Out of the Murky Depths: Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel's Leviathan (2012)

Abstracted from the oily murk and enveloping shadow of the swirling North Atlantic surf, Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel's Leviathan (2012) is an accidental work of the avant-garde, an Anticipation of the Night-style "lyrical" documentary that does not so much transport its spectator to its accursed seascape as it offers a tactile impression of the hard labor performed inside the tempest. A film filled finally with viscous textures and violent camera movements, Leviathan begins and ends in darkest nautical night, in the funereal sea from which the initially unformed flecks of light and empty canvas will suddenly give way to the ship's sparely illuminated deck and the sky's gliding, scavenging gulls. On board the storm-tossed ship, the saltwater spray covers Castaing-Taylor and Paravel's camera lens, thus calling our attention to its discrete physical presence within the larger adversarial setting. Leviathan's muffled mic work provides a similar sense of separation, of recording objects existing within but materially distinct from their host environs. In the end, this is the opposite of Flahertian documentary, of a world presented as it appears before an invisible apparatus: Leviathan instead emphasize the embodied presence of its camera operators (for whom the apparatus at times becomes an added appendage) as well as the mind-twisting impossibility of its more soaring set-ups. Castaing-Taylor and Paravel's film foremost attends to the laborious act and process of shooting its antagonistic Atlantic environment.

As a narrative of perilous professional life, Leviathan opposes itself implicitly to The Deadliest Catch, the long-form Discovery Channel documentary that purposefully provides one of Castaing-Taylor and Paravel's clearest passages of recorded audio. Most importantly, Leviathan lacks The Deadliest Catch's voice-over narration, which in the case of the cable hit serves to delineate the persons and personalities that the television series chronicles. Castaing-Taylor and Paravel take a far less clarifying approach, frequently presenting their human subjects in close-in fragments of wind-scarred and ink-stained flesh. Leviathan by comparison is attuned to surfaces and is alive to the semi- and in-animate, to the topless mermaid painted on the captain's forearm, to the dancing multi-colored netting that hangs off the side of the ship's deck and to the piles of dying fish whose impact is as much tactile and olfactory as it is visual. The latter content also contributes to a horror-picture subtext (one that the filmmakers marry with the aesthetics of metal) that finds even more conspicuous representation in the half-alive floating fish-heads and in the cascades of blood and innards issuing from the ocean vessel.

Then again, Leviathan is less aggressive in its moments of horror than it is in its sequences of slow-cinema: a post-credit long-take passage continues well beyond the eclipse of the visual, while the earlier Deadliest Catch set-piece concludes with the same tattooed sailor falling asleep before the camera. In this latter moment, Leviathan pokes fun at not only its infinitely less adventurous cable point-of-departure, but also its own anticipated slumberous effect on its spectators. For many in Castaing-Taylor and Paravel's audience, however, Leviathan is a truly invigorating experience, a new form of experimental documentary - much more in fact than Castaing-Taylor's conventionally contemplative, if still successful Sweetgrass (2009) - that makes for one of the year's richest aesthetic and ontological encounters.

This review was co-authored by Michael J. Anderson and Lisa K. Broad. Cinema Guild is currently distributing Leviathan in the United States.

New Film: Pain & Gain (2013)

A stupendously captivating, admirably self-aware piece of attention-oriented action-hack cinema, Michael Bay's Pain & Gain (2013), from Christopher Markus and Steven McFeely's adaptation of Pete Collins's eponymous original, promises and delivers a self-deprecating summation of the filmmaker's much maligned auteurship: Pain & Gain produces a metaphor, in its moron-driven, steroid-fueled blunder, for Bay's deliriously dismissed art (with Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson's casting crystallizing the 1995-set film's conspicuous self-consciousness). Mark Wahlberg's "doer" and convert to the fitness faith, Daniel Lugo, emerges as the ring-leader for a dimly conceived abduction plot that at least for a period propels Lugo, Johnson's Christian rock-loving, coke-head Paul Doyle - Pain & Gain is reasonably certain to be the only film this or any year to reference gospel glam-rockers Stryper - and Anthony Mackie's modestly endowed Adrain Doorbal into a previously unattainable affluence. Lugo, despite the ill-gotten and comically unstable source for his new life, remains certain that his rise out of sweatpants is a karmic conferral of justice, the coming of what is for the film an ambiguous American dream. Wahlberg's first lead professes his belief in this cosmic form of justice as he participates in a shifting voice-over that will include not only the criminal trio, but also their victim Victor Kershaw - Tony Shalhoub's archly unsympathetic delicatessen mogul - and Ed Harris's private dick, Ed Du Bois.  (Pain & Gain's principle performances are uniformly worthy of accommodation.) In so doing, that is in producing a multi-voiced, over-dubbed narration, Bay constructs a low-brow analogy to the amorphous commentary of the cinema of Criterion label-mate, Terrence Malick.

Pain & Gain is also a film of bodies, or better still, artificially perfected anatomies, whether they are the result of injection, augmentation - one character's implants provide the investigative key to identifying her dissected form - or even manufacture, as the film's gay sex-toy warehouse intimates. (By this latter setting, Bay bluntly sends up his weightlifters' obvious, outwardly macho masculinity.) Of course, they are also abused bodies: steroids and narcotics are consumed once again; Doyle loses a toe - which comically becomes a canine chew-toy - and is covered in green security paint, all during the same a police shootout; and the severed hands of a wealthy couple are put on a grill in an effort to eliminate any identifying evidence. In this latter moment, Pain& Gain provides its most pitch-black punctum, supported by one of the film's relatively frequent on-screen titles: as the spectator is reminded, "this is still a true story." As many critics have observed, Pain & Gain indeed provides a South Floridan twist on the Coen brothers' Fargo (1996), borrowing everything from its real-world inspiration to its amateur abduction plot and even its chopped extremities. This latter trope also recalls Showtime's "Dexter," which provides one of the more pronounced examples of recent Miami-based screen art, alongside F/X's even more germane, plastic surgery-centered "Nip/Tuck," Michael Mann's magnificent Miami Vice (2006), and in a spiritual sense, the Gulf Coast-situated Spring Breakers (2012) of more recent vintage. Nocturnally bathed in the blue neon that illuminates South Florida's freeways from below, the Miami screen narrative is one of absolute corporeal excess and artificial enhancement - much like the prototypical Bay picture itself.

New Film: To the Wonder (2012)

A Romantic inquiry into love's eternal inconstancy and its coextensive capacity for redemption, American master Terrence Malick's sixth directorial feature, To the Wonder (2012), enumerates and allegorizes its conflated content early in its first act: Olga Kurylenko's Marina and Ben Affleck's Neil, the film's off-again on-again lovers, lustfully embrace inside the cold granite confines of Mont Saint-Michel's Medieval abbey. Theirs is a fitful attempt at a Keatsian transcendence that To the Wonder will continue to chart as the formerly inflamed couple shift from the soft diffuse light of Marina's Northern France to the glowing ambers of Affleck's Great Plains home. The partially autobiographical To the Wonder - the director married a Frenchwoman (whom he later divorced) while residing in Paris in 1985 - emerges as a New World (2005) in reverse, with its frequently frivolous female lead following her often ineffectual man deep into the methadone-ravaged interior of Malick's Middle America. Marina - who, for a time, is supplanted in Neil's affections by former acquaintance Jane (Rachel McAdams) - ultimately will provide a site of struggle, of the warring forces intrinsic to human nature, with the surreal appearance of an Italian friend giving external voice and license to her more illicit desires. The war, in other words, that The Thin Red Line (1998) sees in the "heart of nature," is staged inside the conflicted soul of Malick's maternal lead.

