What's in a name?

A man walks down a country road. Let’s say he’s middle-aged, but this is Victorian England, and that period had a way of making men from the struggling class middle-aged with one foot in the grave. The man—his name is Durbyfield—stops to converse with a parson, who casually informs him of a recent discovery he made: the Durbyfields are descendants of the d’Urbervilles, and thus connected to the old aristocracy. The clan’s all but died out, the money and property long gone, but that name: it changes the man’s identity in a moment. More importantly, it will radically alter the destiny of the man’s daughter, our story’s tragic heroine.

Names. We’re talking about Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles, and the adaptation directed by Roman Polanski, produced by Claude Berri, and starring Nastassja Kinski. That’s one Pole, one Frenchman and one German taking control of a much beloved, terribly English literary classic. The Brits were not happy when they heard the news, nor when they learned that Polanski would film Tess (1979) not in Hardy’s Dorset, but rather in Brittany. The fact that Polanski, a fugitive by then, might have faced extradition if he went to the U.K. surely had something to do with the choice of location, but the truth is that Brittany felt much closer to Victorian Dorset than the Dorset of the ’70s; that Polanski’s childhood experiences, hiding his Jewishness and living in rural Poland during the war that stole his parents and murdered his mother (she died in Auschwitz), granted him an ability to relate to Tess in ways your average bankable director couldn’t (what’s more, Polanski was first given Hardy’s novel by his wife Sharon Tate, just before she was murdered); and Kinski, still in her teens when production began, not only had precisely the look that Hardy carefully detailed in the novel, but also had an innate intelligence and an instinct for conveying Tess’ brutal accumulation of hardships, which include manipulation, rape, heartbreak, gruelling labour and persecution, some of which Kinski herself, as the much neglected daughter of German actor Klaus Kinski, would have understood. (Weighed against all she brings to the role, Kinski’s variable accent seems forgivable.) All this to say that we’re talking about an adaptation as extraordinary as it is unlikely, a meticulous, transporting, painterly film, drawing upon the work of George de la Tour and Gustave Courbet and photographed by Geoffrey Unsworth and Ghislain Cloquet with an alluring mix of natural elements and obvious artifice, that tells a story about how names can mean everything and nothing. Tess is now available from Criterion in a dual format DVD/Blu-ray set. 

“You were one person, now you’re another.” So says Angel Clare (Peter Firth), this chump Tess falls for, a guy who can’t bear the fact that Tess has a past, who basically punishes her for being a victim. A chump, yet Angel is also correct—Tess is, in a sense, another person. She was another person when she was Tess Durbyville; another person when she met Alec d’Urberville (Leigh Lawson), the creep who bought her family name and used it to seduce her, and when the seduction didn’t take, rape her; another person when she found something like love; another person when she herself finally commits a heinous act. (Henious, but also a saint? There’s a scene where, if you look carefully, you’ll notice a halo around Tess’ head created by a steam engine.) Identity is fluid in Tess—another theme Polanski would have understood well. For some insight into just how well, check out the episode of The South Bank Show included in Criterion’s supplements. It’s a wide-ranging, nearly hour-long interview with the director at a very particular moment in his often troubled, often troubling, often brilliant career.  

                

Heist gone wrong just gets wronger and wronger

Trance begins with a heist gone wrong. Director Danny Boyle (Trainspotting, 127 Hours) loves to explore different kinds of kicks, and in the slickly photographed opening sequence of Trance he revels in the depiction of what promises to be an inventively planned clean getaway—before throwing in the wrench and supplying a visceral jolt. The goods to be stolen aren’t jewels or currency but rather a great work of art: Goya’s Witches in the Air. Don’t let this give you the impression that Trance will have anything to do with the specifics of the art world, or art theft, or with art in general, or with anything that makes any sense or means anything. Boyle’s latest adrenaline-confection is hokum—extremely complicated hokum. Rarely does a story work this hard to be this dumb.

