An actress steps through the looking glass

En route to Zurich, where she’s to accept an award in his honour, Maria Enders (Juliette Binoche) learns that her old mentor, the reclusive Swiss playwright Wilhelm Melchior, has died. Delivered bluntly to Maria by Val (Kristen Stewart), her personal assistant, a resourceful young American, the news contributes to the growing sense of things ending for Maria, or at least transitioning into something else. Maria is in the midst of a messy divorce. Despite the obvious incentives, she’s declining to reprise her role in a super hero movie. She may or may not be accepting a role in a London revival of Maloja Snake, the Melchoir play that made her famous, except that when she first did the play 25 years ago she was the young seductress; this time around she’s to play the opposing role, that of the middle-aged business woman seduced and shattered by the younger woman, who would now be played by ostensibly talented celebrity train wreck Jo-Ann (Chloë Grace Moretz). The high-concept casting is tantalizing, and the director is said to be brilliant, but Maria feels vulnerable. She’s tampering with her legacy, acknowledging her age in a viciously age-phobic industry, stepping through the looking glass.

Which is not so different from what Binoche is doing by playing Maria, a character very close to Binoche, written specifically for Binoche by writer/director Olivier Assayas, with whom the actress worked on 2008’s exquisite Summer Hours. Clouds of Sils Maria brims with such slippage, between real life and the movies, between the play Maria is working up the courage to act in and the fraught dynamic between Maria and Val, who retreat to Melchoir’s home in the spectacular, mountainous Sils Maria to run lines and debate the underlying values in conflict in the play. Is it better to be young and arrogant or mature and wise? Certain elements of Clouds recall Ingmar Bergman’s Persona—the borrowed country home, the imperious actress and the fresh-faced helper in psychic face-off—while Maloja Snake is itself inspired by Fassbinder’s The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant. These touchstones, like Binoche and her own stature as a star, are just some of the things hovering in our shared culture that Assayas is responding to and sculpting into something unique, arresting and ultimately haunting. The film is so rife of gestures, ideas, events, subtle little moments in which something suddenly changes. I first saw it nine months ago and it lingered in my memory as an uncontainable thing. I just watched it for the second time and had that peculiar experience of revisiting a film and remembering that films unfold one scene at a time.

While retaining a rawness, post-Twilight Stewart gives a far more crafted performance as Val than in anything I’d seen her do—the twitching and fidgeting has been reduced to a minimum. Moretz too seems to be adopting another, more intriguing register with Assayas and company. Jo-Ann spills over with faux-stoned bad girl affectations when Maria watches her on trash TV shows, only to transform into a young artist longing to reinvent herself when she and Maria finally meet. Binoche is as inventive, bold, playful and as adverse to the slightest falsity as she’s ever been. Her Maria is mercurial, capable of exploding into withering laughter, aware of her power while also aware that her powers could fail her any moment. In the film’s first part she’s the epitome of glamour; in the second and third she cuts her hair and scrubs her face clean. She looks her age, I guess, with a new nakedness, as if to say, If I’m going to be the older woman, let’s get this over with. She’s also radiant, as I imagine she always will be. But radiance quiets with time, and the film’s final, quietly brutal scene leaves Maria in a place similar to its first scenes: we see a woman on the move, between things, figuring out what to do next, and how best to survive the journey.

              

A very particular collaboration

Here are some of the films Ingmar Bergman made with Liv Ullman: Persona (1966), Shame (1968), Hour of the Wolf (1968), The Passion of Anna (1969), Cries and Whispers (1972), Scenes From a Marriage (1973), Autumn Sonata (1978), Saraband (2003). If you know just one or two of the films on this list—to which I should add Faithless (2000), the excellent film Ullman directed from Bergman’s script—you probably know that we’re surveying one of the great collaborations in cinema history. Great not only because Bergman was a visionary director and Ullman an actress of singular gifts, but because each of those films were elevated and deepened by their creative dialogue. Actors were far more essential to Bergman’s cinema that is the case with most of the great auteurs, and Ullman was so much more than a muse.

