The story of ()

In some suitably indeterminate period, in a suitably theatrical alley-crossroads, our bloodied and bruised heroine is roused from her death-like slumber by an elder Good Samaritan, offering only tea, a cosy bed, an ear. The pair retires to the Good Samaritan’s hovel. She has a story to tell and he has all the time in the world, or at the very least the next four hours. We are one foot in the realm of erotic fable, a form that invites tautology and exhaustion, objectification as route to oblivion. Our other foot? It’s stepped into a hall of mirrors, and every reflection reveals Lars von Trier.

Joe (Charlotte Gainsbourg) tells Seligman (Stellan Skarsgård), “I’m just a bad human being.” But Seligman—from the German, literally, “blessed man”—doesn’t believe in sin and he doesn’t believe in bad people. This is an invitation. She’s a nymphomaniac, he’s an asexual: you could not ask for more ideal listener. And so she begins her story, the father (Christian Slater) she adored and the mother (Connie Nielsen) she didn’t, the preternatural interest in her genitals, the burgeoning sense that she is destined to live in contradiction of society’s love fixation. By adolescence, young Joe (Stacy Martin) embarks on a journey of self-actualization whose itinerary is the indiscriminate accumulation of sex partners—“lovers” would seem far too sentimental a word. She describes the loss of her virginity to a po-faced cockney mechanic named Jerôme (Shia LaBeouf) who approaches intercourse like he’s changing a spark plug. She learns the finer points of aggressive seduction while cruising on a passenger train with a girlfriend. She briefly flirts with being part of a group of like-minded girls—“Mea vulva, mea maxima vulva,” goes their motto—before resigning herself to the inherent solitude of her single-minded lifestyle choice. She has no apparent interest in women, multiples or kinks unless dictated by another, so Joe’s story has little to do with sexual exploration or any sort of joy that extends beyond the time it takes to orgasm. Which should give you fair warning that Nymphomaniac, despite its provocative title and promise of explicit sex, is not at all a sexy movie. Its titillation is of the intellectual or formal or aesthetic variety. And like nearly every such exercise from von Trier, all of Nymphomaniac’s most compelling elements—and, to be sure, they are numerous—get us hot and bothered for what is finally a most shallow sort of satisfaction, and the dumbest ending in his filmography. 

Von Trier has always been far stronger as a conceptualist or crafter of bold images than as a storyteller or filmmaker per se, but complex structures serve him well. Nymphomaniac finds its narrative models in 18th century literature, unfolding as picaresque confession, and the truth is that the film’s protracted duration just flies by.* There is no shortage of incident or novel variation. There is a truly remarkable sequence in which a character identified only as Mrs. H. (Uma Thurman) unexpectedly arrives at Joe’s apartment after learning that her husband, duped into believing that his promiscuous mistress wants him for herself, is leaving her and shacking up with Joe. There’s a curious if not entirely convincing episode in which a man named K (Jamie Bell) accepts Joe’s application to take a regular beating. There is Joe’s late vocation as a debt collector, her sexual experience giving her unusual insight into people’s repressed desires. And there is, alas, the eternal return of Jerôme, a fairly tiresome character to whom Joe is inexplicably attached—the first cut is the deepest, I guess—though that constant sense of LaBeouf being totally overwhelmed as an actor serves the character. All the while we are always returning to that hovel where Seligman listens and discusses with Joe a smattering of oddly related subjects, such as the uses of a cake fork, fly fishing, polyphonic music and Zeno’s paradox. These digressions are pretty delightful. All the while we are also treated to veiled allusions to von Trier’s greatest hits: there are plot developments or images that distinctly recall Breaking the Waves, The Kingdom, Dogville—see Joe laying in a coffin of grass—and, no doubt, other von Trier titles that I missed. Von Trier has said that he is closest to his female protagonists, and indeed, he is a bit like his nympho narrator, giving himself a vehicle through which he can relive his past glories. I read a tweet in which film historian Mark Cousins complained that Nymphomaniac should have followed Joe into old age, and I thoroughly agree, but von Trier is still in his 50s. Perhaps in the coming decades we’ll be granted a Nymphomaniac Volume III. Until then, we’re stuck with this feeble climax, and that empty feeling that follows fits of excitement.  

