Cinema Talk

No question, this is Maurice Pialat’s most ambitious film: a two and a half-hour account of Vincent Van Gogh’s last days alive. It doesn’t even sound like the most “Pialat-ian” of set-ups, but somehow, it comes out being a film that cannot be mistaken for someone else’s work. There’s the father-daughter complex, the abrupt emotional meltdowns, and that all too important sense of intimacy that only Pialat can create. If there’s anything specifically wrong about this film, it’s that it does go on a bit too long. The epic scope itself is admirable, but there’s a bit too much stereotypical French cinema small-talk which could have clearly been cut out completely.

The first hour is definitely the most gentle and reserved half of the film. There’s seemingly a lot less dialogue as well, which certainly bodes well for Pialat’s type of cinema. More or less, he seems to be going through some of the Bressonian motions that he used so well in L’Enfance Nue. I guess it is predictable then, that by the film’s halfway point it begins to “pick things up.” The transition itself is a bit jarring as the initial laid back, almost Rivette-esque tone clashes a bit awkwardly with Pialat’s perchance for violent outburst, which kind of lapse into self-parody here.

There are some positives to this, though, as Pialat indulges in some completely amazing moments of kinetic spontaneity towards the very end. The most obvious example being the party in the whorehouse where almost all of the film’s best moments are contained within. Pretty much anything that follows this section is a bit of a disappointment. Sure, it does have every right to be melancholy since it is building up to the death of the main character, but technically, Pialat also tones things down. At the same time, he seems to be trying to make up for lost time, which is quite odd since the film is 150-some minutes long. In the last twenty minutes or so, the film is elliptically fragmented. Some scenes go on for 15 seconds before Pialat jumps to something entirely different. I’ve always admired Pialat’s editing style, but it doesn’t really go well with the very straight-forward pacing present in the rest of the film.

I should take a step back and say that this truly is a wonderful film. Most of my compliants come from expecting only the very best from Pialat. This would unquestionably be the defining piece in the career of almost any other director, but for Pialat, it’s just an odd (but of course, well made) venture into the world of period pieces. It seems that Pialat’s interest was not so much in Vincent van Gogh’s life as it was in the visual potential of impressonistic landscapes. That’s perfectly fine, as the film is clearly beautiful to look out, but in terms of “depth” and whatnot, it falls a bit short of Pialat’s best work.

With all the exciting buzz surrounding Nagisa Oshima’s retrospective in New York, I decided to re-introduce myself to a man who I once considered my favorite director. It’s been a little less than a year since I saw Death By Hanging and The Man Who Left His Will on Film, the two least enjoyable Oshima films I’ve encountered. Watching these two in such quick succession turned me off for awhile, but watching this, I’m beginning to remember just what I liked about Oshima in the first place. This isn’t an emotionally overwhelming masterpiece or anything, but just a really good movie.

The film starts out on a perhaps all too J-New Wave sort of setup: a violent and impulsive man, Wakizaka, falls for Shoko, a young and naive girl. In an act of love, he kills a man that violated Shoko when she was eight years old. A man visits Wakizaka a few days after and tells him that he witnessed the murder. This mysterious man is about to spend five years in prison and asks Wakizaka to watch over a large amount of cash that he embezzled. He accepts, but a year before the man’s release Wakizaka becomes terribly depressed and decides to spend it all within year and kill himself afterward.

That sense of tragic romance that is so prominent in a lot of films in the Japanese New Wave is here too, and it is somewhat of a negative characteristic in my opinion. All the men seem to be proned to violent reactions and everyone seems to be seriously considering suicide. Combine that with a man essentially looking for a reason to justify his existence and you probably won’t get a particularly inspiring movie. Oshima works well within this region, though, with a rigorous style that perfectly compliments the coldness that Wakizaka feels. This came a couple years before both Boy and The Ceremony, the two more well-known examples of Oshima’s “cold and distant” cinematic form but it is just as technically refined.

If there’s anything really negative I can take away from the experience of this film, it’s that my original impression of Oshima that was created from Cruel Story of Youth and The Sun’s Burial has been completely destroyed. While those are probably the least “mature” films I’ve seen from him, they are also the most accessible and most immediately enjoyable. It’s not like these later, less energetic films are deep, subtle, profound character studies, either. It seems with time that Oshima’s style got a lot more heavy, which makes some of his work from this period seem a little too self-conciously serious.

