Now At The Getty: The Religious Art of Sinai and Dresden

Running now through March 4th at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, Holy Image, Hallowed Ground: Icons from Sinai represents the largest American instillation of Byzantine icons from St. Catherine's Monastery on the Sinai Peninsula -- which happens to house more than half of all Eastern icons in existence. As such, Holy Image, Hallowed Ground constitutes a major event in the art world on the basis of its subject alone. Therefore, it is all the more gratifying that the exhibition not only establishes the stylistic and thematic range of the pieces, but their substantial aesthetic value as well, and at least a facsimile of their impact. These are works that don't reproduce well, however -- the pieces require the beholder to interact with them in their space. Take for instance the masterful Late 12th century Annunciation from the Holy Monastery: here, a burnished golden ray of light cuts through the large, empty gold-leaf background, depicting the Holy Spirit's descent in the scene. In print -- or on-screen -- the work's compositional grace is manifest, though it fails to reach its genuine phenomenological impact: in person, the ray of light seems to almost descend toward the Virgin when one moves in front of the icon, with the burnished ray becoming apparent from certain angles when it is invisible from others.

Another instance of this work's power in its presence can be found in the superlative 11th century Scenes of the Nativity immediately to the Annunciation's left. In its case, the work's beautiful color palette becomes visible in a manner that seems impossible in print or on line. Yet, it is not simply that the work utilizes rich hues, but that they guide the beholder's view, narrating what is genuinely a sophisticated narrational space: the viewer's gaze lands at the Mary and then the midwife in the upper center of the composition, before his/her attention is led to the magi approaching and then to a scene of their adoration of the Christ child. (This element again is not evident in print, and therefore does not fully tell the story of their readings; in person, the nativity works in much the same way as Masaccio's Tribute Money.) However, this piece's complexity does not begin and end with its color schema, but indeed finds a form to communicate multiple narrative scenes within the hilly topography of the composition -- often in clearly readable sequences. In addition, this eleventh century work (most likely originating in Constantinople) utilizes space in a fashion where form articulates content, as with the beam of light that connects the Christ child with the ethereal upper register, or with the magi literally leaving on the panel's other side (thereby giving form to the axiom that they left on a different route after being warned by an angel -- whom we see with them elsewhere). And then of course there is the exceptional detail that was once thought to be the purview of the illuminated manuscript, but again in the presence of these works is shown to be essential to their achievement.


If I am becoming a bit long-winded with reference to this single piece, it is because I have been studying it specifically for the past couple of months, in preparation for the exhibition. For the sake of total disclosure, in my new life as an art historian, I have been enrolled in Holy Image, Hallowed Ground's curator Robert Nelson's Icons seminar at Yale. Having said that, let me also say that with my intimate experience of the pieces for these past few months, I can say without reservation that Prof. Nelson's exhibition has exceeded my expectations. These are works that are not only made to be seen, but to be interacted with, in space that the Getty has recreated admirably. For those who can and do see these pieces at the Getty sometime in the coming months, this is the sort of exhibition that can make one rethink its period, and in fact the history of art. Future writers of textbook surveys will need to contend with the Annunciation, Scenes of the Nativity, St. Theodosia (from the catalogue cover; above), a remarkable 6th century St. Peter, and countless other works of similar sophistication -- not that their reproduction will tell us what we need to know about these wonderful works.


Ironically, then, another exhibition currently on view at the Getty showcases a series of works that are actually more impressive in reproduction, as a colleague of mine pointed out: Gerhard Richter's 2005 Wald Series in From Caspar David Friedrich to Gerhard Richter. These series of anti-art, semi-figurative landscapes, commissioned for this exhibit to respond to the half-dozen or so Dresden Friedrich's on display, suffer from the excessively intense over-head lighting and the space's stark white walls (in contrast to the purple tones in the two Romantic-era rooms) to be sure; even so, these spatial difficencies do not mitigate the garish palette of this modern heavyweight: the resonant golds of the catalogue are in the presence of the works, ill-conceived lemons. Moreover, the cycles themselves are incomplete, and at a point, arrest for lack of continuity -- while patterns emerge, to be sure, as with a rich series of landscapes reproducing water effects (again more poetic in print), at some point these same patterns fall apart, denying the cohesiveness that an engagement with the Romantic master would seem to dictate -- that is, if they are to respond to him at all.


As for the Friedrich's, in spite of their slim numbers, there is opportunity to learn something new about this artist -- namely, that his misty and often tumultuous landscapes were very much in the service of another project: his belief in transcendence, presence beyond surface, and particularly his devout Protestant faith. A Crucifix in a suitably Gothic frame (designed by the artist) makes this case as the centerpiece of the exhibition; however, given this point of reference, works such as the poetic Bushes in the Snow (1827-8; above) or Two Men Contemplating the Moon (c. 1819) register this same quality with greater nuance. In this way, then, From Caspar David Friedrich to Gerhard Richter at least provides a framework to view the former's metaphysical purpose -- to say nothing of giving American audiences the opportunity to see rarely-seen masterworks.

New Film: Marie Antoinette

In the words of my girlfriend, Marie Antoinette is not just a girl's movie, but a very particular kind of girl's movie: a movie for girl's who don't mind quasi-long take movies with little dialogue. In other words, its for her -- or better yet perhaps, for who she was maybe five years ago; that is, the kind of girl who then (as now) knows that the first song was Gang of Four. So, I will leave the main -- albeit short -- assessment of the film to her, Lisa K. Broad, with my own similarly concise comments to follow. Enjoy.

Somewhere beneath the 80s-soundtrack and cotton-candy color palate of Sophia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette beats the heart of an American art film. Reveling in pure sensual experience, the film largely avoids the psychological terrain covered by most film biographies. The dialogue is sparse and strange, and the narrative nearly non-existent, but the vivid music and imagery demand not just to be seen and heard, but to be actively looked at and listened to. In its penchant for flat, frontal staging and cheeky reflexivity, Marie Antoinette brings to mind Sally Potter’s Orlando (minus the feminism). I also wouldn’t be surprised if Coppola had studied up on the punk period-pieces of Potter’s mentor Derek Jarman.

At once compromised and uncompromising, the film is alive with beautiful graphic compositions that manifest a painterly attention to color, light, and texture, and striking radial symmetry, but Coppola rarely allows them to linger onscreen long enough to be fully appreciated. Seemingly afraid of alienating her audience, she falls just short of the true long-take style she hints at. The subject, or perhaps the object, of each of these aesthetic meditations is the lovely Kirsten Dunst. Although Dunst’s Marie Antoinette remains completely opaque throughout the film’s duration, her body is exhibited to us so closely and at such length that a kind of phenomenological intimacy is generated that gives way to a creeping, visceral dread as the specter of the royal family’s grisly demise looms ever closer. Thus although Marie Antoinette isn’t terribly deep, it skims along the surface of things with a kind of rigor and sensitivity that escapes many films that presume to plumb the depths.

-Lisa K. Broad

Thanks, Lisa. Let me concur with your observation that "Coppola rarely allows [her compositions] to linger onscreen long enough to be fully appreciated." While one might say that this distinguishes the director as a post-MTV artist, it remains, to my thinking, a flaw of her aesthetic. In my opinion, this same element limits her highly-regarded Lost in Translation (2003), as does her generally tendency to film in a relatively shallow depth-of-field. Perhaps one could connect such a style to the inherent shallowness of the film's subject, but to do so does not exactly flatter the maker -- as she would have produced a superficial form to express her film's superficial content.

As to Coppola's choice of topics, let me say that it makes sense that this daughter of Hollywood royalty would dare to produce a biography of this oft-vilified historical figure. That she musically situates the picture in her own teenage decade -- the '80s -- provides added resonance (in terms of the film's biographical dimension). Ultimately, Marie Antoinette manifests nothing if not the director's ambition. And in its defense, let me add that I find the connection compelling: surely, Marie would not be so out of place in our celebrity-obsessed age.

New Film: Volver

Literally meaning "to return," Pedro Almodóvar's Volver confirms its title through a number of related associations: director Almodóvar was born in La Mancha, where for the first time he has located one of his films; Volver stars two of his acting axioms -- Penelope Cruz and Carmen Maura -- the latter of which he is working with for the first time since 1988's Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown; and then there is the subject of "motherhood" that found expression in his All About My Mother (1999), which coincidentally was released the same year that the director's mother and occasional cameo Francisca Caballero passed away.

Here, Maura plays Cruz's and Lola Dueñas's deceased mother, Irene, who begins to appear to locals of their former home town, including their soon-to-be late Aunt (Chus Lampreave). Dueñas's Sole is the first of the daughters to see their dead mother, after she arrives for Aunt Paula's funeral. (Death, it should be noted, is everywhere in the opening portions of the film.)

However, it is less in this trans-grave reunion than in Cruz's familial plotline where the picture's melodramatic heft becomes apparent. After an initial visit to Irene's grave and Aunt Paula's home, before she passes on, Cruz's Raimunda and her daughter Paula (Yohana Cobo) arrive home to find the shiftless man of the house lazing on the couch after losing his job earlier that day. After gazing at his teenage daughter, the gentleman climbs into bed with his wife, who withholds intimacy from him. The next day Raimunda arrives home to find her stunned daughter -- the implications of which are that she has been sexually assulted by her father (who claims that he is not this). To be sure, we learn that he did try, though as we also learn the young woman has slain her father in the midst of the act. Raimunda quickly intervenes, enlistening her female friends first to hide the body in a restaurant freezer and later to bury him in a spot beside a country stream.