*Nymphomaniac Volumes I & II are being released simultaneously in Toronto as two separate tickets, which strikes me as a bit unfair since neither Volume stands on its own.

God's lovely survivor

Now about that other film based on a true story of unlikely survival at sea… Far more quiet, far more modest, and far more successful and distinctive than Captain Phillips is this haunted little work of modern folklore from Iceland, which, like Gabriel García Márquez’s Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor, chronicles the experience of an ordinary seaman who somehow lived through a catastrophe that brought a swift demise to every one of his colleagues. The Deep, directed by Baltasar Kormákur and adapted by Jon Atli Jonasson from his own play, is one of those eerie, strange and deeply empathetic stories that imposes little and leaves a more lasting impression for it.

Gulli (Olafur Darri Olafsson) and his fellow fishermen set out from their Westmann Islands home in their rusty trawler one March morning in 1984. A routine day turns tragic when technical problems cause the ship to capsize in the unfathomably cold waters of the North Atlantic. Everyone quickly succumbs to the brutal elements, yet Gulli, despite—or who knows, perhaps because of—the fact that he was clearly the pudgiest, schlubbiest of the bunch, manages to hang on. He stays afloat under the hard night, beholds the Northern Lights ribbon green across the sky, attempts conversation with a seagull, says his prayers, itemizes his regrets, slips into prolonged reveries, recalling an volcanic eruption and evacuation that marked his childhood. Eventually he washes up on land. Doctors are baffled. His survival is regarded as a miracle. He’s talked into participating in laboratory tests to try and find out what it was about his constitution that granted him reprieve from what should have been an inescapable watery grave. In the end, it’s just one of those things.

The Deep ends with Gulli back on the water, smoking, as mystified as anyone else. Kormákur is very good with keeping Johansson’s telling spare and visual. We get a strong sense of the community from which Gulli hails, their ways of dealing with life in a frigid climate: heavy drinking and merriment, close family ties, big beards, and learning to scrape just enough frost off the windshield to get where you’re going. It isn’t hard to relate to these characters or the simple working lives they lead. And it isn’t hard to share in their grief and wonder at the events that shatter their calm and yet prompt them to keep moving forward into a life that every now and then eludes explanation. 

             

All Hanks on deck

Captain Phillips, the titanic new movie about the 2009 Maersk Alabama hijacking, is a case study in various forms of cinematic grueling. It opens with about a good half-hour or more of superfluous scenes littered with mind-numbing exposition. The titular Rich Phillips (Tom Hanks) and his loving wife Andrea (Catherine Keener, conspicuously underused) talk in the broadest Baw-stonian platitudes about the trials of raising children. The conversation is presumably meant to convey decades of intimacy, but it’s as though they just met. “Right now the world is moving so fast,” says the Captain. “You gotta be strong to survive out there!” Meanwhile on the other side of the ocean Somali fishermen-turned-pirates turn out to be human too. Even if they have to say stuff like, “You worry about yourself, skinny rat!” Once the Alabama is moving through foreign waters, there are numerous scenes in which the Captain keeps reminding everybody on board to take extra safety measures—there are pirates in Africa, don’t you know. That there is foreshadowing. It is also, perhaps, insurance: we are never to doubt Phillips’ preparedness. The script is by Billy Ray.