In this same Bartlesville, Oklahoma location that provides the setting for Marina's alienation, Malick introduces Javier Bardem's spiritually tortured Father Quintana, who, in moving among the disfigured population of the decaying mid-American postwar's, decries his inability to see a God who is everywhere and experience a God who is present in everything. (The Thin Red Line's pantheistic philosophy in this respect is re-imagined as Roman Catholic metaphysics.) To the Wonder will indeed persist in refusing the Spanish transplant the spiritual rebirth for which he thirsts, insisting instead that he struggle on in his life of service for society's neediest, for its outcasts and dispossessed. Malick's film similarly refuses its more well-healed romantic protagonists with an emotional epiphany of their own, opting instead for a grace made visible in Affleck's late gesture of forgiveness (in the image of The Tree of Life's after-life act). Rather, the love in which both of To the Wonder's marriages will conclude, be it Marina and Neil's or Father Quintana's to the Church, will be modeled after the Priest's homily: love is not something to be found or discovered - as the film itself first represents romantic love in its opening "newborn" sequence - but rather is something to be made, to be brought about by an act of will.

In the aforementioned 'newborn' passage, a briskly and elliptically edited low-grade DV set-piece that introduces the reciprocal romantic feeling first shared by Marina and Neil, Malick identifies with the pre-cognitive, virgin visuality of Stan Brakhage's pre-hand-painted corpus. Malick's affinity with the American avant-garde also appears in his discrete selection of flat, textured images, recalling Nathaniel Dorsky, and in his cardinal emphasis on gradations and effects of light that place the film in a tradition that includes Robert Beavers. Then again, To the Wonder's subjectivity, lyrical visual economy and accentuation of natural lighting effects all represent key components of the Malickian aesthetic in its own right. Taking cues, to begin with, from the preteen narration of Days of Heaven (1978) and the shifting commentary of The Thin Red Line and The New World, Malick manufactures an outsiders perspective on the director's adolescent home, one that in part consists of the combined private reflections of Marina, her ten year-old daughter Anna (Romina Mondello) and Father Quintana. Then there is Malick's increasingly fragmentary and anti-immersive method of montage, that of The New World and especially The Tree of Life, which attends more to the lyrical and textural properties of the individual image, to the creation of an impression, than to the construction of chains of causality. Finally, there is Emmanuel Lubezki's sensitive, golden-hour cinematography that immediately calls to mind, much more than the American avant-garde, the luminous prairie landscapes of the director's very great Days of Heaven.

In the end, To the Wonder may not exactly match the imagistic richness and poetic myth-making of Days of Heaven, the narratological and philosophical ambitions of The Thin Red Line, or the purity and depth of romantic passion displayed within The New World. Though To the Wonder may just be lesser when judged against the impossibly competitive metric of past Malick, it is by every other standard a major and even prophetic work of an all-too-uncommon early twenty-first American art cinema. For better or for worse, Malick shows the way forward for a post-diegetic, Middle-American lyricism.

New Film: Spring Breakers (2012) & No (2012)

A floating miasma of fantasy and myth, Harmony Korine's Spring Breakers (2012) follows four childhood friends, Faith (Selena Gomez), Candy (Vanessa Hudgens), Brit (Ashley Benson) and Cotty (Rachel Korine), on their surreal odyssey into the delirium and degradation of college party culture. Spring Breakers slides deftly between the co-eds' competing and distinct objects of desire and despair, progressively projecting Faith's quasi-spiritual perception of sisterhood and paradise, Cotty's insatiable if somehow controlled (or controlling) path of sensuality and substance abuse, and finally the bi-sexual Brit and Candy's darker pursuit of a Nietzschean power and violence. That is, the nighttime scooter rides and Faith's swimming pool talk of buying a home together with her friends in Florida will be supplanted, in turns, by Cotty's binge-partying and the lusty celebration of her animal appeal, and finally by the (loaded) gun-barrel blow-job that the inseparable bad-girls Candy and Brit force on their shared paramour, Alien (James Franco). Franco's original Caucasian "g" of course will provide not only another source for the picture's shifting projections of fantasy - setting aside Faith, the girls seem to lose their identities in his presence, becoming both "mermaids" and "soul-mates" for the St. Petersburg baller - he also offers a path to the conspicuous consumption that co-eds collectively seek.

In this latter sense, Alien also presents a site of modern myth, filtering the flush criminal lifestyle of Brian De Palma's name-checked Scarface (1983) and the admixed racial archetypes of Jim Jarmusch's superlative Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (1999). However, for the most outwardly innocent of the spring-breakers, the dabbler in Evangelical spiritual experience Faith - Gomez's character accordingly negotiates the continued American bifurcation between collegiate amorality and teenage fundamentalism - her confrontation of a genuine black-gangster culture (and not just its anesthetized white-rap alternative) provides the final impetus for her departure from the fallen, mythic MTV paradise. For her more Dionysian friend Cotty, the dream becomes a nightmare when she is struck by drive-by gunfire, which is to say when she deals with the real-world consequences of thug life - not that there is or is intended to be much of the real in the filmmaker's youth-fueled fable. Then again, when the film's fantastic register reaches its apotheosis in the concluding video-game bloodbath that sends the two most cold-blooded spring-breakers back to their middle American home (with promises of personal reform), Alien abruptly is cut-down, even before the final hail of bullets begins. For Alien, the co-eds' touristic reverie is indeed a tragically reality.

Spring Breakers ultimately concerns itself with an impossibility: the dream to make permanent the impermanent, whether again it is Alien's criminal lifestyle or the girls' substance-fueled week on a Florida beach. Korine approaches his subjectivized ephemeral subject with a looping, repetitive temporality that at once distends and even pauses time, a strategy that figures likewise in the film's indistinct narrative timeline, while also effecting the elegiac impression of an experience already lived, a moment already lost. Spring Breakers, in other words, slows time, while still admitting the impossibility of curbing its flowing - a point, in the latter case, that is brought home by the picture's propulsive sense of rhythm, of the film's forward progress. In the end, Spring Breakers is a work that is perpetually permeated by the seductive, by a life of material wealth and debauchery lived in a lawless paradise, under the electric glow of a pulsating neon, and in the eternal presence and bloom of the young female body.

