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.

              

The strangeness at the top of the world

When you ascend past Camp Four you enter something they call the Death Zone. It is not named that for nothing. After 8,000 feet every cell in your body is reeling from oxygen deprivation. Aside from the numerous physical difficulties this brings, this means that logical decisions become increasingly difficult to make. You are in a sense inebriated—you’ve gotten very, very, very high. That high comes with thrills of the sort you may never again come across. As is often the case, the hardest part is coming down.

Director Nick Ryan’s The Summit is a documentary chronicling an attempt made by representatives of various countries in August of 2008 to make it to the top of K2, the world’s second highest peak, but the one more serious climbers concentrate on, rather than Everest, which I guess is too much the terrain of motivational speakers for the sort of hardcore maniacs we find in this film. Am I out of turn calling Ryan’s subjects maniacs? Perhaps, but consider the fact that one in four climbers dies trying to get to the top of K2 and you might start to wonder about their sanity, even before they hit the Death Zone. Those odds actually turned out to be far too optimistic for the crowd of 2008: 18 climbers approached the summit; 11 did not make it back alive.

To nitpick Ryan’s approach to The Summit: the portent is laid on a little thick at times, there are a few too many title cards providing information someone could have just told or showed us, and the recreations seem a little superfluous and confusing when there’s so much excellent real footage to work with. But all that aside, The Summit is pretty riveting. The testimonies are engaging and ultimately very moving; the images of the Himalayas are consistently astonishing, a glorious landscape out of science fiction, Norse mythology, or illustrated religious pamphlets; the narrative is mostly very well organized, with the emphasis wisely not on psychology but on story, most of all on the strangeness of this story, on how everything is stranger when you’re up above the entire world, apart from it, immersed in airless beauty and imminent doom. So much of what transpired during the 2008 expedition is, in the end, a mystery. Even to those who survived. Why did some of the climbers do what they did when what they did would so surely lead to their demise? As one of Ryan’s subjects puts it, “Only the mountain knows.” 

                    

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. 

                      

Images '12: Weather time solitude collective

Jacqueline Goss’ The Observers chronicles a year in the life of a weather station located at the summit of Mount Washington, New Hampshire, beginning in deep winter, everything frosted with snow, rendering the architecture a desolate wedding cake. Teeth are brushed, sit-ups are performed, tricky knots are tied, a recorder is played (badly). There are weather charts that look an awful lot like bowling scorecards. A metal box is found on the mountain during an especially punishing blizzard. It has a combination lock that refuses to be opened, infusing routine and solitude with the subtlest promise of mystery. In one scene the station’s sole climatologist is found doing some leisurely sketching outdoors in mega-mittens and goggles that cover half her face, which may be an example of Goss’ deadest of deadpan comic sensibility, which meshes nicely with The Observers rigorously, well, observational MO.

The Observers screened as part of Images 2012 last Saturday night, just two nights after John Akomfrah’s The Nine Muses, which also features a lot of parka and snow and unpeopled vastness. But Goss’ film is as mercilessly spare as Akomfrah’s is dizzyingly baroque. It seems driven by the director’s fascination with the impulse to accumulate data, perhaps for its own sake, the trust that data will always be inherently important. It made me think of my 92-year-old grandmother, who some years back started writing down the exact times of the sunrises and sunsets every single day, without ever explaining to anyone why. She shows me her figures when I come to visit, that scrawled handwriting that somehow touches me. She never expects a big reaction, but she seems to want me to know.  

More minimalist still is James Benning’s Two Cabins, which screened on Tuesday night, and which might just as accurately be called Two Windows for all we’re able to see of Benning’s reconstructions of dwellings inhabited by Henry David Thoreau and Ted Kaczynski, aka The Unabomber, respectively. Thoreau’s window is vertical, extended beyond the upper and lower borders of Benning’s fixed frame, the view of a knoll and jumble of grass, leaves and tree, broken up by horizontal lines, the whole composition recalling certain Rothkos. As far as sound goes, the general buzz of forest pervades. Somewhere a dog barks, but only once. A large vehicle lumbers past—we’re close to a highway? Really? The scene goes on and on and on and so we watch and watch and watch and soon become aware of the peculiar coexistence of these feelings: you’re looking out the eye-level window of a cabin in a sunny wood, alone, at peace, perhaps after a long trip; you’re in the middle of a city, looking at a raised glowing screen in a big dark room with people in it. This is a way of being alone with one’s self while sitting amid a crowd of silent strangers.