Once we get through that kind of grueling we move on to the sort of grueling for which director Paul Greengrass is celebrated. The Somali pirates eventually make it aboard, there’s lots of shouting and bulging eyeballs and rifles waved about. The handheld camera is suitably seasick. The Captain, who the pirates dub ‘Irish,’ sweats a great deal, and comes up with ways to delay the pirates’ discovery of the rest of the crew who, in accordance with protocol, are hiding in the engine room. There are many cutaways to engines and rudders. A teenage pirate cuts his foot and man, does it look bad. Eventually the pirates take whatever cash is on board and depart in a lifeboat with the Captain as their hostage. Things get claustrophobic. We are certainly engaged now. Eventually Navy SEALs come and, of course, it all ends badly for the pirates. Could it have been otherwise? “There’s got to be something other than being a fisherman or kidnapping people,” says the Captain. “Maybe in America, Irish,” says chief pirate Muse (Barkhad Abdi, quite good in a pathetically underwritten role). “Maybe in America.” The film ends with the Captain getting treated for wounds and shock in a protracted sequence—the sort of thing that seems designed explicitly for the Best Actor roll call—with Hanks getting really, really into his role.

I mean no disrespect to the heroism or trauma of the real Rich Phillips or, for that matter, to the genuine desperation of the Somali pirates, when I say that Captain Phillips is kind of appalling. When the film sticks to conveying the events as tersely and matter-of-factly as possible, it more or less works as an unnerving docudrama thriller, but its meandering, over-simplistic attempts to make a grand statement about economic inequities or globalization or whatever boggles the mind and insults the moral intelligence of its audience. Watch the similar but much better Danish film A Hijacking instead. 

When worlds collide sparks fly, volcanoes erupt

Stromboli production still by Gordon Parks

Perhaps you know the story. Ingrid Bergman, post-Casablanca (1942) and at the height of her radiance and bankability, writes a letter offering her services to Roberto Rossellini, director of the neorealist masterpiece Rome Open City (1945), also famous, if in more rarified circles. Bergman describes herself as “a Swedish actress who speaks English very well.” As for Italian, alas, all she knows is “Ti amo.” I love you. If that strikes you as several kinds of proposal, what follows validates your suspicion. Both parties were married and those marriages ended very publicly. Bergman abandoned her family and one of the great Hollywood careers for Rossellini, Italy, and what was then considered failure. Bergman and Rossellini’s marriage didn’t last long, but they managed to make three features and three children—one of whom happens to be Isabella Rossellini. Over the years those features have been reappraised and recognized as remarkable. Criterion has collected each of them and a trove of supplements for its new box set 3 Films by Roberto Rossellini Starring Ingrid Bergman.

Stromboli

Remarkable as all three are, I’m partial to the first. Set at the end of the war, Stromboli (1950) follows Karin (Bergman), a Lithuanian interned at a displaced persons camp in Farfa. She’s romanced by a handsome young Italian named Antonio (Mario Vitale). Their sole common language is an exceedingly broken English. (A word of advice: watch the English version supplied on Criterion's set.) Their tryst on either side of the barbed wire, neither having the slightest idea what they’re getting into, is deeply moving. “I don’t understand you,” she tells him with an affectionate laugh as he babbles away. She doesn’t know the half of it—yet. Her options reduced to nil, Karin accepts Antonio’s proposal of marriage. She’s freed, only to be held captive on a volcanic island and former penal colony whose entire populace, Antonio included, she finds unforgivably backward.

Stromboli

Bergman is magnificent, petulant, totally un-ingratiating, and it’s a great story, extreme yet familiar to many—my grandmother was a war bride and could surely relate to Karin's suddenly finding herself in a strange, difficult, isolated place amidst people with whom she feels no affinity. But what makes Stromboli so unforgettable are its documentary aspects: the cast of locals; their singing, mournful even when celebratory; the mythical manner in which Rossellini captures their tuna fishing rituals; an actual volcanic eruption, with the villagers watching the whole thing from boats just off the shore. The collision of Bergman's inherent glamour and the very real rugged island life surrounding creates an engrossing frisson. 

