Two masters, building with precious time

There are collaborations and there are collaborations. In the movies, as in the theatre, collaboration is usually something that occurs over a handful of hectic weeks, often between artists who just met. The result can be brilliant or banal, but it must be arrived at under duress. Time is money, and those who can’t become galvanized by pressure enter into a life in the movies or the theatre at their peril. That stage director André Gregory and playwright-actor Wallace Shawn have been able to collaborate on projects over much longer periods—most recently a period of 15 years!—is evidence of an uncommon devotion to the vagaries of long-term creative exchange. Okay, that and, most likely, some degree of privilege. But this privilege has not been squandered. On the contrary, their collaborations have resulted in some legendary theatrical experiences and three singular, spellbinding, rule-breaking works of cinema, all of which have been collected in André Gregory & Wallace Shawn: 3 Films, Criterion’s inspired new multi-disc collection. Taken as a whole, these films not only chronicle the cinematic manifestations of Gregory and Shawn’s more than 40-year relationship; they also function as a testament to the still-untapped potential for the movies and the theatre to inform each other in aesthetic, formal and thematic terms and, perhaps most importantly, in their processes.

My Dinner With André (1981) has been around and been beloved for an awful long time now—can we all finally agree that a talky movie is not an inherently inferior thing? That listening can also provide cinematic rapture? I can’t think of a better rainy afternoon movie. Nor can I imagine many of Richard Linklater’s finest and most innovative films (Slacker, Waking Life, the Before… series) being made without this precedent. Directed by Louis Malle and written by Gregory and Shawn, who play “André Gregory” and “Wallace Shawn” respectively, Dinner unfolds almost entirely around a single table, occupied by two men and occasionally loomed over by a blinking waiter with an amusing resemblance to Samuel Beckett. Dinner is about dialogue, and thus a study in contrasts: between the opening shot of an oil barrel on an abandoned, dingy street and the refined restaurant where our characters meet, eat and converse; between the easy elegance of Gregory, speaking in mellifluous tones of strange experiences in exotic locales in search of transcendence, and the squat, chinless Shawn, dressed all in beige, mostly listening and posing questions as a way of managing his unease—until he finally reveals his mixture of fascination and contempt for what could be deemed as Gregory’s misguided mysticism, spurred by an apparent nervous breakdown.

Gregory tells of going to the Sahara with a Japanese monk; undertaking deeply ambiguous theatrical exercises with Jerzy Grotowski; tracking uncanny coincidences in old copies of Minotaur; the ostensibly fascist overtones of The Little Prince. Gregory compares a few too many things to Nazis and the Holocaust and over the course of this often very funny but also very serious film. He comes off as both a fool and a wise man. He seems above all to want to be present in the world, and the feeling of being present, of heightened senses, is exactly what Dinner offers. Every time I watch it at home I think I’m going to hit pause at some point, to watch it in parts—and every time I lose track of time and take it all in in a single uninterrupted viewing.

Where the source material for Dinner was its creators’ relationship and personal experiences, the next two films look to works from two of the 19^th century’s most canonical playwrights. Vanya on 42^nd Street (1994), also directed by Malle, transplants Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya to a crumbling Manhattan theatre long out of use, where Gregory and a group of actors—Shawn, Julianne Moore, Larry Pine, and others—invite us to a sort of open rehearsal for a project that they have been exploring, with no particular plan for production, for the preceding five years. The actors use only a handful of props and dress in their own clothes. Their transition from talking about their lives to performing the text—in an adaptation credited to David Mamet—is so seamless you might not notice they’ve started until they begin to call each other by names different from their own. These roles have been lived in. We are transported. “A hundred years from now, will they remember us with a kind word?” one characters asks. This film was made almost exactly 100 years after Chekhov wrote Uncle Vanya, and his characters, all of them stuck in the countryside, in marriages or longings or business agreements they find deeply dissatisfying, are simultaneously so specific and so universal. The camerawork is subtle, beautiful and fluid, a marriage of theatrical intimacy with cinematic intimacy, documentary immediacy with exquisite artifice.