This film is a sprawling, multi-character, senseless piece of cinematic beauty, or in other words, a typical Rivette movie. There’s so much stuff going on here, yet so little of it makes sense. Not a problem with me, as I’ve come to expect this sense of mystery from Rivette. There is one particularly unique (in comparison to the rest of Rivette’s work, that is) element here and that is the 1950s Hollywood musical sensibility that elegantly drifts in and out of the three main stories. It’s jarring, no doubt, but it’s something to separate the film from Rivette’s other efforts.

There are three stories here, and each follows a woman that is either trying to separate from her past and come in touch with it. Two of the women, Ninon and Louise, cross paths on occasion but it never amounts to anything substantial. The stories all share supporting characters, but not in a “converging lives” structure that has dominated Hollywood in recent years. Somehow, it’s almost as though Rivette is deconstructing the narrative structure while simultaneously anticipating it. I realize how laughably pretentious this all sounds, but its not as though Rivette does this in a cerebral manner. After all, musicals are anything but intellectual.

While Godard does (and has done) “deconstructions” his approach is the polar opposite. Godard, in his infinite wisdom, poses questions in the most academic of ways. Rivette, though, almost makes his questions fun. If Godard’s essays are advanced learning than Rivette’s are introductions for toddlers. That sounds a bit like an insult, but I guess it is just another way of pointing out Rivette’s playfulness, which is very prominent here. In this film in particular, it’s as though Rivette has taken the advice from a screenwriting teacher and has performed all the technical things, such as having a structure. But, he has also cynically neglected what screenwriting lessons imply. Saying Rivette’s films are plotless isn’t entirely true, but they aren’t carried, driven, or even built around a story.

So instead, we have many sequences here of characters carrying out seemingly irrelevant tasks and displaying gestures devoid of drama. I guess plenty of other “minimalists” do this, but no one does it like Rivette. This isn’t even implying that he is the best, though he may very well be, but he is most unique in doing so. For example, no one makes sequences of characters walking as exciting as Rivette does. In my mind, it is our human nature to constantly assess meaningless gestures as being something deeper. I’m not entirely sure why that makes Rivette’s unique form of cinema such a joy to watch, but it still is.

This desire to constantly “understand” the meaningless or simple plays a large part in this film in particular, as many of the characters deal with the same exact problem. In Le Pont du Nord, for example, there are characters trying to make sense of a crudely drawn map but it is a bit different in this film. The issues seem a bit more personal and even more complex. Take Ida, for example, who is haunted by a song that she has known since her childhood but she cannot find any information about it. The thing is, the song’s singer, Sarah, may or may not be Ida’s mother. Melodramatic on paper (there’s even a scene where Ida suggests she heard the song in the womb) but it nothing becomes of it. The ending, which is one of most purely Rivette-ian moments of his entire career, shows Ida holding a conversation with Sarah, but nothing happens, and the film ends on Ida walking into the streets.

I personally haven’t had the time to put the pieces together, but I honestly don’t want to, in this case. The joy of Rivette’s film, no matter which film it is, comes from what we don’t know. Characters interact, and they seem to have a history, but we are never told to what extent these people know each other. As a result, character psychology comes from one’s own subconscious, developed not only from characters in other Rivette films, but characters from our own life. For as gimmicky as this film seems, it is one of the most purely self-reflexive things I’ve ever seen, which is a great accomplishment since it probably wasn’t Rivette’s intention to begin with.

There are a lot of admirable missteps here and overall, the film is far from Renoir’s best, but it is still pretty good. The nice, early technicolor cinematography definitely goes a long way to making the film as enjoyable as it is, though I have to admit that it tends to lapse into a level of garishness. The story is simple and straight-forward enough, but most of the characters end up being not only unlikable, but also pretty irritating. The ever-looming voiceover is anything but flattering and tends to interrupt potentially great sequences. To round things out, there is some terribly obvious and embarrassing symbolism. In spite of all of this, the film, as a whole, does indeed work.

A large part of this is due to the aforementioned technicolor visuals, which are brilliant at times, and dreadfully lush at times. I suppose the latter isn’t the result of anything Renoir or his crew could have done, but rather an inherent trade-off that comes with early technicolor film stock. The good does outweigh the bad and it would be pretty crazy to say that the film would be better off in black-and-white, but still, some of the high-contrast, ultra-bright shots tend to cloud the overall visual brilliance that is present here.

The story is on a similar wavelength, occasionally coming off as a very tender and perceptive observation of life in India, while at other times being a crude melodramatic mess. The voiceover, which is still definitely annoying, does quickly “set things up” which does make it easier to concentrate more on the characters’ feelings as well as Renoir’s aesthetic. I guess that compliments my overall feelings of the film: some elements are irksome, but they sometimes create some of the most wonderful moments. Indeed, the annoying voiceover is more exposition than it is poetic, but it does reach a Chris Marker level of brilliance a few times. There aren’t enough for the voiceover to justify itself, unfortunately.