In the meantime, Raimunda herself has stumbled upon an additional revenue stream -- necessitated by her husband's lost income -- by catering for a local film crew (at the aforementioned restaurant). It is at this point that Sole encounters her dead mother and the film's secondary plot commences. Sole takes her mother in as a hair-washer in her fugitive hair salon and soon Sole is forced to hide her ghost mother from her sister and niece.

At this point, the ontological status of Irene is still contested: is she actually supernatural? Is she instead alive? Or perhaps is she a fictional projection of the character's loneliness? After all, those that have seen her have all this loneliness in common. (In this way, Volver resembles the director's masterpiece Talk to Her, 2002; and like that film, Almodóvar poetically concludes Volver by bringing together two lonely people.) Whatever Irene is, suffice it to say that Almodóvar's masterful manipulation of narrative information allows the spectator to evolve in his or her thinking as to what Irene could be, before the director discloses the perfectly reasonable answer. As such, Almodóvar again reveals himself to be one of the world's most accomplished classical directors.

Then again, the classicism of Almodóvar, or rather his position within the framework of popular filmmaking might be more accurately described as "rococo." Indeed, commensurate with this term, Almodóvar's art seems to signal a style that is decorative for its own sake: the director's strong bold colors (blues, yellows and reds) and his canted angles and overhead camera positions all seem to exist for their own sake. If anything one could say that Almodóvar succeeds in producing visual pleasure. Nevertheless, the visual tropes serve as both a signature visual style and also position the artist's work within a tradition that stretches back to the melodramas of John M. Stahl and Douglas Sirk.

Certainly, Volver is no less melodramatic than its hyperbolic sources, particularly given the film's central mother-daughter dynamic, to say nothing of the incestuous content. Yet, in the case of the latter specifically, it would seem that Almodóvar is again figuring the autobiography that is inherent in the picture's title (as one could also say of the film's systematic disclosure of familial secrets) -- that is, as long as one can read the homosexual Almodóvar into the experiences shared by the mother and daughter, given the clear autobiographical elements that are otherwise connoted in his almost male-free narrative. Either way, one might see in this generational exposition of victimhood an archetype of homosexual experience, as it also connects the film thematically to much of the director's corpus (where non-normative sexual experience are closer to the norm).

However, in identifying the author as homosexual, another important component of the narrative loses its obvious interpretation: namely, the emphasis upon the almost vulgar excessive physical beauty of Ms. Cruz. No longer a pure object of fetish, one might instead see in Almodovar's framing of the actress a curiosity in her other-worldly beauty that seems to connect to the picture's profane sense of humor through the director's often tongue-in-cheek compositions (like his overhead's of Cruz's cleavage). At the same time, Volver remains somehow restrained compared to much of the director's corpus. To be sure, it is for this reason, among others, that Volver stands out among the director's work -- this might be his finest film this side of the very similar Talk to Her. Further, the director's genuinely Hitchcockian handling of narrative information (the plot's amoral manipulations are certainly worthy of the master) makes Volver the finest fusion of art and entertainment released thus far this year.

New Film: Climates

Be advised: the following post contains spoilers.

Nuri Bilge Ceylan's Climates (Iklimler), starring director Ceylan and his wife Ebru, compels its viewer to read the film as auto-biographical by dint of the director's casting of he and his wife as a couple who are in the process of breaking up. Indeed, it doesn't take Ceylan long to depict the split -- the director's character Isa, a photographer, initiates the parting following a session photographing ruins with his bored girlfriend in tow, and a dinner party where the latter laughs hysterically after Isa attempts some small-talk with the host. Following a dream sequence of Ebru's Bahar, where she is buried in sand by Isa after he tells her that he loves her, the male lead tells his girlfriend that he believes they should split up in a sequence where we first see him rehearsing and that we see the actual communication, without realizing that she is listening (Nuri blocks the scene to hide Bahar's participation). Shortly thereafter, director Ceylan shows Bahar leaving and it would seem that the film will continue to follow her post break-up.

However, in the next scene it is Isa who returns as the subject. Subsequently, Climates follows the male lead through its second act as he returns to his professorial job, and later, bumps into a couple of friends in a book store. After the chance meeting, Isa arrives at the woman's flat to find to find her parting ways with her boyfriend for the evening. The woman, Serap, lets him in and the pair soon engage in violent floor-play that concludes with Isa force-feeding the woman a stale nut on the floor in the midst of copulation. As such, Ceylan identifies the sadism of his male lead that will again manifest itself in the third and final act when Isa travels to a distant locale where he discovers his ex is working.

At this juncture, it might be worth noting that Climates operates as a sort of revisionist Turkish Voyage in Italy (1954) to the extent that it also follows a couple, with the director's real-life wife playing the female lead, as they part and reunite while traveling through the director's homeland. The revisionism comes in as the couple does not ultimately reunite, though they do get back together for a night of passion. This moment is filmed in a series of close-ups that obscure the couples' mouths, making the emotional component unclear. That Nuri uncharacteristically uses a modernist score during this passage further marks its debt to L'Eclisse (1962), as does also the film's concluding dissolve, where Ebru disappears leaving only the mosque behind her. Yet, it is less Antonioni than Rossellini who appears to be the picture's source -- in fact, as Andrew Sarris once remarked quite rightly, Rossellini-ennui preceded Antonioni-ennui -- provided the opening setting in the ruins (transposing a key scene from Voyage), the couple's reunion, and that film's similar autobiographical component.

That Rossellini and Bergman, however, were nearing the end of their relationship during that film -- where the couple does stay together, thanks to "miracle" that did not occur outside the film -- while Nuri and Ebru remain together following a film where they split, does seem to situate Climates as reversal of the earlier, epochal modernist text. In fact, Climates is built upon these junctures of expectation, be it the shifting focalization, the scene where he tries to get back together with her while they sit in a van, but are repeatedly interrupted by crew-persons loading the vehicle, or the concluding divergence of the two characters. To be sure, Climates does echo the visual rhetoric of modernism, utilizing as it does long takes, to say nothing of its articulation of ennui, but even in Nuri's compositions we can see a reappropriation of modernist form for his irreverent ends: particularly revealing is the sex scene where Isa and Serap creep closer and closer to the camera -- and to the aforementioned nut -- or the above-noted scene where we are made aware that Isa is breaking up with Bahar only after the fact, as if to mute its impact.

Yet, it is not simply the director's ironic blocking, but his use of high-definition video that separates it from its high-modernist sources. This new technology provides both an infinite depth of field that is well-suited to the picture's alienated subject matter, as it does a tactility that would seem impossible without it: the snowflakes that fall at the end of the film, for instance, come closer to the camera than would ever seem possible; and the flakes shot out the window have more definition than film could ever muster. Moreover, the film's usage of yellow (during the sexually-explicit sequence) possesses a truly preternatural character. And indeed in its very adaptability, Ceylan manipulates his compositions of dark skies to match the psychology of the film's ruminative male lead. Then again, Climates cuts against an obvious reading of the film as a sequence of landscapes -- and climates -- that convey the pair's collapsing relationship as they break up in a summer paradise and tentatively get back together in a harsh winter clime. (In fact, even the noted sky-scape nearly precedes the couple's reunion.)

All of this is to say that Climates is post-modern in the sense that it stakes out new territory within the modernist framework that it expressly positions itself within. It is a film that repeatedly shifts the epistemological basis for the images -- the film undercuts itself -- often connoting irony in the process. Still, Climates never fails to express a concise worldview, which perhaps even the director's biography belies: that life is filled with sadness and that relationships don't last. This proposition, however, given its evident incongruity to with his biography, has not mediated the director's need to express himself, which he has done in unmistakably first-person form, whether or not it adheres to what we know of his personal life.

Lest it is not yet clear, Climates is one of the year's most inventive art films, and indeed one its best as well.

New Film: The Departed & a Flags of Our Fathers debate with Matt Singer

Martin Scorsese's The Departed seems to have everyone on its side (save for a few important detractors listed below), scoring a box office victory in week one, registering a considerable 93% "fresh" rating among America's critics on Rotten Tomatoes, and placing 48th in IMDb's on-going survey of its reader's favorite all-time films. It is, as the story is seeming to be written, "His most purely enjoyable film in years". So why then did I find The Departed to be a deeply troubling, magnificently flawed foray into pornographic violence? Well, if we keep reading David Ansen's review, that's because "it's not for the faint of heart."

Before we get to the charge that Scorsese's film is "pornographic," which I am strongly convinced it is, let us first consider the picture's visual style. Note the use of visual, and you may already have guessed what I'm up to: The Departed is one of the vaunted director's laziest visual works of art, which is to use that latter term more than generously. There basically is no visual in The Departed, as Scorsese and his cinematographer (Michael Ballhaus) have foregrounded most of their subjects, often keeping one figure out-of-focus in the extreme foreground, while another character interacts with them in the recesses of that same close-in space. Moreover, as film scholar David Bordwell points out on his blog, the average shot length for the over 3200 shots in The Departed is approximately 2.7 seconds a piece -- compared to 7.7 seconds in such superior Scorsese pictures as Mean Streets (1973) and The King of Comedy (1983) -- making it difficult for the viewer to focus upon what little there is in the film's mise-en-scene.

