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.

The cumulative effect of this movie very much exceeded my expectations after the first 15 minutes. I was pretty worried during the film’s opening that I was in for 100 minutes of teenage angst, artfully filtered and tritely narrated. Fortunately, Alexis Dos Santos appears to be a gifted director, and he creates some very real and sympathetic subjects with character types that are difficult to portray in any kind of fresh way: the ambiguously gay virgin, his seemingly white-trash mother, the dorky girl friend, the absent neglectful father, the straight(er) guy friend, snotty sibling, etc. I didn’t have much of a reason to be optimistic during Lucas’ prologue, where he asks deep questions like “If my parents made love a month before I was conceived, would it be me being born? or another boy?” and “do girls like sucking dick?” He wants to get laid so that he will “stop waking up all sticky.” I thought I was watching a Larry Clark film for a moment, or maybe a Gummo outtake. I’m not sure if Dos Santos actually just made a good film with a weak opening, or if he intentionally structured this like a typical coming-of-age bore in order to make the rest seem so transcendent of the genre. Or, he is critiquing the genre.

Well, perhaps the film didn’t immediately get better after the opening. I didn’t actually appreciate any of the characters until about halfway through. I initially thought the film was focusing on Lucas’ repressed homosexuality, and that Dos Santos was using his friends Nacho and Andrea as the vehicles to express the realization. But, like Lucas’ delusions of successful songwriting and rock-n-rolling, and his parents’ delusions of being able to fix a crumbling family, Lucas just seems like he’s doing what he’s suppose to do, wondering things that he’s supposed to wonder at his age. His experimentation with Nacho is less an example of homosexuality than an exploration that every straight man wants, but represses. Lucas is so likable because he is ballsy and goes after what he wants. I like Dos Santos, too, for ballsiness. Argentinean cinema is getting progressively more exciting with every new filmmaker that I am acquainted with from the country. Considering their Malbec wine, Argentina is beginning to rival Thailand as my number one fantasy destination to have a ‘dinner and a movie’ date.

When I started this project of immediately writing my first reactions to every film that I watch, it was purely for personal use. I wanted to have some kind of a log for the films I was seeing, and I wanted to log these films in a less lazy way than making a list of titles. I love making lists. I have several lists that I’m building right now, including a monster ‘decade’ post that I hope will be ready by Dec. 31. While I keep all of these posts in a text document on my hard drive, it also makes sense to me to post them online on this blog so that I can access my thoughts from anywhere, even if I’m not at my computer; also so that some of my friends can read what I think about the films I am seeing, what I recommend, etc. I’m not a film journalist, and I typically avoid being too analytical about films I see. I’m not very good at deciphering what a filmmaker was going for with each film, nor how successful a film is in the context of film history; I often zone out for large chunks of a film, thus I think it’s pretty common for me to dislike films that are actually quite good. The only research I tend to do between watching a film and collecting my thoughts on this blog involves looking at particular names of cast members on imdb or wikipedia, and reading a few reviews of the films from NY Times, Slant, and Armond. Reading these helps me to remember certain things that I was thinking during the film, so that I can make these entries as thorough as possible. As I said, I write these for personal use, but I’ve noticed that a handful of people that I do not know are reading; the internet can bring some unexpected surprises. So I’ve started putting more ‘effort’ into these things. I panic when I notice I’ve published something with grammar and spelling mistakes, and I’m wary of the pedestrian observations that a rough reading of a film can be composed of.

Anyway, this is the 100th review that I’ve posted on this blog, so I thought I’d offer a belated Mission Statement of sorts to preface my actual thoughts on Céline and Julie Go Boating, Rivette’s ridiculous masterpiece of a film. I had a ticket to see this at the Cinematheque Ontario last December, in a 35mm print, but I missed it because I made plans to visit some friends in Boston. I knew that this was considered one of the great neglected films of the DVD world, so it killed me to miss it. I picked up the BFI disc, a nice set but it has a generally fuzzy image quality. I’m no aficionado of the French New Wave, and this was the first Rivette film that I have seen (I have Va Savoir and Don’t Touch the Axe now, though, and I hope to watch a bootleg of the 13-hour Out 1 by the end of the summer).