The casting is another example of the film’s two-sidedness. I admire Renoir’s decision to include non-actors and actors alike, but they simply don’t work all that well together in this case. Thomas E. Breen, a non-professional and definitely the most natural performer in the film, is almost like a Bresson-ian model surrounded by a trope of Shakespeare-ian trained actors. Needless to say, when he’s together with most of the cast, it is a bit awkward. His sequences with Radha are the best acted sequences in the whole movie, and are so by a significantly large margin. I might even go as far as to say that the relationship between Melanie and Captain John saves the film from falling into mediocrity all-together.

I guess this does paint the picture of a film that is only a mild success, but it is actually a great accomplishment. At this point in his career, Renoir could be considered an “American director” (not literally, mind you) and the fact that he was able to shot a movie completely on location in India is pretty remarkable. On a historical level, the film apparently helped paved the way for Satyajit Ray, who worked as an assitant, as well as his cinematographer Subrata Mitra so it definitely can be appreciated for that. While it comes up short of its potential, it does have some of the most fascinating and beautiful moments in Renoir’s entire career.

Every now and then I see a film that I cannot even begin to wrap my head around. This is such a film. Now, obviously, Gus Van Sant has been working towards something like this with his “death” trilogy, but those films, as good as they are, are clearly Tarr tributes/homages. This, on the other hand, is something completely new, not only for Van Sant, but for cinema in general. Of course there are many cinematic reference points (which I’ll bring up later in this review) but overall, this is one of the most original and exciting movies I’ve seen in a long time. It’s too early to tell, but it is quite possible that this will become the defining movie for the next generation of cinema.

Okay, so all of this sounds a bit preposterous, but that seems accurate, the film is sort of preposterous in its own way. The story line, which isn’t all that essential, elliptically illustrates a small couple of months in the life of the 16 year old Alex. The superficial plot point is provided when he accidentally kills a security guard, something he chooses to hide from the rest of the world. Of course, the guilt begins to eat away at him. This sounds a bit unremarkable, but the outline of the film’s story makes up very little of its substance.

So far, all I’ve established is that this is indeed a “minimalistic” movie and indeed it is, but not simply that. Van Sant has taken ques from Tarr and even Tsai for sure, but he also eloquently (not to mention brilliantly) mixes this aesthetic with grainy 8mm footage (a nod to his friend Korine?) and French ambient music. Perhaps this all sounds like some sort of “art film” parody on paper, but on celluloid, it’s nothing short of amazing. I would compliment Van Sant on his ability to capture a certain atmosphere, but that sounds like an understatement. It helps a good deal that I’m still in high school, but aside from certain technicalities, this mostly rings true in a way very few coming-of-age films do, let alone most high school movies.

There’s not too many art film-fueled high schoolers out there (trust me) but I suppose being one certainly helps in this instance. I’d imagine that the entire film would feel extremely uncomfortable and awkward for anyone outside of the generational gap, or at least to those not interested in this generation. At first, I was even a little turned off. There’s quite a lot of underacting here for starters and even lead Gabe Nevins doesn’t come out untouched. The awkward feeling, though, is 100% reflective of the content in a way that most mumblecore films only hope to be. In Mutual Appreciation, which is certainly a fine film, there is a sense of consciousness in the characters’ interactions, there is anything but here. Young adults might be a little bit more forgiving about conversations with the shy and alienated, but teenagers aren’t. The thing is, it’s not exactly the character who are feeling uncomfortable with one and other, but instead, their whole generation alienating everyone else.

Maybe it would be good to come back down to Van Sant’s atmosphere rather than continue on with the sociological issues presented by the current generation of teenagers, but the latter is what I want to do while watching this. Again, it’s not like the technical choices are completely new, but they are blended together to max something that feels so in-tone with present day. In other words, the best visual style to compliment the unaltered way in which Van Sant presents modern life. A perfect example of “unaltered” would be the previously mentioned “awkward” scenes. It’s presented as is with the usual poetic flair of Christopher Doyle and not one part of the film seems remotely exaggerated. Every single scene rings true – emotionally AND visually. The latter sounds odd, but there is something so beautiful about Doyle’s super-sensory-driven visuals when they are placed with Van Sant’s observational style. To make things simple, it feels accurate in a way that seems completely new.