My sister's hand in mine

Petra Costa was born in Belo Horizonte, Brazil. Her mother always told her she could do anything she wanted, except acting, and that she could live anywhere she wanted, except New York. Costa began acting at fifteen. She studied anthropology and theatre at New York’s Columbia University. Elena, Costa’s heartbreaking and gorgeous feature debut, begins with woozy nocturnal views of New York. Over these images we hear Costa’s voice. “Elena,” she says, “I had a dream of you last night…” In this dream Elena, Costa’s sister, is atop a wall, tangled in electrical wires. But soon the one being dreamed of becomes confused with the dreamer. It is the dreamer who is now atop the wall. She touches the wires, receives a shock, falls, and dies.

This is the story of two women, one an elusive ghost, the other trying to find this ghost, to know her—and, for a long time, very much in danger of becoming her. (Make that three women: Costa’s mother also plays a pivotal role in the lives of both Elena and Petra, and in the narrative conveyed in this film.) Elena is a lyrical memoir of devastating loss and fortifying self-knowledge. Elena was Costa’s big sister, already entering her early teens when Costa was born. Elena wanted to act and sing, to live only for art, but also to go beyond the theatre and break into movies. She moved to New York to realize this. But Elena’s promise was thwarted by her own paralyzing despair and unreasonable expectations and prescription drugs. Petra, too, would grow up to act, sing, make art, go to New York, all the while struggling not to succumb to precisely the same demons that consumed her sister.

Elena received her first camcorder at 13 and, out of her desire to hone her creativity, and out of her perfectly healthy, even endearing adolescent vanity, immediately set about creating a trove of home movies—movies that, unbeknownst to her, would, along with other remarkable archival materials, become the foundation of this film haunted by her and named in her memory. Costa weaves together all this found footage with her own beguiling, at times astonishing images of water and drifting female bodies resembling Ophelia multiplied; of herself looking lost in a vast city; of interviews with those closest to Elena; and with the poignant use of the Mamas and the Papas’ ‘Dedicated to the One I Love.’ Occasionally these sequences overreach in their desire to attain poetics and meaningful gesture, but what could be better to desire? Elena is drenched in much sadness. It’s an abyss of grief and terror alleviated only by mere hints at self-realization (the biggest of those hints being the very existence of this film), but it also flows with tremendous beauty—beauty and fluidity are Costa’s key sources of consolation. The film is so intrinsically personal that it’s difficult to imagine what Costa might do next, but I can’t wait to find out.

                         

"...all these little intimate moments, nothing more than that...": Richard Linklater on Boyhood

Dear readers,
Once again it is incumbent upon me to do some figurative flagellation for my neglect to post anything in this phantom country for over a month, though the truth is that ol' JB has been recovering from an accident and the blog had to fall in priority below stuff like, you know, health. 
But hey! Who doesn't want to read a Richard Linklater interview? Will that make up a little? Will that appease those of you who so graciously read this blog with whatever degree of regularity? Huh? Huh? Anyway, more to come real sooooon...

Boyhood’s visual refrain are its protagonist’s wide open eyes, taking in the world, first at six, then at seven, eight and nine, all the way to that age when boyhood is shed for manhood. Mason ages 12 years over the course of Richard Linklater’s truly extraordinary film about ordinary things—trying to make arrowheads by putting rocks in a pencil sharpener, going camping with your father, poring over lingerie catalogues, catching sight of awful images from Fallujah on TV in a bowling alley, watching your smart mother make seemingly inexplicably poor choices in men—as does actor Ellar Coltrane, who began making Boyhood with Linklater in the summer of 2002, when he was only six.

Overwhelmingly moving and brimming with perfectly realized moments of childhood discovery, there has never been anything quite like Boyhood before. Its time-lapse effect has its precedents in, say, Michel Apted’s Up series, Truffaut’s Antoine Doniel films, and Linklater’s own Before trilogy, but the peculiar vertigo you feel in watching characters age 12 years in 164 minutes feels like a watershed moment in movies. And Linklater’s decision to refrain from melodrama feels like the right way to try out this gambit. We can best feel time’s passage by letting it pass without imposing cataclysm or wilds fortune upon it.

