Notre Musique

This master returns.   At 74, Jean-Luc Godard, cinema’s “enfant terrible”, has still got it.  

His latest, ‘Notre Musique (Our Music)' is a meditation on humanity’s greatest failure: war.   Like the Divine Comedy, it’s structured into three kingdoms: Hell, Purgatory and Heaven.   “Hell” is a 10-minute montage of documentary and fictional “text” (that is, film clips) of war accompanied by piano music that is by turns lovely and jarring.   “Purgatory”, the main body of the film, is a literary conference in Sarajevo in which real literary figures mix with actors.   “Heaven” is an idyllic forest by the sea guarded (or is it occupied?) by the U.S. Marines.

Although “Purgatory” is set in Sarajevo and is thus overtly concerned with the aftermath of the wars over the breakup of the former Yugoslavia, the setting is meant to more generally evoke the hope of healing and reconciliation.   When Judith, a young Israeli journalist sympathetic to the Palestinian cause (Sarah Adler), surveys the charred remains and bombed-out husks of this once cosmopolitan city from the backseat of a taxi and tears stream silently down her face, it is as moving a moment as Godard has given us.      

In “Purgatory”, Godard, playing himself, is in Sarajevo to present a lecture on “Text and Image in the Cinema”.   He makes some interesting points about the ways our preconceptions affect our viewing of images.   If we’re shown a picture of a Danish castle we may say that it’s not that interesting.   Once told it is Hamlet’s castle, it becomes interesting.   He displays an image of charred ruins and asks the attendees where it was taken.   They guess Eastern Europe or Japan.   It turns out to be a picture of Richmond, Virginia, 1865, from the civil war in the United States.  

You may ask, is there more to this film than the obvious “war is hell” message?   Actually Godard’s primary interest here is to look critically at images and narratives of war, and at who gets to create these images and to what ends.   As the Palestinian writer Mahmoud Darwish, a guest at the conference, points out to Judith, the city of Troy was sung of by Homer and the conquering Greeks, not by its vanquished citizens.   Godard’s also concerned with criticizing the images produced by Hollywood, which narratives he considers to be propaganda.   In contrast, Godard cites what he calls “the principle of cinema”: “Go Towards the Light and Shine It On Our Night”.

- Feb 4, 2005

House of Flying Daggers

This is quite a movie.   It’s another artful martial arts picture from Zhang Yimou, whose ‘Hero’ I wrote about last year.   Yimou is a true poet of the cinema, although I’ve read that this film is something of a laughingstock in China because of its operatic passions and ludicrous plot twists.   Some of the lines are indeed howlers (e.g., “I thought you were hot like fire, but you are actually cold like water”—maybe it lost something in the translation from the Mandarin).

The story is set in 859 AD during the decline of the Tang Dynasty.   A rebel group called the Flying Daggers is striking blows against the powers that be.   Two agents of said powers (Andy Lau and Takeshi Kaneshiro) conspire to trick a blind Flying Daggers agent (Zhang Ziyi) into leading Kaneshiro to the rebels’ headquarters.   A love triangle blooms.

In this genre the story is really just an excuse for the grand set pieces, and this film’s are like unto a waking dream: Ziyi dances undercover at an opulent brothel in a circle of drums that she must strike with her flowing robes; soldiers float through the crowns of bamboo trees casting spears down at our heroes; a gorgeous fall landscape transmogrifies into blinding, howling winter.  

The cinematography by Zhao Xiaoding has been nominated for an Academy Award and richly deserves to win.   However, the film’s been passed up for a Best Foreign Language Oscar.

- Jan 28, 2005 

The Aviator

Liked it but didn’t love it.   I’ve a strict policy to never miss a Scorsese film, but it’s been awhile since one of his films meant much to me.   This one is a biopic of Howard Hughes as a young man, when his mental illness (obsessive compulsive disorder) fueled his obsessions with aviation and filmmaking, and before it overwhelmed him.   Scorsese obviously relates to a fellow obsessive: after all, he’s the man who once said, “I love movies –  it’s my whole life and that’s it”.    

‘The Aviator’ begins in the ‘20s with Hughes’ quixotic quest to create the WWI picture “Hell’s Angels”, which became the most expensive picture made to that point as Hughes paid his crew of more than 100 pilots to sit around waiting for the perfect clouds for the backdrop to the aerial scenes, which he shot with over two dozen cameras.   It ends in the ‘40s as he finally achieved liftoff for his massive wooden flying boat, the “Spruce Goose”, which he designed for military use in WWII but which he didn’t finish till after the war ended.  

