Detour as narrative on the streets of Austin

A man arrives in Austin, Texas. It’s 1989. He took the bus here, and seems to have been traveling a great deal. He leaves the station, gets in a cab, lets loose a monologue in which he describes a dream in which he read a book about splintering realities, different dimensions, other versions of himself and of everybody else, even his possibly mute employee of Roy’s Taxi currently driving him around. Soon both dream-raconteur and his stoic audience-of-one slip into the background, making way for a guy in a BE ALL THAT YOU CAN BE t-shirt watching super-8 home movies, for a cheerful babbling conspiracy theorist, for a pedantic youth pontificating on idleness as a route to liberation, for some dude who says he can get three girls into a gig but actually can’t, for a self-described “anti-artist” who claims to destroy works of art (I wonder if he went on to become a film critic), for a young woman who claims to possess Madonna’s pap smear—she knows a gynecologist in Hollywood. Who is the hero of this movie? The answer, of course, is everyone.

Slacker (1991), Richard Linklater’s second feature and a key work in the story of American independent cinema, is one of those rare films that succeeds at pluralizing the protagonist, at capturing a community, a spirit, a place and time—the anniversary of the moon landing, the ’88 presidential election, the leaning towers of VHS tapes and the death of L. Ron Hubbard all provide Slacker with a timestamp. Employing what Linklater described as a “vertical narrative,” the movie moves like a narrative relay race in which no one is in a hurry. The story, as such, goes wherever the next character takes it. The production company is titled ‘Detour,’ a nod to Edgar G. Ulmer’s beloved poverty row noir, but also a directive for a trajectory devoted to alternate routes. The movie seems inspired by late period Luis Buñuel; it is rigorously associational. Which is not the same as random—Slacker’s cast are very much all of the same world, sharing many of the same preoccupations: the unseen hands that control modern life; freedom as something inherently elusive, given our insistence of laying traps for ourselves (a theme explicitly alluded to in the title of Buñuel’s The Phantom of Liberty); and the potential heroism in passivity.

This last theme isn’t mere irony or slacker bravado. The notion of passivity as being socially useful is critiqued in Slacker’s very first transition, when numerous passersby come upon the unconscious, possibly dead victim of a hit-and-run splayed out in the road and each of them passes the buck, uninterested or unwilling to get involved. There is a dark side to this seemingly mirthful, seemingly humanist, seemingly ambivalent movie whose title is totally misleading: this project was a tremendous, ambitious undertaking, and Linklater, still in his 20s at the time, was anything but lazy. He would soon after prove to be one of the contemporary cinema’s most prolific directors, with an astonishing range of works under his belt, most notably Dazed and Confused (1993), School of Rock (2003), the Before… trilogy (1995, 2004, 2013), and Waking Life (2001), which unfolds like a series of dreams and to which Slacker is most closely related—Slacker’s first line: “Man, I just had the weirdest dream.” Previously available only on DVD, Slacker is now available from Criterion on a lovingly packaged new blu-ray edition. It remains striking original, frequently hilarious, at once loose and mesmerizing, and an inspiration for anyone who feels cinematic form to be riddled with constraints. 

      

The intimate apocalypse

This is the way the world ends, not with an asteroid or waves of contagion, but with an aborted cab ride. At least that’s how it ended in South Korea in 2010, when writer/director/editor Jo Sung-hee made his impressive feature debut with End of Animal, a hugely resourceful, super fucking weird chamber disaster drama. The film got less play on the festival circuit than it should have, though its reputation did grease the wheels for Jo’s solid, if less inventive, 2012 follow-up A Werewolf Boy. It was released on DVD earlier this year. I finally caught up with it last week. 

A very pregnant young woman, Sun-yeong (Lee Min-Ji), is traveling by taxi from Seoul to her mother’s home somewhere in the countryside, where she plans to give birth. Somewhere en route, in the middle of nowhere, the cabbie stops for some regular-looking dude in a parka and ball cap—turns out he’s going the same way. But once said dude climbs in, things get tense. He’s touchy, and keeps ordering Sun-yeong not to stare at him, even though she’s in the back seat.  He starts announcing the number of seconds to go… until what? Then he says he has no cash or cards to pay. Then he starts to make uncanny guesses about numerous aspects of the personal lives of the cabbie and Sun-yeong. Then he starts talking angels with fangs and global blackouts. He then tells cabbie and Sun-yeong that he loves them, just before a flash of light startles everyone and knocks Sun-yeong unconscious.

