Who are We? Holy Motors

Often described as “weirdest movie of 2012”, Leo Carax’ surrealist film has left many viewers perplexed. It may not be perfect, but it was the most wonderful complex and meaningful film I saw in 2012.
So what does it all mean?

Leo Carax’ Holy Motors asks a number of existential questions.

What is this thing we call life?

Is there such a thing as community?

The film starts with the protagonist leaving his family for work in the morning, and by the time he returns he enters a completely different home, his original community seemingly forgotten.

What is reality?
What is the nature of our position in relation to the world around us?
What are we? Are we what people see when they see us, or something else?

Holy Motors is a meditation on all of these epistemological questions.

One of the main themes is performance in life and cinema. The main character is constantly changing identity in the movie. Is there a substance behind the layers upon layers of the roles we play?
At one point the lead character bumps into an old friend, played by Kylie Minogue.

She asks: “Is it you?”
“I think so,” he answers.

Shortly thereafter Minogue breaks into a euphoric dance-number: “Who were we, when we were who we were, back then? Who would we have become, if he had done differently back then?”, she sings.
After they say their goodbyes, as soon as he leaves, she pulls off her blond wig and costume, and throws herself off a balcony, killing herself.

It’s about Art and about Hollywod.
At one point a character says: “Beauty in the eye of the beholder. What if there is no longer a beholder?”
To what extent does an artwork have to find an audience in order to be considered worthwhile? What if there are only a few spectators – what if there are none?

It’s a beautiful and thematically complex movie – the most though-provoking film I saw this year.

Why Scarface is a true Masterpiece

I always considered Scarface to be one of De Palmas lesser achievements, as I saw it as a more impersonal film for him, a film that did not reflect his particular social, psychological and political sensibility. In that sense, I saw it as being in opposition to films such as Hi, Mom!, Blow Out, Snake Eyes, and Femme Fatale.

Well, I was wrong.

I just rewatched this film expecting to see a spectacular, but ultimately somewhat superficial epos. However, not only does De Palma coax what is perhaps a career-best performance out of Pacino, but the movie is wildly entertaining while at the same this serving as a stinging criticism of the Reagan administration’s hypocritical “war on drugs”, which was little more than a PR-campaign and the consruction of an external enemy.

De Palma makes it clear that both police, bankers and politicians are all corrupt, meanwhile using Tony Montana as a scapegoat to illustrate everything that is wrong in America. No wonder the afro-american community has taken this film to heart, as they have experienced this first hand.

Watching Scarface today, it’s easy to forget that the story was contemparary in 1983. The political reality that the movie describes – enormously brutal violence, government corruption at all levels – was happening outside the movie theatres as the movie played out on the screen. No surprise De Palma almost got lynched after this one. The criticism of the Reagan administration and American society was so intense that it was impossible to accept. It was an incredibly ballsy move by De Palma. The satirical critique of capitalism and the American Dream is easily recognizable in this movie as well as in De Palmas filmography as a whole.

Making Dressed To Kill, Blow Out and Scarface back to back over three years? Has any major Hollywood director ever offered a more direct criticism of American society? All while keeping his audience glued to their seats with their eyes wide open.

Bad Lieutenant: Pain as Metaphor

Regardles of original director Abel Ferrara’s apparent wish to see the people behind this picture die and burn in hell, I thought this was Werner Herzog and Nic Cage’s best effort in a while. Cage is able to express a number of different emotions and personas as convincingly as I’ve seen this year. (Jeff Bridges also did it empathically in Crazy Heart, but Cage’s performance seems more important.) With his hunched back, walking with stiff, short steps he embodies a whole city’s (if not to say country’s) feeling of despair and disillusion.

Cage’s character, Terrence McDonagh, is a highly flawed, corrupt cop who at one point decides to jump into a flooding prison cell from one story up to save a drowning prisoner. The result is irrepearable back damage and a permanent condition of severe back pain. These chronic back pains spiral McDonagh further and further down into a world of narcotics and prescription drugs.

Setting the plot in New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina is a masterstroke by Herzog. If there is ever a place to illustrate the brimming injustice of the ever-growing inequality in the U.S. (and the world), this is it. (Consider the plans to privatize and gentrify the area in the wake of the catastrophè.)

I find it hard not to see Cage’s tortured cop as a metaphor. A metaphor for how poverty and downward social mobility as the result of disease, injury and disaster strikes coincidentally, dragging shame and humiliation along in its footsteps.

Cage’s good deed does not go unpunished. His injury perfectly illustrates how New Orleans’ poor and predominately black population was brought to its knees. The same way desperate people all over the world see the windows, doors, and borders of opportunity close all around them by a brutal, overwhelming, and merciless force, as poverty sweeps up its random victims.

“If He is not the word of God, then God never spoke”

The movie uses a post-apocalyptic world as an analogy to discuss contemporary issues. Such as the struggle to find meaning in a capitalist world. In this sense I thought it was reminiscent of Kafka’s The Trial. Struggling to find a reason to go on, Viggo Mortensen looks at his sleeping son, and says “If he is not the word of God, then God never spoke.” A lot of credit goes to author Cormac McCarthy’s poetic words. Even for an agnostic like me, the love I feel for my son is so strong that it feels like it has God-like dimensions.

Brilliantly, The Road sheds light on the struggle of the poor, starving and desperate populations of the present day world. It removes the blindfolds from the prosperous, showing a harsh truth. Steven Spielberg also the same in his underrated allegory War of the Worlds.