The main film that I was thinking of while watching this was INLAND EMPIRE. It’s hard to deny the similarities: women mirroring women, women watching themselves diving into unknown worlds of melodramatic, dangerous fiction as if they are watching a film, the three+ hour length, etc. A big difference, though, is that this film’s transformation came out of nowhere. In Lynch’s film, one can sense from the brooding and bizarre opening 5 minutes that the film will not succumb to any sort of logic. The surprising thing is that it takes almost an entire hour before Laura Dern chases the rabbit into its hole and sends the plot into oblivion. Rivette takes care of that chase right at the outset of Céline and Julie. Julie follows Céline the moment she sees her pass in a park, dropping her belongings along her way. Much like the pursuit at the heart of In the City of Sylvia, an actual confrontation seems to be avoided for the simple fact that it would end the enthralling chase. While Julie initially calls out to get Céline’s attention, she quickly shifts from being a good samaritan into an unsubtle stalker. But, as is the case for much of Céline and Julie’s relationship, their roles flip flop, and Céline is soon stalking Julie in the library.

The film continues, looking at the girls’ co-interests in magic and taunting men, introducing the possibilty of a lesbian affair between the two, while the real meat of the film is only lurking in its second half. What I thought was going to be a fun, simple film about the relationship between these girls turned into a complex and exhausting meta-movie. The film complicates itself repeatedly, but it is refreshing, because Rivette is clearly having such a good time with it. While Lynch shows the filmmaking process as an ominous mystery, like playing a score of Penderecki as characters burn holes in silk fabric with cigarettes to look through to the ‘fictional’ version of their lives, Rivette has his characters suck on colorful candy that looks like Jolly Ranchers, cutting back and forth between a tacky soap opera/whodunnit and shots of Céline and Julie sitting attentively, laughing hysterically at what they are seeing.

The pacing of the film is all over the place, just as the film bounces around from one genre to the next. The repetition of the middle third of the film does become hazy, but I was never bored or irritated. The last thirty minutes of the film, though, in which Céline and Julie manage to enter the mansion together, is an explosion of pure entertainment. It is the definition of a climax in a film, putting everything from the film’s first two and a half hours to use. Watching the girls interact, physically and fully aware, with the world that they have been itching to play with throughout the entire film, is exhilarating and hilarious. The mirror scene, in particular, was its own mini masterpiece, a perfect summary of their relationship. But it isn’t all just fun a games; there are some genuinely unsettling things happening in this mansion. The decor, lighting, and camera placement reminded me of the iciness of The Shining, and the characters of the melodrama feel like ghosts who are stuck in a Groundhog Day-like limbo in which they must recreate the same story every day for eternity. Are there people in my DVDs, reenacting the movies over and over again, waiting for me to come in and join/rescue them? This film makes me wonder…

This film is part of a ‘Human Rights Watch’ festival that is currently taking place at the Cinematheque Ontario. The film follows a cluster of Bosnian women and girls who try to continue making a living after the men in their lives have been taken by war. The women, who already have a shaky footing in life, are disturbed by two men who show up trying to get their signatures in order to acquire their land. As their success in this endeavor becomes evident, tensions build in the women and in the plot. My main problem with the film is that the women had very little redeeming value; I think that the absence of men had somehow put all of them on permanent PMS overdrive, and I couldn’t stand any of them. While this is probably the point, it made for an irritating two hours. While a similar plot synopsis can be drawn from Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, the difference is that Almodóvar sees the humor of the situation and lacks pretension. The film only manages to become a bit more interesting by including a few elements of magical realism.

I’ve noticed recently that magic and spiritual realism have been making a huge comeback in the art and film communities so far this century. On a recent trip to New York, almost every gallery and museum that I went into had some sort of exhibition up that showed work by artists who are studying miracles, ghosts, Zen meditation and hypnosis, religious parades, divine lights, etc. Films by Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Semih Kaplanolgu take notice of ethereal and folkish occurrences in the quaint lives of their protagonists, and acknowledge the religious experience of witnessing an ominous light or vacuum, some natural, some man made. My main annoyance with Snow, is that it has the pieces to have been an important human rights or magical realism entry, but is significant to either because it handles these elements absurdly and makes it all look silly. A boy who goes through a brief stint of aging rapidly when he has a traumatic experience made me laugh and then cringe, as the boy is suddenly shown with much longer hair (I think pretty obviously a wig) at one point. Several people in my theatre giggled, but at least I finally understood why Begic felt the need to insert abrupt chapter breaks that told me what day it was, as it initially seemed as if either a large chunk of time had unexpectedly passed, or the boy was playing a silly game on everyone. Not to mention the snow in the last scene of 1997, a Magnolia or Haggis-Crash-esque divine sign of exhaustion and fateful intervention.