"I am a man. I am the angel of the night. I know the script of life." Synopsis: Life as lived by Silvio Berlusconi and the people who wish to gain entrance to his inner circle. UK Teaser. US Trailer. dir. Paolo Sorrentino. 158m (int'l cut)/204m (Ital. cut). 2.39:1. There are multiple ways of saying the same thing, as you know. One is to simply say what you mean. Another is to say the opposite, and then take it to an extreme, such that your viewer has no choice but to agree with your intended point. That’s satire in a nutshell, and the level of satire on display in Paolo Sorrentino’s latest, Loro, borders on the sickening. But it’s all the more effective for doing so. The “Trump of Italy,” for those who don’t know Silvio Berlusconi, was the most powerful man in Italian politics and culture for a period of decades, legendary for his wild parties and laundry list of corruption, up to and including the list currently detailed on Wikipedia: abuse of office, defamation, extortion, child sexual abuse, perjury, mafia collusion, false accounting, embezzlement, money laundering, tax fraud, witness tampering, corruption and bribery of police officers, judges and politicians. Sorrentino is in a unique position. What more is there to say about Berlusconi, after the heavily documented travails above? No, the systematic breakdown of wrongs does not interest him; others have done that well. Nor even does a humanizing approach, exploring what made Silvio become Silvio, a la liberal director Oliver Stone’s downright sympathetic take on Richard Nixon. No, Sorrentino’s interest is in us, and how we look at such self-serving and rampant liberties– with repulsion, and yes, also with attraction. His concern is with the act of looking. The gaze. We are drawn in by our repulsion. We love being repulsed, because we can then judge, as we live out our id’s worst impulses, usually at the expense of others in life, and of ourselves on screen. How Sorrentino achieves this is quite a different approach then any number of other rise-and-fall narratives. The first half of the film doesn’t even feature Berlusconi, but rather the people who want to be Berlusconi, who want to get close to him. That attitude is the subject of the film: the title translates to Them. It’s not about Berlusconi persay. It’s about the impulse to become one of them, the In Crowd, free from both guilt and rules at the expense of others. It’s among the more important films on these lists, because that is the focal point of the new apathetic nationalism sweeping the globe. It says what it needs to say by saying its opposite, guiding us through a seething, vacant cesspool of humanity such that by the time we get to that closing shot of the construction workers, we have a new basis for what we find repulsive and what we’re drawn to. We’ve been partied out, and nothing looks so good as the truthful exhaustion of a team of guys on a work break. There’s a corollary here to Scorsese’s Wolf of Wall Street, except that ended with a condemnation of the American public’s impulse toward greed; this one has a different focus, concluding with a redefining of what’s compelling. I read it as slightly more hopeful. Sorrentino expects the viewer to pay attention on multiple levels– the sensual, the moral, ethical, sociocultural and of course, the political. How does he manage to make those parties feel so unsettling? It’s all the more remarkable because he doesn’t detract from their sensual dynamism; he revels in it. I defy a viewer to name a film with a more formally sophisticated and visual aesthetic than what’s on display here. Look at those images in the trailer. As with The Great Beauty and Youth, Sorrentino continues his streak of unbridled visual feasts of color and shadow, expanding his flair for contrasting the old and the new, the sacred and the profane, light and dark. There isn’t a single frame that doesn’t glow with precision and radiant photographic excellence. The formal daring here, the oblique method of address to the viewer, and offer of periodic clarity amongst the endless sordidness make for a bleakly hopeful and entirely engaging experience. Like the Rob Reiner character in Wolf, Sorrentino tips the hat of his personal opinion only once: in the form of Alice Pagani’s Stella, a dancer who stands in for every silent but thoughtful figure on the periphery, but whose voice we get to hear. She has eyes for things beyond what Silvio considers the ultimate, and can perceive– easily– what he can’t begin to. Silvio’s insecurities keep his conversation with her on his mind for years, but even a decade later he has to defend himself to himself, instead of listening to the truth she’d once shared. But what else are we to expect? Who’d be able to hear a voice beside their own after a life lived like this, and for that long? Good thing we only need to watch this movie, rather than live it. A difficult work like this benefits from context from its maker. Far more relevant than anything I can contribute are these, a few words from Mr. Sorrentino:
On whether we should find Berlusconi sympathetic To the LA Times, actor Toni Servillo says: "No, I certainly don’t want people to feel sympathy for him. I would like audiences to observe this film with a critical slant to reflect about what happens when people who have nothing to do with politics get into politics. And that degenerates the nature of the political spectrum. It creates a system of stalemate. I would like people to be aware of the fact that there are very few scenes in the film that take place in the political chambers because you have people who trained and shaped their approach to life outside of the political arena. And when that happens, they end up protecting the interests of the few and not the interests of the people." Sorrentino adds: "No, I didn’t want to humanize Berlusconi. I concentrated on the man and not the politician. To latch onto what Toni was saying before, Berlusconi as a politician did not produce any extraordinary results. Berlusconi’s political life is known to everybody. What is more mysterious is the human aspect. And that is what I found more interesting for the film. I just wanted to tell his story the way I understood it, that at the bottom of his behavior there is a great deal of fear, fear of aging, a fear of getting old. And there’s a complex relationship that the ultra-rich have with themselves. They are frustrated by the fact that their wealth does not ensure them something more than what everybody else has." On female bodies Variety asks, "There are a lot of naked female bodies in the film, which of course reflects the bunga bunga period. But some Italian critics have said you harped on the titillating aspect a bit much, in a way that could be perceived as exploitation. What’s your response?" Sorrentino: "I don’t agree. It’s the representation of a certain specific period 10 years ago, a world that had a rather limited intellectual component and relied on bodies as a communication tool. That’s a fact that I didn’t make up. I just put it on screen." To GQ, on recreating the parties: "All I did was stick to what the press relayed. I didn't go beyond that because I would have been just making guesses which is not what I wanted to do. I really strictly followed what was all over any newspaper. In terms of the style and mise-en-scène, my focus was... There is a side of mankind that is deeply attracted by vulgar things. There is a certain sensuous nature to vulgarity. So this was the issue." On depiction vs endorsement Vulture asks, "Whenever someone makes a film about men who live extravagant lives of sin — we saw this with The Wolf of Wall Street not too long ago — detractors will accuse them of indulging in the same extravagance they’re condemning in the film. How do you respond to such charges?" Sorrentino: "This is an old controversy that has gone on forever, with regards to violent films. 