However, director John Hillcoat chooses to use tremendously low contrasts in his imagery. At times it’s hard to make out anything at all in the the muddy grey and brown colors. The flashbacks to present time, on the other hand, have over-saturated  colors, creating a dramatic distiction between now and then. A different approach emphasizing the parallels between the two worlds would have been much more interesting in a cinematic sense.

Because that parallel is the real story here.

Nowhere Boy -the young John Lennon

Just saw this on dvd. It is a surprisingly well shot film. It is rare these days that a movie tries to take advantage of cinemas’ intrinsic visual capabilities, but instead relying on dialogue, plot, narrative and character to convey meaning. To a considerable extent, this is also true for Nowhere Boy -which is nonetheless an interesting look at some Freudian trauma of John Lennon’s dramatic childhood and youth.

The camera is always a player in Nowhere Boy.  Nowhere Boy at times uses editing and cinematography to achieve beautiful results. Let me give you one example of how director Sam Taylor-Wood uses cinemas own vocabulary to convey meaning.:

At one point Lennon is given a guitar, and rehearses in his living room. We see him pull out the guitar, sit down, and start playing. He is alone in the room. After a few seconds we realize that the images have been sped up. The other members of the family fly in and out of the living room at exaggerated speeds while John sits still and plays his new instrument. The idea is that he has finally found his calling.; for him time is standing still.  It is understood that John’s life will never be the same again after this moment, brilliantly reinforced by pure visual storytelling.

KICK-ASS

Apart from the nihilism that have become all-too common in action films – particularly since Tarantino popularized the tooth-for-tooth  revenge fantasy in the mid nineties – Kick-Ass is a very likable movie. In that sense it is reminiscent of 1994’s Falling Down, which was a sensationally watchable and engrossing vigilante-drama with a poignant turn by Michael Douglas.   

The editing in Kick-Ass is rapid and competent. It is a rare sight to see action-sequences edited together this well, without cheating. Most action-directors employ a blisteringly-paced and eventually confusing form of jump cutting that leaves the audience to make out the spacial-temporal logic of the scene by themselves. Such directors do not show how the different elements of the scene relate to each other. Take for instance films like Quantum of Solace,  District 9 or Avatar. 

Kick-Ass director Matthew Vaugh is, however, able to do this to a considerable extent. The action sequences in Kick-Ass are exciting, suspenseful and truely involve the viewer. 

Add to that an unusually vibrant color scheme and a truly charming lead actor in Aaron Johnson and you have the year’s second best action movie to date, only behind the fascinating real politics of The Green Zone.

In the Mood for Love

The greatest film I saw in the past ten years was Wong Kar-Wai’s In the Mood for Love. 

When was the last time you saw a film that transported you to another place, another reality, another world. This movie does that -and keeps you there spellbound.

 

In the Mood for Love is by far Kar-Wai’s best film. There was not a better example over the decade of a film using the elements of pure cinema to create atmosphere, emotion and reflection. Certain segments of the film combines music and mise-en-scene to create astonishing results, carrying the viewer away into a dark, dreamy world where you are completely encompassed in the film’s universe. The rythm, color and pacing of the gorgeous, slow, tracking shots have a hypnotic effect which reaches for cinemas highest aspirations.

Other shots visually and metaphorically underline the films theme of distant, impossible love.  A true masterpiece of visual cinema.

Communicating Space, Pt. 2

Reality is three dimentional. Paintings and photographs are two dimentional.  Part of cinemas mission is to explore space in the three dimentions.  As previoulsy mentioned this can be done with a moving, probing camera and also by editing; by mise-en-scene or montage, some might say. Mise-en-scene is sometimes referred to as what is front of the camera but keep in mind that what’s in front of the camera depends on the cameras constant movement and reframing -therefore the proper definition must be what’s in front of the camera as it relates to the camera itself.  

Camera movement is essentially cinematic. But some director don’t utilize these possibilities. There are tons of directors who hardly ever move the camera or explore focus or editing – in short, the cinematic language. Two of the most critically acclaimed directeors whom I’ve never seen move the camera are Bent Hamer (Factotum, Eggs) and Roy Andersson (You, the living). They are good at what they do, but it’s not my cup of tea.

Che Part 2 – communicating space

Cinema is about communicating space.  Film can communicate three dimentional space in a way none of the other art forms can.

This is done primarily with the techniques of editing and camera movement. It is an absolutely essential aspect of the art form.

Steven Soderbergh does a pretty good job of this in the battle scenes in ‘Che’. He doesn’t really engage with the language of cinema to any extensive degree in the two films. But at one point we see the guerrilla soldiers walking down a river shot from an overhead angle -it is a rare and refreshing visual touch that adds some texture to the film.

But still – space is represented quite consistently in the film’s battle scenes, especially the final scene where the Bolivian soldiers close in on  Che and his men hiding in a a hillside behind some rocks. As the the soldiers (who are far superior in numbers) approach, the claustrophobia mounts. The way this is done is through use of foreground and background in the frame, as well as consistency in the communication of the spacial relations in the editing. That means that there is a relationship between the shots, that they relate to each other and work together to communicate space, and don’t contradict each other visually. 

I will write more  tomorrow.

It’s a Free World

“Form is content. But other things can be content too”, Brian De Palma once said.

Well, that’s pretty much how I feel. Ken Loach’s ironically titled It’s a Free World is certainly a wholy uncinematic film that fits into the latter category. But Loach’s film is big on credibility. The main character is exceptionally well fleshed out and we understand the poor’s corrupting struggles to make it. Social realism that is at times heart breaking.