Cinema Talk

More of the same from Garrel here, he isn’t going to convert any non-believers with this effort, but he is going to satisfy the taste buds of his fans. Personally, I have no problems whatsoever with his world consisting of attractive and depressed people falling love with other attractive and depressed people. Sure, it’s not ground breaking or even a slight alteration in the scope of his career, but it is pretty good for what it is. If there’s really anything I can out of this film that I wouldn’t from Garrel’s other recent efforts its that seemingly all “romantic” modern French directors are fascinated by super natural concepts.

The still slightly unrecognized Jean-Pierre Civeyrac is probably the best example of this phenomenon. In almost all of his most recent films, a character is haunted by a recently deceased character. Obviously, it doesn’t take a genius to realize that Through the Forest isn’t a film interested in scaring the audience or even surprising them. Instead, all these recent ghost love stories have just changed some specifics to the whole nostalgic romance tone of Wong Kar-Wai. I admire both Civeyrac and Garrel for attempting to produce more accurate depictions of ghosts, but maybe mainstream film has just diluted the power of such a concept. In that respect, I can’t help but laugh when a dead Laura Smet talks to Louis Garrel through a mirror.

Unlike Civeyrac’s ghost stories, Garrel introduces the ghost-to-be during her existence as a living human being, as opposed to a dead one. There’s merits in both narrative routes, but I personally align my tastes more towards Civeyrac’s as I think it is closer to the aforementioned tone of nostalgic romance. Garrel’s narrative plays out in a rather straight-forward way. Smet and Garrel fall in love, complications ensues, Smet dies, and Garrel tries to move on. He, as one might expect, fails and this provides much of the drive for the film’s final fourty minutes or so.

While I completely understand, and in some respects, agree with the criticism Garrel has recieved, I found the best sequences to be the closet to self-parody. The early sequences between Smet and Garrel aren’t all that different from any number of scenes Garrel has made in the past ten years, but the half-hearted attempt at trying something new may indicate that Garrel should stay in his comfort zone. Assuming he does, I’ll always be willing to eat it up.

Yoshida’s getting warmer with this one, but he still has yet to live up to Joen / The Affair. Some of his trademark themes are already well established in this, his first real “art” film, but they aren’t approached with the same confidence of his later films. On the other hand, some of the lame surrealistic touches, so prevalent in his later films, are toned down a bit here. From time to time, the film seems to have a very laid back approach, almost the antithesis of the precise, structured mentality of Yoshida’s most renowned efforts.

This was actually Yoshida’s second collaboration with his wife-to-be Mariko Okada, but their first film, Akitsu Springs is a much more “classier” one. Maybe some melodrama carried over into the next part of Yoshida’s career, but their first collaboration shares very little in common with the usually transgressive aesthetic of the Japanese New Wave. It is here that Yoshida first begins to show signs of what he’s known and loved for – formally driven, sensual, and bizarre depictions of some of the most dysfunctional relationships in all of cinema.

The story here, which is filled with some beautifully rendered ellipses, follows a young man about to enter a marriage. He begins to think back to his childhood and the incestuous experiences he shared with his mother, as well as other various sexual scenarios. Although there are very little dramatic “events” in the narrative itself, there is an overwhelming sense of heavy tension underscoring the chronologically scattered sequences. No doubt about it, the elliptical nature of the narrative definitely gives Yoshida’s world a much needed boost of energy. It’s not so much that his characters are quiet, but instead that I constantly get an overwhelmingly ponderous tone from their interactions.

I might be mistakened, but I’m pretty confident that Joen had at least a few ellipses here and there. I guess in my continuing search for a Yoshida film that lives up to it, I forgot to factor in this technique. In all of my recent Yoshida viewings, the story proceeds in a very straightforward and simple fashion. This is fine, I suppose, but it doesn’t exactly compliment Yoshida’s extremely formalistic style. Instead, it kind of clashes with it. That’s not the case here, however as the story consistently shifts between past and present and constantly builds a more complete picture of its central protagonists. In fact, I’d say the characters here are the most fleshed-out I’ve seen in any Yoshida film, which has to count for something. That said, Joen remains my favorite, but I’ve also been reassured of Yoshida’s talent.

A step up from Flame and Woman but I still have yet to be as impressed with a Yoshida film as I was with The Affair. I suppose I’ll always have a bias for that film as it served as an introduction into his cinematic world. Based on my last two Yoshida experiences, I’m beginning to think that he repeated himself a little bit too often. The narrative here comes close to lapsing into self-parody. A woman has an affair and a man tries to blackmail her? It’s so obviously a “Yoshida story” that it feels a little bit forced. Thankfully, Yoshida’s wonderful visuals and a great performance by Mariko Okada save the film was being tainted by some of its less savory elements.

Another problem I’m developing with Yoshida is his perchance for overt “weirdness” which comes on far too strong in this film. I admit, the narrative isn’t all that captivating to me in the first place (if only because I feel like I’ve seen it before) but the overuse of “surreal” music does nothing to help the film’s case. All of Yoshida’s films would have benefited greatly from a much less expressive soundtrack. The tone here is very Lynch-ian, but it’s almost entirely because of the music. Had Yoshida just used natural sounds, this would be a deadpan masterpiece. It’s bad enough that the atmosphere is forced down the audience throat, but its worse because it is developed so half-heartedly.