Franck (Vincent Cassel) leads the crew of crooks. Simon (James McAvoy), a gambling addict whose debts Franck took care of, is the inside man: he works for the auction house overseeing the Goya’s sale. During the heist Simon inexplicably Tasers Franck, Franck beats Simon senseless; somewhere along the way the Goya is lost. No one knows where it wound up, not even Simon, because he wakes up in hospital with amnesia. Franck orders Simon to visit Elizabeth (Rosario Dawson), a gorgeous hypnotherapist, presuming that she can unlock his busted memory. Elizabeth rapidly kens on to the fact that Simon’s in trouble, but rather than try to get him out of it she deals herself in: she’ll help the gang find the painting if she gets a cut. So everybody’s on the take, but, alas, nothing is as it seems. Yes, Trance is one of those movies where “nothing is as it seems,” which means that the plot is going to bend over backwards and characters are going to be turned inside-out so as to accommodate surprise at all costs.

For a little while it seems that Boyle, working from Joe Aheame and John Hodge’s script, is going for a blippy, pulsating new spin on Hitchcock’s Spellbound, but gradually things careen into a territory that owes more to the untrustworthy narrators of Jim Thompson novels. Which brings us to the film’s key deficiency, one even more problematic than the script itself. Dawson does her best with a ridiculous role and Cassel is actually quite fun as the ruthless villain who turns out to be the most sympathetic character of the lot—the film actually ends in such a way that he sort of becomes the protagonist. But McAvoy is way in over his injured head. The limp line-readings he gives to the more ploddingly cryptic bits in the opening voice-over (“…the event of a situation…”), the over-rehearsed cracks in his voice that say, “I’m nervous!”: he’s either without any colour or trying way too hard, and in the end, when the character’s full backstory is revealed, nothing in McAvoy’s boyish performance adds up to anything but a confusing mess. I feel somewhat bad about dumping all over McAvoy—he’s done well in certain naïve parts—but he’s badly miscast here, and makes one pine for the days when Boyle’s steady leading man was Ewan McGregor, an actor who can convey a much higher degree of genuine mischief. 

         

Like watching paint dry—in a really good way!

Few bodies of work in any medium have expressed the tension between photography and the world, between representation and expression, between memory and history, as that of the German painter Gerhard Richter: the blur or softening or tricks of light that envelop his photo-based work can also be detected in much of his abstract work. So there’s something almost inherently satisfying about the notion of making a documentary about Richter at work, of photographing the making of paintings whose content or aesthetic are founded in photography.

Largely devoid of commentary, Corrina Belz’s straightforwardly titled Gerard Richter Painting is primarily concerned with bearing witness to the moment when something mysterious comes into being, with tracking the turning points in Richter’s process, moments when he decides to revise the face of an entire canvas in a single broad gesture—moments about which Richter himself has relatively little to say. Which makes Gerhard Richter Painting an unusually physical movie, its key recurring image being that of the very fit titular octogenarian taking his massive flat brush and pushing it slowly and carefully across a work-in-progress. Squarely framed, the act appears mythical, almost Herculean, and the sound is equally impactful, that tremendous echoing whoomph as he lifts the brush away. These scenes are simultaneously meditative and exhilarating.  

         

The rest is the film is pretty interesting too: Richter preparing a number of major international exhibitions, building his 1:50 scale models; glimpses of Richter’s family; Richter’s chipper assistants taking lumps out of paint; Richter examining old photos and recalling childhood memories; Richter speaking of the secrecy involved in painting, but very matter-of-factly—there is no forced mystique to his countenance; he’s pretty much a friendly, smart, but no-bullshit kind of guy. (Every once in a while he reminds me of Anthony Hopkins.) There are also excerpts from earlier television documentaries about Richter dating from more than 40 years ago, and these are also fascinating. In one, the young Richter tries to dismiss the notion of the artist as purely cerebral, as working from clear and realizable intentions. “You can’t think while you’re painting,” he says. “Painting is another form of thinking.” And in this sense, Belz has successfully captured thought on film. 

  

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.