No less a product of methodical mediation, Pablo Larraín's Cannes prize-winner and Oscar-nominated No (2012) filters its crowd-pleasing political content, that of the 1988 Chilean plebiscite, through a hyper-low grade video technology that succeeds first in historically situating the non-fiction subject in stylistic terms. As colors leech and whites bleach and blow out Larraín's analog imagery, in virtual avant-garde fashion, No trades on its outdated technology's obvious limitations to secure a sense of authentic visual experience, to give the impression less of the depicted moment itself than of how events appeared through the film's distinctive period media. In so doing, No also effectuates the kitsch experience of reliving an outmoded aesthetic past, something that Larraín's film does to an even greater degree in the re-produced period plebiscite ads that provide No with its purest moments of popular entertainment. In its period visual culture as well as in its anti-Pinochet politics, No is a work of contemporary consensus, of a flag-waving left-center populism that transforms No into an Argo (2012) for those uncomfortable with the Affleck film's pro-American and C.I.A. connotations.

This review was co-authored by Lisa K. Broad and Michael J. Anderson. Both films are currently being distributed commercially in the United States: Spring Breakers is being released by Annapurna Pictures and No by Sony Pictures Classics.

New Film: Beyond the Hills (2012)

Completely composed of shifting single-take set-ups that systematically substitute for an analytic breakdown of the bleak Carpathian landscape and barren convent interiors, Cristian Mungiu's epic-length Beyond the Hills (2012, Dupa dealuri) serves to summarize the 'new' cinema of the filmmaker's Romanian national cohort, even if it at first more fully calls to mind the over-the-shoulder devotional humanism of its Belgian co-producers, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne. From the fluid follow-shot that opens the film on a rural railway platform, Mungiu, in much the same manner as the makers of the superlative The Son (2002, Le fils), organizes his spaces and narrative around his two co-focal female leads, the twenty-something nun Voichita (Cosmina Stratan) and her newly arrived, fellow orphaned friend, Alina (Cristina Flutur). Mungiu's mise-en-scène in fact establishes an immediate and conspicuous contrast between the less-religious emigrant Alina and her monastic hosts, with the charcoal costuming of Voichita and the latter contingent contraposed against the bolder palette of the former. Alternatively, when Voichita visits a city hospital, the dark tones of her habit set her off within the secular institutional setting. The material is rich with meaning in Mungiu's spiritually themed latest.

Beyond the Hills builds its discourse around a series of structuring, dialectical contrasts: religious and secular, socially conservative and liberal, old-fashioned and modern, East and West. Among the two alternatives inscribed by Beyond the Hills' contrastive leads, Mungiu allies himself with the secular, liberal, Western value system that Alina comes to embody emotionally and indirectly, through her less than reciprocated homosexual feelings for Voichita. To this point, it must be noted that the film's archly unsympathetic exorcist Priest (Valeriu Andriuta) interprets same-sex marriage as a symbol of the West's substantial spiritual poverty, and in this sense its substantial inferiority in comparison to the East. Beyond the Hills thus succeeds Mungiu's feminist, abortion-themed 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (2007, 4 luni, 3 saptamâni si 2 zile) with a gay-rights subtext that provides the film with its own, socially liberal political provocation.

Even more strikingly, however, Mungiu's queer thematic contributes to Beyond the Hills' contemporary re-working of the Christ figure, with Alina climatically crucified by the pharisaical priest and sisters for her erotic love. (Alina, it should be added, also suffers a seizure in keeping with Dostoevsky's epileptic, equally radical reinterpretation of the Christ character-type in The Idiot.) In the end, it is the order's sin-obsessed spiritual life - a mode of being that leads to the culminating exorcism and consequent accidental killing - that proves Mungiu's primary critical object. With this result, Voichita, who heretofore has provided a reticent site of negotiation for the film's dialectical division between monastic life and the outside world - this same contrast also offers a means of mapping a socially regressive Romania and Eastern Europe within the larger, more enlightened global community - comes to understand her own guilt in her friend's death. The film's monastery is not immured, therefore, but rather contributes to the sorry state of contemporary reality that is analogically collapsed into the film's final splash of mud on the police van windshield.

With Alina's lifeless body transported to the emergency room earlier in Beyond the Hills' concluding act, Mungiu's sensational latest moves into the same (secular) institutional setting as fellow Romanian auteur Cristi Puiu's extraordinary international breakthrough, The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (2005, Moartea domnului Lazarescu). The tie burns on the deceased's wrists accordingly invite a police investigation, which in turn elicits further comparisons to Corneliu Porumboiu's very fine Police, Adjective (2009, Politist, adjectiv) and Puiu's homicide-centered major-work, Aurora (2010). Beyond the Hills, in other words, synthetically develops into an anthology of the recent Romanian 'new wave,' with a temporal emphasis (in its description of a prolonged experience of waiting and in its systemic repetitions) and institutional analysis to match the governing predilections of one of the early twenty-first cinema's most distinctive home cinemas. Beyond the Hills stands as nothing less than its latest apotheosis, and a substantial leap forward for the director of the widely acclaimed 4 Months.

Translation and Transposition in Abbas Kiarostami's Like Someone in Love (2012)

Like Someone in Love (2012) is a cinema of translation and transposition, of Iranian writer-director Abbas Kiarostami's rural, vehicular aesthetic into Tokyo's congested, neon-saturated present, and of the Islamic Republic's internationally invisible sex-workers and regressive romantic politics into a more outwardly conducive, if less authentic East Asian setting. Kiarostami's latest enacts a psychodrama forbidden by the censors of the Islamic nation - though it is no doubt known to its populace - where Rin Takanashi's (pictured) collegiate prostitute tearfully avoids a reunion with her visiting grandmother, spends the night at the residence of the director's elderly translator surrogate, and ultimately becomes the physical and emotional victim of her overly possessive boyfriend's audible and off-screen acts of abuse. (Like Someone in Love also imports a modern versus traditional discourse, which the film collapses into a nosy neighbor who spies through a lace curtain that the work transforms into a symbolic veil.) Much like Jafar Panahi's This is Not a Film (2011), Like Someone in Love is a kind of elegy for the unmade, impossible masterpieces of contemporary Iranian cinema, and one has a sense that such a work is concealed beneath the nearly anonymous Japanese surface it affects.  

The film's violence, a new presence in Kiarostami's post-Revolutionary cinema, save for the implied suicide of Taste of Cherry (1997), culminates in the picture's concluding ellipsis, where, in typical Kiarostami fashion, the spectator is left to speculate upon and decide the fate of the film's melodrama. In this sense, Like Someone in Love adds violence (and a more explicit, though still off-screen sex) to its expatriate successor Certified Copy's (2010) concluding prospect of copulation. Away from Iran, though still very much embedded within its hidden social dynamics, Kiarostami continues to produce work that had been impossible previously within the filmmaker's post-Revolutionary production context - even as it would achieve a certain kinship with the director's pre-Revolutionary The Report (1977).

