Tuesday, January 19, 2010

SFIndiefest 2010: A+D

Amber Sealey's verite-style relationship drama A+D is exactly the sort of rough diamond you hope to see at a festival of independent films and it makes all the dreary shoegazing 'quirky' slacker fare you might have to trudge through to find it worth the effort. This film is fresh, intimate, real, brilliantly written and conceived - but it would have fallen on its face for all that had not the casting of Anton Saunders as Dan and Sealey herself as Alice been so inspired. These two are just fascinating to watch. And - at last! - we have dialogue worthy of real human beings, intelligent but unflashy, nuanced, playful, natural, sliding into darker registers of sarcasm and frustration as matters begin to head south. Alice is an artist who documents their relationship's every bend on her hand-held camera, so the verite edge established right away is extended and then magnified again with short webcam sequences. But the actors are so astonishing that when they drop the camera (and the verite motif it signifies) we are already under their spell - the sense is that we are indeed watching actual footage of Sealey's relationship with Saunders, so hypnotically real is every aspect of this scenario, including the grandstanding and cruelty which finally curdle the mix, scenes which grow organically from conditions we recognize as sheer bewildered inexperience inside a bit of a cultural impasse (Dan is British, Alice American: he questions her stagey confusion and need for 'space', she suffers from his sarcasm and unromantic corners; it doesn't help matters that they are squeezed 24/7 into a small London flat).

So who is Amber Sealey? I can't dig up too much about her online, except that she is based in LA and studied at Central and RADA in London. This is her directorial debut; she also wrote and produced the film as well as starred in it. For a film that never puts a foot wrong in any category that is quite an achievement. Even the ending, with its left-pointing arrow on the road and its shot of Alice in the rearview mirror is an understated touch of mastery.

Anton Saunders is something of a revelation as well. His Dan is by turns sweet, blunt, sexy, sarcastic, provocative, funny, and obstinate, a perfect foil for the moody but fascinating Alice - the two crackle and weave about one another in what is I think the most flawless dual performance I have seen in ages. Maybe ever. See this film. Here's the trailer:



Thursday, January 14, 2010

SFIndiefest 2010: The Blood of Rebirth

Filmmaker Toshiaki Toyoda is known for his hip, contemporary themes, youthful urban dramas, music videos and documentaries, so his latest feature The Blood of Rebirth opening in next month's San Francisco Indiefest comes as a bit of a surprise. Based on the Japanese folktale Oguri Hangan and set in a medieval-looking time when gods and demons ruled the earth, the film depicts the trials of Oguri as he is betrayed by a diseased and megalomaniac lord, murdered, and then given the opportunity in the afterlife to return, not as a human but as a 'hungry ghost', whereupon he is rescued by the virgin concubine Terute; he is weak, virtually catatonic, and so unable to defend her against her pursuer, the same lord now greatly inflamed with anger; he struggles on towards a secret spring in which he is magically renewed, and is finally able to confront his (and Terute's) murderer once more. As a story it is about as unsophisticated as they come, which is both its blessing and its curse. The characters are unconsidered, more like signs or types than real people; the maniacal lord is absurd, as are all his functionaries, the hungry ghost (a Tibetan buddhist term of some specificity) is simply sleepy, and the virgin girl a pure cipher; the themes themselves are formulas belonging to the world of graphic novels and comics; there is some exaggeration in speech and gesture, very little in the way of depth or development and a curious lack of meaning to the story itself. But the long, haunting, visually stunning sequences of Oguri and Terute inching their way through rivers and forests, gorgeously captured on 35mm and accompanied by intense, rhythmic, bottom-heavy rock music (courtesy of Toyoda's band Twin Tail) more than make up for these failings. Toyoda has created a poem-within-a-film, a sort of stretched haiku paean to the magic of nature, and inserted it into the center of the action in such an extended way that the story becomes secondary, relegated to the function of vehicle for a very differently complected, meditative work. The lushly beautiful summer forest, its air filled with the delicate snow of Japanese anemone seeds, the stark, rocky streambeds and the driftwood-strewn beaches with their thick coils of ground fog are utterly bewitching; they conjure a mythic dreamtime which is the very element in which such stories move. This filmmaker is a lyric poet before he is a storyteller, a champion of intuitions. There is such a strange quality of innocence in these enchanted passages that we feel we are contemplating a spiritual truth. If you like swordplay, and blood, and magic, you'll enjoy the film regardless of these features, but viewers in search of cinematic artistry and a touch of something quite unique will appreciate this curious dimension of enlightened consciousness within what is otherwise a fairly standard hero's journey.

Saturday, January 9, 2010

Window 24th and Treat


Quote: Theodor Adorno

"Art is magic without the pretense of being true."

Thursday, January 7, 2010

Michael Haneke 'The White Ribbon'

