Lou Reed, 1942 - 2013

“When you’re all alone and lonely in your midnight hour

and you find that your soul has been up for sale…”

            A song of hushed longing, of looking in from the sidelines, of devotion to and redemption through love, ‘Coney Island Baby’ may well be my favourite Lou Reed. It’s doo-wop without irony, with background vocals that caress like an ocean breeze. It closes Reed’s record of the same name (1975), a collection regarded as MOR at the time, despite the fact that the second track has him threatening to punch a woman in the face, while the fourth is a claustrophobic groove about murder as the ultimate kick, the only one left when the others don’t work anymore. Of course, for Reed and his listeners, there are kicks that endure. Reed was Jewish but his religion was music. “Her life was saved by rock ’n’ roll,” he rasped in one of the most accessible songs ever recorded by the Velvet Underground, the band he and John Cale formed in the mid-60s. Fusing literary, avant-garde and primal rock sensibilities, VU were little-known during their brief run yet forever altered their idiom. Brian Eno exaggerated only slightly when he said that everyone who heard The Velvet Underground and Nico (1967) started a band. When I discovered the record as a teenager it created a new standard that everything thereafter calling itself rock had to reckon with.

I’m avoiding looking at the news because every time I do I’m reminded that Lou Reed is dead. His disappearance “into the divine” is hard to process, partly because he never seemed to slow down. Sometimes sublime, sometimes ridiculous—sometimes both simultaneously—Reed never stopped working and never seemed to do anything that wasn’t done on his own terms. Producer Steve Albini: “…once in a while I wish to Christ I could give not a fuck as thoroughly as Lou Reed."

“When you’re all alone and lonely…” That voice that speaks directly to every listener. Reed, the late-night disc-jockey poet. He had a gift for vernacular and intimacy, his lines at once clipped and conversational. He could be infamously ornery. He made interviewers cry. But if you only listened to his music, you couldn’t help but feel he was your friend.

Minus 30 nights in dirt-cheap under-heated basement apartments with only candles, alcohol and 'Sweet Jane' to keep us warm. Talking a friend in another city off a ledge with the grandiosely bleak Berlin (1973) as consolation through recognition. Late nights spilling over into early mornings with Rock and Roll Heart (1976) and Street Hassle (1978) on the hi-fi. Huddling in the van in a strange city, getting stoned to the diamond-studded swagger of Transformer (1972). Reed’s music has been with me all these years, the years when adolescence tumbles into adulthood and musical discoveries burn into your brain and the world expands exponentially, but also the years that start to slip away vertiginously and require more fortified shots of panic and wisdom.

Reed made the exotic familiar. Drugs, sadomasochism and domestic abuse: no subject was taboo. Suicide, vengeance, fear, self-loathing: he made all feelings easier to bear, acceptable in thought if not in action. He made the worst of us better for the four minutes it took to tell some exhilaratingly sad song. “Have you ever had rage in your heart?” Reed asks near the close of a live version of ‘Dirty Blvd.’ He seemed to have everything in his heart.

Above all he had restless, idiosyncratic, vulgar audacity. See ‘Sex With Your Parents (Motherfucker) Part II,’ from Set the Twilight Reeling (1996) or ‘I Wanna Be Black,’ from Street Hassle, in which the narrator wants to die in the spring like Martin Luther King, shoot 20 feet of jism, and “fuck up the Jews.” ‘Mad,’ from Ecstasy (2000), files complaints by a philanderer caught with his pants down. “I know I shouldn’t a had someone else in our bed/But I was so tired… Who would think you’d find a bobby pin?” My girlfriend actually shouted at the stereo to fuck off. There’s the hour of electronic clamour that was Metal Machine Music (1975) and the alienating comedy act of Take No Prisoners (1978). There’s that tune from The Velvet Underground (1969) in which rock’s dominant purveyor of transgression seeks guidance from Jesus. Did I mention he was a Jew?

But Reed’s tenderness was equally potent. It was there, fully formed, from the start: is there a more generous declaration of love than ‘I’ll Be Your Mirror’? Love could be remote (‘Satellite of Love’), multifaceted (‘Some Kind of Love’), a set-up for the greatest betrayal (‘Perfect Day’) or immaculate (‘Heavenly Arms’). “People are always telling me their secrets,” Reed wrote, “and I often put them into song as if they happened to me.” He sang for Lisa, Stephanie and Caroline, for Perdo and Romeo Rodriguez—“A diamond crucifix in his ear is used to help ward off the fear/that he has left his soul in someone’s rented car”—for Candy, in a tremendously affecting gesture of identification with someone frustrated by the bounds of gender. “I’ve come to hate my body and all that it requires in this world,” goes ‘Candy Says.’ “What do you think I see/if I could walk away from me?”