Despite the fact that Like Someone in Love inscribes a new direction in Kiarostami's art, it remains a work ripe with the filmmaker's signature aesthetic: from the film's opening shot/counter-shot set-ups, Kiarostami emphasizes a richly populated off-screen space that will persist in dialogue with the picture's constricted on screen. With the taxi-cab's consequent departure from the opening set-piece's Bar Rizzo, Kiarostami's latest becomes yet another luxuriation in the (in this instance, built) spectacle of the world that passes through the car-window frame window.  In other words, for all of its departures from the subject matter and setting of Kiarostami's defining 1990s idiom, Like Someone in Love is still immediately recognizable as the director's own, as the latest historically essential entry into the cinema's most significant post-1960s corpus. Certainly, Like Someone in Love can and should be recommended to any follower of Kiarostami's work - and, one supposes, reader of this site - even if its moment-to-moment engagement (strange to say for a Kiarostami film that is more conventionally entertaining than his many masterworks) and the leaden nature of its cultural inscription make it the director's least successful fiction feature in decades. Unlike his previous meta-modernist masterpiece Certified Copy, Like Someone in Love represents an awkward act of translation that may just be less interesting than the sub-surface political critique at which the film hints.

This piece was co-authored by Lisa K. Broad and Michael J. Anderson.

Every Howard Hawks Film Ranked

With submission coming of my completed dissertation, The Early Hawks: Howard Hawks and His Films, 1926-1936, I thought it only fitting to provide some form of commemoration in this space. Feeling the momentary fatigue of writing, re-writing and revising the four-chapter project - The Early Hawks consists of "Regarding Eve's Rising Hemline" (on Fig Leaves), "Hawks Before the Hawksian" (on the pictured Paid to Love, The Cradle Snatchers and Fazil, with a Scarface coda), "The Dawn Patrol, the Group and Male Homo-sociality," and "Professionalism, the Protestant Ethic and the New Deal in Hawks" (mostly on The Criminal Code, Tiger Shark, Come and Get It and Ceiling Zero), in addition to an "Introduction" and "Conclusion," naturally - I have decided instead to go with an ill-advised, certain crowd-pleaser: a list of every Howard Hawks directed film, categorized by achievement and ranked in approximate order of preference. Enjoy, and I look forward to your own Hawks rankings (and fiery recriminations) in the comments section.

Supreme Masterpieces:
1. Rio Bravo (1959)
2. Scarface (1932)
3. His Girl Friday (1940)
4. Only Angels Have Wings (1939)

Additional Masterworks:
5. Hatari! (1962)
6. To Have and Have Not (1944)
7. Monkey Business (1952)
8. Bringing Up Baby (1938)
9. Ceiling Zero (1936)
10. I Was a Male War Bride (1949)
11. Twentieth Century (1934)
12. Red River (1948)

Signature and Other Major Works:
13. The Dawn Patrol (1930)
14. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953)
15. Air Force (1943)
16. The Criminal Code (1931)
17. The Big Sleep (1946)
18. Fig Leaves (1926)
19. The Thing from Another World (1951)*
20. A Girl in Every Port (1928)

Varying Degrees of Good:
21. The Big Sky (1952)
22. Come and Get It (1936)
23. El Dorado (1966)
24. The Cradle Snatchers (1927)
25. Man's Favorite Sport? (1964)
26. Tiger Shark (1932)
27. The Crowd Roars (1932)

Essential if More Mixed in Their Success:
28. Ball of Fire (1941)
29. Red Line 7000 (1965)
30. The Road to Glory (1936)

Minor Achievements:
31. Sergeant York (1941)
32. Barbary Coast (1935)
33. Paid to Love (1927)
34. Rio Lobo (1970)
35. Today We Live (1933)
36. A Song is Born (1948)

Deeply Flawed and Failed Pictures:
37. Fazil (1928)
38. The Ransom of Red Chief (1952)
39. Land of the Pharaohs (1955)
40. Trent's Last Case (1929)

Notes: Though The Thing from Another World [*] technically was directed by Christian Nyby, with Howard Hawks credited as "producer," few films are more expressive of the filmmaker's unique auteurship. For this reason, and for the persistent rumors of Hawks's greater involvement, it has been included in this accounting.

However, two films from which Hawks was let go shortly after shooting began, The Prizefighter and the Lady (1933) and Viva Villa! (1934), have been excluded. Neither, in the opinion of this writer, is particularly interesting in view of or germane to Hawks's larger body of work.

Likewise excluded are Hawks's two lost features, his directorial debut The Road to Glory (1926) and his first partial talking picture The Air Circus (1928). Of these two, there is every reason to believe that The Air Circus is the more substantial achievement.

The Spectator as Filmmaker: Abbas Kiarostami's Shirin (2008)

The film opens with the illustrated pages of Khosrow and Shirin, a story of Persian origins that the great epic poet Hakim Nezami Ganjavi pushed to its romantic apex in the twelfth century.  After a final credit naming Abbas Kiarostami as the director and producer of the work, Shirin (2008) cuts to a close-up of an attractive dark-eyed, round-faced woman of early middle-age seated in a darkened movie theatre.  Off-screen we hear a door unlatching, water dripping and the sound of footsteps on a stone floor.  The woman chews on a finger-full food, nodding briefly to her left, before fixing her gaze back on an off-camera cinema screen.  The film cuts to a second, likewise attractive woman, also chewing, as she watches the same film.  She is younger with droopier eyes and a more ovular face.  As in the first shot, a woman sits in the much less illuminated row behind her (in this case an older woman in a crimson head scarf) as the sound of women mourning becomes audible from the off-camera screen.  A second cut leads to yet another woman staring up at the invisible projected image with the first lines of film dialogue voiced over: “It’s time for my story.”  With this, the tragic story of Khosrow and Shirin unfolds in a motion picture that remains for us audible but unseen.

While we hear the off-camera adaptation proceed in its entirety from Shirin’s ecstatic discovery of Khosrow’s portrait to the heroine’s suicide at the tale’s conclusion (through a series of dialogues, accentuated sound effects and a conventionally manipulative score) we watch as a series of more than one hundred Persian women, with the jarring exception of Juliette Binoche, react to the projected film on camera.  Kiarostami maintains the same framing for each: a woman wearing a head-scarf is composed in a carefully lit close-up with typically darker planes behind her featuring additional female and occasionally male spectators.  Variations in the lighting of the unseen film reflect into the auditorium, painting Khosrow and Shirin’s spectators intermittently as they stare up at the invisible screen.  The women laugh, gasp, recoil and frequently weep as they react to what they (but not Shirin’s viewers) see on screen.  With the graphic, squishing sound of Shirin plunging a small dagger violently into her torso, an aged female spectator glances down, wiping a tear from her cheek before casting her gaze back up at the screen.  A non-diegetic, male-female duet commences within the off-screen picture as both films fade to black.  The music continues as Kiarostami rolls the credits for his one hundred-ten on-camera performers and twenty-two voice actors.         