'If you make a violent film, you must be glorifying violence,' and so on. Any person, regardless of how abject or deplorable they can be, is potentially worth being put on screen. Because putting something on the screen allows you to understand what can otherwise seem distant or incomprehensible. "The objective is not to glorify, at least not for me, nor is it to point a finger and decide which men are good and which men are bad. That’s the wrong approach for art in general, whether it’s a film or novel. This film gives us an opportunity to get an in-depth understanding of all sides of this man, and that’s why it had to be two and a half hours long. Reaching that understanding means exposing certain bothersome facts. If aspects of this film bother and audience, that is a crucial step on the way to understanding. "For example, this film is about a triumph of vulgarity. I don’t think it should be my job to say, 'Look how ugly vulgarity is, and how ugly these vulgar people are.' That would be an excessively Manichean way of looking at the world. This ambiguity can be unpleasant and uncomfortable, and doing it this way gets fewer positive responses from viewers, but it’s necessary to show the beauty of vulgarity. It is beautiful. Why else would it be so popular? I am more interested in interrogating what is so attractive about a life we can also find repulsive." On older male protagonists GQ asks, "Another common thread in a few of your last films is that the main characters are these aging men who they're struggling with their loss of relevance. What is it about that kind of psyche that you want to unpack?" Sorrentino: "I don't ask myself a lot of questions [about] the choices I make and the reasons behind them. But having said that, what you just stated is undoubtedly very true. I do like to talk about these characters who are caught at the moment of their decline and they tend to turn towards a melancholic attitude. They are afraid of death and they inevitably make wrong decisions and it's something that does happen when in aging they try to have one last stroke of vitality and this can become pathetic and ridiculous. "These kind of mood and feelings are very much in tune with how I feel and I like talking about them. It is true that I've focused on male characters and older male characters….I will no longer make movies about that kind of man. I did two on two politicians and then I did the pope series. So I believe that the chapter of my life about that kind of subject is over… Now I want to focus more on women and on young people. Maybe when I was young myself, I was interested in older people. Now that, unfortunately, I'm turning toward that other stage of life, well I'm going to flip my attitude and look back at you now." To Time Out: "For me, it was about capturing a time in life where you are attempting to grab back at youth, even if your body is going in the other direction." He adds to Variety: "[Berlusconi] always had this narrative about himself as someone driven by uncommon pride, by an iron will, by an indestructible determination. We’ve never understood whether behind this there were some pockets of pain, of failure, of melancholy." On two films vs one film Vulture asks, "Loro was released as two films for Italian markets. Could you talk us through the process of condensing them into one?" Sorrentino: "The first part of the film was where I did most of the cutting for the international version, because it mostly dealt with the courtiers surrounding Berlusconi. The story delves more into these ancillary characters, who are more recognizable to people reading the Italian news and keeping up with the country’s current events. The average foreigner probably isn’t aware of all this minutiae, so I cut that from Part One, and it didn’t compromise what I’m trying to say with this abbreviated version in the least." --- Nathan's Films of 2019 Index here.
0 Comments
1. Waves "Lord knows I've held onto way too much hate in my life." Synopsis: A brother, a sister, their parents and lovers, on a journey involving forgiveness, and the gradual processing that comes with taking time. Trailer 1. dir. Trey Edward Schults. 135m; 1.85:1, 2.39:1, and 1.33:1. A trailblazer in every regard. Schults’s experimentation with a bifurcated mirroring structure, emotionally motivated aspect ratio changes, and shifts in tempo pay off tremendously. The camera documents the human figure in ways I’ve never seen before. Trey and DP Drew Daniels take advantage of the smaller digital camera body to execute unique moves in tight spaces (the rotating shot in the car that opens the film, for instance). They shot the whole film at an unheard-of 3200 ISO, going for a more filmlike tone curve, retaining highlight detail and a quick shadow fall-off. The attention to color, fluid movement and saturation levels make this one a sensual experience unlike any other film. The blues and pinks, the intricate interweaving of songs with the Trent Reznor-Atticus Ross score, the stillness infusing the brilliant second half, the acute understanding of how grief changes our perception of time… this is a new master in the intoxicating first moments of hitting his stride. A masterpiece. 2. Honey Boy "You can walk on water until someone tells you that you don't know how to." Synopsis: About Shia LaBeouf's complex real-life childhood and relationship with his abusive father. LaBeouf plays his father in the film. Trailer 2. dir. Alma Har’el. 94m; 2.39:1. As a screenwriter, LaBeouf has the self-awareness that only comes from years of considered distance. The final line reframes our understanding of his abusive father with a humanity that brought me to tears. His friendship with the quiet neighbor would in any other picture be described as illicit or else eliminated entirely; here it is transgressive solely in its kindness, and redolent with the absurd specificity that comes only from real life events. The film is peppered with many such moments, and the long-running father-son conversations go places most dialogue scenes don’t allow themselves the length and depth to probe to. Ms. Har’el’s capable direction nimbly handles the subtleties with flair, color and resonant style, despite it being her first feature. An intensely cathartic experience. Note the propensity toward lens flares; she’s unafraid of backlighting. A convincing patina of grain lends a filmlike image, along with a pungent tone curve saturated with rich blues and oranges. Note her precision in ramping down from slow motion to regular speed while pulling up on lights during the pie-to-the-face shot: TV as comedy becomes cinema as tragic metaphor, all through the execution. There are so many levels of genius here, but none surpass the film's studied, delicate fragility, its sensitive knowing heart. Hopefully the above trailer expresses how special this one is, the sort of picture you walk out of different than you were before. Nathan's Films of 2019 Index here.
