Let's take this lyng down

It may be the most horizontal movie I have ever seen. The teeming populace of La Ciénaga (2001), Lucrecia Martel’s beguiling feature debut, spend an inordinate amount of time lying down, usually awake, sometimes several to a bed, sometimes with limbs splayed in various positions. There are amazingly dynamic geometries composed of bodies just trying to get a little rest. The laziness on display in La Ciénaga is charming and funny, and maybe also appalling, emblematic of the liminal space La Ciénaga nimbly inhabits, as though suspended on a high-wire, scathing social commentary on one side, vivid, goofy, impressionistic sounds and images on the other. The film is idiosyncratic, utterly personal, yet riddled with the political, with class critiques suggested only in playful ways. It’s a stunningly confident work. And the great news is that it’s now available from Criterion.

“La Ciénaga.” “The Swamp.” It’s the name Martel gives to the place where she grew up in northwestern Argentina. Part of this film’s allure is also what makes it very difficult to summarize. It is about two families. It is about a summer home, with a pool, and bedrooms, and lots of wine drank with ice, and an adjoining forest where the boys go to play with guns. It is very much about the bourgeoisie, but it’s told from the inside: many of the characters are often drunk (this would make a pretty good double-feature with The Swimmer), and the camerawork is somehow brilliantly choreographed and also stumbling and tipsy too; as rough-and-tumble as the cameras of John Cassavetes, but with a precision Cassavetes’ beloved mania wasn’t designed to take on. The film is autobiographical and the camera is never editorializing. The editing, of course, is another matter. It’s elliptical, teasing. Those boys with the guns: one wants to shoot a dead, muddy cow; another stands in the way; we cut to a shot of the landscape, no figures in sight, and we hear the gunshot, not knowing if someone’s been hit. If Martel made conventional narrative films we’d call her a master manipulator. But there is nothing conventional and little that’s narrative-forward about La Ciénaga.

It begins thusly: following an atonal aria in which a chorus of the world’s noisiest, cheapest-looking lawn chairs are dragged across tile, one of our two matriarchs, totally stinko, collapses, cutting herself badly. Her daughter comes to pull pieces of glass from her chest. A lazy assessment of La Ciénaga might say that nothing happens, but the film’s gambit rests in the opposite camp: everything happens, though it happens in fragments, in shards, with scenes that start halfway-in and end before they’re resolved; with more characters—family, friends and servants, victims of racial slurs—than we can be expected to keep track of. Martel is focused on immersing us in this world and that’s exactly what she’s so devastatingly good at. The film is so funny—the blitzed characters getting so animated about the idea of shipping for school supplies in Bolivia—the dialogue so curious, the images so transfixing, we might forgot that this is also an oblique indictment of a culture of waste and sloth, snobbery and unjust disparity, of tackiness and unchecked Catholic neurosis. All these ingredients will come into play in Martel’s subsequent films, The Holy Girl (2004) and The Headless Woman (2008), each of which feature fewer characters, or at least feature central characters, and something close to what we might call a storyline. Paragons of the New Argentine Cinema, they feel sprung from the same swamp yet each are inventive, provocative variations. Seeing La Ciénaga reminds us of how vast Martel’s powers are—and how long we’ve had to wait for more.

                             

Birth disorder

At the heart of Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Like Father, Like Son is a study in contrasts. On one side we have the upper-middle-class Nonomiya family. Father, mother and well-behaved six-year-old boy reside in a spacious apartment in a modern high-rise, every room immaculate in its tastefulness; whether donning business or casual attire, they all dress well, if blandly; when first we see them they’re being interviewed for a high-end school, and even the manner in which they’re seated, postures erect, with just the right distance separating their chairs, exudes order and exactitude. Nonomiya patriarch Ryota (Masaharu Fukuyama) works hard, rarely takes a day off, and seems the pride of his company.

The Saikis, meanwhile, mother, father and three kids, live in a set of cramped, cluttered rooms attached to their modest suburban appliance store. Yudai (Rirî Furankî) seems perpetually disheveled, wears garish pattern combinations, is openly thrifty, unabashed about looking for a handout, and happy to avoid work. His motto: “Put off for tomorrow whatever you can.” The upshot is that he’s more amiable than Ryota, spends more time with his family, and seems able to fix anything.

If directorial style is anything to go on, Kore-eda clearly relates more to Ryota—though he might envy Yudai. Kore-eda’s films, which include After Life (1998), Nobody Knows (2004) and Still Walking (2008), are clean, intelligent yet humble, subtle, even somber, and overwhelmingly favour symmetry. In the case of Like Father, Like Son, this symmetry is heightened by the use of Gould’s Goldberg Variations and other piano pieces that at times have the unfortunate effect of leveling the film’s emotional spectrum. It is to their enormous advantage that several of these films, which have regularly focused on families, feature adorable, fascinating, expressive children, which either Japan has a surplus of or Kore-eda and his casting directors have an exceptional knack for tracking down. Children bring life and merry disorder to Kore-eda’s films, and Like Father, Like Son concerns the fates of two children: Keita (Keita Ninomiya), the Nonomiyas’ boy, and Ryusei (Shogen Hwang), the Saikis’. The film begins with the belated discovery that Keita and Ryusei were switched at birth, and the central dilemma is about whether the families should swap the kids or leave them with the families who’ve raised them so far. From the instant resentment that Ryota feels toward his wife when the truth comes out to her growing guilt over dividing her love between two boys, to the peculiar ways in which the boys adapt to their changing living arrangements, there’s so much in Like Father, Like Son, in all its characterizations and individual journeys, that is observant, sensitive and wise. But the film’s protagonist, the one whose capacity for change will determine the story’s outcome, is Ryota. I won’t be so presumptuous as to say that Ryota is a stand-in for Kore-eda, but I like the fact that Kore-eda is willing to invest so much in his film’s least likeable character.