***

In Abbas Kiarostami’s cinema of half-finished diegetic worlds requiring the spectator’s active participation to bring the works to completion, no film sustains a larger absence, nor requires a greater act of collaboration, than does Shirin.  As a film that systematically refuses to cutaway or to reverse fields from its ubiquitous female spectators to the always audible events occurring on the unseen screen, Shirin not only allows but insists that its viewers imaginatively supply a style to what is proceeding out-of-view, to make the visual choices that are traditionally the purview of the filmmakers: namely, to decide how the off-screen film looks, how it is lit, how the actors are blocked, whether the dialogue sequences utilize shot/reverse-shot editing and so on.  Of  course, Kiarostami does offer his spectators cues, as for instance the off-screen film’s reflected nocturnal shadows that envelope the room in a greater darkness, or conversely the waves of brighter light, bouncing off the invisible screen, which break through the auditorium and suggest a sudden, luminous daylight in the off-camera narrative.  Likewise, through the unseen film’s competing panoply of sounds, Kiarostami invites us to imagine the off-screen of the off-screen film; a mise-en-abyme of off-camera space is produced accordingly.  However, both the places and the people featured in the off-screen retelling of Khosrow and Shirin remain hidden from our view, subject to our own making (to the extent that we participate) in tandem with the sounds of their voices, the opening illustrated credits or even our images of the characters that we bring into the viewing.  In other words, we are permitted by Kiarostami to cast the actors, scout the locations and create the mise-en-scène, albeit within the parameters of a film practice, like Kiarostami’s, that remains attentive to off-camera sound and thus space. 

In suggesting an off-screen for a screen that is itself off-screen, Kiarostami further expands the space depicted in his cinema, which as always far exceeds that which the director captures between the four edges of his frames. Kiarostami frequently constructs the spaces of his films to insist on the relative smallness of the on-screen visual field within the greater framework of a world that his camera only fleetingly – and restrictively – captures.  Beyond the visible in these films there is an abundance of existence, whether it is the souls of the director’s The Wind Will Carry Us (1999) or the mise-en-scène of the unseen Khosrow and Shirin adaptation. 

At the same time, the visible in Shirin provides excesses of its own.  First, there are the more than one hundred women who populated Kiarostami’s static, close-up framings.  Though, in obedience with Iranian law, each wears a headscarf – thereby facilitating modesty by reducing the emphasis on the wearer’s outward appearance – the director’s method of framing each woman in extended, intimate close-up counteracts the logic of these coverings as its asks us to contemplate each woman’s appearance.  In our prolonged study of the film’s nearly uniformly beautiful set of actresses, we come to notice the smallest physical differences, whether it is a suppler lower lip or wider set eyes.  In this regard, Kiarostami pursues both the extreme repetition of works like Fellow Citizen (1983) and The Wind Will Carry Us, while also demanding the subtler, minute variation-based spectatorship of his landscape film Five Dedicated to Ozu (2003). 

Similarly, the responses of Shirin’s on-screen performers to the off-camera narrative provide us with an additional category of excess.  In contrast to the frequently inattentive, normative film spectator, or to the even more distracted, fragmentary viewer of the art gallery – Shirin’s original mode of exhibition – Kiarostami’s on-camera female spectators remain uniformly attentive to the unseen narrative; they almost never stop reacting to the film they are watching.  As such, we become aware of the fictitiousness of their gesturing and thus, of the gap between the performer and the feelings they articulate.  Nevertheless, the emotional tenor of the performers’ responses invite us to see in Shirin’s travails those of the modern Persian women.  In this concern, as in the film’s systematic use of close-ups to frame female faces, Shirin points back to the director’s feminist Ten (2002).  Both films also reaffirm, along with Pedro Costa’s Colossal Youth (2006) and Wang Bing’s Fengming: A Chinese Memoir (2007), that the baseline for twenty-first century minimalism resides in close-ups of the human face.   

Yet, Shirin offers another, very different spectatorial experience to its viewers.  By placing the greatest emphasis on what we hear rather than what we see, Shirin becomes a much more conventional narrative experience: a story, replete with romantic intrigue and graphic violence, told chronologically following an opening framing device.  It becomes in other words its off-screen adaptation of Khosrow and Shirin, which notably differs substantially from the director’s personal idiom.  Indeed, though it is easy to speculate that Kiarostami himself would never make the film-within-the-film in the conventional form that his soundtrack suggests, the director permits this right to his spectator by leaving Shirin’s meta-narrative off-screen, and thus, unfinished.  Again, he leaves it to his viewers to “make” the film as they see fit.

English Title(s): Shirin, My Sweet Shirin
Original Title: Shirin

Country of Origin: Iran

Production Company: Abbas Kiarostami Productions

Director: Abbas Kiarostami

Producer: Abbas Kiarostami

Executive Producer: Hamideh Razavi

Based on Khosrow and Shirin by: Farrideh Golbou

Inspired by the work of: Hakim Nezami Ganjavi

Screenplay: Mohammed Rahmanian

Based on the 12^th century poem by: Nezami

Cinematography: Mahmoud Kalari, Houman Behmanesh

Editor: Abbas Kiarostami, Arash Sadeghi l.n.

Sound: M. Reza Delpak

Sound Recording: Mani Hashemian, Reza Narimizadeh

Music: Heshmat Sanjari, Morteza Hananeh, Hossein Dehlavi, Samin Baghchehban  

Conductor: Manouchehr Sahbaie

Singers: Hossein Sarshar, Solmaz Naraghi

Lyrics: Sheikh Farid, Aldin Attar

Runtime: 92 mins.

Genre: Art Gallery Instillation

Color: Color

Cast: 132 credited on-screen performers and voice actors including Mahnaz Afshar, Taraneh Alidoosti, Juliette Binoche, Golshifteh Farahani, Niki Karimi

Year: 2008

New Film: Django Unchained (2012)

One half of two thousand-twelve's most essential Hollywood double-feature along with Steven Spielberg's Lincoln (2012), Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained (2012) pursues and provides the greater and more novel insight into the abhorrent institution of American slavery, unearthing a piquant metaphor in the period-specific performativity that the writer-director's film spotlights. From Christoph Waltz's first on-screen appearance driving a carriage capped with a colossal molar, the writer-director's revisionist latest highlights the process of play-acting and the act of withholding one's identity: Waltz's Dr. King Schultz, a former dentist turned bounty hunter as it happens, labels himself only as a "weary fellow traveler," desirous of purchasing a recently auctioned slave from a pair of Texas slavers. When the latter refuse to accommodate Schultz's abnormal (if still amenably offered) request, Waltz reveals his preternatural faculty with a firearm, executing one of his newly made acquaintances in a manner that extends the film's eponymous citation of the "Spaghetti Western" cycle.

With the title's 'unchained' Django (Jamie Foxx) thus joining the flesh-hunting Schultz, the latter coaches his new riding companion on the role he will be charged to fulfill, first in virtual form and consequently in point-of-fact: that of a free man. Waltz's lead insists on the importance of Django not breaking character, and entreats his new associate to select his costuming - an invitation that initially results in an brassy blue suit and over-sized white lace bow that feels borrowed from the visual lexicon of African American minstrelsy. Of course, when Django is compelled, following his archetypal emergence as a New Hollywood cowboy, to pretend that he is a black slaver, "the lowest of the low" - despite his stated reservations, Foxx's character shows some relish in inhabiting the despicable figure - he opts for dark-toned garments and gold-tinted spectacles that help the undercover black bounty hunter to carry off his latest role in true Tarantino fashion, as a bad-ass.