As the film closes Hughes stands on the cusp of his descent into full-on madness.    
Today he would be medicated for his OCD/germ phobia, but it was his obsessiveness that impelled him ever skyward, to dream on the grandest terms possible and beyond.   Some claim that ‘The Aviator’ offers little insight into what caused Hughes to behave so bizarrely, but the cause probably was that there was something physically wrong with his brain chemistry.

Leonardo DiCaprio (or DiCrapio, as I’ve been known to call him) is actually quite good as Hughes, though I’m still not entirely sure what Scorsese sees in him.   Cate Blanchett plays Katherine Hepburn, one of Hughes’ many movie star lovers.   At first I thought, Blanchett’s doing a fine impression of Hepburn’s screen persona, but did Hepburn actually behave that way off-screen?   Later it becomes clear that Blanchett is playing Hepburn as someone whose screen persona bled into her day-to-day life.

These days, the pleasures of a Scorsese film are not emotional but sensual: the liquid style with its almost dreamlike flow, the vivid use of color, the moving camera and its interplay with the rhythm of the cuts (for which longtime editor Thelma Schoonmaker once again deserves a hand).   However, I rarely felt much for the people in the film.   If he can marry his masterful style with characters that involve the audience emotionally, he’ll have another masterpiece.  

Scorsese’s next project (which he’s been working on for years) is a film on Bob Dylan circa 1961-1966 due to air on PBS this summer.   Now that could be amazing.

- Jan 21, 2005  

Million Dollar Baby'

When a film comes as heavily freighted with hype as this one, one almost hopes to report that the movie can be taken down a few pegs.   Not this time.   ‘Million Dollar Baby’ truly is a heartbreaking piece of art.

There’s a theory that in the winter of his career Eastwood is atoning for his earlier films by critically examining the mythos of violence with which he used to titillate us.   Since ‘The Unforgiven’, his intent has been to show the human costs of violence.   Here he finds a subject, the world of boxing, which evidences that humans thrill to carnage.   However, this sure ain’t “Rocky”.    

Eastwood plays a trainer (a metaphor for a director) and boxing gym owner who agrees to train an eager “poor white trash” female fighter (Hillary Swank) despite his reluctance to work with a woman.   At first Eastwood’s character comes perilously close to cliché: the grizzled old boxing trainer with a heart of gold underneath the gruff exterior.   But as the film progresses his performance deepens to become as powerful and moving as any screen performance I’ve seen (and I’ve seen a lot of movies).   Swank is perfectly cast as the woman who, in her way, always remains a fighter.   Morgan Freeman plays Eastwood’s longtime friend, an ex-fighter who works as the gym’s custodian.  

- Jan 13, 2005
You may think you know where the film is going, and for a time you’d be right, but trust me on this: you don’t know where it’ll end up.   Strenuously recommended.

Closer

This one knocked me out, which surprised me as I found the trailer unbearable.   However, since I found myself at the theatre at show-time I decided to check it out rather than wait around for something else.   I braced myself for the parodistically over-dramatic howlers that’d made me wince in the trailer, but in the context of the film, “every one of those words rang true”, to paraphrase Dylan.   This is disarming stuff, stunningly acted, ranking with LaButte’s “The Shape of Things”, Bergman’s “Scenes from a Marriage”, and Cassavetes’ “Faces” as a lacerating portrait of human relationships.   I suppose we should expect nothing less from Mike Nichols, who after all directed such films as ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?’ and ‘Carnal Knowledge’.

“Closer” is set in London, where Natalie Portman’s character, an ex-stripper, is making a fresh start when a cabbie driving on the left knocks the unexpecting American to the feet of Jude Law, a writer.   This couple becomes entwined with a dermatologist played by Clive Owens and an American photographer played by Julia Roberts (an intelligent actress whose work I rarely get to see since she so often appears in stuff I’d run miles to avoid).   The film charts the permutations of their couplings as the characters’ stock rises and falls.   It riffs brilliantly on issues of intimates vs. strangers, victims and victors, identity, and coincidence.   Highly recommended, although it is adult in the most profound sense (though the assignations are off-screen).   Screenplay by Patrick Marber from his play.

 - Dec 17, 2004