When she wakes up: no cabbie, no touchy, psychic stranger. Just her and her unborn child in that seemingly endless desolate landscape. No mobile service. No nothing. She starts to search for a rest area that’s meant to be nearby. She’s starving. She finds an insolent kid in an abandoned house. She badly injures her foot. She meets a bickering couple. She’s aided by a goofy guy in track pants riding a bike—never trust a man in track pants. She nearly gets raped. Once in a while she gets instructions from the psychic stranger via radio signals—he’s the only thing on the air. At times, from across the wintry plain, she hears some sort of growling, freaky and hard to identify. Is this unseen animal going to be the end of her?

Despite the sweeping nature of the premise, Jo knows he’s not making a spectacle film of any sort. His camera most often sticks very close to his characters, often to just head and shoulders. Occasionally we get a wider view of the landscape. End of Animal is an intimate apocalypse. This is its novelty and strength as well as the source of its failings—which should not deter the intrigued from seeing it. It’s just that, however sympathetic her position may be, Sun-yeong winds up grating on you a bit. She’s having a rough time of it, and she whimpers, cries and screams an awful lot. End of Animal is at once fascinating and annoying. It’s probably too long, but it’s also a hell of a strange world to visit, one on its last legs, or simply waiting for something new.   

         

Denis dans le métro: 35 Rhums on DVD

The crisscrossing of rails seen through the smudged windows of a Parisian train glint softly under dusky autumn light. Soon it will be dark, and the faces and figures of passengers will appear reflected on the Plexiglas. Most of the characters in 35 Rhums work in transportation, driving the trains and taxis that move us around our cities. Among them are Lionel (Alex Descas) and his daughter Joséphine (Mati Diop), whose relationship, one characterized by warmth, patience and generosity, is undergoing transition. The images of Lionel and Joséphine—Jo, for short—that lingers most vividly are of them riding together on Lionel’s motorbike, or, in a brief, lyrical departure from the film’s dominant realism, a horse. Despite its abiding calm 35 Rhums is a film where perpetual motion is always being quietly emphasized, though the movements we witness will come to feel less like arrivals and departures than they do like circulation. This is a gentle story about letting things take their course.

With its attention to potent details that slip outside the dictates of conventional narrative, its resistance to explicit drama where implication will do just fine, and its utter lack of severity or formal rigour while maintaining a perfectly recognizable, carefully honed aesthetic, 35 Rhums is quintessential Claire Denis. 20 years after her feature debut Chocolat (1988), the French writer/director has emerged as an exemplary figure in world cinema, one of those luminaries whose work frequently dazzles audiences, is celebrated, discussed, written about and argued over, yet somehow rarely manages to appear on screens outside of major centres and film festivals. Since I first saw 35 Rhums at the Toronto International Film Festival in September of 2008 Denis has already released a follow-up, which possesses only marginally better chances at finding decent distribution thanks to its exotic milieu—war-torn Cameroon—and the presence of international star Isabelle Huppert. (Like I said, marginally better.) 35 Rhums in the meantime played a number of other major festivals but received no theatrical release in Canada. It’s now available on DVD from Mongrel.

Written by Denis and her frequent co-scenarist Jean-Pol Fargeau, 35 Rhums feels like an homage to the films of Yasujiro Ozu, Late Spring (49) in particular. It’s not simply the mellow air or the poetic intermediary scenes that invoke the Japanese master but the story itself, the widowed father, the adult daughter, the negotiations that lead to her full blossoming into independence. Not that any of this is clearly stated in the film—Denis’ approach feels antithetical to exposition, and part of the pleasure of immersing yourself into this film comes from gradually discovering the relationships and histories shared by the characters through their behaviour, their layers of trust, their boundaries. There’s Gabrielle (Nicole Dogué), the taxi driver close in age to Lionel who lives in the same building, who smokes a lot on her balcony, and observes, who’s perfectly at ease with Lionel and Jo yet also accustomed to being pushed away when she tries too aggressively to be part of their family. There’s Noé (Grégoire Colin), closer to Jo’s age, living in an apartment full of memories with a fat old cat and an intense, inarticulate desire to change everything in his life. And there are Lionel’s work buddies, who go out drinking when there’s an occasion to celebrate, such as the retirement of René (Julieth Mars Toussaint), a quiet man with a sweet smile and heavy-lidded eyes. He keeps a famous photograph pasted up in his locker of a guy keeping dozens of plates spinning on rods. What will René do when he has no more plates to spin?

