engaging enough to sustain a story that might not be up to snuff, which isn’t the case with this film. Pierre is returning home to care for her sick mother (a motif for Lifshitz?), once again enforcing an air of doom for not just the mother, but for all characters that are affiliated with her. A tranny caring for her dying mother, the groundwork for a great film. A prostitute tranny, involved in a relationship with two men with ambiguous sexualities, caring for her dying mother; even better. But the film too often aims to entice with inconsequential nudity and bareback sex with strangers, instead of addressing its strong premise. Even Antony’s brilliant ‘I Fell in Love with a Dead Boy,’ performed as a kind of prologue, is narrowed by this pedestrian study of sexuality, as the song seems to only exist in the film for its “are you a boy or a girl?” coda, ignoring the delicacy of the rest of its verses.

It’s fitting that the last comedy that I saw before this was Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, as this felt like Woody Allen spent a weekend going through his Viva Pedro box set and then sat down to write a film(among the tone and characters, see also the guitar scene). Allen should take notes from Almodóvar more often, if this was in fact the case, because the result is the funniest Allen film that I have seen. The close second, Annie Hall, made me laugh more in retrospect than during (though I have only seen it once). Most of this is thanks to Penelope Cruz. Cruz was unfortunately absent inWomen on the Verge, but her character here makes up for it (she might as well have stumbled out of the development pages of that film and wandered, drunkenly, in Woody’s subconscious). There is not a moment that she is in the frame, clinically and cynically unhinged by love’s consequences, that I wasn’t staring at her, smiling. But, like every good film that Allen has made, the laughs are secondary, and his misanthropic sentiments toward love and sex take precedence.

While Cruz’s Maria Elena is the glowing madwoman who makes this film such a beautiful farce, the most interesting character in the film is arguably Scarlet Johanson’s Cristina. Cristina comes off as hopelessly naive, but refreshingly impulsive, and her presence is often missed as much as, if not more than, Maria Elena’s is during the scenes with Vicky juggling her doofus fiancée and neurotic parents, easily the weaker sections of the film. Cristina enters and exits relationships on whims, and is in blunt contrast to Vicky’s commitment hell. When Cristina announces that she wants out of the menage e trois with Maria Elena and Juan Antonio, it refreshing because it feels like a such a simple and honest decisionIt is strange how satisfying it feels to see these characters making decisions that I want them to make. It’s a completely, viscerally rewarding viewing because Allen identifies urges that are innately inevitable and condemns the conventions that hold us back from happiness.

The film has a plasticky feel, in the warm and vivid colors and the ‘this-has-to-have-been-DNRed’ lack of grain in the image, to the slightly stilted line-deliveries by Johanson, Berdem, and Hall, to that pesky voiceover that has given so many viewers reservations about the film. It’s silly to complain, in this circumstance, that the voiceover is telling people what is happening instead of showing it visually, because the guy narrating is so hammy and blatantly ironic. The whores on the back alleys of Oviedo are clean and friendly, and the streets are immaculate. Allen is holding up bunny ears to the heads of traditional rom-coms and Spanish soap operas alike, sending Americans a Spanish postcard; crisp and glossy, worn edges and crumpled corners.

As if to explicitly yell at me you do not know Chantal Akerman as well as you think you do, I came out of La Captive dazed and delightfully confused. Just as one would conceivably get much more out of the Watchmen story if they had actually been patient and just adapted the 12 issues one at a time (this is speculation, I haven’t seen the film, looks awful, won’t see it), this film gives me a much clearer idea of the type of person Marcel Proust is, and what his monumental literary project is going for, than the ambitious but confusing Time Regained by Raul Ruiz. What a strikingly anti-woman film for a supposed feminist to make, as Ariane completely fails to exhibit anything encouraging, or even at all positive, for the female gender. But, of course, I don’t actually think that this film is damning women the world over, and if it is, Akerman if certainly telling this story ironically. As my previous experience with Chantal Akerman was exclusively her early 60s and 70s work, this film was topically surprising, but probably even more formally jarring; the structural minimalism of Hotel Monterrey and the superb News From Home has been thrown out completely.