Begrman and Ullman were married for a time, and had a child—another collaboration—and theirs is a fascinating, at times chilling love story. He was over 20 years her senior, a notoriously difficult, neurotic, particular man already on his fourth wife—whom he’d leave for Ullman, just as Ullman would leave her first husband for him. He bought a house for them on Fårö, the island where they shot Persona and many subsequent films, and surrounded it with a high stone fence. He wanted to keep her there and she needed to spread her wings, which in time she did, embarking on an international career with few filmic highlights that didn’t possess his signature, but with numerous successes in the theatre. They remained close friends and creative allies until his death in 2007. Their relationship deserves serious investigation. It deserves so much more than the narrow, sentimental gloss it gets in Dheeraj Akolkar’s Liv & Ingmar.

The film’s chapters are given titles like ‘Love,’ ‘Loneliness’ and ‘Pain.’ The music feels best suited to a soap opera or a commercial for long distance rates. There are shots of tastefully arranged photos and letters which Ullman’s hand gently glides across, and shots of Ullman gazing solemnly from a beach or an empty stage, or through the window of a car. In short, this documentary, about people who made some of the most austere and emotionally brutal films ever made, is super-cheesy. More importantly, it seems largely devoid of curiosity. Ullman is the only interview subject. Akolkar apparently spoke to no one else, not even Bibi Andersson, Ullman’s frequent co-star, and another of Bergman’s actress-lovers. There are no archival interviews with Bergman or cinematographer Sven Nykvist, his other great collaborator. There’s almost nothing about the nature of Bergman and Ullman’s working life—which surely can’t be separated from their love story—how it was negotiated, given their intimacy, how characters and stories were developed, and so on. It’s hardly the case that Ullman isn’t articulate on these subjects—though only a fraction of the duration of Liv & Ingmar, the interview Ullman gives on Criterion’s new Persona DVD/BD (see previous post) brims with insight into their process.

There is a moment near the film’s end in which Ullman describes following an impulse to go visit Bergman on the last day of his life. The scene is almost unbearably moving, but what makes it so moving—the phenomena of having someone whose life is so utterly intertwined with yours—only emphasizes all that this film lacks.    

                   

Persona's still-haunting sliver mirror

There is no settling into Persona (1966), so let’s not settle in. A projector’s viscera glows white hot, whirring celluloid flutters by, a cartoon prototype appears, then a shard of silent slapstick: set to modernist horror movie music, the prelude reminds us we’re watching a movie; it’s also incorporating spectatorship into the realm of its story. A sheep is slaughtered, a spike is driven through a hand, a tarantula crawls across a white surface, a bespectacled boy (Jörgen Lindström) wakes up in, it seems, a morgue; at least, the elderlies sharing his pale space look dead enough. Perhaps the unnerving images that preceded were excerpts from his dreams; perhaps they were the dreams of the dead surrounding him, their psychic vapour. The boy tries to read Lermontov (!), but gets distracted, like us, by the screen, or, for him, the lens, but, actually, a barring window or membrane separating him from the dissolving images of two women’s faces. He reaches out, to that screen-lens-membrane, to us, to the women, or some elusive, amorphous mother that the pair represents. Hard cut. Prelude over. Roll opening credits. We’re not so much acclimatized for Persona as sufficiently jarred to enter it.

Nearly 50 years after its debut, Persona can seem less like a linear experience than a cinematic ecosystem, a movie-place containing interconnected elements, most famously, images of Bibi Andersson and Liv Ullman, the film’s ingenious actresses, their merging and/or interlocking faces and hair. But that sense of the film as an object to behold and puzzle over dissolves once you start watching it. The opposite of ponderous, the economy of the opening expository scenes is bracing. Alma (Andersson), the nurse, is debriefed by her superior (Margaretha Krook) about their their new patient, Elizabet (Ullman), an actress who stopped speaking one night while playing Elektra on stage and has yet to recover. A hard cut to a brief flashback appears in the midst of this: a tight close-up of Elizabet in the moment of her sudden pause—a pause yet to be broken. It’s as though, all at once, a veil fell away and she became paralyzingly aware of the sham of her performance, or of this play, and that awareness followed her into the rest of life. Authenticity was in that moment all but drained from the world, through the rare moments when she’s presented with something undeniably authentic—a television broadcast of a self-immolating monk in Vietnam, a photo from Jürgen Stroop’s report on the suppression of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising—she recoils.

