In the shadow of Tarkovsky

The Banishment (Andrey Zvyagintsev, 2007). In the shadow of Tarkovsky, sure. Not just the big images – wind in the long grass, the lost blonde mother disappearing, with all the yearning and nostalgia – but the small ones too. The jigsaw puzzle the kids are doing, the bookmark – the religious art. But you can’t help suspecting that Zvyagintsev is saying something more, that it’s not just derivativeness or showing off an influence, as some suspected, but it is about asking what the Tarkovsky world looks like when the miraculous no longer intervenes and simple bad luck takes its place. The world that is doomed and secular, or the expulsion that is visually alluded to. 

Raving maniacs

My review of Movie Journal: The Rise of the NewAmerican Cinema, 1959-1971 by Jonas Mekas, is at The Spinoff. 

World apart

Room (Lenny Abrahamson, 2015). Circumspect in important ways and a film about acting that itself depends on great acting. About acting? To me, the centre of the film comes when Brie Larson’s Joy pretends her son is dead to fool her captor, and her son must then play dead, and carefully follow her instructions. In that moment, their world apart is more apart than at any other time, as the outside world opens up to them and us, and that’s the hinge of it all too: the first half of the story was easier for her to bear and the second half is easier for the boy, who seems so surprisingly wise and grave. 

The image of happiness

Sans Soleil (Chris Marker, 1983). Watched again as the President of the United States visits Hiroshima. “I looked at those pictures, and it was as if the entire year of 1965 had just been covered with ashes.” 

Not quite rightness

Yella (Christian Petzold, 2007). Not quite rightness, done with such precision and control, such attention to detail. The business activity, the quiet, the envelopes full of cash, the doubling. 

It snowed

Uzak (Nuri Bilge Ceylan, 2002). Maybe it’s not as grandly-staged or as beautiful as more recent Ceylan – the chief location is the director’s Istanbul apartment – but, and this is a good thing, it’s probably funnier, in a Beckett-like way. There is a lot of talk about Tarkovsky but the gag (to use the word very loosely) is that the film is not really like that.    

The green light of the Empire Hotel sign

Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958). “She had come back from the dead, and he felt it, and knew it, and probably was even bewildered.”  

A collector of invented stories

Mysterious Object at Noon (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2000). For fans, this early experimental work, shot roughly on black and white video and blown up for release, has a raw appeal and there are some trace elements of later Weereasethakul masterpieces in it: that sudden, dream-like appearance of the supernatural in the everyday, which is barely even remarked upon as strange or unlikely. To us, the films feel like a version of Thai folklore; it’s hard to know how they seem at home, but one of the revealing and ingenious things about Mysterious Object at Noon is how Weerasethakul invents and develops his own folklore that could pass as “tradition” to us. Equally, though, the films are also open to tough social realities. 

Where is thy brother?

The Witch (Robert Eggers, 2015). A different kind of horror movie, made with historical fidelity and Bergman or Dreyer-like seriousness – and a rare economy and a gradual increase of dread throughout. This small masterpiece may be the greatest religious film in years – relatively calm and steady where Von Trier’s more personal Antichrist was psychologically overwrought and fiercely anguished, but it is just as deep. 

Animals

The Jungle Book (Jon Favreau, 2016). Hyper-realist and pleasingly old-fashioned, as though the Disney-Kipling story had somehow been found within a TV nature documentary from the 1960s, with their earnest understandings of animal motivations, power structures and loyalties. The first sight of the giant orangutan is straight out of Apocalypse Now, but so too is the tiger – all menace here, not camp. Humour is added lightly, and never overdone.  

I always knew you would come back

Phoenix (Christian Petzold, 2014). “They think they can make pictures of the Holocaust, and that’s not possible.” – Christian Petzold, interviewed in Sight and Sound magazine, June 2015.  

Battle of the Bulgers

Black Mass (Scott Cooper, 2015). Don’t you feel like you’ve seen all this before? All that creeping fascination with violence, secrets and honour. The wiretapping, the infiltration, the trips down to sunny Florida, the slow drives to somewhere remote to kill and bury somebody. Even Boston isn’t a novelty anymore (The Departed, Mystic River) although the Boston Globe was featured here as an intrepid, investigative paper a few months before it got a much bigger, lasting splash in Spotlight. The gimmick of Black Mass is that psychopathic Boston-Irish crime lord Jimmy Bulger (Johnny Depp, unthreatening despite his vampiric Hunter S Thompson make-up) and FBI agent John Connolly (Joel Edgerton) are as close as family but it’s not until the credits roll and the screenplay reveals what happened to Jimmy and his politician brother, Billy (Benedict Cumberbatch), that you realise what the problem has been: Black Mass followed the wrong story.

The guest

Far From Men (David Oelhoffen, 2014). Algeria, 1952. There are astonishing landscapes and silence. It shows you that a world is disappearing from view forever and that nothing could have been done differently. In a French-speaking lead, Viggo Mortensen carries the weight of this himself. It suits his sense of nobility, or integrity.   