In transitioning between freeman and black-slaver, Tarantino's Django invites the spectator to consider the performed aspect of each historical type. With the film's subsequent sketching of Samuel L. Jackson's kowtowing head house slave Stephen in disparate public and private settings, where he inhabits profoundly different personas, Django Unchained further extends this discourse onto the institution of slavery itself, with the abundant mental aptitude of Jackson's villainous race-trader coming into view. That is, through Jackson's shifting characterization, one that it should be added that cuts strongly against the Gone with the Wind (1939) simpleton stereotype in its acknowledgement of Stephen's substantial masked intelligence, writer-director Tarantino suggests that slavery itself - and as always its depiction over the course of film history - required an adherence to expected type, which belied the personality and again mental abilities of those inhabiting the roles. Tarantino's film opens up a space between the role and the person (rather than the slave) inhabiting it.

Django Unchained's theatrical discourse serves additionally to translate Inglourious Basterds' (2009) Occupation-era cinematic intertext into a self-referential form more appropriate to the film's mid-nineteenth century moment. The incontrovertibly major Inglourious Basterds indeed provides a point of departure in almost every sense, beginning with its ontological status as an object of psychic historical revision: where Inglourious Basterds provides a fantastic, contingent counter-reality in which Jews and members of the cinematic colony bring about the destruction of the Third Reich, in an orgiastic final act explosion of extreme cartoon violence, Django Unchained gives agency to the victims of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, whether it is the unshackled slaves in the opening set-piece, Django in his role as homicidal bounty-hunter, or the latter in his final, ruthless, John Woo-coded devastation of Candieland (which will include slavers and complicit whites and blacks alike). Django Unchained also responds to and revises Inglourious Basterds' negative Germanic archetype, with former film Nazi Waltz recast as the 'good guy.' At the same time, the World War II film's heroic Americans are now cast as their villainous, slave-owning ancestors in what will prove the first of Django Unchained's many provocations.

Even more inciting perhaps than Django Unchained's audacious anti-Americanism is its approach to its race-centered subject in a purportedly post-racial America. In particular it is Django Unchained's facility for making its spectator take pleasure in one form or another in the focalized Schultz and Django's interactions with the film's execrable Southern subjects, whether it is the humor that he or she finds in Big Daddy's (Don Johnson) sudden, financially prompted acquiescence to Django's visiting freeman; Stephen's hyperbolized embodiment of his house slave role; or the brutal Monsieur Candie's (Leonardo DiCaprio) perverse appreciation of Foxx's black-slaver. In each one of these instances, it is the charisma of the performers, in a further indication of the centrality of the film's performative discourse, along side the character's moral or intellectual flexibility - their humanity, in a manner of speaking - which sanctions the spectators enjoyment.

However, this is not to suggest for a moment that Django Unchained glosses slavery. Indeed, in Tarantino's latest, the viewer is immediately confronted with the nauseating brutality of the institution in the sliced backs of the film's black subjects, the unrepresentable spectacle of dogs ripping a Mandingo fighter to pieces - this off-frame holocaust brings about a change in the German Waltz - and of their dehumanizing denial of family, which in Django Unchained provides the ultimate impetus for the film's cotton-field Odyssey. Django Unchained in this sense is a very moral film, despite its trafficking in an Alfred Hitchcock-inspired amorality and its incursions of extreme visceral violence.

Much more can and should be said for and of Django Unchained, beginning with its exploitation and genre-cinema citations and its admixture of cultural archetypes in the service of its black subject matter. (Of note, for instance, is the provocative appearance of hip-hop to coincide with Django's embodiment of the black-slaver role.) For now and for this writer, let me just close by stating simply that Django Unchained could have been made by no one other than Tarantino and that, for better or (on some socially symptomatic level) worse, the director's latest stands as the most powerful piece of American filmmaking to reach screens in the past twelve months.

Let me thank fellow Tativille contributor Lisa K. Broad for her substantial contributions to this piece,  and especially for her insights into the film's theatrical thesis.

The 2012 Mini-Poll

In the fifth consecutive installment of Ten Best Films' "Mini-Poll", the Tativille extended family's annual attempt to find some form of cinematic consensus for the year that was - by means of a statistically insignificant survey - general accord has once again been achieved. At least it has been reached in choosing the film of the year: Leos Carax's Holy Motors. Of this year's ten respondents, seven listed the latest by France's enfant gris (to quote programmer James Quandt) as one of the year's best, with an eighth citing it among the year's better runners up. Among the seven that picked Holy Motors, three chose it as the best film of 2012 - including Tativille's husband-and-wife proprietors - with a fourth listing it in second place. In other words, it was a decisive selection for this year's Mini-Poll respondents, even if personally it represented a soft number one after the very great Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives and Once Upon a Time in Anatolia topped my own picks in 2010 and 2011 respectively. For the record, the former major masterpiece ranks tenth overall in the combined poll results (which are available likewise on the Ten Best Films post linked here) whereas the latter. sixth place finisher in 2011 received points from two more voters in two thousand-twelve, making it more marginally more popular than this year's surprise second place selection.

What was this year's number two? Well, suffice it to say that it premiered at the 2012 Berlin Film Festival (along with this year's even more startling fifth place selection) and is cited in visual form at the top of this post. (It's Christian Petzold's G. D. R.-themed Barbara if any question still remains for the reader.) Between Adopt Films' second and fifth place titles are this year's highest ranked American films, from a pair of well-established auteurs who got their directorial starts during the formative for us all 1990s. Numbers six through eleven - there were eleven films that got three or more films in this year's poll - include two more American titles from an even younger generation of directors, a pair of English-language films from outside the United States, and finally two additional titles from the European Union. Of these, the sixth place Amour came the closest to matching Holy Motors' top-end popularity with two of its three voters listing it as the best of the year, and a third slotting it in at number three. Haneke's strong performance is nothing new to the 'Mini-Poll,' with The White Ribbon remaining 2009's highest ranking world premiere (and of the survey's all-time top eleven).

Finally, let me list those additional titles that were cited by this year's remaining contributors as the year's very best: The Kid with a Bike, Leviathan, Looper, Moonrise Kingdom and The Turin Horse. Of these, only Leviathan has placed on a single list, though its advanced reputation - and its champion's exceptional track record - would suggest that you will see quite a bit more of it on the two thousand-thirteen Mini-Poll.

For the full 2012 poll results, click here.