Coltrane is joined onscreen by Lorelei Linklater (the writer/director’s daughter) as his sister, Patricia Arquette as his mother, who goes back to school and finds a new career while being a single mother, and Ethan Hawke as his dad, already out of the picture by the time the film begins, though he shows up more and more as time passes, first in a GTO, later in a minivan. The family lives in Texas, and a memorable interlude has Mason receive a Bible and a shotgun for his 15^th birthday, his “redneck bar mitzvah,” as Linklater puts it. Songs by Cat Power, Wilco, Flaming Lips and Yo La Tengo help place us in time, as Mason/Coltrane’s voice changes, face changes, body grows, and ideas gradually get articulated. “I just thought there would be more,” Arquette says near the film’s end, watching her son prepare to leave her with an empty nest. Those words are heartrending and ring true, yet for the viewer, it’s hard not to think, “But there was so much!”

Richard Linklater

I spoke with Linklater a few weeks back. There is indeed so much that can be said about Boyhood, but I’ll cut this short and let the below conversation cover some of that.

JB: Is this a project you would have undertaken were you yourself not a parent?

Richard Linklater: Never. I wouldn’t have had the idea. When I did I’d been a parent about six years. Which really thrusts you into the mind-set of that developing kid, and which can’t help but dredge up memories of your own childhood. It wouldn’t have felt worthy of exploration had I not been experiencing it, I think.

JB: Whatever parenting skills you’d developed by that point must have came into play not only when directing your own daughter, but also when directing your lead actor.

RL: Absolutely. Everybody knows the old saying in film about not working with kids or animals, but I actually found I was good at it. I like working with kids. I went from the first shoot on Boyhood directly to working on School of Rock. That’s how confident I was. That film was nothing but a bunch of nine- and ten-year-olds.

JB: Parents always talk about how time flies when you’re watching kids grow. One of the things that makes Boyhood so moving is that you’re watching 12 years of a boy’s life fly past in a little over two-and-a-half hours. We feel swept up in time’s passage in such a visceral, overwhelming way.

RL: Yeah, there’s something there about the fleeting nature of our lives. I think you can feel that even if you’re not a parent. Everyone was a kid once. Everyone has parents and siblings and schools. We’re so similar in our maturation process worldwide—more similar than we are different. That’s just what I was hoping to get at with this movie and its particular process. Time flies and we do all get a year older.

JB: Is there anything that might have happened to Coltrane that would have thrown you for a loop? I mean, if he became a juvenile delinquent, or something horrible, like he lost an arm?

RL: [Laughs] I think I would have just kinda gone with it. I never viewed him as a risk. Technically it’s a little insane to make a movie like this, but I had some faith that things would work out. It’s just a way to approach life. You got to assume the best and work hard and hope you get lucky. This whole film involves collaborating with an unknown future. Which is the deal we all make in our lives. So I just tried to feel ready to deal with not only my four cast-members, who are growing up and aging, but also the world in general.

JB: I know that some of Boyhood is autobiographical for you, and I was thinking that, if you were to write a book based on your childhood, or make a period film, like Dazed and Confused, you can control most every aspect of the story and its degree of fidelity to your life, whereas making a film like this one you’re obligated to reflect whatever’s going on around you. That feels like something new to me: it’s fiction, it’s also based in history, yet it’s inherently responding to things happening in the present, like documentary.

RL: It’s a pretty simple idea and people keep asking me why no one’s ever done it. It may have something to do with film people being control freaks. With this MO you have to relinquish certain levels of control and go with the flow. For me, that was exciting! I didn’t know what was coming in the future but I was committed to just adapting. Like life. There was always a life corollary behind our decisions. 12 years is a long time. But I’ve committed my life to film, so to commit 12 years to one project isn’t that crazy.     

JB: One of my favourite scenes in Boyhood is when Hawke is coaching the kids in conversation—and they coach him right back, reminding him that conversation should happen naturally. As I watched this scene it occurred to me that I was watching a lesson in acting in a Richard Linklater movie. Something I like about your films is how people have fluid, easy conversations about big ideas. Ethan Hawke seems particularly deft at capturing that element of your work.

