Looking without seeing, enlarging until vanishing

Blowup (1966) found Michelangelo Antonioni at the peak of his renown, yet, rather than resting on his laurels, he was embracing all things new. Following the astonishing Red Desert (1964), it was only his second film in colour, and every arresting hue feels precisely selected and shot-through with wonder. Blowup was Antonioni’s first film in English, with dialogues written by playwright Edward Bond. Most notably, while Antonioni was already well into middle-age, Blowup is immersed in the youth culture of its moment, its costumes colourful, scanty and modern, its London fully swinging, populated with the likes of Jane Birkin, Verushka and the Yardbirds, and with kids running wild in the streets, or anyway as wild as a troupe of mimes can get. We see these merry-making mimes flood into frame at Blowup’s beginning and at its end, when they enjoy a tennis match sans ball or rackets, serving as a reminder that the visible world is riddled with illusion. Is seeing believing, or is the reverse true? Is a photograph a way of obscuring reality or does it reveal a reality we’d otherwise never see? These questions haunt Blowup—and, as is often the case with Antonioni, they’re questions that will remain dutifully unresolved.

An unnamed photographer (David Hennings) takes photos of a man and a woman in a park. The woman (Vanessa Redgrave) demands the negatives. The photographer tells her she has to wait as he has other things on the roll. Eventually the photographer develops the film, makes prints of the images taken in the park, and, as takes photos of the photos, enlarging one detail until it becomes clearer and then more abstract, he comes to believe that he’s photographed a crime. The script was put together by Antonioni and Tonino Guerra, but a prominent credit is given to a story, alternately translated as ‘Blowup’ or ‘The Devil’s Drool,’ by the great Argentine author Julio Cortázar. It’s a generous credit, in that what happens in Blowup echoes its source material only in essence; its characters, setting and situation are very different. But Antonioni was an artist who appreciated just how rare a truly perfect idea is—and the idea of Cortázar’s story is so good it inspired at least two more excellent movies, Coppola’s The Conversation (1974) and Brian De Palma’s Blow Out (1981), though both cleverly trade photography for sound recording.

It must be said that Blowup does nothing to counter Antonioni’s tendency to put utterly unpleasant men at the centre of his films. Ostensibly based on photographer David Bailey, Blowup’s protagonist is a prick, treating models in a way that alternately reads as sexual harassment or verbal abuse. Still, watching him work is fascinating, and his lack of empathy, or rather, his overwhelming focus on his own creative work, drives the story forward in a way that a more sensitive and sociable protagonist wouldn’t have managed. All he wants is the most compelling, most beautiful, most mysterious images possible, and if he has to disguise himself as a homeless person, scream at models or put himself in danger to get these images, so be it. Though on first glimpse Blowup seems locked in time, a closer examination reveals a timeless notion at its heart, something about truth and technology, and what happens when the world is broken down into frozen fragments. Which begs the question: where is the Blowup for our digital age?   

                 

The missing person

Cheekily edited, brilliantly structured, manipulative in the best sense of the word, Bart Layton’s The Imposter is a true crime documentary that unearths a high profile, already well-examined case of identity theft and somehow manages to render it only more mysterious, more generative of questions. And its questions are haunting, burgeoning in your mind as you go over the facts—or lack thereof. A boy disappears, leaving a black hole in a family; someone comes along to fill that hole, and that someone, against all common sense, is embraced by the family. Some kind of exchange appears to have taken place. A tacit agreement perhaps. It only falls apart when the outside world forces the issue, and then the tacit agreement becomes a crime, a violation, an outrage. At least, that’s one reading of the events chronicled in The Imposter. One of many.

The film’s antihero—or, if you’d prefer, its villain that we’re led to identify with—is serial impostor Frédéric Bourdin. Layton has told his story so that it’s Bourdin we trust, because Bourdin’s been caught, over and over, and speaks openly about his various deceptions. He’s got nothing to lose. While the film’s ostensible victims, excessively naïve, in some cases zombified, seem anything but credible. The bizarre, sensational story, if you missed it during its 15 minutes back in the late 1990s, goes like this: 12-year-old Texan Nicholas Barclay goes missing in 1994. Three years and four months later someone is found in a phone booth in Spain, is taken into custody, and some time later this someone claims to be Barlcay. Carey Gibson, Barclay’s older sister, flies to Spain and, as promptly as legalities allow, takes Barclay home and reintegrates him into her extended family and community. But this Barclay, who was blonde, blue-eyed, born and raised American and only 16 years old, was, we now know, 23, Franco-Algerian, of dark features and hair, and could barely speak English, and when he did speak had a heavy accent. What is going on here? After watching The Imposter I kept thinking about the moment when Gibson and Bourdin first meet. Bourdin claims that Gibson showed him family photos, told him who everyone was, essentially began crash-coaching him in becoming her little brother. Did she have something to hide? Did she just need to have her brother back so desperately that she would willingly accept a substitute?