A Master Builder (2014) is Shawn’s adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s strange, difficult, alluring Master Builder Solness, devleoped by Gregory and the cast over a decade and a half and finally translated to the screen by Jonathan Demme. (Malle died in 1995.) Shawn plays Solness, an aging, ferocious architect who, in Gregory and Shawn’s interpretation, is on his deathbed, visited by what we suppose is an apparition of a young woman (Lisa Joyce) who by turns seems worshipful and oddly threatening, a mischievous angel. She recounts for him an occasion ten years previous on which he erected a church in her town, climbed its spire, kissed her 12-year-old lips, and promised her that one day he would build castles in the sky for them to inhabit. Whether out of guilt, self-disgust, dementia or the story’s falseness, Solness has forgotten all of this, but then remembers it, or participates in the fantasy, as she tells it back to him. Meanwhile Solness denies a talented young assistant the praise he so deserves and requires so as to forward his own career. Solness placates his unhappy wife (Julie Haggarty), who seems to both resent his neglect and dread his demise. Employing tight close-ups, ostentatious zooms and sudden impressionistic cutaways to views from a moving car, Demme’s approach, though working with Vanya’s ace cinematographer Declan Quinn, is entirely different from those taken by Malle in the preceding films, yet it is extremely effective for this project, taut and tense, riveting even, despite the play’s endless ambiguities and lengthy conversations. Demme has described A Master Builder as a haunted house story, and this is ultimately how it feels, a medley of phantoms, palpable objects and places, and carnal experience.

Criterion’s supplements are especially superlative—and too numerous to list here. Most are interviews outlining the extremely interesting development processes that I’ve only mentioned here. But I think my favourite is a conversation between Gregory, Shawn and Fran Lebowitz, touching on topics such as the truth and myth of “playing yourself,” the importance of small theatre, how the past is never really past, and working on something long enough to explore every cliché and then throw it away.

           

The milky way: Louis Malle's Black Moon

Black Moon (1975) opens with the initially serene image of a badger innocently snuffling its way across a quiet rural road… only to meet sudden death under the wheels of our heroine’s smart little orange Euro-hatchback. The badger’s shocking accidental demise is our entrée into this film’s distinctively violent world, violent in the literal sense—there’s some sort of war going on, apparently between the sexes, with early scenes involving young men executing a line-up of young women by firing squad, and young women tormenting and molesting some young men—and violent in the figurative sense, with its almost total absence of exposition, its dearth of intelligible dialogue (though there is a conspicuous quote from Macbeth), and its succession of bizarre images and encounters that never accumulate into anything so pedestrian as coherent causality. Black Moon proved to be something of a bête noir in Louis Malle’s formidable oeuvre, a fantastical, anti-allegorical, sumptuously photographed (by Ingmar Bergman’s long-time collaborator Sven Nykvist) work that greatly rewards those viewers inclined to shrug off things like narrative logic in favour of sustained fascination, beauty, and mystery. It’s now available on DVD and blu-ray from Criterion, who’ve made a special project of heralding Malle’s legacy.

Our protagonist, Lily (Cathryn Harrison), is an Alice-figure hovering somewhere between adolescence and womanhood, apparently oblivious to her nascent sex appeal. She finds herself at a country manor inhabited by a small, elderly woman (Therese Giehse) confined to a bed and two young, mute adults (Andy Warhol/Paul Morrissey “superstar” Joe Dallesandro and Canadian actress Alexandra Stewart), each of whom seem to communicate primarily through telepathic touch, and a gang of rowdy naked kids who vanish at random. There are a great many non-human inhabitants of this house and its surroundings as well, including pigs, turkeys, a unicorn, a snake, a chorus of sheep, and flowers with feelings to hurt. Lily’s central action throughout is to look at things, most often astonishing or alarming things, and Malle and Nykvist manage again and again to render the images of her looking captivatingly. The most notable shift in Black Moon finds Lily gradually coming to understand that the old woman’s survival, and perhaps that of others she meets, is dependent on breast milk, and the film draws to its close with Lily resolving to offer her breast up to one in need.

Malle’s work frequently concerned sexual development in children, most obviously in films such as Murmur of the Heart (1971) and Pretty Baby (1978), and while its tempting to regard Black Moon as purely surrealist—especially given that one of the script’s co-authors is Joyce Buñuel, daughter-in-law of filmmaker and one-time card-carrying surrealist Luis Buñuel—there are a number of elements that prompt an interpretation in keeping with this over-arcing Mallesque theme. Many of Lily’s encounters impart a heightened awareness of gender, sensuality and the body as a site of numerous forms of erotic interest, hidden threat, and corporeal need. Not to mention the scenes where Lily reaches across a table for a giant-sized glass of fresh milk or the fairly straightforward symbolic possibilities generated from the aforementioned snake and unicorn. I don’t want to pigeonhole Black Moon so much as address some of its fecund multiple readings. It’s a delightfully perplexing film. It’s a bestiary. And it’s one of the most beguiling weirdo-discoveries on home video this year.