Kaczynski’s window is, by contrast, claustrophobic, a square contained easily by the parallel framing, the woods beyond resembling a miniature impressionist painting. I kept thinking of this window as a sphincter—was it because of the darkened knots in the wooden walls? Thoreau’s cabin feels like freedom and perspective; Kaczynski’s like entrapment and paranoia. It’s a brilliant juxtaposition, a space for dreaming of civil disobedience and a space for planning attacks on civilization, and its duration, 30 minutes in total, feel just about right to absorb what it has to offer, to slip off into reverie and then slip right back in, drawn to details, and to that weird effect of stasis slowly becoming something alive and nearly mobile. A deeply inspired, immersive work. 

Rock Crystal: Lost in the glittering winter darkness, and happily so

“In most places, midnight as the very hour of his birth is solemnized by ritual of great splendor, to which the bells ring out their heartsome invitation through the still darkness of the wintry air; then with their lanterns, along dim familiar paths, from snow-clad mountains, past forest-boughs encrusted with rime, through crackling orchards, folk flock to the church from which solemn strains are pouring—the church rising from the heart of the village, enshrouded in ice-laden trees, its stately windows aglow.”

Adalbert Stifter

I realize now that, as a child, whatever magic surrounded Christmas for me seemed drawn exclusively from the past: old movies and old storybooks; my grandmother’s anecdotes of her own childhood Christmases; paintings, photographs, or other such images culled from or invoking of antiquity. I’ve just read Adalbert Stifter’s novella Rock Crystal (New York Review of Books Classics, $14.95), quoted above. It was written in, I believe, 1853. I was immediately entranced and even moved by the book’s delicate evocation of a time of year that as an adult I’ve come largely to dread—I’m irreligious, have no children, dislike frantic shopping and hate most Christmas music—and this relationship between Christmas’ former allure and such elements as the darkness of long nights unadulterated by streetlamps and luminous skyscrapers, genuine quietude, ancient rites and activities, and the serenity of an era that predates modern consumerism, now seems very obvious to me. I didn’t want to be transported to a mall; I wanted to be transported back to several decades before my birth. I’ve always had a special attachment to Ingmar Bergman films—maybe I just wanted to share my holidays with Fanny and Alexander.

The story of Rock Crystal is easy enough to summarize: two children travel from their tiny Alpine village to a slightly larger Alpine village to visit their grandmother on Christmas Eve; on the way back they’re lost in a snowstorm and forced to pass the night outdoors. The problem with offering such a synopsis is that this little drama constitutes only about half of Rock Crystal’s page-count. The first third or so, in which Stifter’s trickling prose runs through descriptions of the villages of Gschiad and Millsdorf, their inhabitants and customs, their relationship to the world beyond and most especially to the natural splendour surrounding them, initially seems to promise no drama at all. It seems rather like a work of wondrous, affectionate anthropology, until we gradually realize that everything Stifter details foreshadows the children’s journey: the hubris of their shoemaker father, the gifts provided by their grandmother, the discovery of the remains of a baker in the woods. Stifter draws his narrative from an exacting sense of place, an approach that, along with Rock Crystal’s setting, may have had a considerable influence on Visitation, a wonderful recent novel by the contemporary German author Jenny Erpenbeck.

W.G. Sebald

I don’t know how I first came to hear about Stifter, who was born in Bohemia in 1805, and died in Austria in 1868. Everything I’ve read refers to him as unknown or forgotten, but my finally getting around to reading Stifter this past week was prompted by W.G. Sebald, that specialist of the forgotten, who cited Stifter as an influence and, indeed, whose ornate sentences not only owe something to Stifter’s, but whose particular obsession with history possessed an unmistakable precedent in Rock Crystal, whose descriptions are so rapturous that it’s as though posterity depends on sheer urgency and devotion. (Incidentally, Stifter’s description of how the residents of Gschaid “are obliged to keep their dead with them over the winter till they can bring them to the valley for burial after the snow has melted” reads almost exactly like the description of dealing with the dead in Sebald’s own Alpine village offered in Sebald’s 1998 Writers & Company interview with Eleanor Wachtel.) In the writings of both Stifter and Sebald, memory is a living force, the past inextricable from the now, and the dead remain somehow present. Reading their work inevitably comes with an air of melancholy, but it also comes with deep consolation, perhaps most of all during these longest nights of the year.