Michael Haneke's films can be read as chapters in an ongoing, postmodern theoretical essay on moral equivalence, repression, alienation, and guilt. It is a consistently disturbing work, provocative in ways both subtle and overt, with its passionless acts of cruelty to both animals and humans, its logical, rational, 'ordinary' atmosphere of a society without values, its indictment of 'the best of us' - the liberal, compassionate, educated folks like you and me - and finally its forthright implication of the audience itself as a desensitized, vacant consumer, guilty not just of watching but of co-creating the meaningless and horrible acts it pays to see, of participating in the world that is conditioned by its watching and conditions its audience in return. It's as bleak a vision as anything out there, but it's never absolute, because Haneke chooses always and above all other considerations to stress what is questionable in human motivation rather than what can be explicitly packaged as evil or insane. It is ultimately his unanswered questions and their dimly recognized connection to our own interior landscape that make the films so disturbing and at the same time so compulsively watchable. It's a bit like seeing our own blind spots for an instant - the flash of self-interest behind the morally correct position, the hypocrisy of a sentiment, the potential for cruelty within alienation, the media-fed gluttony for breakdown and terror, the love of things we hate - and then being left with the matter unclarified, since resolution on the level of character analysis and even plot is radically denied. Haneke's characters are ordinary civilians whose violent acts proceed logically from their familiar assumptions, denials, equivocations; his mysteries open out onto further mysteries when, like a labyrinth, they are closest to solution. And so we are forced, through recognition, implication, and irresolution, to consider how we ourselves, not our leaders (or filmmakers), might contribute to some form of corrective for what is clearly our problem, the problem of our time and our society, the problem of us. It is a radical call to responsibility that echoes throughout every chapter in Haneke's book.

That being said, his latest feature The White Ribbon, a period drama shot entirely in black-and-white and chronicling the strange events in a small German village before the First World War, is something of a departure for a filmmaker who has seemed, especially lately, with the grotesque Funny Games, hellbent on disturbing us. We still find a clutch of unanswered questions, the usual cruelty to animals and violent acts posited as logical outgrowths of so-called normal societies, but the viewer is let off the hook a little, allowed by virtue of the distancing effect of the period and the classical production values to enjoy the film as a film, to consider the roots of its violence as sociological curiosities of its time and place, though of course extensive to other societies in principle. But we endure none of the direct referencing of the viewer that is such a hallmark of his other films and, it has to be said, the gorgeous visual sweep of this more conventional film is like a breath of fresh air after the horrors of Benny's Video, Code Unknown or Cache, with their scenes of videotaped torture and the despicable atmosphere of implied voyeurism that accompanies them.


The White Ribbon has more straightforward narrative aims, despite its unsolved mysteries. As Haneke has commented, the idea is to explore the "roots of terror" in a given community, and to consider the ways in which these roots connect with later, diabolical developments in society at large. In this case the connection is between pre-war Puritan absolutism with its sanctioned cruelty and suffocating repression, and the disastrous fascist period which followed in its wake. I wanted to present a group of children on whom absolute values are being imposed, Haneke comments. What I was trying to say was that if someone adopts an absolute principle, when it becomes absolute then it becomes inhuman. As a study of German development it seems a bit reductive - what about other Puritan communities that didn't breed a nation of fascists? - but the point is generally well-taken. As Jewish writers are at pains to point out, no social or psycho-analysis is adequate to the unspeakable horrors of Nazism, but since it is Haneke's stated intention to examine the non-stop fascism in France, Austria, Germany, everywhere you look, his study of German society can be understood generally. Certainly the sort of rigid, joyless, life-negating, entitled and cruel pedagoguery assimilated by the children in this village as normal expressions of societal order must have - has had - catastrophic effects in later life. Such effects are never portrayed - it is Haneke's style to present a psychological situation in situ and without comment - but it is precisely this technique which allows for consideration of effects according to the disposition of the viewer. It is a powerful form of political communication.


The film is also fascinating and beautiful to watch, and this for two reasons that are immediately striking. One is its atmosphere of mystery and dread. The tension established in the first few frames builds inexorably from one 'accident' to the next, swerving through more and more complex and detailed territory towards a denouement we begin to crave (and are denied). And the stiff, obedient, blond, ultra-conformist children who whisper to one another between episodes of punishment and tuition and who seem to have an understanding of things entirely their own recalls nothing so much as the spooky 1960 Village of the Damned. Combine this with the exquisitely visualized and highly researched look of the cast, their old-fashioned faces, to use Haneke's term, like those in a vintage photo. This superb cast is a revelation to behold before it even begins to act. It is reminiscent of the Mennonite community used in Carlos Reygadas' astonishingly unusual and authentic portrayal of contemporary (but not modern!) 'village' life in Silent Light. Haneke's German faces are studies in complexity, composed in various degrees of innocence, disappointment, resignation, rectitude, slyness, and contempt, marvellous faces we don't encounter very often in real life let alone in movies. And the acting is nuanced, collected within a register of repression that says as much if not more about effects and conditions as the strange incidents themselves. The character of Eva (a shy 17-year old who is courted by the teacher/narrator) is breathtakingly perfect; her scenes of courtship are impossibly, heartbreakingly discreet, understated, and exact. Haneke looked all over Germany for his child actors, and the results illuminate every scene. These children have a mysterious valence appropriate to their roles as both victims and possible perpetrators (the question is never settled), and it has something to do with their authenticity as well as the concentrated quality they bring to the parts; they are jewels which have to be seen to be appreciated. The film could stand as a study in childhood alone, realistic in spite of its outlandish events, but Haneke is at home in complexity, and he extends his detailed examination to all aspects of period village life, from its feudal dynamics, its labor practices and feast-days, its festering resentments, gossip, familial relationships, inter-generational conflicts, superstitions, societal accomodations, and sexual mores to its all-encompassing religious life and the sort of psychological types it engenders and destroys. It is a sort of masterwork in sociological and philosophic filmmaking, and freed of the usual discomforts associated with Haneke's output, but as sophisticated as any film he has made, more assured even, it is frankly delightful to watch - probably why it won him the prize of last year's Palme d'Or at Cannes. Don't miss this one.

Saturday, January 2, 2010

Quote: Gaston Bachelard

"One can know states which are ontologically below being and above nothingness"
from The Poetics of Reverie

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Friday, January 1, 2010