Knight of Cups, first time

Knight of Cups (Terrence Malick, 2015). I’m glad I read that essay on Heidegger earlier, at First Things. One important thing: you can feel lost in the world and still feel sure, as well, that the world is a beautiful place that you never want to leave. Also, you can be forgiven. “All things shining” is almost a Malick catchphrase or slogan, or it should be (The Thin Red Line). There is a dead brother, with its suggestions of The Tree of Life (and Malick’s own life), as though The Tree of Life’s Sean Penn had, at the end, kept walking on the beach and turned into Christian Bale. There are pilgrims and legends, the desert and the sea, water and light, and us looking upwards. There are hints of Solaris and Mirror in that repeated piece of music and the dense web of sorrow, memory, love and regret. Has a film ever collapsed time quite like this – not even Mirror. There is no clear sense of what is past, what is present, what happened when, what is remembered, what is observed and what is imagined. It is a feat of editing, and it is mesmerising. The use of Hollywood studio lots as settings suggests dream cities or simulations of the real world, but then so does Las Vegas, which looks like paradise. Malick and cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki stage crowd scenes that are moved through calmly, in real space, with real light, and the mobile camera has its own point of view. “Love and do what you like,” a woman says, quoting St Augustine. If they tell you that the ennui is stylised, that there are too many convertibles, too many girls and parties, say Antonioni. Tell them it’s as good as The Tree of Life, which was a masterpiece, remember?  

Maps to the stars, maps to the past

Nostalgia for the Light (Patricio Guzman, 2010). 

Americans in Europe

The Two Faces of January (Hossein Amini, 2014). Americans in Europe – that seldom ends well. Greece and Crete, ruins and tourism. From a Patricia Highsmith novel and with aspects of a Ripley story, this is cunningly plotted. Yet you sense there is more in the book: more history, more psychology. 

The thing lasts

F for Fake (Orson Welles, 1973). There have always been phonies, Welles suggests, what’s new are the experts who claim to know how to separate the true from the false, or the real from the fake. On one level, you can read F for Fake as Welles’ answer to the “expert” (Pauline Kael) who challenged his authorship of Citizen Kane and you can see that Welles shares infamous art forger Elmyr de Hory’s delight in proving the experts wrong, just as he and Oja Kodar enjoy fooling us with their story about Pablo Picasso, but the quiet centre of the film is the Chartres section, in which the cathedral, silhouetted like Xanadu in Citizen Kane, is a monument that transcends all the individuals who worked on it, in Welles’ remarkable monologue. In the end, he asks, why does the name of the artist matter? The thing lasts, names disappear. But is this humility, really, or is it actually the opposite? A story about anonymity comes with Welles’ visual signature, familiar from the opening of Citizen Kane, and the Welles voice-over now has an intimate seriousness that the rest of the jubilant, chaotic and enjoyably contradictory film otherwise overlooks in its rush to entertain and impress. Everything is a performance, or a trick, you suspect – seriousness as well as levity. 

The trees

The Falling (Carol Morley, 2015). A quiet, dreamy film about teen girl hysteria, set as the British 1960s were about to turn into the 1970s – and Carol Morley evokes the creepy, pagan, autumnal, erotic, supernatural feeling of the era, complete with anti-realist Don’t Look Now-style edits, beautiful cinematography (trees, rain, legs, faces) by Agnes Godard and a creaking folk soundtrack provided by Tracey Thorn. There are also tips of imaginary hats to The Devils, Picnic at Hanging Rock, The Virgin Suicides and Heavenly Creatures and perhaps even early 70s Hammer horrors, but it’s not just pastiche or revivalism – there is something deeper and fresher happening here. 

Seen and believed

Risen (Kevin Reynolds, 2015). Risen is neither a daringly revisionist Jesus movie in the mode of Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ nor a bloody slice of ideological violence in the tradition of Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, to which it was planned as an unofficial sequel. Former Costner sidekick Kevin Reynolds directs – at Reynolds’ 1990s commercial peak, you might have said that he had a knack for choreographing epic exercises in crowd-pleasing mythology (Rapa Nui, Waterworld, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves), but it’s hard to tell if this relatively low-budget and modestly staged Biblical film is a personal statement for him or just another job. Either way, the mood is traditional, respectful and slightly tepid, with Joseph Fiennes’ taciturn and death-haunted Roman centurion moved or shaken, forever changed, by his sightings of the resurrected Christ, played by the Maori Jesus (Cliff Curtis) as a figure of love, peace and generosity rather than the leader of the apocalyptic rebellion that the prissy Pilate (Peter Firth) fears. At best, the film is a footnote that cleaves closely to the story as it has come down to us, despite the invention of a Roman witness as an audience intermediary rather than the early Christian movement telling its own story – can we call this Romansplaining? 

Story ark

Northfork (Michael Polish, 2003). This doesn’t work, but it should. Angels of some sort descend on mostly empty plains in wintry Montana, into a sick boy’s imagination, while men dressed like FBI agents tell the few locals left that a flood is coming – not Biblical, although that is evoked a few times, but a power company’s dam-building. The slow, hushed style is an attempt at Lynchian Americana, but without surprise or depth or the genuine threat of something uncanny that comes as naturally as breathing to Lynch. The non-committal acting – James Woods, Nick Nolte, Daryl Hannah – doesn’t help. Just to exaggerate the Lynch B team feeling of it all, Kyle MacLachlan even has a cameo. The wide, empty, raw spaces do look kind of beautiful, though. Desolate, gloomy pioneer sublime, in shades of grey.