And for our individual ballots, click on the italicized websites listed below:

• Michael J. Anderson, Tativille
• Soren Bailey, Ten Best Films
• Lisa K. Broad, Tativille
• Pamela Kerpius, Ten Best Films
• Mike Lyon, Tits & Gore
• Matt Singer, Criticwire
• R. Emmet Sweeney, Ten Best Films
• Jeremi Szaniawski, Ten Best Films
• Karen Wang, You're Making a Scene
• Alberto Zambenedetti, Ten Best Films

The Ten Best Films of 2012

1. Holy Motors (Leos Carax)

2. The Deep Blue Sea (Terence Davies, 2011)

3. Barbara (Christian Petzold)

4. Cosmopolis (David Cronenberg)

5. Tabu (Miguel Gomes)

6. Moonrise Kingdom (Wes Anderson)

7. Looper (Rian Johnson)

8. 4:44 Last Day on Earth (Abel Ferrara, 2011)

9. Footnote (Joseph Cedar, 2011)

10. Silver Linings Playbook (David O. Russell)

Honorable Mentions: Here and There (Antonio Méndez Esparza) and Argentinian Lesson (Wojciech Staroń, 2011)

The Best Films of 2012

The Ten Best New Films of 2012: 
1. Holy Motors (Leos Carax)
2. Moonrise Kingdom (Wes Anderson)
3. The Deep Blue Sea (Terence Davies, 2011)
4. Barbara (Christian Petzold)
5. Tabu (Miguel Gomes)
6. Django Unchained (Quentin Tarantino) 
7. In Another Country (Hong Sang-soo)
8. Here and There (Antonio Méndez Esparza)
9. Alps (Yorgos Lanthimos, 2011)
10. Footnote (Joseph Cedar, 2011)  

First Runner-Up:
Bernie (Richard Linklater, 2011)

Performance of the Year/Second Runner-Up: 
Seann William Scott, Goon (Michael Dowse, 2011)

Honorable Mentions (In Alphabetical Order):
Las Acacias (Pablo Giorgelli, 2011)
Argentinian Lesson (Wojciech Staroń, 2011)
Attenberg (Athina Rachel Tsangari, 2010)
Elena (Andrey Zvyagintsev, 2011)
I Wish (Hirokazu Kore-eda, 2011)
Lincoln (Steven Spielberg)
Miss Bala (Gerard Naranjo, 2011)
Oslo, August 31st (Joachim Trier, 2011)
Silver Linings Playbook (David O. Russell)
We Have a Pope (Nanni Moretti, 2011)

The above films represent the best new commercial releases and festival premieres that I first viewed in two thousand-twelve. Excluded are those commercially released features that I screened previously - mostly at the 2011 New York Film Festival. For those choices, see last year's selection of the Ten Best Films of 2011. Of course, I would be remiss were I not to mention the large swath of 2012 premieres, which have not yet had their local festival or commercial debuts. Please assume that my exclusions of films such as Amour, Leviathan, Like Someone in Love, Neighbouring Sounds, Night Across the Street, You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet, and Zero Dark Thirty reflect my inability to see the films before year's end, and do not constitute intentional slights. 

However, I do not wish my readers to assume the same about The Avengers, The Dark Knight Rises and The Master - three films that impassioned audiences and/or critics, but which left me greatly underwhelmed. As for the lauded Argo, Beasts of the Southern Wild, Cosmopolis, Looper and Magic Mike, while I found all five to be creditable works of the English-language cinema, none felt quite list-worthy to me. I might be inclined to say the same for Paul W. S. Anderson's Resident Evil: Retribution, were its substantial virtues not overlooked by most critics. So for it, let me offer the 'best use of 3-D' garland and one last 'honorable mention' citation.     
  

Excellent Belatedly Screened 2011 Commercial Releases (In Order of Preference):
My Joy (Sergei Loznitsa, 2010)
To Die Like a Man (João Pedro Rodrigues, 2009)
Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol (Brad Bird, 2011)

Twenty-five Outstanding Older Films Seen for the First Time (In Alphabetical Order):
Act of Violence (Fred Zinnemann, 1948)
The Adventures of Robert Macaire (Jean Epstein, 1925)
Au bonheur des dames (Julien Duvivier, 1930)
The Big Country (William Wyler, 1958)
A Cottage on Dartmoor (Anthony Asquith, 1929)
Clouds of May (Nuri Bilge Ceylan, 1999)
Fedora (Billy Wilder, 1978)
Flowers Have Fallen (Tamizo Ishida, 1938)
From Saturday to Sunday (Gustav Machatý, 1931)
The Girl I Loved (Keisuke Kinoshita, 1946)
Letter Never Sent (Mikhail Kalatozov, 1959)
Lifeline (Víctor Erice, 2002)
Martha (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1974)
Only Yesterday (Takahato Isao, 1991)
Phoenix (Keisuke Kinoshita, 1947)
The Portrait (Keisuke Kinoshita, 1948)
Prix de beauté (Augusto Genina, 1930)
Remorques (Jean Grémillon, 1941)
The Report (Abbas Kiarostami, 1977)
School for Scoundrels (Robert Hamer, 1960)
The State I Am In (Christian Petzold, 2000)
The Story of Temple Drake (Stephen Roberts, 1933)
The Stranger (Satyajit Ray, 1991)
Whisper of the Heart (Yoshifumi Kondō, 1995)
Zorns Lemma (Hollis Frampton, 1970)

Major Films that I Came to Appreciate Considerably More (In Alphabetical Order):
The Best Years of Our Lives (William Wyler, 1946)
Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982)
Hallelujah! (King Vidor, 1929)

Finally, there are my nominations for film event and screening of the year: Sight & Sound's commendable selection of Vertigo (1958) as "the greatest film of all-time"; and a private, six-person screening of the film in a pristine, 1983 re-release print, a matter of weeks before the announcement of the poll results. In almost any year - and certainly in 2012 - seeing Vertigo under these extraordinary circumstances would qualify as my single best cinematic experience. 

The Best of 2012 In Review: The Deep Blue Sea

Adapted by the director from Terence Rattigan's eponymous 1952 play, Terence Davies' The Deep Blue Sea (2011) opens in a procession of powerfully cinematic figures, from the filmmaker's Ophülsian (commencing) crane work to a breathy collection of cross-dissolves and fades that seem to inhale along with the on-screen heroine. As Rachel Weisz's Hester slips into a suicidal unconscious, Davies' film slides imperceptibly into Hester's recent fire-lit past, thereby initiating a Proustian temporality that will continue to obtain throughout the remainder of the filmmaker's highly refined reworking of Rattigan. With Samuel Barber's stringed Concerto sobbing along with the unhappily married lead, Davies cuts to the obsessed-over object of Hester's diffusely-lit memory, Tom Hiddleston's impeccably tailored, laddish combat veteran, Freddie Page. With their kiss - wrapped in the amber warmth of a London pub - becoming an almost gender-less knot of pale white flesh, Davies' camera circles above his adulterous pairing in the first of a set of similar rotations that will return the viewer back to Hester's receding present. It will remain for a sudden hard sound edit to snap Hester and the spectator back into the diegetic now, to break the narcotic spell of Davies' opening romantic salvo.