Bourdin: “I wanted to be someone else. Someone who was acceptable.”

Barclay’s mother: “My goal in life was not to think.”

Crafting a deft braid of reenactments and interviews that owe something to the films of Errol Morris—another filmmaker obsessed with uncertainty—Layton’s narrative builds slowly toward its larger ambiguities. The last act, which introduces us to a wily detective named Charlie Parker, who proves Bourdin’s ruse by way of studying his ears, is as engrossing anything you’ll see on a screen this year, featuring developments that, if you’re not familiar with them, I won’t spoil. Of course the film will leave you wanting more, much more. I keep thinking how much this story deserves a great writer to give us an exhaustive investigative, book-length essay, something as much about psychology, about need and grief, about secret violence and secret contracts, as it is about crimes and disguises and con artists. But The Imposter works beautifully as a lyrical, very cinematic introduction to this deeply strange story. 

     

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. 

  

Melancholia: bad vibes all over

Birds tumble softly from the ether; a woman gazes at her hands as they give off sparks; a horse collapses to the ground like an old barn; a woman clutching a child sinks deeper into a darkened golf course; a bride sinks into the surface of a stream or trudges through forest only to be snared by roots. All of this unfolds in extremely slow slow-motion, as though some collective will is urging time to a standstill. And you can see why. The end is nigh. Mind you, it’ll take a while to actually get there.

Had I, for whatever reason, had to exit the theatre after the prologue of Melancholia, an astonishing, kind of devastating sequence heavily indebted to more masters of contemporary photo-based art than you could squueze into a year at ICP, set to the romantic bombast of Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde, I would surely have thought I’d seen the first ten minutes of some rapturous masterpiece. But I stayed, or rather stuck it out, and remembered I was in Lars Land, a place where flights of genius are undermined by lengthy digressions imbued with didacticism, smugness, cynicism and sadomasochistic projections of the author’s disorders onto the opposite sex.

Lars von Trier: maker of some unforgettable images, brilliant conceptualist, shit storyteller. I think I’ve done the image bit, so let’s get to Lars the conceptualist. Melancholia has two parts, two sisters, two disasters. Justine (Kirsten Dunst) shows up two hours later for her insanely lavish wedding reception at a castle. Once she arrives things just get worse: mom (Charlotte Rampling) delivers the most withering wedding speech in history before locking herself in the bathroom and Justine slips ever deeper into debilitating depression. She can barely make it through the night, though disappearing for long spells, telling off her boss and jumping some nervous stranger’s bones seems to help. By dawn, the damage is unrepairable, the marriage still-born. The groom ultimately leaves without her.

After the wedding Claire (Charlotte Rampling) determines to take care of Justine, who’s now verging on catatonic—there’s a painful scene where Claire simply can’t get Justine to step into a hot bath... and that bath looks pretty nice! Claire becomes increasingly preoccupied with the news that a planet called Melancholia has been hiding behind the sun and now seems to be on a collision course with Earth. As apocalypse looms, Claire, quite understandably, becomes hysterical, while Claire's husband (Kiefer Sutherland) turns out to be of no help and Justine is increasingly becalmed and not nice to her at all.

As I summarize all this I realize how much I admire the raw ideas behind Melancholia, the balance of it, that juxtaposition of the individual crisis with the infinite that makes it the nihilist cousin to The Tree of Life. As I think through my experience of Melancholia I have to admit that it was definitely made by someone who really, really gets depression. The problems all come in the way we meander through the story without pace or punctuation, the way we’re meant to bask in the ostensibly clever portraits of one-dimensional or only semi-coherent characters who are mostly just assholes. Everyone, generally, is cruel, though the men tend to be weaklings while the women at least have a certain integrity—and, as with so much von Trier (see Breaking the Waves, Dancer in the Dark, et cetera), that integrity is what ensures their doom. So we watch and we wait for von Trier to do whatever it takes to twist his plots into awkward, sometimes plain stupid knots so as to completely screw over his heroine (though Dogville, it must be said, attempted to reverse this somewhat by allowing its heroine a climatic revenge). We worry, we do indeed feel the burgeoning unease, something von Trier is indeed highly skilled at inducing, and we wait. And the waiting can be tedious.