Does Elizabet’s crisis mirror that of Persona’s writer and director, Ingmar Bergman? He’d spend the first part of the 1960s making increasingly strange, inventive and claustrophobic films exploring the traumas and liberation of living in the absence of God. During those same years younger filmmakers were renovating film language, making the movies exhilaratingly self-conscious, producing, for example, movies about genre in place of more genre movies. With Persona, Bergman took that new self-consciousness and went inward instead of outward—he applied these new tools to an exploration of inner life. As Paul Schrader eloquently puts it in an interview included in Criterion’s superlative new Persona DVD/Blu-ray package, Persona is a milestone not because it was the first shot in a revolution but, rather, because it was the second. Me, I didn’t live through the revolution in question, but this second shot, once it came to me, was the one that wounded me permanently. I first saw Persona when I was 16, and it was the most transfixing, mysterious and, frankly, erotic experience with moving images I’d had. It remains all of those things for me. I’ve seen thousands of movies since, but every time I come back to Persona all those movies seen only heighten and reinforce my appreciation.

I was saying something about story, and, truly, for at least half of Persona the story remains crisp, clipped, just cryptic enough to intrigue. Alma and Elizabet are sent to Alma’s superior’s cottage on the island of Fårö. It’s summer, the sun never sets, and the scene seems idyllic. Elizabet remains mute, but her beguiling face could be read as sympathetic, even fascinated. So Alma talks and talks and her life, which she previously described as “decided,” begins to seem looser, at once less fixed and more interesting. She tells stories, and in the same way that this movie works as profoundly as it does because it acknowledges its movieness, her stories possess the transfixing-mysterious-erotic power they do because they come to us as stories—flashbacks would never have the same impact as the sentences so deftly delivered by Andersson. Elizabet becomes something like a best friend, or a therapist, or a vampire—later on she’ll actually drink blood. Does she truly care about Alma’s life and career, or about that impromptu orgy she partook in and never told a soul about before? Is Elizabet genuinely interested in Alma or just searching for material? For an artist, maybe for actors (and writers) most of all, are both things not always in play?

Persona’s key moment, or the whole movie in one scene: Alma in bed, the night not dark but slivery, the air almost smoky, and Elizabet soundlessly enters her room like a Japanese ghost. Like the boy, the two women will gaze into the screen or mirror, faces close, stroking hair, a seduction, a spiritual merger… And then comes some sort of betrayal; petty revenge; a simmering resentment that briefly tears up the physical substance of film itself; friendship becomes a duel; then a visit from Elizabet’s confused husband (Gunnar Björnstrand) and a turning of tables—maybe Elizabet’s real fear wasn’t of being false but of being ordinary, like Alma. You can explore the emotional geometries in this movie for ages. This is the trick: certain fundamental mysteries endure, but the character dynamics and the feelings involved are only too identifiable. “Persona” means mask and masks continually fall away in Persona. But, in spite of all these haunting close-ups, how do we know for certain when we’ve arrived at a real face?   

Persona was always my number one when it came to movies that I felt begged for inclusion in the Criterion Collection. Criterion hasn’t neglected this happy occasion. This gorgeous new package has the best looking transfer I’ve seen. The strongest supplements are, for me, the interviews: one with Andersson, Bergman and Ullman at the time of the film’s release; one with Bergman from 1970 for Canadian television; a new interview with Ullman, in which she emphasizes the rigour of Bergman’s collaborative process and the many important elements that were discovered only during production or in the editing room; and the aforementioned interview with Schrader, who supplies sturdy historical context and still beams like a schoolboy when expressing his admiration for this film. If you could see my face right now, I suspect I’m beaming too. 