All of this is to say that The Departed could just as well be heard only as it can be seen (as always, Scorsese's film seems to score with respect to its soundtrack). In saying this, one could easily object that scant visualization is by no means a signifier of bad filmmaking, to which I would agree. Then again, as opposed to the paradigmatic cinema of the austere, Robert Bresson's, where the spare visuals call attention to that which exists beneath the surface, namely to the spiritual dimension of life, in Scorsese's film, there is nothing beyond his flat visual. Indeed, what is perhaps most troubling about The Departed is this absence of a moral core, its failure to critique the misanthropy which the film depicts (as critic Armond White argues rather cogently) even as it revels in the carnage on screen. With The Departed, Scorsese seems to have crossed over into postmodernism, while in the process revealing a sensibility and personality that is nothing if not cruel.

Of course, I would be remiss were I not to mention the film's redeeming facet (in the parlance of Jonathan Rosenbaum) which in the case of The Departed I would say is its fine male lead performances by both Leonardo DiCaprio -- who my girlfriend really thinks I look like, which makes me feel good -- and especially Matt Damon. Then again, the film's original, far superior incarnation, Wai Keung Lau and Siu Fai Mak's Infernal Affairs (2002), equals if not surpasses Scorsese's on this front as well in its awe-inspiring teaming of Andy Lau and Tony Leung. And at least the Hong Kong version does not have to contend with Jack Nicholson being "Jack Nicholson" for every split-second of the actor's screen time.

Further, the earlier version also does not manifest the insistent psychologizing of the Scorsese version, in part no doubt to that national cinema's tendency toward episodic narratives, and away from the psychological naturalism of the American cinema. (Both Bordwell and another of the picture's high-profile critics, Dave Kehr, make mention of this cloying proclivity.) Similarly, in its usage of more naturalized violence, The Departed attains a degree of the pornographic that the stylization of Infernal Affairs mediates. The Departed is a viscerally experience, to be sure. My only question is how can we endorse such brutal violence at the service of such facile nihilism?


Moving on, I was hoping to construct this piece as a portrait of two directors moving in very opposite qualitative directions, that is of Scorsese becoming less and less a major director with each passing film -- though the first half of The Aviator (2004) showed a great deal of acumen -- while Clint Eastwood further solidifies his standing as America's greatest active director with each passing film. While Eastwood has done nothing to jeopardize this status (so long as he remains the creator of The Outlaw Josie Wales (1976), The Gauntlet (1977), Bird (1988), White Hunter, Black Heart (1990), Unforgiven (1992), the sublime A Perfect World (1993), The Bridges of Madison County (1995), Space Cowboys (2000), Mystic River (2003) and Million Dollar Baby (2004) -- all of which are major works of art) he has done nothing to help it either. In fact, I would not hesitate to call his latest, Flags of Our Fathers, the director's weakest film since his thoroughly dispensable Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (1997).

While there is just enough in Flags of Our Fathers to make it an Eastwood film -- and therefore worthy of our attention -- such as the film's rethinking of myth (The Outlaw Josie Wales, Mystic River) the picture's anxiety toward inadequate parenting (True Crime [1999], Million Dollar Baby) or even a visual style marked by both volumetric interiors represented via wide-angle lenses (The Bridges of Madison County) and also strong chiaroscuro (Million Dollar Baby), there isn't enough otherwise to mark this as essential cinema, though it does flirt with summarizing our moment. To this end, if The Outlaw Josie Wales said something profound about America's loss of faith in itself in the years following Vietnam and A Perfect World encapsulated the early 1990s anxiety concerning children raised in single parent households, Flags of Our Fathers should have said something about our contemporary anxiety with respect to Iraq, which again it almost does. As the film frames the issue, war is made palatable by symbols, and particularly photographs, be it the raising of the flag on Iwo Jima that is the focus of the film's narrative, or the execution of the Southeast Asian that made us doubt American's virtuousness during Vietnam. (Is Iraq's image Abu Ghraib, or are we still waiting for that one image that helps us to redouble our will? Eastwood leaves us to speculate.)

Of course, to criticize a film for not summarizing its moment is a bit unfair, even if its director has done this so successfully in the past. The larger flaw of Flags of Our Fathers is in its utilization of a flashback structure, which its narrative would at the same time seem to necessitate. Specifically, there is one sequence wherein we are directly delivered from a close-up of strawberry syrup covering a bowl of ice cream (made to model the film's image-subject) to a placement on the battlefield that cannot help but strike one as a painfully literal. While at least Eastwood does not succumb to producer Steven Spielberg's propensity to connect character subjectivity to incidents beyond their possible range of experience (he does this in his own World War II epic, Saving Private Ryan, 1998) this frequent movement between past and present does not seem to serve the director's greatest strengths as a director. At the same time, Eastwood does share Spielberg's bleached-out color schema, as he does his interventionist camera work during battle.

Then again, his direction of battle scenes, in particular, does show his enormous range: as when the black sand explodes in front of the intervening camera producing substantial visceral impact. On this basis alone I hold out hope that Letters from Iwo Jima (2007) can still give the director his great World War II film. If only he hadn't changed the title from "Red Sun, Black Sand," which was in itself a masterpiece.

Matt Singer responds:

So now you look like Leonardo DiCaprio? Is it possible Lisa was taking a piss?

And I think you missed the boat on Flags (haven't seen The Departed yet). You seemed to review a movie that didn't exist -- the movie you wanted to see -- instead of the movie that Clint offered. Plenty of people have tried to make the movie into something about Iraq, and you seem to wish that it was a movie about Iraq. Why can't it be a movie about World War II? I don't understand that.

And I thought the flashback structure was ingenious and, the moment you singled out as too literal, the ice cream sundae, was perhaps my favorite moment of the picture. Granted, Eastwood takes liberty by using the moment as a key into a flashback, but given this is based on true stories, I took this to be based in something that really happened (I haven't read the book -- someone correct me if it doesn't appear in Bradley's book). Is something is too literal if it actually happens?

Comparing this movie, even in passing, to Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, is a really low blow. And you like Clint! How could you do that?!?

Michael J. Anderson replies:

As to your criticisms, I think most are well grounded -- basically I did not make my case well enough, which I will admit. So let me grasp at what I think is Flags fundamental flaw: its flashback structure. If we are to look for a superior treatment of the same motivating theme -- the persistence of trauma -- I would call your attention to Eastwood's Mystic River. In the case of this work, the trauma depicted is in childhood, which coalesces with a key theme from A Perfect World, namely that children are made to grow up too fast -- in the case of the later film, to disastrous results. In both cases, this theme is subsumed by a linear narrative that provides just a hint of circularity with its opening and closing images -- a primary Eastwood trope. Likewise, with Mystic River, where this theme is more explicit, said trauma has implications for the actions and therefore for the plot of the film.

To the contrary, Flags of Our Fathers depicts this element for its own sake, which has a stifling effect on the narrative. Let me make this analogy: say you are driving on an interstate and you slide over onto the shoulder. As you do so, you feel a series of jarring bumps as you have driven over a "rumble strip." I think we could say a similar experience occurs during each instance of shell shock structuring the narrative -- sure it gets the point across; but it lacks in the subtlty that the director often achieves in expressing human psychology through action. I guess my basic critique is that the film lacks the director's characteristic economy, which in the opinion of this writer links the director to Hollywood's finest. (Also, for an Eastwood devotee like myself, this flaw as noted above strikes me as all too similar to the key problem with screenwriter Paul Haggis's monumentally over-determined Crash, 2004; so it's all his fault, in other words.)

Eastwood himself has admitted that he tried to re-construct the narrative without this structure to no success, which I think points to its weakness: that it doesn't lead anywhere other than this most basic point of that enduring trauma flows from wartime experience. Eastwood at his best, i.e. A Perfect World or Mystic River, would have expressed these ideas through action, that is in the subsequent actions of the characters, or even in what we as spectators might (wrongly) think that the actions of the characters were, again as in Mystic River. And from this subsumption of action within the contours of plot, moreover, it would be possible to universalize from the narrative what precisely this trauma signals in our current experience -- as Eastwood has communicated the theft of childhood (endemic to our times) in both, or the mass trauma of 9-11 in Mystic River. No similar conclusion can be drawn here, because again the (literal) image of Iraq is unclear, and we have no entry point through which we can extend the film's critique.

All of this is to explain why Flags of Our Fathers is not Eastwood at his best. I hope my feelings have become more clear.

Matt rebuts:

You have written more, and written far more clearly, but my initial statement stands. You are upset at the movie for not what it is, but for what it's not. Specifically, you are upset that Eastwood's depiction of trauma in Flags differs from his depiction in earlier films like Mystic River and A Perfect World. You give a lengthy and cogent explanation why the earlier model is superior, but I think that's mostly an excuse for your belief, rather than the basis for it. The unspoken (but more genuine) reason you hold for opinion -- in my eyes -- is that you, as a devout auteurist, want Eastwood to depict trauma as one way across all his films, because that strengthens your auteurist reading of his films. By trying something different, he skews from one of the things you've found in his films to link them all together.