As time passed, Reed’s guitar became more angular and fluid, his manipulation of feedback and distortion more controlled. His voice quickly lost its Velvet-softness, but while age limited his range he actually became far more expressive a vocal stylist. Grunts, growls and stutters became supple, funky, more passionate. It was almost rap, that hostile amphetamine babble at the top of ‘Gimmie Some Good Times’ that sounds like nothing so much as coming up for air. “Where’s the number where’s a dime and where’s the phone?” he snarls in the searing ‘Temporary Thing.’

Time also made Reed’s intrinsic morbidity acute. As a young man he extolled a longing for protracted spells in oblivion, or to slip far back in time. ‘Venus in Furs’: “I could sleep for a thousand years.” ‘Heroin’: “I wish that I was born a thousand years ago.” But as a middle-aged man Reed was firmly stuck in the present. “I wished for a magical way to deal with grief and disappearance,” Reed wrote of Magic and Loss (1992). That record’s gorgeous lead track wondered what makes life worth living when friends vanish.

“I worry that my liver’s big and it hurts to the touch,” Reed sang on The Blue Mask (1982). After giving up drugs Reed always looked to be in amazing shape—71 seemed like nothing. But he had a liver transplant earlier this year. He died on Long Island, where he grew up, with his longtime companion, artist and musician Laurie Anderson, near. Did he see death coming? If so, was it the ‘Beginning of a Great Adventure,’ or a final disappointment? Did he feel himself burning out, a “shooting star,” or “a star newly emerging?”

“You loved a life others throw away nightly/It’s not fair, not fair at all.”

“"In the end it was just an ordinary heart pumping blood!"

“Linger on…” 

     

TIFF '08: Kuroawa, Assayas, Kore-eda and others keep it all in the family

John Cale lives in a hippy commune in Patagonia. That’s really all I needed to know. A friend suggested I see Salamandra and, knowing full well of my special fondness for Cale and the Velvet Underground, he started his hard sell with the above item and I told him just to stop there. Cale’s brief, rather crazed appearances—chomping into glass, toying with a knife, singing in Spanish with a junkyard band, replete with a ragged chicken bone for percussion—comprise several of the highlights in Pablo Agüero’s feature debut, which follows a young single mother, freshly released from some sort of institution, as she uproots her six-year-old son from his established life with his grandmother and whisks him down to El Bolsón to live amongst the unwashed, the heavily bearded and the incense-drunk.

Agüero errs on the side of unimposing, his observational hand-held camera seeming to will precious little into action, counting on our connection to the protagonists, the boy in particular, and the rising absurdity of their deeply dubious attempts at roughing it in this cold, wet and largely unfriendly place to engage the viewer. The images frequently yield layers of metaphor, and the technique overall works well enough, though it’s difficult not to wonder if things couldn’t be pushed a lot farther, if the real hard work still to be done by Agüero wouldn’t involve driving his nervy, New-Agey, curly-haired mom past the point of mere constant nail-biting and deluded nattering. Still, an interesting, and certainly very sensitive picture that offers a glimpse at a most marginal life.

“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” so goes the famous opening sentence of Anna Karenina. Salamandra is just one of many films showing at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival that deal in some compelling manner with the grand old theme of family life, a theme that when applied to drama hardly requires the word ‘dysfunctional’ to be placed before it. Happy or unhappy, TIFF ’08 sees a number of families struggle to realize some fresh level of self-knowledge both for its parts and as a whole. And I think the finest—and funniest—example of this that I’ve managed to see came from one of the festival’s most pleasant surprises, Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Tokyo Sonata.

Kurosawa is most famous for his distinctively brooding and image-centered horror films, such as Cure (1997), Charisma (00), Pulse (01), and my personal favourite, the über-creepy Séance (01). As far as I’m aware, Tokyo Sonata marks Kurosawa’s first stab at comedy, and I have to wonder if it isn’t in fact his real calling. His horror films are smart, infectious and remarkably chilling, but they can also be overly ponderous and, in the case of Pulse in particular, simply over-long and limpid. It’s difficult to describe just what a refreshing about-face this new film signals without simply seeing it for yourself. Yet it occurs to me that the film does actually have something in common with Cure: where the characters in the older film are afflicted with a disease that drives them to kill, the protagonists in this new film seem to be afflicted with one that makes them crazy to start their lives over—even the little kid.