But anyway, I thought this was enthralling and deliciously awkward and unsettling. Not sure of what has been changed and retained from Proust’s ‘The Prisoner,’ but the role of the ‘captive’ applies pretty equally to both Ariane and Simon. Simon is locked in his mansion by pollen allergies (allergic to ‘beauty’? one could suppose…), locked emotionally with the idea of being in a relationship with Ariane, and locked by the conventions of his class. Ariane, in the meantime, also locked by conventions, resists her lesbianism for a morbidly boring status with Simon, and is also seemingly locked into her role as a woman: gratingly submissive and defined by her sex. But more than anything, the film looks at a couple that refuses to unite, in which the two partners remains complete individuals. Simon and Ariane have different social circles, different interests, and even different bedrooms in the same mansion. The impossibility of sustaining such a relationship is presented here in all of its aggravating glory. Jealousy inevitably jumps in, and tragedy resolves what the two cannot successfully resolve themselves. This is originally set, I assume, almost a century ago when the books were written, though it seems to have been updated to the present, partially explaining how awkwardly dated some of it feels.

It’s been a few days since I saw this, which breaks my ‘post-the-next-day’ rule, but I don’t think I should even be writing anything about this film without having seen it at least two more times. It is dense, both in information, and with emotion. Dreyer’s last film plays out like one would expect a great filmmaker’s final film to play out, even though he didn’t pass away until over three years after Gertrud was released. Same thing with Altman; how perfect a film to go out on than the playfully morose A Prairie Home Companion; and Kubrick, who couldn’t have ended his career with a more badass line of dialogue. But, Dreyer’s final scene is less ‘what a great way to wrap things up!’ than ‘oh, how can I watch any of his films again without welling up?’ Gertrud seems to be the sum of all of Dreyer’s previous most important and devastating women: Jeanne, Inger, Leone, Herlofs; she is kind of a statue memorial to all of them. Gertrud, and most of the men in the film, seems to be a pinocchio who briefly breaks from her stillness to say a line of dialogue before retreating into her motionless daze. It feels self-consciously theatrical, and appropriately creepy. Are these people dead already? Is this a ghost story? Gertrud could definitely be a ghost. She appears in frame mirrors (see attached poster) and looks at herself with uncomfortable apathy and iciness, as if she can’t comprehend why it is that she can see her reflection. When she goes to Erland’s house and makes love to him on the night of the first day of the film, she goes into the bedroom, and we see her shadow as she undresses, as if Dreyer is trying to reassure the viewer that her body is physically there. That glow that follows her is awfully angelic.

But if ‘Love is All,’ as is said in the film, then what is Gertrud? The film treks through a couple of days in her life that all but prove that this woman is incapable of finding a love that can satisfy her. Dreyer uses archetypes to prescribe Gertrud desolation. Like Stalker‘s portrayal of godlessness via a writer and a scientist, and the strict niche’s a of faith depicted in Dreyer’s previous Ordet, I thought that Gertrud‘s sense of barrenness was being sculpted by its existence as an excessively academic thesis on love. If Love = A or B or C, and Gertrud = -A, -B, and -C, then Gertrud = cold, distant zombie. The film managed to feel like one of the most comprehensive studies of a woman’s need to love, while also feeling like the completely wrong approach to the subject. How can I grasp what this woman yearns for and how she feels when she doesn’t get it when there is no entry point into her heart? There seems to be an academic/objective explanation for each reason why she is incompatible with each man in her life. But, in reality, if the big issue is ‘your work is more important than I am’ or ‘A woman’s love and a man’s work are mortal enemies’ or ‘I don’t have the funds to leave with you, ‘ then can’t we work around this? Gertrud is not only incapable of compromise, but stubbornly self-destructive. It is in her nature to not get what she wants. Thus, as she gives up on love, and becomes a recluse to the idea and to people in general, and she has picked apart the end of her life, and planned even for what the living will for her after she is dead (‘you will stand on my grave and you will…’), Gertrud becomes the ultimate melodrama, even though it doesn’t seem to contain a clear melodramatic moment.