I certainly agree that the choice of using the flashbacks throughout instead of as prologue and epilogue is less subtle and more blunt: but in a war film, I don't think subtlety is necessarily a plus. As much as it is about trauma, I took Flags to be about perspective. When the American people see Joe Rosenthal's photograph, they see heroism and triumph. When the men in the photograph see it, they see the horrors they've endured. And because everyone loves that photograph, the men in it can't escape it. And every time they see it, they are confronted with what they'd done. I wrote in one of my reviews of the film that my grandparents, both WWII vets, did not like dwelling on anything from the war except the most frivilous stories — just as Bradley, author of the Flags book, didn't even know his father was in the famous Iwo Jima picture until after he died! The more I've thought about it, I've considered what a great sacrifice those brave men made when they came back home. They smiled and sold those war bonds, and pretended like being atop that mountain in the Pacific was a great accomplishment, not day 5 of a 30 day trek through hell. As good as Mystic River is, I thought Flags was even more moving and poweful.

And it was manly, too. And manliness is awesome.

And now you've gone from comparing Flags to Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil to Crash?!? Wow.

Michael redoubles:

By Mentioning Crash -- and really, as underwhelming as I think Flags is, it remains light-years ahead of the Haggis picture in terms of its quality -- I meant to step outside my little auteurist framework and ask whether this deviation could be due to a collaborators' contribution... which is another way of me saying, 'why do I think this film is so far inferior to the director's better efforts?' (So yes, you're right in your critique.) But, Midnight in the Garden... is material ill-suited to the director, as is this picture. Hence the comparison. And that it is material shaped by Haggis leads one to the second comparison. I might throw in Spielberg as another check on the film's quality, though a producer's role in shaping a film is far more unclear often times. Then again, perhaps the film's scope can be related to his participation. And if anything, those parts that look and feel like Saving Private Ryan are among the better moments in the film.

Matt retorts:

I concede your cleverness, turning my auteurist argument about you against me. Perhaps the Yale debate team could use your skills.

But I press on nonetheless! Midnight in the Garden is a terrible movie but a remarkable soundtrack: I remain convinced to this day that Eastwood made it mostly so he could put that soundtrack in his CD collection. And I'm glad he did; it's in mine too. If you wanted to make an Eastwood auteurist argument related to jazz and his movies, Midnight in the Garden can be recouped. A little, anyway.

I'll agree that the main Iwo Jima battle resembles Saving Private Ryan with one distinct difference, though I should warn in advance that I haven't seen SPR since 1998 so my recollection isn't perfect. The thing that Flags has that SPR does not is a remarkable number of shots designed to ape what a real war photographer's shots might look like — I'm thinking specifically of the shots of the camera falling into the water as it leaves the transport for the beach, and also of a camera getting covered in dirt as men storm past it — images I took as a credit to the work of men like Joe Rosenthal who were yet more unsung heroes of that battle (you don't see Rosenthal touring America with his subjects, after all). Spielberg's version is a grunt's eye's view, but it is a beautiful, perfect one in its own grisly way. Eastwood's shows the seems a bit more, yet another element that ties into his showing the reality behind a legend, and another perspective to the multitude he shares. I quite prefer Flags to SPR.

You won't find many people who hate Crash more than me. Maybe it helped that I didn't know Haggis co-wrote this movie until I saw his name in the end credits, maybe not. I think even if Flags wasn't based on true lives, it would still feel infinitely more authentic than Crash.

New Film: Private Fears in Public Places

Constituting what may well be his finest work in twenty years, Alain Resnais' masterful Private Fears in Public Places (Cœurs) showcases a greater integration of form and content than has been the norm in the legendary Left Bank director's latter-day, theatrically-inflected cinema (of which his supreme Mélo [1986] and the more recent Not on the Lips [2003] are paradigmatic). While an element of the stage returns in this reconfiguration of a play of the same name, particularly in those interior scenes filmed from an overhead position where the camera passes above the walls from one room to the next, Resnais has invested even these passages with newfound meaning: in this instance, as the director makes clear in one of the film's ultimate sequences, the said high camera location connotes a god's-eye view. Indeed, rare within Resnais' corpus, Private Fears in Public Places explicitly engages Christian belief, as one of the film's multiple protagonists, Charlotte (Resnais axiom Sabine Azéma) confesses a devout religiosity. She lends co-worker Thierry (André Dussollier) a videocassette of Christian music, which the latter accepts only because of his desire for the red-head. As it happens, following the glibly contrived video, of which we see various fragments, Thierry discovers soft core porn at the conclusion of the tape. Convinced that it is the same Charlotte, he hastens to borrow a second tape. (These tapes become the film’s on-going comic relief.)

Thierry lives with his sister Gaëlle (the much younger Isabelle Carré), whom he thinks goes out partying with her friends every night. Commensurate with the film's disclosure of secrets, we soon learn she is looking for love, which she finds in lay-about Dan (Lambert Wilson) after the latter breaks up with his fianceé, Nicole (Laura Morante), whom we initially meet in the first scene of the film, where she is shown a ridiculous apartment by realtor Thierry. Rather than looking for the apartment himself -- or a job -- Dan spends his evenings in a bar tended by Lionel (Pierre Arditi).

To complete the film's interlocking series of relations, Lionel seeks evening care for his elderly father (who Resnais never shows on-screen, though do see the foot of his bed and often hear his scatological rants). This leads us back to Charlotte, who according to her faith has charitably agreed to substitute for Lionel’s usual care-giver. Lionel (in possession of his own secret that has led to the estrangement that is evident between he and his father) inquires as to whether Charlotte's faith brings her peace, and after paging through her Bible, where the forgiveness is in her religion. She responds that it is in the New Testament, and later tells him that she, like him, doesn't believe much in hell, though she does believe we all have the Devil inside us. This is certainly the case with Charlotte herself, though Resnais does not simply reduce his picture to a critique of Christian hypocrisy. In fact, we see in one of her final gestures that she, no less than the lascivious Thierry or the drunkard Dan is fighting this very same Demon, which importantly she is able to do successfully. If Lionel claims that he has never been able to accept this stuff, he still packs a New Testament when he departs late in the film, giving one a sense of the power that these question might have for the director himself as he nears his eighty-fifth year.

Yet, religious curiosity is less ubiquitous in Private Fears in Public Places than is another hallmark of later life: loneliness. This existential condition in fact extends from the film's thirtysomethings, to Lionel's dying father (to whom Resnais is much closer in age). Certainly, it is essential to emphasize the degree to which Private Fears... is explicitly an old man's film: the film consciously depicts the winter of one's life, which stylistically Resnais reinforces through the use of a snow effect over each of the picture's structural dissolves. Indeed, Private Fears in Public Places represents both an elegiac first-person account by a director not exactly known for direct personal expression, and also to date the year's most elegant piece of filmmaking.

New Film: Belle Toujours

As with his recent Oporto of My Childhood (2001), Manoel de Oliveira's Belle Toujours begins with a lengthy orchestral performance that the director films at a perpendicular angle. Interspersed with these long takes are shots of a crowd that features the aging Michel Piccoli and Bulle Ogier, whom we quickly discover are old acquaintances, though it similarly becomes clear that the latter wants to have nothing to do with the gentleman. Then again, to most audiences of this film (with a perfunctory knowledge of the picture's subject) we are already well aware that these two characters are Henri Husson and Séverine Serizy of Luis Buñuel's Belle de Jour (1967) -- Catherine Deneuve played Séverine in the original -- encountering each other after a lifetime apart. After establishing this off-stage space to relate to the proscenium, through a series of glances, Oliveira then concludes this sequence with the musicians bowing to the camera.

Following this opener, we soon get an arial view of Paris that is accompanied by a similar soundtrack, following M. Husson's attempt to track down Séverine in the city's nocturnal streets. As such, Oliveira encourages a reading of his film, at least in part, as a 'city symphony,' the Paris of his youth and the consistent stage upon which/in which the two films have been orchestrated. However, as it has been noted, Belle Toujours differs from its source in its casting of the female lead. To this point, it should be noted that as Deneuve has worked with the director on multiple occasions in the past, it would seem less that he failed to get the actress he wanted than that his casting of Ogier was intentional -- and perhaps represents a second debt to Buñuel, and particularly to the director's ultimate That Obscure Object of Desire (1977) with its two Conchita's. Here, this discordinant casting seems to signal the director's advocacy of cinema as theatrical, and particular the fact that these are not two people over a 40-year span but rather two characters. To this end, Ogier more than once reminds us that she is not the same person she once was, speaking for her character of course.