The downsizing of Ryuhei Sasaki (Teruyuki Kagawa), the result of his company’s outsourcing to cheaper China, is the catalyst. He goes home that night and begins the familiar charade, not telling his wife and children what’s happened and instead putting on the suit and pretending to go to work everyday. He mostly hangs out at the library and eats his lunch with the homeless. He meets another unemployed businessman who goes so far as to set his phone to ring every hour so can feign business calls in public—even though there’s usually no one around he could possible need to impress. It sounds pathetic, yet it actually impresses Ryuhei deeply. Ryuhei spends most of the movie looking like his head’s about to blow up, and I guess he can’t help but admire the other man’s mood-management.

We soon see that all three male members of the Sasaki clan are deceiving the family for their individual reasons, the quiet 12-year-old Kenji (Kai Inowaki) being the most sympathetic. When he’s suddenly struck one day by the lulling sounds emanating from a suburban piano class, Kenji asks his parents if he can take lessons and is brutishly denied by his newly emasculated dad, so he goes in secret, using his lunch money to pay. Meanwhile his remote older brother is secretly joining the US military just as they decide to send more troops to Iraq, and his over-burdened and under-loved mother is slowly descending into quiet desperation, nearing bottom and its accompanying implosion.

There are characteristically elegant, beautifully composed sequences here, such as the opening, in which papers blow through the empty house during a storm, or the moving finale, which manifests the title as something more than just an homage to Ozu’s classic. But much of Tokyo Sonata is sharply focused on clear, concise storytelling, terrifically goofy comic interplay, and steady character development, each strand of the narrative building to the point where there is a synchronicity of panic boiling over. It goes on for a while, but is never less than diverting and propulsive. There are moments of utter cruelty and hopelessness, yet Kurosawa somehow pulls things together in such a way that the film finally finds itself lighting upon a coda of redemption and new awakening.

If Ozu can be traced in the title and broad themes of Tokyo Sonata, from the intermediary landscape shots on down, he’s positively haunting virtually every aspect of Still Walking, Hirokazu Kore-eda’s latest, a heartfelt, often solemn, but still vivid, sensual, lovingly detailed and warm depiction of familial differences amongst adult children and their elderly parents, most of them irreconcilable. Centered quite simply around a family reunion, this is the sort of movie where no viewer can fail to recognize some fragment of their personal experiences. Kore-eda’s film was inspired by stories he was told by his own mother in the months before she died, and his story is very much informed by the absence of a key family member.

This same sort of near-palpable absence is equally essential to Oliver Assayas’ Summer Hours, which finds three adult and nearly estranged siblings—played by the impressive trio of Juliette Binoche, Charles Berling and Jérémie Renier—negotiating their way through what seems an inevitable complete break with the past after the death of their mother, wonderfully played by Edith Scob, the striking actress who many years ago starred as the titular victim of Eyes Without a Face (60). Marred only by a few unneeded scenes of bathetic weeping, Assayas’ survey of the increasingly rapid erosion of artifacts that bind us to our families and our collective history is at times positively biting and all-too resonant. But the film is also brimming with humour and, with its special, loving attention to its younger supporting characters, is equally invested in nurturing a sense of regeneration.

Okay, one last film before I sign off here, and one which brings us back full circle to Latin America. Dioses is Josué Méndez’s second feature, and reveals a genuinely propositive sense of camera placement and movement. Concerning an upper-class Peruvian family that includes a father, a teenage daughter and son, and the father’s new girlfriend—a dead ringer for Halle Berry, should that grad your attention—Méndez takes a series of more or less conventional dilemmas—a party girl with an unwanted pregnancy; an angry young man sick with his sinking into bourgeois rot and in love with his sister; a gold-digger painfully ashamed of her indigenous background—and frames them in such a way that we’re often able to re-examine our assumptions. Ménez has a knack with these slow zooms out and back in he uses, his juxtaposing of music and image in seemingly contradictory ways, and his fun game of having characters move in and out of frame from unexpected places.

The way Méndez conveys Diego’s inner anguish in particular is frequently tender, perverse and hilarious all at once, cutting to Diego’s amusing permanent scowl at inspired moments. The treatment of Eliza on the other hand can feel trite, especially in the very cutty scene that finds her rehearsing inane comments to make when around her new coven of snobby middle-ages wives, but the performance of Maricielo Effio, which shifts in subtle ways, goes a long way to gaining our sympathies. She’s the bridge between the worlds of wealth and poverty in Peru that Méndez seems very keen on imparting upon us, though the handful of scenes with the servants are some of the most telling of all. These women, always present and rarely visible, are in their way members of the family themselves, interlopers into a realm of elitism that, as its portrayed here, seems on the brisk of collapse under its own dead weight.