1. Dark Waters "I’m seeing documents I don’t understand." Synopsis: Corporate defense attorney Rob Bilott takes on an environmental lawsuit against a chemical company that exposes a lengthy history of pollution. dir. Todd Haynes. 126m; 2.39:1. This is the most important film on the lists. You have to watch it. Just do it. And then get rid of your non-stick pans. It’s a true story about an unlikely hero– a high-powered attorney who went from defending megacorporations to attacking them, and sticking with the fight for twenty-odd years because it was what he needed to do. Sometimes we are compelled toward goodness and right action, and the outcome is less important than the effort, and the effect of trying alone is worth it. There are resonances here with Bombshell and Hidden Life: historical figures who took a stand and didn’t expect to have much of an impact, if at all. And yet: goodness has a way of multiplying. I don’t think anyone was expecting the director of Far From Heaven to follow up Carol with this, but Haynes brings his customary thoughtful attention to the proceedings. Note the filmlike patina; Haynes and regular DP Ed Lachman go digital for the first time, likely to be able to more accurately approximate which film stocks would’ve been in use during which years of the 25-year span of the text. In terms of color choices, it’s very muted; says Lachman, "I was looking for a way to help feel the images becoming toxic and contaminated in our character’s lives, in our story as it is revealed.” Somewhat like The Irishman, the aesthetic of the camera– workmanlike, effective, lacking in flair– matches the protagonist’s dogged character, and conveys the determination of this ordinary man under extraordinary pressure. The 2.39 ratio helps sell the size of the narrative. Haynes underplays beats that other filmmakers would emphasize, and such as they are we appreciate their real-world context with more power. One such moment is when Tim Robbins yells at the other attorneys seated around the conference table. I know of no other director who would run that in a wide shot. The discipline makes for a fresh take on moments that might otherwise come off as overfamiliar from lesser legal pictures. Personally, I was struck by the fact that Bilott kept going. We know through hindsight that the positive outcome of this information being made public was worthwhile; but he would’ve had no way of knowing that, nor knowing if he was any closer to success for years. A remarkable human interest and triumph narrative and a vital piece of public health information, packaged in an entirely absorbing narrative drama format that sends its message much more potently than any documentary. 2. A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood "Sometimes we need to ask for help. And that's okay." Synopsis: A retelling of the creation of Tom Junot's 1998 Esquire profile on Mr. Rogers. Trailer. dir. Marielle Heller. 109m; 1.85:1. It’s not the greatest film. It isn’t even great. It’s not Heller’s best moment of creative direction; this is staid compared to the visual rambunctiousness of Diary of a Teenage Girl and the pleasing natural-light shallow-depth lensing of Can You ever Forgive Me. But we forgive that, because of the content. Tom Junot’s famous and justly awarded 1998 Esquire article is the subject here, with a fictional standin playing the Junot character as lead; Rogers is a supporting role, and the subject is how Rogers brought the cynic journalist around. It’s about goodness, in other words, and learning to see it. Rogers inspires me because reading about him, watching him, learning about him– all normalizes the behavior of compassion and love. He makes you feel brave enough to slow down, to really listen to others. To care. Hanks is riveting. He doesn’t look like Mr. Rogers, but no one else could’ve played him. Goodness is best when it stems from truth, and Hanks channels his own persona into something deeper here. Fabulous work. 3. Knives Out "The complexity and the gray lie not in the truth, but what you do with the truth once you have it." Synopsis: Agatha Christie for the 21st century, with an unexpected amount of heart. Trailer. dir. Rian Johnson. 131m; 1.85:1. What a piece of misdirection the marketing campaign is. Knives is so utterly not about what the trailer leads us to think it's about. I almost didn't see the film. I'm so glad I did. To wit: Todd Phillips made one compelling dramatic feature before making Joker. 2016’s little-seen and underappreciated War Dogs (trailer) was advertised as a comedy, but wholly functions as a (spectacularly well-photographed) drama, effectively tugging our emotions as it charts the sad dissolution of a friendship between two arms dealers. War Dogs was also the first place I saw Ana de Armas. In it she plays “the girlfriend,” and like all “the girlfriends” in movies her character is compelling for two reasons: being underused and therefore curiously compelling; and playing a key role in the film’s emotional arc. Unlike many “the girlfriend” roles but in keeping with what all great actors do, Ms. de Armas makes the most of an underwritten role. I found myself watching the picture waiting for her to reappear. Later, she would play the role that would largely define her in my consciousness until now: the robot in Blade Runner 2049 (trailer). She occupied the role with such charisma I forgot I’d ever seen her before. She enlivens that magisterial, stoically paced masterpiece not with pep or quirk or any other element out of keeping