Indeed, what is most striking about Belle Toujours is not how it resembles Buñuel's work -- unlike the earlier film, Oliveira's features Henri as its guiding perspective; hence the pictures' very different attitudes toward Séverine -- but rather how fully Oliveira's sensibility permeates this work. This is to say that Belle Toujours is very much the work of an old man (Oliveira is currently ninety-seven and is at work yet again) given not only its preoccupations, but also the freedom with which he depicts: again, we watch a large portion of an orchestral movement, the bulk of a meal featuring the two principles -- both by the way demonstrate the director's old world refinement -- and in the picture's lone surreal moment, minus its basic conceit, a rooster appears momentarily in a hall. (For works that are similarly free, one might think of the great final films of John Ford, 7 Women [1966], or Jean Renoir, The Little Theatre of Jean Renoir [1970] -- Oliveira has earned both comparisons -- where unmediated artistic expression seems to trump all issues of structure or taste.)

Speaking of the aforementioned preoccupations, Oliveira returns to a contested spirituality that defined his work in the middle of the previous decade. In fact, Séverine at one point late in the film says that she's alone with her soul, wherein Oliveira eliminates virtually all of the scene's light, illuminating only this spiritually tortured woman and her alcoholic foil Henri. In this respect one might argue that Belle Toujours is closest in subject -- and also quality -- to the director's underrated 1996 feature, Party, though there is actually a good deal of the director in aging man-of-the-world Henri, who is importantly played by previous stand-in Piccoli (I'm Going Home, 2001) . Then again, with the consistency of the auteur's preoccupations over the previous decade and a half, it is hard not to see him in all his (lead) characters, as could be said of his absolute masterpiece Abraham's Valley (1993).

Regardless, the portrait of the director that emerges in Belle Toujours is of a man of the old world again, of infinite culture, whose inevitable passing may just represent the end of this civilization on screeen forever. In the meantime, Oliveira continues to work at a level unmatched on his continent, both in the frequency with which he completes films, and also for their unwavering high quality. Here he has made his best picture since I'm Going Home and one of the year's most purely enjoyable art films.

New Film: The Go Master & Woman on the Beach

Tian Zhuangzhuang's The Go Master does little to explain the film's titular game, Go, in spite of its insistence that said game and the obscure religious sect Jiko define the picture's autobiographical subject. Rather, Fifth Generation auteur Tian has opted to limn the tranquility of master Wu's internal life, which the director figures through the picture's static framing, long takes, accompanying deliberate pacing, and the natural settings that inscribe the same interior peace. Indeed, one of the film's lines underscores this conflation of nature and Go as it claims that only a mountain lake claim can rival the peace that the game affords the master. Yet, it is not simply the game but also the aforesaid religious faith that the combine to shape Wu's life, even if the abuse of that faith is cautioned -- the sect leader, who makes a claim for her own deity, is in the words of another character filled with an evil spirit, "the delusion of grandeur" (in this way The Go Master compares in its subject to Horse Thief [1986] and the latter's critique of the Buddhist faith -- and implicitly the Communist regime). Likewise, the film's exquisite, modulated handling of light echoes that of Springtime in a Small Town (2002), which it also copies in its removal from Maoist Chinese history. Yet like with that film, and particularly his fearless The Blue Kite (1993), there seems to be a dissonance between his personal concerns and the politics of the Marxist regime. Consequently, one may be able to read Tian into the film's concluding quote: that his life has been about truth and Go (which in his case one could replace with art).

Hong Sang-soo's Woman on the Beach furthers a trend in the Korean auteur's corpus (Virgin Stripped Bare by Bachelors [2000] may be the paradigmatic case) wherein character subjectivity is expressed in the manipulation of a seemingly objective narrative. Here, Hong offers a second reading of the film as the story of the main female lead by concluding Woman on the Beach with a scene that depicts the thirtysomething having her vehicle pushed out of the sand. Up to this concluding turn, Woman on the Beach reads as the story of a director Kim, who clearly instantiates the contemporary Korean male, as he suffers from an irrational jealously directed toward the lady's earlier affairs with Europeans before he sleeps with a woman whom he says looks exactly like her (after the former leaves for Seoul). However, when the first woman returns to the off-season beach resort where both of the affairs had been consummated, Hong's film becomes a variation of Vertigo (1958) were it somehow possible for Madeleine and Judy to coexist and compete for Scottie. (In fact, the picture's extensive utilization of character doubling clearly marks the film as descending from Hitchcock's cinema.) The Scottie of Hong's film, Kim, is to be sure a stand-in for the director himself -- as it is worth stating that the film's self-consciousness is further connoted by the semi-frequent zooms and a framing strategy that calls attention to the artificiality of the frame -- though as the earlier description should suggest, Woman on the Beach is perhaps the least flattering self-portrait this side of the cinema of João César Monteiro (Recollections of the Yellow House, 1989). Of course, this sense of humor extends far beyond the contours of the director character, making Woman on the Beach by a large margin the funniest reflexive Korean art film of the year.

Two Traditions of Late Soviet Counter-Cinema: Zero City and Stalker

The Film Society at Lincoln Center's From the Tsars to the Stars: A Journey Through Russian Fantastik Cinema does precisely what repertory cinema in the age of DVD ought to do: expose audiences to large numbers of otherwise unavailable titles, selected from a historical moment that remains mostly unknown to moviegoers. Karen Shakhnazarov's Zero City (1988) is in this way representative of the series as a whole, representing neither the salad days of the Soviet silent cinema nor the period of the Thaw and the subsequent emergence of a poetic counter-cinema in the works of Sergei Paradjanov and Andrei Tarkovsky. Instead, Zero City is very much a product of its own, slightly overlooked moment -- the late perestroika era, of which Kira Muratova's The Asthenic Syndrome (1989) and Aleksandr Sokurov's The Second Circle (1990) are the better-known masterpieces -- with its preminition of the Soviet Union's disintegration twined with an ambivalence toward the nation's post-communist future. Shakhnazarov's picture, like Muratova's, relies heavily upon the (il)logic of the absurd and trades heavily upon the creation of images of striking visual beauty, which to be sure would reach its stylistic apogee a decade later in Aleksei German's virtually incomprehensible Khrustalyov, My Car! (1998).

As an earlier step in this tradition and not that latter point of extremum, however, Zero City does paint a somewhat clearer portrait of both Soviet administrative disfunction, in the not-so-with-it provincial office replete with its very own nude secretery -- unbenounced to the boss -- and the trans-Atlantic crassness that seems to infect both Shakhnazarov's home country and its Cold War opponent -- which the director dissects first in the oddly out-of-place waxworks museum and later in a hotel meeting that makes careful reference of both anachronistic American rock-and-roll and even more out-dated Soviet song.

If anything, Zero City has the flavor of a David Lynch-Theo Angelopoulos mash-up, even as it maintains a strongly allegorical, and therefore late Soviet narrative: particularly revealing is the tree, whose branches were said to have granted the Russian state's greatest leader their might, but whose limbs have become startlingly brittle. Indeed, if there is a single image that can be said to sum up the Soviet Union's subsequent collapse in the cinema of that still relatively nigh era, it is this twilight visual.

Neither as epochal as Zero City nor as little-known internationally, Andrei Tarkovsky's crowning masterpiece Stalker (1979) is likewise being screened as part of the Russian Fantastik series, before receiving its long-awaited US DVD release from Kino International -- in a beautiful new print supplied by Russian distributor Ruscico -- on the third of October. Yet, if Stalker fails to summarize an era, it nonetheless impresses mightly with the courage of its critique of the then current political realities of Soviet life, and particularly its figuration of religious supression: it is no coincidence that Stalker is Tarkovsky's last Soviet film before seeking political refuge in Italy. To be specific, Stalker allegorizes the process of spiritual journey in a state that has forbidden an equivalent form of knowledge, which in Tarkovsky's film is translated into the space known as "The Zone."

Stalker opens with the titular lead leaving his wife and crippled daughter to lead two seekers to the aforementioned location (behaving as though he is answering the New Testament call to leave everything and follow Christ). His fellow travelers are referred to merely as Professor (a physicist) and Writer, thereby providing the film with unmistakable metaphorical grist for its narrative mill. The stalker subsequently leads the pair under the noses of armed military guards into the so-called Zone, at which point Tarkovsky transforms his palette from a sepia monochrome to full color. If this shift is the most obviously totem of Tarkovsky's stylistic transformation, it should be likewise noted that the Zone itself is filled with tall grasses that have overtaken the military hardware that is scattered throughout the space. This is a post-apocalyptic world to be sure, but one in which nature has begun to reclaim its place among the symbols of desolate industrial landscape. Of course, Tarkovsky's configuration of the space thusly not only fits his narrative discernment of the sepia industrial wasteland and the color-filled Zone, but it offers an external expression of the human beings in-born quest for spiritual fulfillment and its inability to be supressed through the rational ordering of human life within the socialist state -- a sort of reverse Man With a Movie Camera (1929).

Once there, it soons become evident that neither passenger possesses the purity of motives that the stalker had hoped they would: the Professor reveals his desire to destroy the Zone, and the Writer instinctively collaborates. In this way, Tarkovsky seems to suggest the Soviet Union's systematic elimination of religious life and the complicity of his country's artists (Eisenstein and October [1928] for example) in discouraging faith -- often by the barrel of a gun, to be sure. As such, Stalker reveals a crisis of faith certainly, but it is one shared by his fellow countrymen to the exclusion of the film's lead, and implicitly Tarkovsky, both of whom can only despair at its prospect (though, importantly, Stalker does suggest that there may be hope for the next generation, which the director establishes via the stalker's daughter's telepathic powers).