RL: I remember 20 years ago, when I was casting for Before Sunrise, thinking that what I really needed was just the most verbally dextrous and really sharp actor around for that role. That was Ethan. 100%.

JB: Boyhood is filled with things that only happen in a person’s life once. I wouldn’t assume that you’re ever going to do anything quite like this again, so, given that you spent 12 years working on this, do you feel bereft now? I can imagine it might be hard to let go.

RL: I don't know that it’s bereft exactly. On one hand I come away feeling elated that it worked as I’d hoped. On the other, honestly, I just haven’t really processed it yet. It’s out, people are seeing it, but I don’t know that I’m fully cognizant of its being over. With other films there’s been a pattern to help me predict how I’m going to feel. But everything about Boyhood has been unpredictable. Everything about this film was always different.

JB: I think about the moment when Patricia Arquette is driving the kids away from their home forever and she says, “Don’t look back.” That sounds like a crucial survival technique for her. But as an artist you don’t really have that option. It’s hard to tell stories, much less promote those stories, without looking back on your own experience.

RL: Tell me about it. You can’t help it. Your mind is always going forward or back. You have to talk it out lots. But yeah, “Don’t look back” is a way of getting through sometimes, filing something away like it never happened.

JB: I know people keep asking you what would have happened had Ellar given up at some point in the project, but what about you? Did you ever want to give up?

RL: I never stopped feeling lucky just to have the opportunity to make this film at all. I had waves of doubt maybe at the start. We were accumulating all these little intimate moments, nothing more than that, and I did wonder, “Will this be enough? Will it be compelling?” I bet the farm on this idea that the accumulation of such moments over time could be everything. But one or two years in I knew it would work the way I wanted it to. If you can’t draw people in with such moments of universal truth, what can you draw them in with?

                 

Bad language, bad glory, bad memory, bad movie

Based on Marcus Luttrell’s eponymous memoir, this recreation of 2005’s failed Operation Red Wings, in which Navy SEALs got stuck on an Afghan mountain while attempting to capture or kill Taliban leader Ahmad Shah, is itself a failed attempt to honour those men who died or nearly died on said mountain. The closing montage displaying photos of Red Wings’ (exclusively American) casualties is immensely moving. The problem is the preceding two hours, which begin like a recruitment video, build up to the war movie equivalent of torture porn, and end with an oversimplified resolution that’s willfully oblivious to any larger context.

During the opening teaser, Lutrell (Mark Wahlberg) explains in voice-over that “there is a storm inside” SEALs, “a burning, a river, a drive, an unrelenting desire,” and a lot of other stuff. Once the shit hits the fan, most of what’s spoken in Lone Survivor varies between “Goddamn motherfuckers,” “Fuck you,” “Ow, fuck,” “Fuckin’ fuck,” “Fucker,” “Fuck,” and “Fuuuuuck!” Carnage, chaos and imminent death will stifle the poet in any of us, but such expletive-laden dialogue seems designed foremost as a way of bluntly heightening the rat-a-tat and crunch of bones, which seem to be the key point of interest for director Peter Berg and his collaborators, who strain verisimilitude not only by reportedly grossly exaggerating the number of Taliban involved in the film’s central firefight, but also by hurling our already shot-up heroes down the mountain at high speed, smashing their torsos and skulls into pointy rocks, and having them continue to walk, talk and fight afterward.

Reverence for the dead shouldn’t make this film bulletproof—it should make us that much more concerned with truth and consequence. This is a serious movie, ostensibly dealing with serious questions about war, strategy, policy, and ethics. When discussing whether to eliminate or set free a trio of civilians who accidentally blow their cover, among the four SEALs (Wahlberg, Emile Hirsch, Taylor Kitsch and Ben Foster) only Lutrell speaks passionately about the imperative to be humane. Which leaves us with an uneasy feeling since—hardly a spoiler—he’s the only one who lives to tell the tale. And in the moral causality of Lone Survivor he’s rewarded for his humanity, by having his life fearlessly defended by an entire Afghan village—though in the closing voice-over he thanks only his brothers. The issue isn’t about what Lutrell feels or says in moments of trauma or mourning; it’s what’s said by this movie, which has the advantage of time and distance, and the burden of memory. 