"The person’s gone, but scenes from the relationship you shared with them are still ringing in your ears": Mike Mills on Beginners

Beginners begins with an ending, with introverted thirty-something Californian illustrator Oliver (Ewan McGregor) mourning the death of his father Hal (Christopher Plummer), who came out of the closet at 75, following the death of his wife, Oliver’s mother, and then died five years later. Oliver inherits Hal’s house and his dog, who’s telepathic and knows 150 words of English, and whose thoughts we glean through subtitles, which along with numerous drawings, notebooks, postcards and graffiti contribute to this film’s charming, text-heavy, scrapbook texture. Oliver falls in love with a gorgeous, funny, friendly yet oddly unknowable French girl (Mélanie Laurent, of Inglorious Basterds), who he takes rollerskating and whose smile inexplicably breaks your heart, in part because she doesn’t speak for the first part of the movie. Oliver meets Anna at a Halloween party, where he’s dressed as Freud and she suffers from laryngitis. As he falls in love he remembers Hal falling in love, or something like it, in his final years, when everything in life was new again and he enjoyed speaking to inanimate objects and trying on various forms of expressing his sexual identity the way one tries on outfits. Oliver also remembers his mother, back when he was a boy and they used to rehearse movie deaths for fun, or go to the museum and imitate the sculptures. Memory and the present are intertwined. They bleed into each other and fold into a single narrative that’s admittedly a little sketchy in some of the emotionally complicated bits yet brims overall with spontaneity and moments of truth that are touching and wry.


Beginners is the second feature from writer/director Mike Mills, who previously made Thumbsucker and many music videos and is also a graphic designer, a musician, and probably a lot of other things too. He’s a very sweet, endlessly curious man. We met for our interview in a fancy hotel in Toronto, where there’s supposedly massive televisions hiding behind the bathroom mirrors, though no one could prove this to me. Mills wore a tie and carried a small camera and was very generous.

writer/director Mike Mills

JB: Beginners feels like a very natural progression from Thumbsucker. It also feels very personal. What prompted the film?

Mike Mills: It comes from my real dad, actually, who came out when he was 75 and passed away five years later, just as I was finishing Thumbsucker. I started writing Beginners right after that. I think I’m always going to be writing about families and relationships and people trying to figure out who they are, trying to get the bad story out of their head and get to the better story. That’s certainly true of both films and seems to be the case with the one I’m writing now. But Beginners was a very immediate reaction to my life.

JB: Did your father know that you were planning to incorporate his story into your next movie?

MM: My dad was really having his party by then. I said to him, “I want to make something about you and mom and your whole deal.” And he was just sort of pleasantly taken aback. I interviewed him a few times, so he knew I was investigating. When he came out, he really came out. He was very politicized, very social, very involved in gay pride groups in Santa Barbara. So I felt he would be down with this idea of coming out more and more and in different ways.


JB: Having seen the film, it’s difficult to imagine it with anyone besides Christopher Plummer playing Hal, but were you ever feeling like you should cast a gay actor in the role?

MM: My first concern was with finding someone who could really get my dad right. But there’s also this fact that my dad was sort of playing a straight man, or half wanted to be a straight man, for 75 years. He didn’t really have any gay affectations. I liked the idea of taking Captain von Trapp and having him be gay. I thought about this a lot, and it wasn’t an easy decision, but this intuitively felt more natural to me.

JB: I guess you were developing the project for a fairly long period. Was it difficult to finance?

MM: It was difficult in that Thumbsucker wasn’t a hit. Beginners is also what people call a “small” film, which I don’t know if I understand, given that it’s about things like death and love and self-discovery. Even after I got Ewan and Christopher attached the economic crisis hit and it remained an uphill battle. But the more alone or hopeless I felt about it, the more I thought this might be the last movie anyone ever lets me make, the more it made me want to invest even more of myself into the project. What makes me unique as a director? What interests me most? Those were the questions that kept me working and the answers all got thrown in.


JB: Both Thumbsucker and Beginners develop this theme of finding one’s voice, quite literally. Did you grow up with a speech impediment or otherwise have a tough time feeling confident speaking?

MM: I’m definitely a recovering very shy person. But even if you’re not shy, I think figuring out who you are and not listening to those voices that demand that you conform or be simpler or more likable is such a common issue. It’s central to family relationships. So much of what constitutes our voice is the result of what story we inherit from out little family, or immediate family, and also from our bigger family, which seems to have to do with the place we grew up.