Populated with actors who evoke through their mere presence a rich sense of past experiences—Descas, a regular feature of Denis’ work, is especially good at evoking a long, intriguing personal story without saying a word—nothing about what’s going on either up front or in the margins of 35 Rhums is entirely ambiguous. So much is communicated through glances, embraces, through the way people stand up to eat dinner in their kitchen, the way they might enjoy farting on the couch of a friend when he’s not home, they way they trade off partners when dancing in a small restaurant to the Commodores’ ‘Nightshift’—the song’s rippling guitar/bass/percussion/keyboard groove never sounded so seductive—after being stranded in some suburb when Gabrielle’s car breaks down on the way to a concert. 35 Rhums is elliptical, yet Denis isn’t withholding. She’s selective—what she chooses to show and what she chooses to leave out are major elements of her craft. When Lionel and Jo finally reach the moment where their paths must diverge we know we haven’t learned everything about them. We know their lives are far too much to fathom for a movie. But we’ve seen enough of what they share to sharply feel the rushing current of conflicting emotions welling up in both of them, and this variation on an oft-told tale becomes something singular.

Fact is, he was talkin' to all of us

The yellow cab emerges silent, hulking, opaque and phantom-like out of the plumes of steam that waft up from the gutters, the gauzy, rain-slick streets bleed super-saturated reds and blues, the brass and snare drum conjure up oppressive waves of portent, and finally the darkness parts its curtain for God’s lonely man to make his entrance. He comes from nowhere, peers the world through slatted fingers, and can’t make convincing small talk to save his life. By his own claims he’s a Vietnam vet, an ex-marine, with no friends or family with whom he can connect or accept consolation from. A genuine outsider with only the most marginal sort of charisma imaginable, he seems somehow the unlikeliest of characters to mount the stage of movie history, but more than 30 years after making his first appearance there’s no denying that he’s earned his place there.

I think I’ve probably seen Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976) as many times as I’ve seen any movie, yet every time I revisit it I’m always caught off guard at just how abstract, even hallucinatory, those opening moments are that I’ve described above. I’m equally caught off guard by how goddamned young, even asexual, Jodie Foster is as the child hooker Iris, or just how deeply immersed Robert De Niro seems in the role of the titular cabbie Travis Bickle, how convincingly he nurtures Travis’ loneliness, alienated logic, and the notion that his movement toward vigilantism is inevitable and somehow even heroic, cleansing, this 20th century underground man determined to wash the scum off the mean streets.

“I don’t believe that one should devote his life to morbid self-attention,” Travis writes in his diary. “I believe that someone should become a person like other people.” As delivered by De Niro, the comical, crude poetry with which he expresses his delusions of conformity is marvelous, and just one of several elements that make Paul Schrader’s churned-from-the-gut screenplay one of the most perfectly realized of the New Hollywood era. And you can actually access the script as you make your way through the movie on Sony’s recent Taxi Driver two-disc set, stopping at any point to see how it matches with the final result. Its just one of a plethora of special features designed to entice fans who obsess over the film to a level that competes with Travis’ obsessing over his misguided vocation.

There have been a number of excellent multi-disc packages of Scorsese films in recent years, with the two-disc release of Raging Bull being a major standout. I’m not sure why it took so long to finally get Taxi Driver the same deluxe treatment, but its proven to be worth the wait. There’s good making-of type stuff and testimonies from everybody from Scorsese himself to his one-time student Oliver Stone to numerous New York City cabbies who remember just how mean the city streets were back when the film first came out.

There’s also a pretty smart little featurette that’s got plenty of interesting quotes from the always articulate Schrader, though the highlight of the whole package for me is Schrader’s full length audio commentary, where he discusses where he was at in his life while writing the film (i.e.: in miserable shape), how he’d connected with Scorsese, how they adjusted the project to best accommodate the cast and shooting conditions, how much of the film was scripted and how much improvised, and how little anyone expected the film to become the enormous success it did. Schrader talks matter-of-factly about the underlying themes of racism in the film, explaining why he though it essential that Travis attack blacks in particular, and why the racism in the film eventually became one of the factors that led to Harvey Keitel being cast as the jive-talking pimp Sport, a role originally meant for a black actor.

Taxi Driver is a film that speaks to the ages yet could probably only have come out of the particular conditions of its time. Its fixations are those of young, angry men, and Scorsese, Schrader and De Niro were just young enough to still really feel it. Its singular position both in its response to and shaping of film history is on exhibit all over the place, with Scorsese’s wildly adventurous playing with form indebted to his voracious consuming of the work of Jean-Luc Godard and Rainer Werner Fassbinder, among many others. And it’s a film that’s finally a product of the heady 70s, that time when young directors with a newly-gleaned sense of film history's continuity could take control of their work, a time when mainstream audiences occasionally flocked to see films for reasons other than fleeting thrills (though Taxi Driver arguably has those, too), and the battle between art and commerce in movies found some near-perfect harmony for a few golden years. Taxi Driver is the grotesque child of that era, and one that deserves to be visited again and again.