                      

Stories within stories

This is the story of a woman who couldn’t quite cope with the demands of a marriage that never brought her joy so much as stasis, who took a chance on a spell of fulfilled desire in another city, who returned from that city and out from under that spell with irrefutable evidence of her indiscretion, who opted to remain in that not very joyous marriage and to keep that irrefutable evidence and incorporate it into the story of her family. This is the story of a girl who was loved but whose mother died when the girl was far too young, who was told certain things over the years in jest and began to wonder when exactly jest becomes so insistent as to resemble truth. This is the story of a woman who was lovable but hard to love with, who had a loud laugh, who spoke a lot on the phone and worried over things, who really wanted to be an actor but mostly settled for being a casting director, a mother, and a problematic wife, who died far too young and became an enigma for everyone she left behind. This is the story of a young actress and political activist who became an extraordinary film director, who wanted to make a terribly thoughtful essay film about the vagaries of memory and how stories shape identity, who thought she could regard her subject from layers of distance and abstraction but slowly came to realize that her essay was a kind of memoir, that the thesis was blushingly personal, that however broadly she populated these Stories she was telling with colorful characters from her family and beyond, the film was always bound to become about her. Stories We Tell is many stories, but like any story it’s also about the storyteller. It cannot be otherwise.

Sarah Polley’s third feature as director, which has been called a documentary for lack of a better term, feels like the culmination of her preceding films, Away From Her and Take This Waltz, in that those films used fiction as a way of thinking about domesticity, intimacy and betrayal between fascinating women and loyal, sturdy men. It was sparked by Polley’s longtime suspicion that her father was not really her father, that is, her biological father, that her mother, who died 20 years ago, conceived Polley with some other man while working on a play in Montréal (the family lived in Toronto). Stories We Tell combines interviews with family and friends of the family—all of them providing different, conflicting speculations or supposed certainties about who was Father X—with sometimes startling home movie footage, an investigation, a formal reading by the father who raised Polley, a great orator with a rigorous emotional poker-face, and other, trickier elements that needn’t be described here. It’s rich, suspenseful, funny, smart, and heartbreaking. It keeps changing its mind about what it is as it goes along, yet it never looses the thread of its search. At one point Polley’s brother quotes Neruda: “Love is so short/Forgetting so long.” That about sums it up. And this film imaginatively sums up something about love and forgetting that Polley’s been getting at for a while. Which makes it that much more thrilling to consider where she goes from here. 

    

TIFF '12: True stories of people and animals

Once Upon a Time Was I, Veronica

Hotel rooms and bars, coffee shops and offices, street corners and many different screening rooms. In long lines. Every once on a while, at my desk. Here and there, in my own warm bed. It was a good TIFF for ol’ JB, busy, largely free of the runaround, free booze, too much coffee, too little food, movies movies movies, including several very good ones, some of which will make their way toward the regular sorts of cinemas, many of which will recede into the vast film festival fog. In that former, happy category, keep your eyes peeled for an expansive post here in phantom country about something we like to call Tabu, from Portugal’s Miguel Gomes. In that latter, frustrating category, a great discovery for me was a character study entitled One Upon a Time Was I, Veronica, from another Gomes, this one a Brazilian named Marcello. It’s a sensual, wise film I knew nothing about going in. Its eponymous heroine (Hermila Guedes) is a young doctor who lives with her ailing dad, whom she loves—seemingly to the exclusion of others; the film belongs in that small niche of sensitive, complicated films about fathers and daughters, a niche which also includes Claire Denis’ 35 Rhums and Ozu’s Late Spring. Veronica has good friends, loves to swim and to dance. She has an active, often fulfilling sex life, vividly captured in several memorable scenes, often full of laughter and happy fumbling, but she feels no great urge to get serious with anyone. Using a handheld recording device she undertakes some amateur self-analysis; she conceives of a movie of her life where she gets a happy ending of her own idiosyncratic design. Refusing to force any artificial resolutions upon Veronica, Gomes helps her find that ending, which became only more satisfying to me the more I thought about it in the hours and days afterward.