Essentially the same film as In the City of Sylvia, this seems like the sort of film that Guerin would have settled for if film didn’t exist and everyone told stories visually via Powerpoint presentations. But, it still has an impact, which is proof enough that In the City of Sylvia isn’t perfect only because of its stunning lensing and sound design. The most offputting thing about Some Photos, though, is its lack of a sound track. It’s the same beef I had with Hotel Monterrey (though that film needed much more than sound to make me want to see it again), and I only feel a little bit naive with my opinion that a film needs sound to be successful. Even if it’s a low static buzz running through the whole thing. I want something to listen to, and I’d rather not count on the ambient noises in my apartment or studio, or whatever I’m playing in iTunes, as the sonic accompaniment to a film.

So, the film is photos and text. There are a few things that he does with this format though that are nice, like intermittently showing a photo, and following it up with a nearly identical photo (that he took right after the previous one). It was a brief nod to the difference between a photo montage and a motion picture. It gave me the feeling of watching choppy video, which always makes me tense. The same feeling as when I realize that the video has no sound, and I have to spend 5 minutes researching to make sure that the film has no sound and that my DVD isn’t faulty, I momentarily feel like my DVD is skipping. Also, he would take many similar photos and fade them quickly in and out over each other, which gave the image a ghostly effect.

There are differences in the stories told in Some Photos and In the City beside it’s photo presentation. It simultaneously feels like a more in-depth version of the filmed Sylvia and a different, parallel story to that one. For one, the protagonist has been searching for Sylvia for 22 years instead of 6. I’m not sure if Sylvia is based on Guerin’s actual experience, but I had the impression that Some Photos was Guerin telling the ‘true’ story that In the City was based on. I believe that the photos were taken by Guerin himself, but I’m not sure if he took them 22 years ago, or if he took them for this project. Either way, there are a lot of photos here. The screen is rarely consumed by the same photo for more than a couple of seconds, and often there are multiple photos that play over one second. The film is over an hour, so, lots of photos. I found the text intrusive, as it was placed in the center of the image, in fairly large, white, italic font. I don’t see why there couldn’t have been a voiceover, but the written story was begging for someone to be reading it aloud.

This is a nice companion to In the City, but I don’t think it functions well as it’s own feature, as it feels like a DVD supplement more than anything else, which is not what it is being sold as. It would be a shame for someone to see this supposed feature before In the City as I think it would diminish the impact of the guy’s hunt for Sylvia (also the fact that I didn’t know that he was had been hunting for this girl for 6 years until more than halfway through the film). It does expands the myth of Sylvia and ideas of the ‘male gaze,’ and it makes for a nice, quiet after-viewing cool down for the superior In the City of Sylvia.

So, I was very confused when I was searching for this film on the internet, because I knew that the title of the film actually translated to ‘Almost Nothing’ and yet the only thing coming up for my searches through Lifshitz’s filmography for the year 2000 was ‘Come Undone.’ I finally connected the dots and found out that the English translation that was tagged to this film was ‘Come Undone,’ which is a huge embarrassment to the film, and Mr. Lifshitz, and anyone gay, or anyone who appreciates queer cinema. Really, what does ‘coming undone’ have to do with anything in this film? Not to mention the trashy poster, which is slightly more obviously idiotic. Anyway, I was pleasantly surprised by this, and have to thank Joe from Fin de Cinema for his recent posts on Lifshitz that convinced me to seek out his work.

The film jumps around a bit between two different timelines in the narrative, going from Mathieu’s life before/during Cedric, to a more dire and empty bit of his life when his status with Cedric is mostly unknown. In the pre/during scenes, we witness Mathieu’s discovery of his sexuality, the development of his relationship with Cedric, and the gradual recognition of the nature of his relationship with Cedric by the three females that he lives with: his younger, bratty sister, his sick mother, and his aunt Annick (her relationship is never completely clear, but the official website states that Annick is Mathieu’s aunt). There is an air of sickness hovering over the film, especially in Mathieu’s mom and in his ‘present’ scenes of depression. The sense of mortality, seemingly brought on by loneliness/lovelessness, causes the film to have a significantly morose weight, particularly in the final quarter of the film. The prospect that Matheiu revealing his sexuality will worsen his mother’s condition comes between them and delays, or even extinguishes, the possibility of an honest and loving relationship between them. It’s one of the most well realized depictions of the tolls that coming out can have on someone’s relationship with another that I’ve seen in a film.