with Villeneuve’s slow-moving mythic grandeur, but with something else. Why do I respond to her so? [Spoilers] This is the question I found myself asking after Knives Out, and only with Knives Out can we find the answer, because we are lucky enough in that she plays the lead role. But before I could answer I had to think about what I was really searching for. The question is much broader, and I’ll ask your forgiveness in bringing up: what do we find attractive? The easy answer is that I respond to Ana de Armas because she’s pretty– and she certainly is. But in the world of cinema, everyone’s pretty. Everyone has a trim figure and clean skin and symmetrical features. So what is it about her? I like Ana de Armas because she reminds me of certain kind people who have had the huge impacts on my life. She reminds me of those people because she is good. Tom Hanks recently explained to NYT why he doesn’t play villains: “I recognized in myself a long time ago that I don’t instill fear in anybody. Now, that’s different than being nice, you know? I think I have a cache of mystery. But it’s not one of malevolence. It’s because I never get them, because bad guys, by and large, require some degree of malevolence that I don’t think I can fake.” I would argue Ana de Armas possesses a similar quality. In the way Rachel Weisz and Cate Blanchett prove the notion that it’s very hard to hide the fact that you’re intellectually smart if you are (although the extremely well-read Ben Affleck completely disproves this hypothesis!), de Armas and Hanks suggest in their performances that there are elements of goodness which are so genuine they can neither be faked nor hidden. She prevails not by being clever, although she is and that’s part of it, but through her most essential quality, as spelled out by Daniel Craig at the close. He recognizes this goodness because he possesses some of it himself. To have the film end as it does gives me an existential shuddering release of joy, the relief that things in this dream world turn out right after all. The images reinforce what can be possible. They carry the joy that concludes Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood, except without the pugilistic aftertaste of extreme violence. I don’t mean to say it’s a better film than that one (it isn’t), but I would easily say it’s far more than an effective genre exercise. It invites a consideration not of who did what, but of who did what why, and more crucially who had good intentions and who didn’t. Intent being the thing– a less common focus than you'd imagine. Chris Evans will be arrested, among other things, for attempting to kill ADA, because in this country, attempting a crime is legally identical to committing a crime. Because it’s about where we’re coming from, even more than the hard facts of who did what. I took enormous comfort in this movie having such a big heart to reach out and understand her, give her safe haven among a cast(e) of people inclined otherwise. I was beyond thrilled to gradually realize she was the centre of the film. I could hardly be happier with the dream the film offers us, the dream I want to believe, that I try to make happen every day I continue as the fragile and joyful person I hope to be. 4. Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood "Naturally, we never succeed, but it's the pursuit that's meaningful." Synopsis: Sharon Tate, a fading TV actor, and his stunt double coexist in Hollywood in the summer of 1969. Trailer. dir. Quentin Tarantino; 165m; 2.39:1. Everything I’ve ever wanted to say or will say about this film and Tarantino's oeuvre can be read on this site's biggest post, here. 5. Bombshell "Someone has to speak up." Synopsis: A group of women take on Fox News head Roger Ailes and the toxic atmosphere he presided over at the network. Trailer. dir. Jay Roach. 109m; 2.39:1. It’s safe to assume, at this point, that the negative reception and turgid box-office performance of the 2015 Will Smith vehicle Concussion, about the trauma that concussions have on football players, was a result of successful sabotage by the almighty NFL and its affiliates. If the information in that film had been widely seen, the financial damage to the NFL could have been significant. And we all know how much the NFL doesn't want that. I wonder after a similar theory regarding Bombshell, another film that exposes the unambiguous wrongs of a massively popular corporation. How on earth does this film have such mediocre reviews from so many major establishments when it is so obviously excellent? Should I be surprised that the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post both gave the film bad reviews, when those institutions are housed in the same building as Fox News? No. I am not surprised. I am happy, though, that the film exists, and that it offers a highly compelling portrait of women standing up for themselves and coming forward despite enormous pressure and personal cost, to right systematic evils and reconfigure what’s acceptable in the workplace. The three leads (plus Kate McKinnon) are terrific, dimensional figures played with zest and magnetism. John Lithgow makes the despicable Ailes character dimensional as well, and his work plus Charles Randolph’s script offer a glimpse into how this train wreck of a personality may have gotten started. The aim isn’t studying Ailes though, which I see as an exercise with useful but limited returns, but rather articulating what was going on for the ladies, what happened next, and what that felt like.