Something in the Air

More likely to garner a proper theatrical run in the near future—one would hope, anyway—is Something in the Air (Après mai). Set in the early ’70s, the latest from Olivier Assayas, the prolific writer-director of Irma Vep, Summer Hours and Carlos, is an autobiographical portrait of the artist as a young dissident, trying to forge a political identity while struggling to come to terms with a calling as suspiciously bourgeois as painting (Assayas’ métier before he got into cinema). The film moves fluidly from one extended scene to another, through demonstrations, nocturnal vandalizing, ideological powwows, travels abroad, brushes with mysticism and drugs, trysts with likeminded lovers, hellos and farewells with sundry friends, art classes and film sets. Elegant and inquisitive, rich with period detail, Assayas keeps just the right distance at all times, never judging his characters, however young and zealous, never over-emphasizing a single scene to give us a false sense of sudden realization: self-discovery is an ongoing process, and Something in the Air simply lets us drift along with its teenage protagonist for a while, long enough to sense the great changes that occur both in his own psyche and in that of an entire generation trying to make sense of the world in the wake of that titular turning point of May, 1968.

Ginger and Rosa

Sally Potter’s Ginger and Rosa takes a somewhat similar tack, tracing the collapse of a friendship between two teenage Londoners in the early ’60s, one of whom (Elle Fanning) becomes increasingly devoted to the cause of nuclear disarmament, the other (Alice Englert) to finding some bohemian-traditonally domestic hybrid life with her best friend’s handsome writer father (Alessandro Nivola). The film ends rather too neatly, but the lead-up is utterly engrossing, and the supporting cast, which includes Timothy Spall, Annette Benning and Christina Hendricks, is marvelous.

Post Tenebrus Lux

Family life may seem wildly fraught in Ginger and Rosa, but those aspiring adolescent radicals and their lusty, misguided dads ain’t got nothing on the violent, neglectful, doomed patriarchs of Mexican writer/director Carlos Reygadas’ Post Tenebras Lux. Like Something in the Air and Ginger and Rosa, the film is very much grounded in autobiography, though when refracted through the prism of Reygadas’ (often beveled) lens, personal memories and anxieties blend with fantasies and dreams, visions of radiant demons carrying toolboxes (a archetypical fatherly accessory if ever there was one) and spectacular acts of self-destruction. There’s little in the chronologically amorphous Post Tenebras Lux that lends itself to easy synopsizing; let’s just say that the young family at its center, living in beautiful rural Morelos, move through a series of crises both banal and mythic: the sexual dissatisfactions of life after kids, substance abuse, betrayals, attempted thefts, and petty acts of revenge. The kids are played by Reygadas’ own children, and give some of the most natural and mesmerizing performances I’ve seen this year from humans. (See below for non-humans.) Just watch that gorgeous, eerie opening bit, where little Rut, just old enough to walk, scurries through a dusky valley where all sorts of livestock get restless and the sky darkens and thunders. Tenebras, indeed.

Bestiare

Of the Canadian titles I caught, Sarah Polley’s Stories We Tell (yet another fascinating, formally engaged, autobiographical work) and Peter Mettler’s smart but deeply groovy hypno-essay film about the nature of time, The End of Time, are both strong works that will be dealt with in this here country soon enough. But my favourite Canadian film this TIFF? Bestiare, from Quebec’s ever-inventive Denis Côté, auteur of Carcasses and Curling. As the streets of downtown Toronto were stampeded by fans, stargazers and nut-jobs clamouring like wild beasts for a closer view of, say, Shia Leboeuf, I was tucked away in Lightbox, delighted and mesmerized by the many animals on display in Côté’s observational, but also witty, playful, maybe political (but probably not), quietly provocative and beautifully crafted study of four seasons of life at the Hemingford Parc Safari zoo. For all the big stars striding the red carpets in expensive clothes over the last week and a half, I confess that I was most drawn toward the hairy ones, the four-legged ones, the odorous ones, the inarticulate yet inherently cinematic stars that graced Bestiare. Here’s hoping you get a chance to see them yourself soon.