That one can read Tarkovsky in Stalker, moreover, is an important element of both the film's narrative structure, as well as its style: at one point the stalker himself argues that purpose of life is to create art, through which one can't help read the author's point-of-view. Likewise, even the picture's style, as has been suggested, indicates the conscious agency of a creator artist. As an example, take one of the film's opening long takes -- Tarkovsky's preferred means of constructing the time and space of his narratives -- wherein the titular Stalker exits frame and then reappears immediately in front of Tarkovsky's camera. In so doing, the camera seems to announce its presence in Stalker, as said character gets too close to the camera to maintain the illusion of an unembellished depth-of-field, even if he moves unawares through the space of the film. Similarly, the director's use of a zoom lens and even two seperate instances in which a character looks at the camera, in the second the character addresses it verbally, further confirms the interventionism of the director's practice, and ultimately the self-consciousness of his directorial style.

Even so, if Stalker can be read both as a direct condemnation of the Soviet Union's supression of religious expression (and the subsequent barrenness of spiritual life in that state) as well as an affirmation of art's privileged status, and particularly of its importance to the director himself, Tarkovsky language often remains analogical and his symbolism personal: what for instance is to be made of the profusion of water throughout the Zone? In this way, one might position Stalker within a tradition parallel to the absurdist school noted at the outset, noteworthy for its poetic language rather than its illogical impulse.

New Film: Vers le sud (Heading South)

One of the unmitigated commercial art house successes of the summer, Laurent Cantet's Vers le sud (Heading South) continues that director's examination of the intersection between the personal and the political in a very uncharacteristic environment -- 1970s Haiti. Leaving behind the industrial French and Swiss hinterlands of Human Resources (1999 ) and Time Out (2001) respectively, Cantet fixes his gaze on the Western hemisphere's poorest state during a moment in which that nation profited exceptionally from the pre-AIDS sex tourism industry. Specifically, Vers le sud treats the practice of middle-aged Caucasian women traveling to Haiti to experience all the sensual pleasures that their wealth will purchase them.

Vers le sud focuses upon Brenda, a woman of in her late forties, who returns to the island nation three years after she had a life-changing sexual encounter with a then fifteen year-old black boy. Upon her reappearance, the finely-sculpted young man, Legba (Ménothy Cesar), has become the favored paramour of fifty-something Wellesley professor Ellen (Charlotte Rampling). The former is in the employ of a full-service, so to speak, resort catering to all the hedonistic whims of its female clientele. However, with the arrival of Brenda, Ellen's domination of Legba, and indeed the equilibrium of the world they inhabit, is threatened. At the same time, Legba unwittingly finds himself becoming the object of desire of a well-taken-care-of lover of a Haitian military leader.

To be sure, the stakes of Vers le sud are not exclusively personal, but in fact reverberate according to the film's anti-colonialist allegory. Precisely, Cantet's picture utilizes this narrative structure to produce a parable for the Haitian people's tragic fate, being stuck between their capitalist colonizers -- from whom they readily accept the benefits of their riches -- and an oppressive state instantiated both by the aforesaid colonel and his lover and also by the resort's defacto pimp, who contrary to his inherited anti-white, anti-American sympathies, readily sells out his own people for profit. Indeed, the film's social situation is expressed acutely in an opening, pre-credit preface in which a woman attempts to sell her daughter to the resort worker in order to prevent the young girl's rape at the hands of a lawless populace that would just as soon murder the mother if it would make it easier to get to the fifteen year-old (the age being no coincidence, certainly). In other words, the position of the underclass in Vers le sud is represented by the untenable choice between being used and abused by Haiti's Western colonizers or becoming the victims of the nation's despotic -- terroristic -- regime.

Then again, the implications of Vers le sud's elegant allegory do not end with Haiti's poor, but indeed extend to the female Western subjects around which Cantet structures his story. The fact that it is women -- and not men -- who here partake in the sex industry reveals the power politics that are unique to the film's setting: they attain a desirability via their wealth, which is to say a power, that is absent in their lives in the States and Europe. Then again, this power is not unassailable as the laws of the transaction (and not the power of capital) remains immutable. Beyond the obvious implications for the romantic feelings of the middle-aged women toward Legba -- they cannot have whatever (or whomever) they want -- there is also, for the instance, the congruent moment when Brenda begins to dance like a Haitian and is quickly reined in by those who would deem it necessary to uphold the racial and social politics that define said transaction, even if it means ascribing acceptable modes of behavior to be determined by racial and social difference; in other words, the class system is static.

Nevertheless, if Cantet's narrative engages the injustice of Haitian sex tourism, it does offer a subversive counterpoint through the director's treatment of the Haitian male body: as inversion of the Mulveyan critique, it is "he" who is the object of desire, while the film's older female characters can be said to share the audience's point-of-view with respect to the fetishized body. This is not to say, however, that the film participates in the salacious: importantly, this sex tourism film never once depicts coital love on screen. In fact, when the sex act is not being elided, be it in the case of the first present-day love-making scene between Brenda and Legba or Legba and the colonel's lover connection (to be certain, we actually have no idea whether or not they ever consummate their "friendship"), it either doesn't happen, as with the one scene in which Legba and Ellen share a bed, or it is narrated through one of the film's talking head interviews, as with Brenda's clip.

Speaking of these insertions, it must be said that they lend a certain quality of the "document" to a film that is in other ways far from verite in its ethos. Having said this, there is a certain clunkiness to this stylistic choice, as could also be said of the polyphonic performances in general. Nevertheless, Cantet maintains a certain visual gracefulness otherwise, defined as it is by perpendicular, slightly below eye-level compositions and the sustained tight (identifying) framing of the director's camera. Moreover, there are the ubiquitous tans and turquoises of the Haitian beaches that are finally brought into full relief through a late travelling shot in Port-au-Prince that belatedly establishes the nation's extreme poverty -- the film's consistent natural beauty is tellingly confined to this privileged world of the resort in keeping with the picture's social critique. However, it is less in any of these details than it is in the film's narrative integration of political allegory that the success or failure of Vers le sud rests. And according to this measure, Cantet's film may just be the best new picture to be released this summer.

New Film: Talladega Nights

Adam McKay's Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, from a McKay and Will Ferrell screenplay, might just represent Hollywood's fullest engagement with American consumer culture (or at least NASCAR's hyperbolic variation) since Frank Tashlin's classic 1957 satire, Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?. Like Tashlin's comic masterwork, McKay's Ferrell vehicle (he is, surprise, the titular Ricky Bobby) utilizes a spectacle-intensive technique wherein live action commercials are inserted into the body of the film -- though in the marked exception of Talladega Nights, the products being shilled are real products, and the commercial insertions are in the middle of the film, rather in the beginning (over the credits) as with the Tashlin picture. Of course, the hand-wringing has already commenced vis-a-vis the film's mimicking of NASCAR ad culture, revealing nothing so much as the new puritanism of those who would decry the creeping presence of product placement in film art. Amazingly enough, I did not slip into Applebee's after the film -- in spite of the fact that there was actually an Applebee's in the Times Square multiplex where I saw Talladega Nights -- just like I did not make clothes out of the size fourteen women I murdered after watching The Silence of the Lambs. I do, however, find myself craving chipotle shrimp-stuffed chicken breast smothered in Monterrey Jack and a bottle of chianti, for what it's worth.

No, the point to the film's incessant commercialism is ultimately verisimilitudinal -- this is what NASCAR is like, and for those not in the know, it works: if you're a Dale Earnhart, Jr. fan, you're gonna drink Bud, and you've probably done so since you were six, when Bud Light started to taste like water to you. (Oh, all this jesting is in good fun; the truth is that I'd much rather watch NASCAR than say the NBA, and am knowledgeable enough to know that Jimmie Johnson is again in the points lead and that Jeff Gordon and Jr. are in real trouble this time.) And indeed, McKay, Ferrell, et al. make the most of this environ, which is perhaps most brilliantly sent up over one particularly juicy dinner scene, wherein, amidst a sea of Domino's boxes, KFC buckets and two liters of Coke, Ricky squabbles with his speed groupy wife over which is the best Jesus to pray to -- he prefers the infant Christ -- while his violently precocious boys, Walker and Texas Ranger, or T.R. for short, threaten their shrinking maternal grandfather.

Speaking of grandfathers, it is their paternal grandpa and Ricky's deadbeat dad, Reese Bobby (Gary Cole, in the best grandfather performance since Gene Hackman's magnificent Royal Tenenbaum) who really chews up his scenes, particularly when he reconnects with his son to help the latter regain his love of speed -- be it in getting his son to drive with a cougar to steady his nerves or by forcing him to outrun the cops after he tapes coke to the bottom of his son's car and then proceeds to snitch on him. Likewise, John C. Reilly as his best pal Cal Naughton, Jr. and Jane Lynch as his mother prove equal to Ferrell's comic brilliance. And then, of course, there's Sacha Baron Cohen's French Formula One drive, Jean Girard, who would seek to dethrone Ricky, before later admitting that his one dream in life is to move to Stockholm with his husband (Andy Richter in the arm-candy role he was born to play) and design currency for dogs and cats.