Roach gets significant mileage out of Robbie’s ability to convey a lot with silence (which she does to ample effect in her excellent perf in Once… Hollywood), helping any audience member understand exactly how much mere words can still be a violation. The picture snaps and crackles with energy, and part of me wishes it was longer; what fascinating people these are, and how curious and comforting to reflect that even people who believe working at, watching, or even thinking about Fox News is a good idea… still share quite a bit in common with the rest of us when it comes to what constitutes human decency. Now who would’ve thought that possible? --- Nathan's Films of 2019 Index here. 1. 1917 "I hoped today would be a good day." Synopsis: Two soldiers are assigned the task of hand-delivering a message to prevent a deadly attack. Trailer. dir. Sam Mendes. 119m; 2.39:1. Here’s the thing about unbroken takes. They’re incredibly difficult to create. The only thing harder to do in cinema, requiring more planning and careful execution than an unbroken take is… a longer unbroken take. Mendes’ 1917, like Birdman (teaser), is composed of a few unbroken takes, stitched together at key moments (usually a frame of pure black, a la going in and out of the tunnels) to appear like a seamless move. Mostly, however, scenes run for dozens of minutes at a time where there is absolutely no opportunity to break. The fact that the film is comprised of a few unbroken takes rather than a single massive one does not detract from the enormity of its accomplishment. Because you still don’t want to screw up a 30-minute take. Even a 3-minute shot is a massive accomplishment, and something to be proud of; look at the legendary opener to Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil. Who can forget that camera gliding over the tops of the buildings and coming all the way back down? Mendes and superstar DP Roger Deakins have etched into the medium’s legacy something that will stand as a pinnacle for a long, long time. A move like this is simply too difficult, too complex, and in need of too much skill for people to try and replicate. Popular films start trends; this one won't. It’s just too hard to do. Look at the scale of this thing. An airplane crash, a fire, crowds, explosions, stunts, with every moment blocked and rehearsed, every aperture change and focus pull, the camera switching mounts as it glides over rivers and out windows, into basements and over rubble. Birdman had the advantage of a controlled indoor environment. This is something else entirely. The unbroken take forces us to confront the reality of what we see, to realize we’re experiencing time exactly as the actors are. We really are going to walk across to that horizon with these two actors, and we’re going to do so them in real time. Mark Strong and the troops really are waiting on the other side of the hill for this whole section, because we come upon them in the same shot. It’s the breathtaking magic of truth. The immersiveness, the jaw-dropping you-are-thereness, of being able to truly believe what you are seeing on so many more levels than normal… this is one of a kind, and though it isn’t the best picture of the year, it is entirely and absolutely worthy of winning Best Picture of the year this Sunday, as it probably will. A milestone. Further thoughts on Birdman and unbroken takes here. 2. Parasite "Min-hyuk, this is so metaphorical." Synopsis: An unemployed family infiltrates a wealthy one, and things get complicated. Trailer. dir. Bong Joon-ho. 132m; 2.39:1. So much ink has been capably spilled in the exploration of this film's many themes and able execution. I'll be brief. Lee Chang-dong's 2018 masterpiece Burning may have tackled similar issues and more with greater nuance, restraint and mystery (look for an essay by me soon), but we can’t fault Bong for that. There’s room for more than one film on class differences in Korea, and this one is thoroughly deserving of its legendary accolades. Parasite is more commercially digestible, and if it gets viewers on board with arthouse and international films, all the better. His direction is precise, with razor sharp editing, deftly executed delineation and reveals of information, and highly controlled camerwork with distinctive movement choices for each class level. Like so many of the pictures I'm reviewing this year, it's a touch violent for me, but spectacularly well made. 3. A vida invisível de Eurídice Gusmão (The Invisible Life of Eurídice Gusmão) “My sister didn’t run off.” Synopsis: Two sisters live their lives after being separated by the men in their lives, each unaware the other is nearby, and struggling. Trailer. dir. Karim Aïnouz. 139m, 2.39:1. In her landmark 1971 essay, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?,” art historian Linda Nochlin reminds us that saying 'you can tell this was made by a woman’ is a fool’s exercise. She writes that “in general, women's experience and situation in society, and hence as artists, is different from men's, and certainly an art produced by a group of consciously united and purposely articulate women… might indeed be stylistically identifiable as feminist, if not feminine, art. This remains within the realm of possibility; so far, it has not occurred” (emphasis mine). She continues: "No subtle essence of femininity would seem to link the work of Artemisia Gentileschi, Mme. Vigee-Lebrun, Angelica Kauffmann, Rosa Bonheur, Berthe Morisot, Suzanne Valadon, Kaethe Kollwitz, Barbara Hepworth, Georgia O'Keeffe…” The list goes on, including Sand, Woolf, Plath, Eliot, Sontag, Dickinson and more, before concluding that “In every instance, women artists and writers would seem to be closer to other artists and writers of their own period and outlook than they are to each other. It may be asserted that women artists are more inward-looking, more delicate and nuanced in their treatment of their medium. But which of the women artists cited above is more inward-turning than Redon, more subtle and nuanced in the handling of pigment than Corot at his best? Is Fragonard more or less feminine than Mme. Vigee- Lebrun? Is it not more a question of the whole rococo style of eighteenth-century France being "feminine," if judged in terms of a two-valued scale of "masculinity" versus "femininity"? …In any case, the mere choice of a certain realm of subject matter, or the restriction to certain subjects, is not to be equated with a style, much less with some sort of quintessentially feminine style.” Nochlin invites us toward the unpopular notion of judging people not by their gender but more fundamentally by their humanity, and if they be artists, than their art by their artistry. Experience and perception transcend gender norms, and I think of Nochlin’s words whenever I think of this film, and versa vice. The Invisible Life of Eurídice Gusmão is the year’s best argument that men might have something relevant to say about the evils of patriarchy. No innocent viewer would ever assume its director was male, given not just its sympathies but its potent, delicate, and expansive understanding of its principal topic: female oppression by men, what it feels like, and how it alters and limits the course of lives. The passion and anger quite simply bleed off the screen. Marketing materials bill it as “a tropical melodrama,” and it earns the term not so much from its story content as its tone: strong. It’s heavy stuff, and unlike many melodramas it carries the unmistakable whiff of truth. As a viewer and member of modern society I found it essential, and as a filmmaker who couldn’t be less interested in writing male main characters, I found it instructive and inspiring. More importantly, the two protagonists move me tremendously in doing what one does under hopelessly unjust circumstances: you do what you can, and make the most of things. Aïnouz’s wide frame captures image after image of earthy, sensual beauty; the (digital) picture was lit and color-timed to match 16mm daylight stock. The replication of 60’s and 70's era color film is uncanny, down to the underexposed interiors and hints of saturated color bleed outdoors. A beautiful and heartrending picture. Nathan's Films of 2019 Index here.