Having said all that, this is still pretty fantastic, if only for Yoshida’s pitch-perfect balance between extended hand held tracking shots and more precise shots along the lines of Antonioni. The only non-Yoshida film I can think of that achieves a similar balance is 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days of all things. It should say a lot that it took more than 40 years for people to catch up with Yoshida. I may never develop an interest in his repetitive narratives, but the way in which they are executed, is absolutely brilliant.

Yoshida, thankfully, has more than just formal brilliance to fall back. He also has his wife, Mariko Okada, one of Japan’s greatest performers of all-time. She’s excellent here. Truth be told, she’s not doing much different from her other collaborations with her husband, but she manages to impressive me anyway. Combine her physical beauty with the poetry of Yoshida’s visuals and the result is something gorgeous, even if the context isn’t all that fascinating.

Unfortunately, at least so for my own sake, I don’t like Luis Buñuel quite as much as I did about two years ago. While I can still appreciate his absurd humor from time to time, I’m nowhere near as crazy about it as I once was, which is a little bit upsetting. I really wish I could have somehow sent the recent Criterion disc through a time machine to myself in 2007 as I’m sure I would have loved it. I can’t, though, but I still enjoyed this a great deal and it definitely ranks up there as one of Buñuel’s funniest and most immediately accessible efforts.

As much as I am reminded of what I love about Buñuel, I’m also reminded of the some of his elements that I never really liked in the first place. To begin, I don’t think any single film of his sticks out as being particularly nice on a visual level, and this one is no different. Some shots are nice, but nothing too special. Then again, I don’t think I’d ever describe Buñuel as a visual filmmaker. I suppose all filmmakers are inherently visually-driven, no matter how boring and bland their films look, but Buñuel’s strengths, to me, always laid in his careful depictions of the truly bizarre. In that case, there’s very few people better.

Back to problems, though: I get the feeling this Buñuel intended this to be a very (explict) metaphor for social classes in Mexico. The upper class are all going to go insane if those below them (in this case, the residential servants) disappear. With that out of the way, the story here really is fantastic. It’s pretty much Abigail’s Party raised up ten levels to be better suited into a very Buñuel-ian universe. The extremely awkward tension in Leigh’s film is replaced by the deadpan absurdity that is, without a doubt, one of my favorite elements of Buñuel’s cinema. Certain sequences involving sheep and bears wouldn’t be nearly as funny had they not been attacked with the surrealistic vision of say, David Lynch.

In fact, it took only one viewing of this film to realize that the connections between Lynch and Buñuel are actually few and far between. Perhaps the largest link is that they both work with bizarre ideas, but now, it seems to me like the way these approach their content is completely different. With Lynch I get a very self-aware sense of weirdness, almost akin to a giant finger pointing at grotestque imagery and shouting “look how weird and crazy and unconventional this is!” Buñuel, on the other hand, does the polar opposite. He observes, from an emotional distance, the line between real life and his world, and the absurdity that comes when such a line appears extremely funny. In other words, he’s a realist’s idea of surrealism and I like that a lot.

Now this, on the other hand, is a full out masterpiece. I’ll admit immediately that there are a few sequences that are more than a little bit ridiculous (the ending in particular) but for the most part, it’s an extremely moving tragic would-be romance, the kind that became almost a genre in early American cinema. Thankfully, this is closer to being a Murnau film along the lines of Sunrise or Tabu than to Griffith’s poetic yet oh-so-dated True Heart Susie. Outside of our protagonists, the characters are drawn rather crudely and one-dimensionally, but such elements should go with out saying for a film like this.

It’s the sort of thing that really shouldn’t have an impact on my overall impression of a film, but man, Janet Gaynor is extremely cute here. She’s charming enough to make you break down and fall on the floor, which is exactly what Charles Farrell does. Gaynor plays Mary Tucker, a poor farm girl. She appears to be the oldest child in her family, only her strict mother acts as her superior. Farrell plays Timothy Osborne, who has an encounter with Mary the day before war is declared. He, like his friends, enlists almost instantly. Unfortunately, he returns home in a wheelchair, incapable of using his legs. He begins to pursue a relationship with Mary, but there’s something physically and emotionally in the way.

The two maintain a friendship, but both are conscious of the fact that something romantic can exist between them. One night, Mary meets Sgt. Martin Wreen at a local dance. He’s the man indirectly responsible for Tim’s injury, and the stud of the town. He immediately takes a liking to Mary, who is a little bit indifferent. He takes her home and makes a convincingly charming case to her mother, who wants the two to get married as soon as possible.

Even though a lot (if not all) of the film was made in a studio, it does have a very laidback and natural small town feel to it, not unlike the tone of John Ford’s Judge Priest. Borzage manages to pull more than a few really impressive sequences. The look isn’t consistently expressionistic, but the frequency of gorgeous shots is greater than it is in Lazybones. I can’t quite but my finger on why this is true, but the visual tone perfectly compliments the tragedy of the story, as well as Janet Gaynor’s own physical beauty. Watching the whole thing unfold is rather remarkable, if occassionaly silly. The ending is pretty, well, goofy, but I can’t criticize the relentless romanticism of this picture. It’s not always realistic, but it always manages to illustrate the intimacy of the events.