Views of Strange Lands from Windshields: Jarmusch on DVD

In Jim Jarmusch’s 1984 film Stranger Than Paradise we light upon the confluence of many streams of poetic cinema, of numerous currents of the NYC underground of the period (already on its last legs), and of drifting strangers discarding the signifiers of their varied homelands both geographical and psychological. I retain a deep love for this “indie” landmark in part because while it’s so very about something, it evokes its themes, ideas and emotions with such a light touch, such singular, rigorous formal grace, and such emphasis on languid humour and the pure pleasures of unfiltered –and uncut– human behaviour.

Stranger Than Paradise is concerned with self-determination. Right off the bat, Willie (John Lurie) is heard demanding his Hungarian aunt speak to him in English and not call him Bela, his given name. We see Willie’s visiting Hungarian cousin Eva (Eszter Balint) tour “The New World” of New York while playing Screamin’ Jay Hawkins on her tape recorder, in effect projecting her prized artifact of America back into America streets. We see Eddie (Richard Edson) struggle with his role as the supremely pushy Willie’s sidekick. Without having to actively do a whole lot, these characters, buoyed by the ease, playfulness and individuality of the actors, become tremendously well fleshed out. Like J. Hoberman wrote in his original Village Voice review, “half the fun in Jarmusch’s leisurely paced film is just watching those palookas breathe.”

But it was Jarmusch’s self-determination that was also announcing itself. His cinematic influences can be seen in every unbroken scene –Ozu, Dryer, Warhol and Antonioni, not to mention The Honeymooners, are all evident precursors– yet his style as developed here exudes a very particular vision of the world. Jarmusch’s individuality is something explored in depth in Criterion’s new Stranger Than Paradise two-disc set, which contains smart essays, the German documentary Kino ’84: Jim Jarmusch, and, most excitingly, Jarmusch’s relatively little-seen 1980 feature debut Permanent Vacation.

Permanent Vacation opens with NYC crowds undulating in slow motion juxtaposed with nearly abandoned streets and, eventually, a series of varied empty living spaces. “I’ve known all kinds of people,” protagonist Allie (Chris Parker) tells us, “and to me those people are like a series of rooms.” The newness dies, a creeping dread emerges, and then its time to split. Allie, with his floppy pompadour and endearingly pretentious air of cultivated outsiderness, spends much of the film wandering between people, rooms and empty lots, pontificating on his inability to settle. The filmic space is a frontier bridging the real world and one malleable to the characters’ fantasies, and in this sense it’s really a coming-of-age film. This goes for Jarmusch as much as Allie: the young writer/director is already honing his minimalist, episodic sensibilities, and his special interest in the interchangability of the foreign and familiar.

Along with Stranger Than Paradise, Criterion has also released Jarmusch’s 1991 film Night on Earth, the ambitious portmanteau Jarmusch initially wanted to title L.A. New York Paris Rome Helsinki, a tell-it-like-it-is rundown of the film’s travelogue. Each episode is set in one of the above cities, each more or less confined to a taxi cab. Though he professes to not be of an analytical mindset, Jarmusch in fact describes the idea of the film perfectly in a short Belgian TV interview included here: he states that he was interested in the freedom of the fleeting intimacy with a complete stranger one finds while taking a cab, as well as the ostensible insignificance of a taxi ride, the point of which is usually to get from one place to another. An artist isn’t always the most accurate representative of his work, but I don’t think I could come up with a better summation of what Night on Earth is about than what Jarmusch himself describes.

The events depicted in Night on Earth are unassuming even by Jarmusch standards –a talent agent offers a cabbie a job; a passenger takes control of the steering wheel when its clear the newly immigrated cabbie can’t drive automatic– yet at less than a half-hour each they provide rich portraits and conviviality. Re-teaming after Down By Law (1986), Jarmusch gets another career-best performance from Robert Benigni, who rambles on about fucking pumpkins and livestock of all things; he gets a marvelous camaraderie going between a double recorder-sporting ex-clown Armin Mueller-Stahl and an impossibly enthusiastic Giancarlo Esposito; he summons up a genuinely quirky and deeply sad story from the late, great Finnish actor Matti Pellonpåå in the film’s final, melancholy dawn; and he wrangles a highly memorable, Mingus-inspired score from Tom Waits. Any one moment here can seem slight, yet Night on Earth amounts to fare more than the sum of its deeply charming parts.

Repeating the terrific supplement found on their Down By Law release, the highlight of Criterion’s disc is easily the audio-only Jarmusch Q&A, where he responds to questions emailed in from fans the world over. His comments are fun, insightful, anecdotal, alive with attitude and full of homage for his esteemed colleagues. By the time you get through Night on Earth and all its supplementary material you’ll likely feel as though you’ve passed a long night yourself, but one that leaves you satisfied, alert to simple beauty and a little bit in love with people and the world.