I swear this is more for my enthusiasm for these lovely booksellers than any desire of my own to actually sell this thing! But a massive thanks too all who continue to keep it a bestseller.
It's taught as a textbook at Seattle University now, and a highlight at Tacoma's PLU, where I'll be the visiting writer and lecturer next month (details here), and one of the attending writers on the conference faculty at the upcoming Chuckanut Writers Conference this June, as well as a pick for Redmond Library's reading group in September (stay tuned for related events!). To all of which I say: EEP EEP! You're making me blush!! You can buy my book online here, through these direct links: And in person here, where all these friendly booksellers are just waiting to say hello:
And, newly added in West Seattle:
Are you having trouble getting hold of the book? Email my publisher, Chin Music Press at chinmusicpress@gmail.com. Thanks for all your support! 1. A Hidden Life "Better to suffer injustice than to do it." Synopsis: The real-life story of Franz Jägerstätter, who refused to fight under Nazi Germany, and his wife Fani. Trailer. dir. Terrence Malick. 173m; 2.39:1. [spoilers] It's an impossible choice he faces. Or is it? Upon second viewing and further reflection I'm not sure Franz Jägerstätter, a conscientious objector before the term entered common parlance, feels much indecision at all. Malick's latest recounts the true story of an Austrian farmer who refused to support Hitler's genocide, and who was executed as a result. The film's masterstroke is to withhold Franz's explicit reasons for taking such a stand. Because isn't that one of those decisions that's beyond reason? You either recoil from the thought, repulsed on a gut level and unable to bring yourself to violate your soul to that degree... Or you don't, you're okay with the moral compromise. We can't pretend to know what we would do, because it'd be a supposition based on idle speculation, and nothing more. Complicating his situation is the love he has for his wife and their idyllic life. Fani, also a real-life figure, was instrumental in guiding Franz toward the very character which would ultimately keep them apart– by all accounts she awakened in him an inclination toward goodness, peace and thoughtful intention. She loved Franz because of who he was, who he had become; exactly what he'd be turning his back on if he signed Hitler's oath on the hope of being returned to her (not that a Fascist government during wartime should be particularly trusted to keep such promises). Franz can't go back to Fani because of who he is, and the fact that it's you, yourself, who has to live with your decisions. And she can't encourage him to abandon what she loves most about him– though in a moment of weakness she does, before relenting in anguish– because that's not how love sustains. A moment I missed on first viewing is when Fani grabs Franz with intense frustration, saying, "You're going to do it, aren't you." She's enraged by the thought. Only on a second round would I realize she's referring to him capitulating. Fani doesn't want him to join Hitler's crusade, especially not on the level that matters most– even though this means they will be kept apart, likely forever. His refusal to follow Hitler, in light of her wish, becomes an act of love. Her frustration is not with him but with a world and a God that don't make sense, who are silent in the face of obvious tragedy. Wisely, Malick doesn't answer the questions he raises, though he does include what feels like a first in his oeuvre: a scathing appraisal of Christian hypocrisy by an icon painter that rings as true now as it did in Nazi Germany. Malick lets his images speak for themselves. As in The New World, certain characters promote arguments of hate or apathy using words, using reason– you can reason yourself into any outlook– but there are no grandstanding counter-speeches here. Images cut deeper, and intuition runs more potently than intellectual arguments. Franz's decision is positioned as an instinctual one: with historical hindsight we know the full breadth of Hitler's evil and the notion of refusing to embrace it is more straightforward. But as an Austrian mountain farmer in 1939, Franz would only have an inkling of the inhumanity being done. As we now know so well, his suspicions were more correct than he ever could have guessed. The shock of Franz's fortitude is that he didn't need mountains of traumatic evidence to sustain it. It was as simple as knowing himself enough to know that there was no way, on this Earth, he'd be able to bring himself to kill people. His is less a decision to abandon life as to retain his soul. These two individuals believed they needed to be good, and that staying consistent with the character of their best selves was of greater value than the hatred du jour their contemporaries acquiesed to. They imagined their actions would be unknown and insignificant in the tide of history, and this did not concern them. They cared for other human beings, in a society that had no use for such an outlook, and which actively sought to destroy it. Who looks the fool now? Franz and Fani's actions ended up impacting nearly everyone around them after all, and inspiring generations afterwards, but even if that had never been the case, I don't imagine they would've much cared. Neither lived to see their actions recognized in appreciation; their three daughters would be ostracized by the community for decades afterwards. Those externalities weren't part of their concerns, which had more to do with the interior question of what they'd be able to live with. Conscience is who you are when no one but hindsight is looking. Conscience is what reason cowers before, what reason lacks the tools to truly master. Look at the faces of the other conscientious objectors Franz is imprisoned with. Or at the way Bruno Ganz looks at his hands. At the reflected sun beaming down onto the prison hallway floor, the camera always searching for the light. In the struggle between intuition and reason, intuition never needs to justify itself. [end spoilers] Like its protagonists, A Hidden Life faded from view quickly. It came and went without Oscar nominations, though it did draw sold-out crowds(!) here in Seattle. Fox Searchlight may have enthusiastically bought