While the film feels like a pretty conventional love story throughout, even considering its jumpy structure, it leaves an impact because of the well-drawn characters and quietly droll conclusion. The title of the film (the actual title, that is) references the cause of the rupture in Mathieu and Cedric’s relationship, pertaining to Cedric’s illusion that when he cheated on Mathieu once, it meant nothing. The film, though, is more than about a break-up, but about the gargantuan impact that particular people can have on your emotional and mental state, and the fine line that separates genuine happiness and utter despair.

My favorite shot in this film is, for some reason, the shot of the goth at the Le Aviateurs bar, with the light on the left side of her face coming in and out, in the latter third of the film. I found myself looking forward to this shot throughout most of the running time. Close seconds are the moments when El is following the, potentially fake, Sylvia, and a streetcar dives between them, and the sound momentarily swells and throbs of machinery and motion, and then back to reality, as well as the moments of, potentially fake, Sylvia’s reflection on the windows of passing streetcars. Very nice, but I preferred when it was subtle. We see her reflection at few too many times and a bit too clearly after a while. Like in a Haneke film, particularly the ending of Cache, I like the moments in this film where the meat of a shot is so subtle that when you notice it, who get the sense that you could be the only person who noticed it. Film is still lovely, though, and now I can’t wait to dive into my Jose Luis Guerín box set in the coming week.

I see on Guerín’s imdb page that he has a small number of films under his belt since his first film, a drama he made when he was 22 called Los Motivos de Berta. A couple are documentaries, and a couple are fiction. All of them, though, are rarely seen and largely unknown even in Spain. The Harvard Film Archive in Cambridge, MA just had a retrospective on all of his films a couple of weeks ago, but I don’t live in Boston anymore, so I didn’t go. Guerín is also an installation artist; much like Apichatpong Weerasethakul, he blurs his filmmaking practices with his art, creating pieces that build on the ideas in his films. While I’m unsure of which came first, his filmmaking or his installation work, both Guerín and Weerasethakul advantageously crossover between art and film, while Miranda July uses the medium as an advertisement for her work to the ‘indie’ community (I do like Me and You and Everyone We Know, though, despite its commercial indie presentation). While I think that ‘art cinema’ has become just as much a negative term this century as a positive one as a genre, it is refreshing when filmmakers show that they have genuine artist sensibilities. I think that a filmmaker that is interested in how his films function as an exploration of ideas should also be working in more ‘art’ media like sculpture, installations, and video projects; it’s narrow and pompous to think that celluloid is the only medium appropriate for telling stories. Most of the best visual ideas that I have seen so far this year have not been in cinemas or on DVD, but in art museums, and most of my favorite films were made while being simultaneously explored and developed in other media.

That said, In the City of Sylvia advances the practice of filmmaking like few films this decade have. The task of presenting a film that contains something that a viewer has never seen the likes of is difficult enough, but to translate an idea so simple, and seemingly cliche, into something so fresh, blew my mind. The film follows one character nicknamed El, and contains almost no dialogue except for one key scene. I watched the film without subtitles up until this scene and easily understood everything that was going on; it’s pretty much pure cinema. Shots of flowing hair could have gone on for reels for all I cared. Perfectly frames shots of the characters on a streetcar made it seem as if they were gliding through the city. When El is first scouting at the cafe, layers of women fill the frame at different depths, communicating with people off camera, but collaged so that the goal is to understand who it is that El is looking at. The film I thought of most often while watching this was Cache. Shots are generally low and dense with information. At times I couldn’t tell if I was watching what El is seeing or if there was another character that I never saw that was watching the events, too. The film deals with El stalking Elle, and I was always paranoid that some other force was present, but invisible; another viewer; perhaps the being that tagged ‘Laure, Je T’aime’ all over the city. The graffiti turned the city into a hall of mirrors; when I saw one tag, I could tell that I had seen that tag before, but couldn’t remember which specific one I was seeing. Later, when there are flashes of reflections of people who aren’t there, and dialogue is ominously repeated, I was dazzled and felt unbalanced. Some of the awkward supporting characters and shots reminded me of Jacques Tati, another master of making films about composition and repetition.