But in the end, this is a Will Ferrell vehicle, and the big guy doesn't let us down, whether he's running around in his tighty whities convinced that he's on fire -- this happens more than you might think -- selling pork rinds or wrestling the aforesaid cougar, Ferrell shows himself again to be the most dependably funny one-man show in American screen comedy today. And if you do go, stay through the final credits for Lynch's bed time reading -- and discussion of Southern lit. -- with her grandsons. After all, this is the type of American filmmaking where little distinction can be made between the closing credit blooper reel and the gags in the picture itself.

New Film: Miami Vice

Michael Mann's Miami Vice is, if nothing else, certain to be the year's best looking American film. Transmogrifying his palette with the pastel and Caribbean hues of South Florida and its Latin American neighbors, Miami Vice follows the director's masterful Collateral (2004) as an articulation of the beauty of the urban landscape, dictated by the vibrant neon lighting -- particularly the electric blues -- that bathes the City. In terms of the aforesaid color schema, Mann registers Miami and its environs in a tapestry of mint greens, whites and pinks (which even combine in particularly aestheticized lens flares) that connote the tropical flavor of the region; the surrounding seascapes are even more startling, particularly, in one over-saturated sequence where Crockett (Colin Farrell) and Gong Li speed over the sea blue-green straight between Miami and Havana -- on a mojito run -- leaving a bright white wake behind.

Indeed, the appearance of these locations is not just background to Miami Vice but is central to the film's discourse -- as were the nocturnal, postmodern Los Angeles cityscapes of Collateral. And like that film, Mann manipulates the picture's narrative structure to call attention to this precise feature. Here, Mann structures the relatively looser plot (compared with the tight scripting of the previous feature) around movement between Miami, Havana, Haiti, Columbia and Brazil. In this way, Miami Vice effectively articulates Miami's unique position as an interface between the United States and Latin America, as well as the sense in which America is less a nation-state than a continent -- and therefore the degree to which the contemporary American experience necessitates the expression of numerous regional variations.

Moreover, Miami Vice shares a similarity to that most American of genres -- the Western -- with the directors' previous forrays into cop land, be it his neoclassical meta-western Heat (1995) or even Collateral and its echoes of the pre-determined structure of Budd Boetticher's Seven Men from Now (1956). In the case of Vice, the clearest predacessor may just be Howard Hawks' Rio Bravo (1959) and in particular that film's climactic shootout: as with that earlier picture, Mann's officers enact a flanking manuver around the sides of their opponents. Nonethless, Vice's stylistic élan shares as much with Wong Kar-wai (Gong Li's appearance almost feels like a reference in this respect) as it does with Hawks' Hollywood classicism -- though it should be noted that Mann similarly uses a very classical shot-reverse editing style in the cutting of his film. (Adding to this classicism, Mann utilizes pyschologically-incisive sound work, as for instance when the pair enter the South American kingpin's car and the music cuts out entirely, suggesting the gravity of the situation in this particularly stark artisitic choice.)

Collectively, it might be said that Mann puts style before substance, or to be more generous, that for Mann, the style is the substance. This is not to suggest that Mann's film lacks an ideological content. In fact, Mann expressly argues for an existentialism imbibed with the moral relativism that South Floridian life seems to ooze -- be it the visceral sex that seems aware of the film's axioms that "probability is like gravity" and "time is luck" (and in a very Wongian turn, that time seems to "run out" for two of the characters) or even in Mann's seductive aestheticization of violence. To be sure, this is a city where a vice squad is very necessary indeed.

The Movie that I've Seen the Most...

Slate recently ran a feature asking a number of esteemed film people which motion picture they've seen the most. When initially I read the piece, many of the responses struck me as improbable: for instance, does Phillip Lopate (one of my favorite critics, mind you) really expect us to believe that he's seen Mikio Naruse's Flowing more than any other film, given particularly that it is and has always been unavailable on any format in the United States? Or how about Judd Apatow and Bottle Rocket? Come on Judd, you and I both know that a sensibility like yours could have only been forged through serial viewings of Meatballs.

Speaking of which, it speaks well to the parenting skills of Lawrence Kasdan that his son Jake has seen Ghostbusters more ofter than the more ignominious, aforementioned Reitman. Given my own age and upbringing, it would seem likely that I too should cite a film similar to the junior Mr. Kasdan's -- if not Ghostbusters, then perhaps Return of the Jedi (my favorite movie when I was five, before I ever saw it), The Goonies or Back to the Future. Then again, I was never a serial movie-viewer as a child, meaning that even with these early favorites, one could count the number of times that I actually saw them on one hand. Likewise, I am not one to catch The Wizard of Oz or It's a Wonderful Life, every time it airs, though I do have that tendency when it comes to Dumb & Dumber (good thing I don't make a habit of watching TBS). No, my obsessive streak manifested itself only after I began to seriously engage with individual films as works of art. As a result, excluding those films that I've viewed in a professional capacity, a few come to mind as genuine contenders: Max Ophüls' Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948), Eric Rohmer's My Night at Maud's (1969), Robert Bresson's Pickpocket (1959) and the likely winner, Kenji Mizoguchi's Ugetsu Monogatari (1953).

The first time I saw Ugetsu followed shortly after my discovery of the Sight and Sound polls of the 'ten best films of all-time,' in the back of a Roger Ebert tome, the title of which I no longer remember. At the time, I remember my fascination with the idea that there might just exist films that I had never heard of, but which were nonetheless objectively among the greatest films ever made. I supposed that Ugetsu, like the equally mysterious La Règle du jeu/The Rules of the Game (Jean Renoir, 1939) was one of these films. I was right, but I certainly didn't get it at first -- to me, Ugetsu was an interesting, if a somewhat dull ghost story, just like La Règle du jeu was some kind of impenetrable hunting film. I was wrong... and so very stupid.

My second time with Ugetsu marked my first appreciation of the film as a masterpiece, having since discovered the director's Sanshô Dayû (1954) and Street of Shame (1956) -- and in the process, the manner in which his mise en scène served to guide his spectators' attention. Three, four, five and six (viewed over four consecutive nights in the sad comforts of my childhood bedroom, well after childhood) established my current opinion of the film: that it is that rarest of all breads, the perfect work of art. (The only other film that I have ever viewed in multiple consecutive days was Letter from an Unknown Woman -- another manifestly perfect film --which I additionally screened back-to-back one night; this distinction for me, interestingly enough, it shares exclusively with another Ophüls' film, Lola Montès [1955].) By my count, then, this latest viewing of Mizoguchi's masterpiece was my seventh, if I'm not forgetting a time or two. And as with each of my previous viewings, Ugetsu once again showed itself to possess a richness that transforms and deepens upon every viewing.

On this occasion, seeing it for the first time on Criterion's pristine DVD transfer from late last year, I was struck most (counter-intuitively, perhaps) by the narrative's management of physical reality, metaphysical reality and dream/reality. To be more precise, Mizoguchi invests these three ontological categories with the same hyper-realistic verisimilitude so that none is distinguishable by its visual treatment, not that there isn't embellishment. For example, when the protagonist Genjurô (Masayuki Mori) examines a set of kimonos for his wife, Miyagi (Mizoguchi axiom and one of the most talented actresses in the history of cinema, Kinuyo Tanaka), the latter appears through a rear doorway, accompanied by a sudden, light lilt in the film's soundtrack. Indeed, a similarly sentimental theme procures the same effect in the celebrated scene wherein Genjurô crosses through his abandoned residence before re-entering to find his deceased wife waiting for him. Of course, Mizoguchi famously films this sequence in a single, unbroken take, seemingly disclosing Miyagi's entrenched presence in the same place through which Genjurô had walked only moments before (seemingly as Mizo pulls his camera back slightly, at one point, to reveal a new trajectory). In so doing, Mizoguchi produces a narrative logic where the external world and the spiritual realm cohabit the same space. In fact, the metaphysical imbues Mizoguchi's story, from the disembodied, acousmatic voice of Lady Wakasa's (Machiko Kyô) deceased father to her own posthumous population of the terrestrial realm.

At the same time, these incursions of spiritual figures into the physical universe are on multiple occasions referred to as dreamt, providing another potential source for their presence in the narratives, as projections of character subjectivity. If there is thus slippage in Mizoguchi's narrative, Ugetsu continues to portend the logic of a narrative completely under the control of its creator. Ugetsu is the way it is because its art; it possesses no necessity to distinguish between fact and fiction, dream and (metaphysical) reality. All inhabit the reality of a work that is ultimately distinguished by its determination to convey the tragic consequences -- and fatal ones for the women of the narrative -- that result from the quest for glory, be it materially or in terms of reputation. Truly, Ugetsu is a confirmation of those Buddhist axioms (from the 'Four Noble Truths') that state that all is suffering and that suffering comes from desire; Ugetsu is, in other words, a Buddhist fable that promotes the modest values of home and hearth, contentment.

It is also a meditation on the place of art and of the trappings of success: Genjurô's dissent begins when he is flattered by Lady Wakasa's appreciation of his art. Had only he been satisfied to make his pottery side-by-side with his wife, rather than thursting for wealth and later fame, the tragic consequences of his desire would have never come to fruition. Parenthetically, both of these themes can be said to represent the director's autobiography, and can therefore bestow Ugetsu with the title of "personal art": his sister was sold as a geisha to pay for his education as a painter.