Through its masterful manipulations of space and time, light and sound, Davies' Deep Blue Sea beginning bolsters the filmmaker's already unimpeachable status as the very best that the British cinema currently has to offer. So too does the physical precision that Davies pulls out his performers, whether it is Sir William Collyer's (Simon Russell Beale) hovering hand that in the faintest measure of his all-but-absent sensuality makes next to no tactile contact with the surface beneath it, or the achingly beautiful rhythmic rise and fall of wife Hester's seizing chest. The Deep Blue Sea's feeling for gesture, in this respect, elicits comparisons to the extraordinary observational acumen of the director's Mizoguchian masterpiece The House of Mirth (2000), while the fragmented temporal structure of Davies' very great Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988) and The Long Day Closes (1992) returns in Hester's fluid subjectivity. Similarly present is the Liverpudlian Davies' pop sensibility, which as it happens belongs much more to The Deep Blue Sea's pre-rock-and-roll early fifties moment than to the 1960s British Invasion sound that Of Time and the City (2008) excoriates.

Davies' diegetic use of pop, in his signature sing-along format, serves to construct The Deep Blue Sea's proletarian public. In the film's first group sing, a collective public-house rendition of  "You Belong to Me," Davies establishes the class disparity that divides lovers Freddie and Hester, and which finally denies the latter full membership in the film's postwar community: where Freddie freely belts out the 1952 hit, Hester only sporadically mouths the familiar pop lyrics. However, amid the socially leveling experience of World War II bombardment, Hester and her husband Sir William are allowed temporary membership in London's closely knit public: in another of the film's fluid long-takes, Davies discloses the upper-class couple, huddled together on a populated tube platform, as they sing along with the Dublin street anthem, "Molly Malone." In this flashback-within-a-flashback, inaugurated by an architectural madeleine, Lord and Lady Collyer join an historical British public that is finally defined by a shared popular culture.

Even more than its carefully rendered class dynamics and its exceptional aesthetic sensitivity - save for the supremely focal remembered warmth of the postwar period's interior illumination and the dull morning light that stages the work's prodigious melancholy - The Deep Blue Sea emphasizes the staggering romantic commitment of Hester to her beloved Freddie, a love that Hiddleston's objet du désir ultimately refuses to reciprocate. Lady Hester risks everything for Freddie's occasional gift of himself - an offering that he only rarely extends to the endlessly devoted heroine. Hers is an absolute in passion that landlady Mrs. Elton (Ann Mitchell) nonetheless distinguishes from real love. (Mrs. Elton defines genuine love rather as wiping someone's ass to preserve their dignity.) For her cuckolded husband - whom it should be noted learns of the affair in a static, behind-the-back framing of Weisz that constructs an expectation of discovery - their story is fundamentally tragic, a worthy heir to the filmmaker's Ophülsian and Mizoguchian sources. For Hester, however, her great love of a man who does not share her feelings is merely "sad," not least of all as it proves an experience that can be overcome. Indeed, Davies ends with an emblem of perseverance: in a circular return to the film's nocturnal opening, the psychologically ruins of the Second World War are presented in the clear light of day, following an unexpected shift in Hester's heretofore gloomy disposition.

The Deep Blue Sea is currently available on the Netflix Instant streaming platform and on home video.   

New Film: Holy Motors (2012)

A work of enterprising vision and aggressive newness that finds all narratives exhausted, Leos Carax's Holy Motors (2012) emerges as one of the year's most fully realized ruminations on the current and coming status of film art. With flash Muybridge inserts, Hugoesque fiction and a battery of prosthetic disguises, Carax's first film in thirteen years brings the century of cinema's invention into contact with the incidence of its digital expiration and even its extrapolated fictionalized future. Holy Motors is a film without an outside, a cinema that is all cinema - a cinema as dream, in the spirit of Carax's opening metaphor - that nonetheless feels the fatigue of the productive act in the ages of the DCP multiplex, satellite broadcasting and inevitably, Internet image-making.

Holy Motors constructs its allegory for the twenty-first century artefactual experience as a omnibus-style sequence of nine "appointments" (in addition to a reflexively surreal prologue, de-constructive musical intermission, and post-human epilogue) that the aptly named M. Oscar (Denis Lavant) keeps over the course of a single, extended work-day. Chauffeured to each by professional associate Céline (Édith Scob, pictured, beneath the mint-green mask), Oscar is charged with incarnating a series of disparate figures that he cometically contrives in the spacious backseat of stretch limousine. (Holy Motors almost inevitably suggests an aleatoric companion-piece to David Cronenberg's fellow Cannes premiere, Cosmopolis; 2012.) In thus relying so exceedingly on the mise-en-scène of the celluloid index (make-up, costuming), Carax's film openly resists the transformative capacities of digital editing.

What Holy Motors opts for instead is already and more profoundly present in Muybridge: the movement of a body in space. In Carax's latest, the ubiquity of Lavant's physical presence suggests nothing less than the displacement of the traditional film index onto the actor's body. In fact, the body is so central to Holy Motors that it remains the focal presence even when it is submitted to technological effacement: in the instance of M. Oscar's employment as a motion-capture actor, it is not the animated adult-fantasy imagery that provides the chief source of the passage's spectacle, but rather the astonishing bodily contortions performed by Lavant's co-star (in addition, of course, to the glowing abstractions produced by the body-suit sensors). In any case, it is the body in space once again that perseveres as Carax's subject - even when it is submitted to digital conversion.

Oscar's fantastic motion-capture 'appointment' contributes to Holy Motor's comprehensive cataloging of genre, with forms as disparate as Gothic horror, deathbed melodrama, the musical, and science-fiction comedy also included in Carax's encyclopedic project. This same omnibus structure equally serves to inscribe the changing cultural tenor of contemporary Paris: indications of radical Islam, single-parent households, demographic exhaustion and (of course) celebrity all emerge over the course of Carax's nine-part narrative. (In attempting on some level to contend with Paris as it is now constituted, Holy Motors achieves a surface-level contemporaneity that is absent all-too-often among art-house French imports.) Finally, Carax's shifting subjects and settings afford the director the opportunity for revisiting his own cinematic past, from the return of his "Merde" (2008) sewer-dweller to the sparkling nocturnal presence of Les Amants du Pont-Neuf's (1991) focalized structure.

It is Paris ultimately that completes Holy Motor's historically grounded sense of the cinematic index. However, it is a Paris that the spectator will never fail to behold without the filmmaker's self-conscious mediation. Holy Motors is cinema that perpetually reminds its viewer of its status as fiction, explicitly transforming the often familiar, though rarely less than fresh narratives that surrealistically unfold as a series of acting 'appointments' into the stuff of the capitalistic commodity. Holy Motor is a film for our media-saturated moment and one of the few releases of 2012 that might just merit the title masterpiece. Minimally, Carax's latest represents a career peak for the director, and at the risk of damning with faint praise, a new high for the filmmakers of France's Cinéma du look.

This review was co-written by Michael J. Anderson and Lisa K. Broad.

Holy Motors is currently being distributed in North America by Indomina Releasing.