it last Cannes for $12 million, but it didn’t get booked into as many theatres as Searchlight may have liked because Disney, which owns Fox, overcharged theatres at the same premium tentpole rate it was charging them for their latest Star Wars, an absurd business move for an arthouse feature; of course the chains balked, and everyone lost out. Though it’s a three-hour period piece made with heavy improvisation (Ms. Pachner says below they stopped using the script after about a week), sources say it was made for “high single digits,” which implies the Cannes buy more than recoups investors, though Fox won’t see a return after Disney’s mishandling. The picture itself was funded primarily by four private equity investors who don’t have their names listed in the credits, and who were aware this was unlikely to be financially lucrative, but who rather supported the director as private citizens and fans. Jörg Widmer takes over lensing duties from the trilogy's Emmanuel “Chivo” Lubezki with no meaningful difference in aesthetic, which shouldn’t be a major surprise given that Widmer was Chivo’s lead steadi operator on all their Malick collaborations. The difference here is this is Malick’s first entirely digital production. We’ve finally gotten to the point where digital can generate film-competitive results if treated properly in post; it used to be easy to tell the difference between a digital movie and celluloid, especially when looking at skies and skin tones. That remains the case, except when filmmakers take care to impose tone curves, color spaces, and grain overlays from specific film stocks, as has clearly been done here. It’s a rich, filmlike image with deep blacks and exceptionally competent light-dark latitude. With the attention Malick pays to his visuals, I’m not surprised; and I suspect going digital worked wonders for his process, which involves searching for extemporaneous moments and shooting enormous amounts of footage doing so. Tree of Life and Thin Red Line both resulted from a million feet of film shot– enough for 91 two-hour films each! Much has been made in press materials of the average length of a take during shooting Hidden Life: 28 minutes, impossible with film. Explore the links below for stories of the actors doing farm labor for 40-minute takes. If it looks they know what they’re doing on screen, it’s because that is what they’re doing. The actors also got texts every morning from Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, psalms from the bible, and more; but they weren’t discussed. As Malick told Sight & Sound in 1975, you can't film philosophy. In keeping with the above advocacy for intuition, they were offered less for intellectual analysis than reflection, a search for a “grounded feeling” with the landscape. Chivo and Malick’s camera rules from The New World carry over mostly intact: all natural light, handheld or steadi only, deep focus, subjective view, and leaning into happy accidents. The 12mm lens, used for the entire film except for a few “long-lens shots” using a still laughably wide 16mm, take “wide angle” to a new level. No other film looks like this one, simply because no other films have been shot with only a 12mm lens, let alone solely natural light. The focus range is massive, and the lens distortion emphasizes depth in the frame; we are there, as we never have been. Lines and composition get emphasized as well, and the camera can read closer to a surface than normal. Note how vast the distance between Franz and the priest seems; or the uncanny uniqueness of the standing soldiers and children, with the unusually close camera; and the diagonal lines in the courtroom. It's the silences in Malick that speak the loudest, the room he allows us to divine meaning from image and soliloquy. The ever-fluid camera tells us all we need to know. He achieved an apex of this abstraction of form with his excellent last three films, with the final third of this so-called 'Modern Life' trilogy* (Song to Song) fine-tuning the possibilities of his brand of pure cinema to their fullest potential. No other contemporary filmmaker has gotten closer to communicating directly with the viewer, freed from the bounds of narrative, plot, structure and even language. This is purity of expression not as a headless avant-garde, but as primal emotional discourse with the viewer. Malick reaches us not with heady intellect but with the vernacular of the soul, and is thus available for engagement with any sensitive viewer, whether or not they are educated or otherwise elite. Malick transcends and even appears to actively resist such statuses, choosing not worldly or learned protagonists but thoughtful ones, reflective people who speak in a voice we reach for, who put to words the ephemera we don't know defines us. ---
*My thoughts on each of the films: 2013's To The Wonder (scroll down); 2016's Knight of Cups (scroll down), and 2017's Song to Song. Behind the scenes
Essays These two longform reviews offer far more than anything I could come up with on my own:
--- Nathan's Films of 2019 Index here. 2. The Irishman (I Heard You Paint Houses) "Oh, boy. You don't know how fast time goes by until you get there." With Robert DeNiro, Al Pacino, Joe Pesci et al. Synopsis: Recollections of Frank Sheeran, who claimed to have killed his friend Jimmy Hoffa per mob orders in 1975. Trailer. dir. Martin Scorsese. 