Speaking of his background, my companion in this viewing, Lisa Broad, pointed out that Mizoguchi's palette effectively registers every gradiation of black, white and gray in his unequalled mastery of visual technique. To this, let me add that Ugetsu's compositional grace is a product both of this painting in light and shadow, and also in a compositional manipulation that relies heavily upon diagonal framing that seems to bespeak an internal harmony: a spare tree in a courtyard or meadow frames a seated protagonist; jutting, perpendicular beams parallel the head-lines of conversing characters; etc. Often, it is worth mentioning, Mizo utilizes overhead angles to forge these undeniably painterly spaces.

The point is that this is an artist who is in complete control of his medium, manipulating form according to the dictates of his subject. Another telling example of his free use of the art form is the well-known sequence where Mizoguchi's camera follows a small stream of water out of a hot spring, over stones, and to a field which, by virtue of a lap dissolve becomes a grassy meadow where the ritualistic infidelity between Lady Wakasa and Genjurô. Here, the mise en scène is no longer dictated by a spatial-temporal unity of time and place, but by the emotional cause-and-effect inherent in the hot springs' passion and the devotional, nay obsessive love that Genjurô succumbs to in the field.

Ultimately, the fabulist nature of his narrative makes all things permissible. At the same, his mature style, and particular the visual grace of his mise en scène make for a work that seems to harken back to the promise of early sound cinema, as my partner also stated. Or, as I would add, were we to discover some day that cinema can not progress aesthetically beyond the 20th century, this will be the pinnacle of the art form. A cinema of infinite beauty and of deceptive complexity in its conflation of ontological categories. To echo Luc Moullet upon its French commercial release, Ugetsu is the simplest and most complex film in the world.

Hold Back the Dawn: Well Worth Seeing Even if it Means Sitting Next to That Guy with the Backpack Eating Soup

As Film Forum's well-timed summer swashbuckler series draws nigh, the merits of the concluding Billy Wilder retrospective are easy to miss -- after all, is there a director this side of the "master of suspense" who is less in need of revival than Mr. Wilder? Besides, I can think of no theatre that I find less pleasant -- save perhaps Brooklyn's Pavilion with its nacho cheese-encrusted upholstery -- than the Film Forum, which somehow manages to attract the single most ill-mannered bevy of unlikable losers that one has ever witnessed, in any one place. If you want to know what happened to that guy in your class who combined a 105 i.q., know-it-all attitude and a serious misanthropic streak, he's wearing his backpack to $5 movies (with his $50 membership) at the Film Forum where he eats soup and curses at the couple behind him for daring to whisper during the coming attractions of movies he's already seen 15 times. But heaven knows he loves to see movies on the big screen... in part because his cable was turned off in 1995 after his checking account finally ran dry without the infusion of bi-annual Stafford Loans. Plus, who likes to spend time in an unfurnished, Stuyvesant Town high-rise without air conditioning and only pickles and miracle whip in the fridge? God knows that an ump-teenth screening of Sunset Boulevard sure beats the alternative; and if you have to shout at that pretty-enough undergrad Spanish major from Northern New Jersey seated two rows back, then so be it -- she shouldn't be there anyway if she just wants to talk to her date about that chemically-unbalanced roommate of her's.

So yes, the prospect of another Wilder retro. in light of these specifics didn't exactly set my heart a flutter -- that is, until I saw two words under a couple of the titles: Mitchell Leisen. To those who are not in the know, Mr. Leisen remains one of the least appreciated directors of Hollywood's golden age, in spite of (or perhaps because of) his collaborations with such acclaimed screenwriters as Preston Sturges and the team of Wilder and Charles Brackett, which of course accounts for its inclusion in the series. While of course it must be admitted that Leisen's career cannot approach Wilder's five decades of relevance in particular, there can and should be no disputing his aesthetic inventiveness and the protean engagement of generic categories that the works showcase. Leisen is no mere placeholder for his more famous screenwriters, as they learned the directorial trade. Rather he is a classical artist, whose peak deserves to be remembered among the glories of Hollywood's greatest age.

That peak, spanning approximately five years between 1937 and 1942, includes both of the films featured in the FF program, 1939's Midnight and 1941's Hold Back the Dawn, which despite being the recipient of six Academy award nominations including best actress (Olivia de Havilland), best screenplay and even best picture, remains unavailable on home video and as a consequence, largely forgotten. Even Midnight lacks the following it deserves as one of the finest romantic comedies of that form's superlative moment; suffice it to say that it is not yet available on DVD, even if one could reasonably argue that it is superior to Wilder and Brackett's other great collaboration of 1939, Ernst Lubitsch's Ninotchka. (That these two films are both exceedingly funny makes their oversight even more inexplicable.)

Thankfully then there are art houses that cater to the permanently unemployable, as were it not for the Film Fourm Wilder series, I may not have had the manifest pleasure of seeing my third Leisen film Tuesday night, the aforesaid Hold Back the Dawn. For starters let me concur with that year's Academy voters in their nominations of Leisen's film in the acting, writing and best picture categories: all were undoubtedly deserved, starting with Ms. de Havilland's vivid portrayal of semi-dowdy school mistress Emmy Brown, who is seduced by Charles Boyer's Georges Iscovescu during a 4th of July elementary school trip to a Mexican border town which she chaperones. Miss Brown proves easy work for the Continental, who only hours before had learned of a loophole in getting the American visa that he and so many others had coveted: marrying a Yankee. Former mistress Anita Dixon (Paulette Goddard) supplies him not only with the strategy, but with the ring as well.

With the holiday over and the bus fixed -- Brown and her school children are forced to spend the night in Iscovescu's hotel lobby after one of the parts mysteriously goes missing -- the new Mrs. Iscovescu crosses back over the border, anticipating a reunion with her gentleman husband in the allotted four weeks. Parenthetically, the misbehavior of the students against a disgruntled mechanic who sadistically desires one young man's punishment, even offering to do it himself, provides the film with some of its grimmest humor -- one suspects that there is far more Wilder/Brackett here than the film's romantic helmer. In the meantime, Iscovescu recommences his affair with the vampish Dixon before being interrupted first by a border official that seems to make the border community his home away from home, and then by the unexpected, early return of his new bride.

Without giving up too much of the film's wildly uncoiling plot, it almost doesn't need to be mentioned that Iscovescu will have something of change of heart concerning the new Mrs. Iscovescu. Yet, it bares mentioning in the context of the film's analysis, at this moment at least, for the style that Leisen brings to sequences wherein the couple are forced together in the nation's less accessible hinterlands. There is, for instance, something virtually Eisensteinian in the director's compositions of both cactus-framed dirt roads, and more spectacularly, a Mexican church that is filled with hundreds of lit candles for a sacramental affirmation of marriage. (Eisensteinian in that it almost prefigures that director's depiction of Ivan the Terrible's coronation in the film by that same name.)

Then there is the subsequent scene in which Mr. Iscovescu, partially succumbing to a sudden, uncharacteristic guilt, decides that it is better if he doesn't consummate their marriage. After faking a shoulder injury, we see him spying on the de Havilland character sleeping in the back seat of the caravan. Gazing at her through the rearview window, Leisen distills the gentleman's desire into her rising and falling bosom. It is indeed in brief moments and relatively understated gestures like this that Mr. Leisen shows himself to be a director with startling visual flamboyance.

Not that there is anything small about Leisen's visual imagination. Take, for instance, the car chase that Iscovescu provokes near the end of the picture. Here, in radiant black-and-white photography, Leisen not only summons the visceral excitement of the sequence, which he does quite effectively, but he moreover explicates the process by which, against all odds, Iscovescu escapes from his police/immigration pursuers. We see how he turns off his lights, slips behind billboards, etc. to get to his love. Similarly, in the earlier sleeping scene, Iscovescu not only fakes his injury, or tells the Mrs. of his pretend infirmity, but we see him stage the feigned accident, again offering a case for a believable outcome to an improbable scenario.

By this juncture, Leisen has fully succeeded in involving his spectators in a picture where ultimately much is at stake -- at least in my case, I was hoping that Iscovescu and his wife would live happily ever after, however cruel and undeserving the former might be. Without saying too much more about the film's plot trajectory, suffice it to say that happiness seems quite unlikely by the time the narrative devolves into said car chase.

As to the ending, anyone knowledgeable of Leisen's ouevre may suspect a happy ending (ala Midnight and Remember the Night) whereas the same conclusion in Wilder's body of work (think Double Indemnity, 1944) is far less certain. Significantly, then, it should be noted that Hold Back the Dawn manipulates a structuring device wherein Iscovescu recounts the tale to a director whom he once met during his days as a continental socialite. That the director is played by Leisen is of no minor importance, as is the fact that he is directing Veroica Lake and Brian Donlevy, whom he actually made I Wanted Wings with that same year (1941). In effect, the film proper could almost be said to have two endings, a Wilder/Brackett and Leisen one, were one to judge their competing temperaments. Regardless, the Wilder and Brackett penned flashback structure (which of course the former employed to famous effect in Double Indemnity and Sunset Boulevard [1950]) can at least be said to represent a way around classical Hollywood codes of the time.