                    

Haunted by these images: The Film That Changed My Life

Something happens to us when we try to come to terms with formative experience. Some of us can articulate what constitutes the turning point in our lives. Some slip into reverie. Some are forced to acknowledge that there’s nothing more ineffable than the things that set fire to our imagination. Can something that blows your mind be analyzed? Does the fact that it blows your mind not preclude the inability to do just that? These questions haunt The Film That Changed My Life: 30 Directors on Their Epiphanies in the Dark (Chicago Review Press, $18.95). They give you some idea of what works and what doesn’t in this book of transcribed interviews conducted and edited by Robert K. Elder.

Alex Gibney

Some of the selections in The Film That Changed My Life are genuinely surprising, such as Boys Don’t Cry director Kimberly Pierce on The Godfather, or, most interestingly, documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney on Luis Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel. Gibney tells a nice story about his brief correspondence with Buñuel, and goes some distance toward explaining how he was influenced by Buñuel’s cryptic surrealist techniques while commenting on the intermediary walking scenes in Buñuel’s Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie: “It’s like finding some random shot as a documentarian, and throwing it in there because it has some kind of power you can’t quite identify.” Elsewhere, The Last Seduction director John Dahl recalls seeing A Clockwork Orange at a drive-in in Billings, Montana. “It was the first time I paid attention to the sets,” he says, which probably tells us something about the cinema of Stanley Kubrick.

Danny Boyle

Many choices however, especially those from directors with a large and familiar body of work, are more predictable—and why wouldn’t they be? And who can blame Peter Bogdanovich if he doesn’t have anything especially fresh to say about Citizen Kane? 8 1/2 changed Henry Jaglom’s vocation from actor to director. Richard Kelly believes that “We get closer to Brazil with each passing week.” Danny Boyle declares Apocalypse Now “a celebration of the destruction as well as a condemnation of its subject matter.” Boyle laments the loss of the sort of quixotic ambitions that could drive a film during Francis Ford Coppola’s salad days. He also claims cinema is fundamentally a medium designed for young men, which I probably tells us something about the cinema of Danny Boyle.

I wondered soemtimes if The Film That Changed My Life mightn’t have been better as a series of magazine pieces. Some of Elder’s choices of interviewees might have seemed less puzzling in that context. (Bill Condon? Brian Hertzlinger?) It also might have forced him to be a more judicious editor. There are numerous repetitions that sound fine in conversation but in print read as mere redundancy. There’s also a lack of spontaneity in some pieces that I can only assume arises from Elder’s insistence on using same questions every time out, whether or not they go anywhere. The best interviews in here are the ones that seem to indulge tangents—that’s when Elder’s subjects, as well as Elder himself, really engage and come to life.

Guy Maddin

I’m happy to report that two of the very best interviews are with Canadians, and I take comfort in knowing that both directors in question discovered the movie that changed their life while channel-surfing late at night for glimpses of accidentally uncensored nudity (something I myself have experienced—is this a Canadian thing?). Had he never seen L’âge d’or, Guy Maddin, a man not adverse to hyperbole, claims that he would have never picked up a camera. “It’s just a love story,” Maddin says, “every bit as surreal as a love story deserves to be.” Atom Egoyan meanwhile is extremely sharp about Ingmar Bergman’s Persona, describing its sculptural qualities, how it emphasized the friction in language and the role of the listener. He also says one thing in particular that nearly sums up the entire book: “We are never more alive, I think, as when we are trying to ascertain our relationship to something which is completely mysterious to us.”

Done with mirrors: The Magician on DVD

In the carriage we find a troupe of traveling showmen: a mute mesmerist in a corny fake beard, a beautiful woman in drag, and a bespectacled, hunched-over crone who claims to be a 200 year-old witch. Call them mystics, entertainers, or businessmen like anyone else, they’re still fugitives the lot, wanted on charges of fraud and blasphemy, which makes you wonder just what it is their audiences were expecting. It’s the middle of the 19th century and all over Europe are towns not big enough for both science and the spirit.