JB: It’s interesting to consider how your filmmaking relates to your work as a graphic designer. I think about the way you photograph empty spaces or the way you incorporate text, which is especially layered in Beginners. Is it that your work in graphic design informs your filmmaking, or is it more that you have a particular sensibility that imbues everything you do with these motifs?

MM: I think it’s the latter. I don’t really make a big division between media in my head. I went to art school, and I think a lot of what I do just comes from an “art” context, rather than a strictly cinematic context. With this film I felt free to put all that stuff into one project, to speak through drawings or stills. But, you know, one of my favourite graphic designers is Jean-Luc Godard. The graphics in his films are cooler than anybody’s. His sense of design influenced me as a graphic designer before I was a filmmaker. A lot of my still photography is also pretty flat or proscenium. You could say that comes from graphics, but it also comes from my love of William Eggleston, Stephen Shore, or Robert Adams—it comes from the photography that I like. Also, in my family things were always vague or unexplained or confusing, so I think the way I construct images has a lot to do with trying to make things clear and expository and observable. So it’s as much an emotional sensibility as it is a purely aesthetic one.

JB: The style of Thumbsucker felt more severe to me, more pared down. Something about Beginners by contrast feels looser, perhaps more guided by the emotional patterns of the story.

MM: Yeah, Thumbsucker turned out to be a little more formal that I intended, partly by shooting anamorphic, which actually has a lot of restrictions.

JB: Funny you should mention that. I was really aware of the aspect ratio as I watched Thumbsucker recently.

MM: You don’t want to totally control films. They have their own life. I knew I wanted more movement in this one. The story between Oliver and Anna is all hand-held, no marks, and hardly any lights. The story between Oliver and his dad is all locked off or tracking shots. I thought that was a good way to talk about the difference between memory and being in the present. The bottom line was that, while the film has a death at the heart of it and several sad parts, I really wanted it to be filled with life.


JB: It’s interesting the way you introduce the character of Andy, the young boyfriend. It’s a sort of snapshot. I think he says one line.

MM: That’s right. And he’s part of a much longer barrage of information.

JB: Right. From the start of the film these sorts of moments made me feel like part of what I was watching was Oliver trying to come to terms with the discrepancies in his memories. You also have these flashbacks scattered throughout that seem to respond to something happening to Oliver in the present, though the parallels are always just shy of being obvious, which makes them more fun and interesting. Were these flashbacks part of one narrative thread you had in your mind, while everything in the present tense was another thread and you then had to find ways to marry the two? Or did you just write it all in the order that it came out?

MM: I wrote it as two stories. I wanted to interweave them. That was what interested me. There’s a film called Love Film by István Szabó that has a similar structure that I’ve always loved, and that’s kind of how I was living at the time. I was writing this right after my dad died, and when something like that happens it’s like the past just keeps flooding into the present. The person’s gone, but scenes from the relationship you shared with them are still ringing in your ears. So it felt natural and intuitive. A lot of this was derived from my own very real memories, which the more you examine the more crazy and unreliable they seem. Try and stare at a memory—I invite you to do it—some pivotal moment in your life. They’re so fragmentary and slippery. The longer you try to look at it the more it tries to slip away, and when all you have left of your parents are memories, that’s a banal but pretty earth-shattering discovery. I tried to work that feeling into the film, like when Oliver remembers his father wearing a sweater but he was really wearing a robe. I don’t think anybody notices this, but there are memories that reoccur throughout the film and each time they’re a different take, and something is slightly different.


JB: In making Beginners did you uncover any shocking memories of your parents that you’d completely forgotten?

MM: No, but I’m glad I wrote them all down, and not just those that made it into the film. I have this big stack of 5x7 cards that I made notes on to start with, and I was just looking at them recently and already noticing how easily things slip away, things you thought you’d never forget. I didn’t unearth anything big, but it was really interesting to write from my parents’ perspective. One discovery I made was realizing that they were funny. They liked to use humour in this subversive way, maybe just out of the desire to make life more unusual or beat back unhappiness.

JB: Sounds like something you inherited from them.

MM: I guess so, but you never think of your parents as funny. There are those two main things: your parents aren’t funny and they don’t have sex…

JB: Or they’re only funny when they have sex!

MM: [Laughs] Anyway, there’s lots of stuff in the movie that didn’t actually happen to me or my family. I have two sisters that aren’t even represented in the movie. It’s not a memoir. Your parents dying is so much bigger than making a movie about it. But making this movie has been a way of hanging onto all these things.

JB: And maybe also a way of letting go of them.

MM: Yeah, that’s true. Spewing all this out into the world is a funny sort of way to burn it all up.