The premise is sensational, but the execution is anything but. At times I found Kore-eda’s pacing too deliberate; admirable, dutiful, and a little dull. But the Saikis come along often enough to throw everything a little off-kilter, and while Kore-eda refrains from sentimentality or facile resolution, he understands what emotional pay-off will come from Ryota’s gradual realization that he might be able to better his life by learning a thing or two from this family he quietly despises. 

          

Escape from planet ghetto

It’s the mid-22^nd century and disease and pollution have driven the 1%—or, given the overpopulation, more likely the .001%—into space, where they live on a pretty spinning wheel called Elysium, get plenty of artificial daylight and receive medical attention from all-purpose healing beds that can eradicate a cancer or perform massive reconstructive surgery in seconds. Meanwhile, somewhere in a sprawling shantytown called Los Angeles, a paroled ex-criminal named Max (Matt Damon) works the assembly line in a factory that produces the very robot cops that routinely beat the shit out of him. One day Max’s asshole foreman tells him to fix a glitch and winds up giving him radiation poisoning that’ll kill him in five days. So Marx finds his old Chicano gang, who run a coyote operation that takes illegals to Elysium—this is, among other things, a border-crossing movie and a plea for universal health care—and insists that he gets put on the next flight. The gang boss says Max can go so long as he performs a wildly dangerous “data heist,” which means kidnapping a top-ranking Elysian and draining his brain of all sorts of codes that can be used to start a revolution, or something. To prepare Max for his mission the gangsters provide him with an exoskeleton that turns him into a fleshier Robocop.

If that strikes you as a lot of synopsis already, trust me, that ain’t nothing. Part of the problem with Neil Blomkamp’s follow-up to District 9 is that it’s overloaded with plot. What Elysium does well are the big, broad concepts and the action bits; things like details or character development, not so much. Elysium spends a lot of time on secondary characters, yet all of them—Jodie Foster’s evil, leaden secretary of defense most of all—remain boringly one-dimensional. Not that Max is all that nuanced. Damon has a knack for bringing an unlikely soulfulness to his action roles, but Max is humourless and the script’s one stab at endowing him with psychological need is a shopworn trope that has Max longing to go to Elysium since childhood. We get this information not from anything Max says or does but rather from gauzy, corny flashbacks that, like much of the subplot material, are extraneous and make the film drag, right up to its nonsensically hopeful ending. 

             

The colour of no money

A series of sea changes in class position have made Jasmine (Cate Blanchett) blue. Or is her rattled state symptomatic of something more fundamentally flawed in her psyche? Maybe it’s just early dementia? We see her nattering away to a fellow passenger in first-class; traumatized and narcissistic, she has a serious handicap when it comes to over-sharing. But Jasmine needs to share—the bad thoughts creep up when she’s all alone—and it seems anyone will do. She was not so long ago filthy rich. By the rather devastating end of Blue Jasmine, she’s mostly just filthy.

This is the work of the serious Woody, which is a good Woody in that seriousness can bring out a focus and discernment sometimes lacking in Allen’s recent comedies. Woody on the economy might sound like a dubious tag, but Blue Jasmine is pretty smart, if cynical by default, about the pitfalls of privilege and the ways that desires for class ascension corrupt everyone. As the film begins, Jasmine arrives in San Francisco. She’s hopeless, penniless and needs to crash at the modest home of her cashier sister Ginger (Sally Hawkins). Jasmine is self-absorbed and snobby, and Ginger seems set up as her salt-of-the-earth, pure-hearted foil, but Allen isn’t one to sentimentalize any class, so as the plot thickens Ginger will also spy an opportunity to better herself, however slightly, in the arms of a much classier man than her current beau, Chili (Bobby Cannavale), and stoops to deception—both of Chili and herself—to accelerate the new romance. The Ginger subplot may seem predictable, but it also feels alive, thanks in part to the nuance and urgency brought to it by Hawkins and Cannavale, and by Andrew Dice Clay giving a shockingly strong performance, and Louis C.K., who’s wonderful, not emphatically funny but a welcome breath of fresh air at the film’s musty midpoint. He’s one of those actors who should be working with Allen as much as possible.

As is Alec Baldwin, very funny in an incoherent role in To Rome With Love and very slimy here as Hal, Jasmine’s ex, a Bernie Madoff-type whose imprisonment for running a Ponzi scheme leaves Jasmine—who may or may not have been onto him—broke and humiliated. “I sign everything,” Jasmine claims. “I’m very trusting.” Hal was a millionaire, a philanthropist and serial philanderer—we see him chatting up a nipply confection at what seems like an otherwise deadly boring party full of rich old people during one of Blue Jasmine’s many flashbacks. The line separating past and present in this film is diaphanous. For Jasmine, as her confusion burgeons, it occasionally dissolves altogether. At times the camera itself (Vicky Christina Barcelona’s Javier Aguirresarobe returns as Allen’s cinematographer) seems to float, disembodied, in time with Jasmine’s spells of dislocation. That these fugues finally work as well as they do are a testament to Blanchett’s daringness, collaborative intuition and clarity of choices. Amazingly, Allen claims to have not seen her in Liv Ullman’s 2009 production of A Streetcar Named Desire at the Brooklyn Academy of Music—amazing because Blanche Dubois is so obviously a template for Jasmine, whose mind keeps escaping to some idealized past. She too is always relying on the kindness of strangers, and is usually lying as a way of soliciting that kindness—a recipe for small, personal tragedies of the sort that Allen, however old-fashioned his sensibility may remain, is still very good at evoking.