The troupe offers a lift to a fellow thespian found starving in a wood, an alcoholic seemingly on his deathbed. His name is Spiegel, the Swedish word for mirror, so when Vogler (Max Von Sydow) hovers over him closely, smelling the despair on the man’s breath, there’s much to imply that he might as well be looking at himself, or what he’ll become just a few more miles down the road.


The troupe arrives in Stockholm, where they’re to perform for a small, elite audience, among them the chief of police and the royal medical advisor (Gunnar Björnstrand), a righteous rationalist determined to prove irrefutably that their magic show is a sham. Though his more intimate struggles would be dramatized numerous times over the coarse of his long career, The Magician (1958), newly available from Criterion, is probably Ingmar Bergman’s most unabashedly autobiographical film about his professional life, pitting artists and critics against each another to see who can out-humiliate who. Björnstrand’s debunker was based on the critic Harry Schein, who Bergman felt persecuted by. Schein was the husband of actress Ingrid Thulin, and this knowledge injects a delicious audacity into a scene where Björnstrand simultaneously iterates his distaste for the troupe’s hocus-pocus and confesses his attraction to Thulin, who plays Von Sydow’s wife. Björnstrand has a line here that’s terribly on-the-nose yet somehow more potent for it, as though he himself were mesmerized and felt compelled to utter some naked truth: “You represent what I despise most of all: the inexplicable.”


The Magician was made during a transitional point in Bergman’s career: between The Seventh Seal and The Virgin Spring; between anxiety about death and anxiety about godlessness; between collaborations with cinematographers Gunnar Fischer and Sven Nykvist; between staging his films as, to some degree, extensions of his theatre practice, and transforming his aesthetic into something more wholly cinematic, driven as much by the characters’ internal states as their external dramas. It’s never been an especially beloved installment in Bergman’s oeuvre, and critics fret every now and then about whether it successfully adopts one genre or another, since some sections are comic, while the climax borrows conventions from horror. I can’t get too worked up about regarding any Bergman film’s genre status, but I find it tremendously interesting to see how The Magician so casually dismantles the obligatory narrative conventions used in every genre. It starts out focused on the troupe and implies that Von Sydow’s the hero. Yet we gradually become more invested in Thulin, who’s character and performance are more sympathetic and dynamic. (Von Sydow, usually so very good in Bergman, is a little hammy here, his character’s silence prompting him to overact with his face and hands. This overcompensation for silence would be memorably corrected some years later by another Vogler: Liv Ullmann in Bergman’s Persona [66].) Regardless, a third of the way into the film we abandon these characters and their adversaries both and pass an extensive digression with two younger, minor characters hungry to bring excitement to their lives: the troupe’s coachman and a servant girl, played by a very sexy yet subtly sad Bibi Andersson, who each drink from an ostensible love potion and await the results with a certain desperation. It’s as though Bergman conceived The Magician not as a propulsive drama or even a character study, but rather a sort of ensemble-driven essay on precarious ambitions under constant threat of having the rug pulled out from under.


We gradually come to the troupe’s performance, thoroughly pulled apart and laughed at, as promised, and to a series of deaths or seeming deaths, one being that of a man we already thought dead, another being a man we can’t quite believe is dead, and still another being a death already foretold by the crone, who may be the film’s one genuine mystic. These deaths set the stage for a carefully devised haunting meant to shake up Björnstrand. It’s a wonderful display of trickery, much of it dependent on mirrors, shadow and imagination, none of it ultimately capable of persuading Björnstrand that he was wrong in his initial assertions. Not that it matters. The troupe comes and goes and want only to amuse us, and perhaps move us, for the short duration of their stopover. As Bergman himself writes in his memoir Images: My Life in Film, which is excerpted in the booklet that accompanies Criterion’s disc, “I had often felt that I was involved in a continuous, rather joyous prostitution. My job was to beguile the audience.”