209 mins, 1.85:1. Viewers nowadays are so used to being told what to think that they struggle when they’re given the option do so on their own. Not all films have their protagonists helpfully verbalize the themes of the films they’re in, or tell us how to think about their actions. Such things don’t happen in life; people don’t have the self-awareness for it. Can’t a film just say something? Does it have to also say what it’s saying to you? Martin Scorsese’s pictures have always assumed the audience watching them is smart, perceptive, reflective, able to come to their own conclusions very different from what the film’s protagonists may think. His characters are unique in that they usually don’t learn anything. They, like real people, tend to stay the same. They are who they are. We learn a lot, by watching them, but they don’t. Frank Sheeran gets through life a day at a time, up close, using survival skills that got him through the War, but which have crushingly limited value back home in the real world. He became good at following orders, not questioning them… not questioning his own actions. Do you know where that road leads you? As a mob hitman, his tragedy isn’t that he dies prematurely, as most in his profession do; it’s that he survives long enough to live with his decisions. Only after it’s too late do his choices catch up to him, bulldozing his soul over with a regret so vast, so debilitating, he can’t even acknowledge its existence. What they don’t tell you about moral compromise as a survival tool is that it works, in the worst way possible: you survive, and thus have to live with yourself, look at yourself in the mirror, be partner to your past on every sleepless night. The torture of sitting alone in a room, lost to time, aware of the friends and family one could’ve known, could’ve loved, but chose not to. No other mob picture devotes its final thirty minutes to these truths. Scorsese and cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto (they collaborated on Wolf of Wall Street and Silence) shoot on film where they can (why shoot on film?), but any shot requiring digital de-aging had to be photographed digitally, using a complex 3-camera capture system, which has been much discussed elsewhere. The de-aging effect isn’t meaningfully more or less distracting than the other methods of cinematic shorthand for conveying aging that we've all tolerated for years: makeup, or using different actors. Makeup is ideal because it's actual rather than computer-generated, but it's more useful in aging actors up than down. And using different actors destroys continuity in ways that require much more suspension of disbelief than what Scorsese offers here, and that was his principal motive for doing so: these actors know what life was like in the time periods they’re portrayed as living in. Younger generations don’t. They bring that authenticity, as well as an emotional linearity heretofore unarrived at in cinema: the same actors living all the scenes over a half-century lends credibility to their experience, and particularly makes the later scenes all the more potent, rather than just hiring an older actor to pretend the regret of someone else’s earlier performance. It may be imperfect, but for these reasons it beats any existing alternative. Regarding the visuals: this film feels often like a summation and a response to Scorsese's earlier works taking place in related environments. Just as only a younger person could’ve made Goodfellas, only an older mind could’ve created The Irishman. Consider the opening tracking shot, which mirrors the famous Copacabana tracking shot in Goodfellas. That shot emblazoned the high-key vivacious glamour of everything Henry Hill loved about his life, and is appropriately scored to the present-tense joy of The Crystals' "Then He Kissed Me." The Irishman's opener rather shows us the End of the Road, not just of working-class mob life, but of something larger: Life caked over with regret, reflection, and the winsome recognition that the present has gone by, and these are the days of After. The 5 Satins’ “In the Still of the Night,” which accompanies the shot, is redolent with melancholy and memory, which is exactly what The Irishman is all about. I find it a devastating way to begin a film. Consider how DeNiro’s character is musing to us silently, with narration, before he continues speaking, this time out loud. Is he talking to himself, or to a reporter? Or is he silently musing the entire film’s events in his own mind? I like how it isn’t clarified, since it isn’t important: what matters is that he’s thinking it. Note the workmanlike nature of Prieto’s camera: no flashy angles here. We are always either perpendicular or parallel to the action. Says Prieto: “For Frank, he would get an order and then go and do it. So the camera behaves very simply– no spectacular angles or movements when a killing is happening. So the camera pans with him approaching a person, maybe he kills, maybe it pans back. Or sometimes the camera just sat there, static. It even extends to the cars. All the cars, we show them in perfect profile. Filming in a dry, simple, methodical way. There are other moments, which aren’t related to Frank Sheeran, maybe the deposition of Jimmy Hoffa, where the camera moves around, swoops down toward Robert Kennedy.” He and Scorsese chose the appropriately unglamorous 1.85:1 ratio, which Scorsese has used only once since discovering ‘scope in 1991, because, as Prieto told Indiewire, “We chose spherical lenses and a 1.85:1 aspect ratio because the main character approaches his task of “painting houses” (meaning killing people) in a methodical, practical way. It seemed to us that old glass, but without heavy distortion or fancy flares, would be appropriate to represent Sheeran’s perspective.” Prieto also references Garry Winogrand’s wide-angle color work as an inspiration, and has told multiple outlets about the progress of color through the film: a Kodachrome approximation for the 50s and earlier, Ektachrome for the 60s, and a method of increasing contrast while desaturating the image called ENR (like bleach bypass, but variable in terms of how much silver is left in the print; developed by Vittoro Storaro). The level of desaturation increases as the narrative continues, leaning toward monochrome for the bitter end. The Irishman’s power is in what it doesn’t say. It observes, like a silent God, as actions permeate into consequences. It withholds judgment and sees the goodness in ‘bad’ people. It speaks in silences and offhand turns of phrase across a half-century, and it feels, similar to Delillo’s Underworld, like a history of the post-war twentieth century, an expansive plumbing of its ethos and texture and manner of life, neither celebratory nor condemnative but observational. These plebian crannies of existence get their full due here, in lives that aren’t normally considered interesting enough for the silver screen. When did you last see a studio picture about union delegates, delivery drivers, blue-collar backrooms and the drama of unknown working-class midwestern life? Any life seen in enough detail is worth examining. There are multitudes here. Nathan's Films of 2019 Index here.
|
Nathan
Archives
March 2024
Categories |