Variations on life's first-times: Au revoir les enfants and Yi Yi turn blu

As rendered in Louis Malle’s autobiographical Au revoir les enfants (1987), the Petite-Collège d’Avon, which rested on the grounds of a Carmelite monastery and neighboured Fontainebleau, and which Malle attended during the Nazi occupation of France, seems austere and bone chilling, especially if you’re permanently garbed in short pants. Yet it’s also an oddly wondrous, comforting place, nestled in fecundity, where boys could get away with a little horseplay and develop a scrappy camaraderie. Under Malle and cinematographer Renato Berta’s earth-toned, always fluid gaze, the Petite-Collège feels like home, even its sleeping quarters, where too many bunks cram a single room and a it’s only a matter of time before a serial bed-wetter like Malle’s surrogate Julien (Gaspard Manesse) gets outed by his merciless peers.

The masterstroke in Au revoir, now available on gorgeous blu-ray from Criterion, lies in Malle’s respect for the past, his resistance to burdening it with the gravity of hindsight. In keeping with the experience as lived by Malle’s adolescent characters, much of what passes feels essentially ordinary, even if historical circumstances are extraordinary: reading by flashlight, playing on stilts in the courtyard, dodging the air raid drill to rattle off some boogie-woogie on the school piano, getting treated to a screening of Chaplin’s The Immigrant with live accompaniment. The film traces Julien’s friendship with Bonnet (Raphaël Fejtö), a story which stumbles along playfully and awkwardly the way childhood friendships do, until that day that forever changed Malle’s life, the day the Gestapo arrive to take Bonnet and three other boys away to their deaths, along with the school’s headmaster Père Jacques, who took them in and attempted to conceal their Jewishness. Before this final sequence Nazis remain in the background, spied outside the classroom window asking to confess, or, ironically, shooing away collaborators attempting to throw Jews out of a local restaurant. By largely eschewing overt, artificial portent, Malle’s finale becomes infinitely more moving, and every scene leading to it, however mirthful its tone, becomes pierced with unbearable loss.


The fleetingness of childhood (and adulthood) and ordinariness punctuated by sudden violence (which is ordinary enough) also dominate Edward Yang’s Yi Yi (2000), also new to blu-ray from Criterion. It follows a middle-class Taipei family through a rough patch: grandmother slips into a coma, mother into a spiritual crisis, father into two parallel ethical crises. Sister undertakes her first brush with romance while little brother quietly absorbs everything, translating it into images. Eight year-old Yang-Yang’s nascent experiments with his father’s instamatic, collecting evidence of those aspects of ourselves that remain invisible to us (he takes pictures of the backs of people’s heads), arguably make him the world’s youngest conceptual artist. Not that he knows it.

Yang’s group portrait is also a portrait of urban life and its inherent merging of disparate experiences. Public scenes are observed entirely through windows, neighbours are heard fighting through walls, surveillance cameras track movements. Sounds, music or dialogue from one scene bleed into the next. Yang-Yang, whose name invokes the film’s writer/director, is Yi Yi’s richest source of discovery and amusement. He’s cute, of course, but also vividly alert to the world and all its contents he can’t understand. A scene where Yang-Yang beholds a pretty schoolmate standing before the projected image of a documentary on thunder is elegantly echoed in a later scene where he dives into a swimming pool during a thunderstorm.

Yet I find myself most drawn to scenes involving NJ, Yang-Yang’s father, who, like Yang-Yang, is unassuming and wears clothes three sizes too big for him. The scenes where NJ dines and hits a karaoke bar with a Japanese colleague, their exchanges limited by their broken English (the only language they share), constitute marvelous moments of adults connecting. “Why are we always afraid of the first time?” the Japanese asks. Yi Yi brims with so many resonate variations on life’s first-times, and even if Yang allows them to be harrowing, he nonetheless consoles us with the fact that we can at least share them, though conversation, physical contact, or the compressing force of art.