Europe '51

Revisiting the themes of Rossellini’s The Flowers of St. Francis (1950), Europe ’51 (1952) casts Bergman as a society woman who transforms into a modern saint following the tragic death—an apparent suicide—of her 12-year-old son. Our heroine gradually strays from her moneyed, sheltered life—a key sequence finds her covering for a friend (Giulietta Masina!) who works in a factory, and the rapid cutting between her uneasy visage and the factory machinery recalls moments in The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), while the creepy exterior shots of the factory look forward to similar images of industrial alienation in Red Desert (1964). Her actions eventually draw the attention of authorities who deem her mentally ill and confine her to an asylum, whose stark walls also invoke Joan. The final scene, in which her admirers weep below her cell window, is curiously echoed in the final scene of Red (1994), one of the subjects of my previous post. 

Journey to Italy

Rossellini and Bergman’s final collaboration, aptly enough, concerned marital strife. Journey to Italy (1954) finds Bergman and George Saunders’ English couple visiting Naples to liquidate some assets gained in an inheritance. Unaccustomed to spending time alone together, they quickly realize they kind of can’t stand each other. So he goes off in search of kicks while she visits museums and historical sites. A startling, now famous moment has both witness archeologists unearthing a pair of clinging corpses, victims of the eruption that consumed Pompeii. Deep history comes to haunt the couple—fleeting pleasures or frustrations whither in the face of the eternal. Even if I don’t quite buy the climatic reconciliation, I believe entirely the difficult questions posed to these characters on their journey. The film is a quietly devastating exploration of long-term love and what it means to confront all we chance to lose. At least, thanks to a few champions, cinephiles and preservationists, we haven’t lost these tremendous films. 

             

A slaughterhouse on the high seas

It begins pitch-dark and wild, disorienting and inexplicably terrifying. Is this a horror movie? Chains, white light, white caps, a rusty hull, rain, intermittent metallic clang, indistinct voices buried in the clamour, different coloured raincoats obscuring the identities of those wearing them, camera angles with no regard for which side is up. Water everywhere. I went to a sold out screening of Leviathan during last September’s Toronto International Film Festival without the slightest notion as to what we all were in for. The lack of context made our plunge into the film only more bracing and thrilling. This opening sequence I’m attempting to characterize went on for perhaps 20 minutes, and it was some of the most visceral 20 minutes of cinema I’ve seen in some time. Nothing in the rest of the film matches it. How could it?

We get our bearings. We are on a ship in the North Atlantic. Cut to the interior and we hear heavy metal and we see an arm, and then eyes, and a deeply lined face. Soon we’re back up on deck, and you get to thinking that yes, this is a horror movie, torture porn even—providing you identify with the fish. Think about it: rough men, hacking up bodies, pouring buckets of blood and water into the sea. We’re trapped in a floating slaughterhouse. Carcasses abound. This could be the full-colour marine version of George Franju’s Blood of the Beasts. Sure, I suppose we can call Leviathan a documentary, in the loosest possible sense of the word, about fishing, but the film is not here to teach us anything about the fishing industry, not directly; rather, it offers an engulfing sensory experience. (Funny coincidence: Roberto Rossellini’s Stromboli, which features another of the most stunning fishing sequences in cinema history, was also screening at TIFF 2012.)

A mermaid tattoo; frames so full of gulls the images almost become abstract (and invoke The Birds). Filmmakers Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel have assembled countless moments of savage poetry. Both had fishermen fathers and thus consider the film a “personal” work. Leviathan was shot over the course of a half-dozen trips to sea, with a fleet of little plastic GoPro cameras, which the filmmakers attached to everything and everyone in sight, even tossing them into the sea in waterproof containers. On the level of what some call “pure” cinema, this is truly a work of immense invention. 

But the excitement does drain toward the end, perhaps because we realize that the film is, I think, partly intended as an homage to labour, to those who work at sea. And on this level, I mean, come on. It is difficult to detect any real interest in, much less compassion or feeling for, human beings in Leviathan. A guy slowly falls asleep at a table. We spend an awful lot of time looking at some dude’s elbow. These are not the film’s finest moments. See Leviathan—and, for god’s sake, see it in the cinema—but see it for the sprawling thrill and the audacity and the beauty of colours that new technology and immense craft and sheer punk rock adventurousness are granting us. But seeing it so as to connect with the people on-screen? Not so much.