This is my favorite film by Michael Haneke, though I still haven’t seen anything from before Benny’s Video, including the supposedly similar and arguably better 71 Fragments. Code Unknown is just as rife with didacticism as any of his other work, but it is less offensive and belittling of me as a viewer than anything else I’ve seen by him, especially Benny’s Video or either version of Funny Games. I think this is true because the main element of the film that I focus on is its formal arrangement of the plot rather than the filmmaker showing me how cruel the middle and upper classes are to each other or how much of a failure communication has proven to be. While these are interesting and important topics, Haneke tends to talk down to anyone who happens to view his films. The amazing thing for me in Code Unknown is that there is a constant tension involved with whether I feel like I’m being manipulated to feel guilty, or if I actually feel guilty about what I’m seeing and my reaction to it, or if I can feel justified with who I am naturally sympathizing with.

Like in the brilliant subway scene near the end of the film, as I try to decide if I am a prick for sympathizing with Binoche’s Anne. She is being harrassed on a train by a jerk, simple enough. Oh, but he’s an Arab, would she ignore his questions if he were white and well-dressed? But would someone who is white and well-dressed speak to a stranger in this tone? Would I take her reaction to be more rude than defensive if he was white and well-dressed? Probably not. But I considered these things. Maybe because I knew I was watching a Michael Haneke film and that I know that that is what he wants me to consider. But the film is obviously about class struggles and struggles with language and prejudices, so it’s all in line with the film’s logic.

But, as the title suggests, the film is a code, a puzzle, presented out of order and supposedly orderable. It handles this form much better than Arriaga ever has or, probably, will, because the shuffled plot structure is truly baffling here. Where 21 Grams and the copycat Babel (has there been a more annoying plagiary in filmmaking this decade than this trite re-imagining of Code Unknown?) take simple and cliche narratives, slice them up and rearrange it all to make the viewer have to ‘think,’ Haneke made a puzzle where no matter what order one put the pieces in, at least one piece wouldn’t make sense, while at the same time, every possible ordering of it would have the illusion that it makes complete sense. Which is a pretty apt metaphor for the structure of civilization.

100 of the forum members at theauteurs.com recently combined top 10 films of all time lists to make a ‘definitive’ Top 10 best films of all time list, inspired by Sight & Sound’s decade Top 10s. I participated in this list, so I thought I should post the final results here, in the lists section. A pretty boring list, but two of my choices made the cut:

Well, my first encounter with Chris Marker, the voiceover wunderkind that I’ve always heard so much about and was so excited to dive into, has happened. Now, I’m skeptical enough when it comes to lessons-of-the-world-told-in-pictures films like Baraka and Koyaanisqatsi. The practice of setting stock footage and photos to music or voice over rarely eclipses IMAX movie-of-the-week superficiality and didacticism, but at least it always looks nice and is hardly boring. Chris Marker has finally entered my life to let me know that yes, it is possible to make one of these films and have it be mindnumbingly tedious and boring. The film crawled along for me, with no sense of development and no chronology of ideas. I got excited at one point when I got the idea to check my DVD player’s display clock so that I could see how much longer was left, but I was deflated to find that that first hour and a half that I thought I’d already sat through was only the first thirty-three minutes.

I can’t say that I have much to write here because it all went in one ear/eye and out the other. I do remember some Icelandic girls walking in a rural area, and some cats, the fake kind shown on the left side of the poster. I remember that a woman was speaking throughout the film and I found her to be pretentious. My first encounter with My Dinner with Andre when I was in high school came to mind, a similar experience for me. Even a five-minute cameo by Vertigo in the film’s latter half couldn’t hold my attention. I thought ‘ooh, Vertigo’ but it went nowhere and I didn’t know why they were talking about the things they were talking about. I’m just not at Marker’s level, I guess. I’ll give it another shot in 5 years.