Caught in the devil's bargain: Taking Woodstock

Would-be interior designer and might-be abstract painter Elliot Tiechberg (Demetri Martin) gets starved out of New York City at the start of a very un-groovy summer of ’69. He heads back to the Catskills, where his folks run a fleabag motel and self-described resort that even at eight bucks a night can’t draw customers. Though he’s in his mid-30s Elliot looks younger. Though he’s secretly a less than straight arrow under his polyester suits he looks sufficiently trustworthy to his elders, or at least those who aren’t openly anti-Semitic. Elliot’s the youngest-ever president of the local chamber of commerce, a thankless gig whose greatest benefit is a free pass when it comes to getting permits approved. But permits and sheer desperation are all Elliot needs to help grease the wheels of history and ensure that Woodstock happens after the festival gets booted out of its original location. Elliot’s acting as middleman between the locals and the organizers also saves his family’s business and gives him an opportunity to finally break away from a vicious circle of codependence and repression. So everybody wins. At least until Altamont comes in December and bums the whole universe out.

Taking Woodstock is based on the memoir by Elliot Tiber. I’ve been wondering why his name was altered here to sound more explicitly Jewish. I can only assume it has something to do with justifying the wildly over-the-top characterization of his mom Sonia (Imelda Staunton, no holds barred), whose knee-highs, horn-rimmed goggles, incessant nagging and permanent lunge make her the most extreme overbearing Jewish matriarch the movies have seen in years. It may very well be an accurate portrait of this most unlikely midwife of one of the hippy generation’s crowning achievements, but it also makes for some broad and rather uneven comedy, which is not the strong suit of director Ang Lee, who along with his screenwriter/producer James Schamus was probably more attracted to the story’s mixture of sexual awakening and dissection of a pivotal moment in American culture. You could say Taking Woodstock is a little Brokeback and a little Ice Storm, but you wouldn’t quite do justice to the film’s own distinctions—or to the richer rewards of Brokeback Mountain or The Ice Storm, both of them movies with more focus, insight and emotional punch.

Better to just say that Taking Woodstock is a reasonably good time, with some nice details, lots of nudity, heady nostalgia, more than a handful of freak flag clichés and a paucity of actual music, the idea being that those who in attendance who actually heard the bands were in the minority. Elliot never quite gets near the stage but he does strike up an alliance with amiable neighbour Eugene Levy, get some solid advice from a ass-kicking transvestite played by Liev Schreiber, crawl into a boogie van for a pleasantly touchy-feely acid trip with Paul Dano, and tumbles out of the closet and into bed with a hippy hunk who is quite possibly the only guy who went to Woodstock that actually likes Judy Garland records. There’s not a heap of narrative dynamics here, but like Titanic we all know how it’s going to end anyway. A psychedelic cascade of split-screen effects followed by one massive, mud-splattered hangover.

Time will break the world: Jeanne Dielman

She’s very good about shutting off the lights when she leaves a room. She coats the cutlets in flour right on the tabletop. Her adolescent son sleeps on the foldout in the living room; he asks her difficult questions while never looking at her. She has different housecoats for different tasks. She works at home, which is to say she invites her clients into her own ordinary-looking bedroom. As we sit and observe and listen to and immerse ourselves in all three hours and 21 minutes of Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), the feature debut of Belgian director Chantal Akerman, made when she was a mere 25 years old, we’re struck by overwhelming recognition. The title Belgian widow, so wholly and richly inhabited by Delphine Seyrig, is a double-archetype, at once the mother and the whore. Yet, through the careful exhibition of select banal domestic routines, playing out in real time, she’s fleshed out to the point of transcendence. Over the course of three days Jeanne’s routines will start to break down and these detours will prove traumatic, leading to a violent catharsis. Identification is rewarded with catastrophe. Jeanne Dielman is one of the most persuasive feminist gestures in cinema history, cool and formalist in its style, deeply compassionate and finally shattering in its effect. It’s now on DVD from the Criterion Collection.

To call Akerman’s approach anthropological would not be accurate. The compositions are rigorously squared, or rather, like Jeanne, contained. The camera is stationary, never tempted to follow its subject even when she exits the frame, confident, we presume, that it knows she’ll be back. There’s no attempt to create the illusion of spying or catching something by chance. Everything has been meticulously arranged. This fierce control over the mise-en-scène, as exacting as Hitchcock, is essential to the cumulative effect. As Ivone Margulies writes in the superb—and superbly illustrated—essay that accompanies Criterion’s deluxe edition, “Jeanne Dielman works like a time bomb.” Exactitude, the anxiety of waiting and watching, impatience giving way to fascination with minutia, the revelation of seeing an aberration from routine and its effect on a character we’ve gradually come to feel that we know in a way that we never know people in the movies: all of these are intrinsic to Akerman’s achievement.

It would be a cynical error to think you can “get the idea” without actually watching Jeanne Dielman. Duration, something filmmakers typically, and for perfectly good reason, disguise with editing, scoring and spectacle, has an intensely physical effect. It interesting to note that all the directors who’ve marked my viewing experience most deeply through the use of extended shot or scene duration—Tarkovsky, Cassavetes, Dreyer, and, now that I’ve finally seen her work, Akerman—are so utterly different from each other with regards to tone, sensibility, subject matter, politics, et cetera. Yet what they all have in common is that after I’ve come out the other end of one of their films I’m consumed by an unshakable sense of having been somewhere and through something, a whole gamut of emotions, suspicions and ideas having emerged and receded along the way. These films extend a pretty loaded sort of invitation, and I don’t hold it against anyone if they might not be eager to take it up often, if at all. But if you love film and all the ways that it can reflect on our lives you need to know that this sort of work does something tremendous—something that only films can do. And the effect is unforgettable.

Let there be lightning: Jennifer Baichwal discusses Act of God

The cloud looks lonely and monstrous, cradling some dying sun inside it. Though it’s only the first of many such ominous masses of droplets to loom throughout the film it’s the one that lingers in my mind. It seems to hold an unusually potent charge of destruction and wonder, but it rests there in the sky, suspended static, all threat. Act of God by contrast could be described as all question, an essay on chance and meaning that uses stories of being struck by lightning as a platform for meditation, without concern for hard results.

Paul Auster

Featured among the film’s subjects is novelist Paul Auster, modern literature’s custodian of chance, and musician Fred Frith, for whom improvisation forms the bedrock of his practice. Act of God ends not with a summation of theoretical points but rather a sort of duet between these two, with Auster describing an incident from his childhood where the kid next to him was fatally struck. The interplay between narration, guitar and percussion is buoyed by the filmmakers’ reining in of atmosphere, their evocation of the electrical brooding that precedes a great storm.

Fred Frith

There’s also James O’Reilly, whose monologue about death by lightning inspired the film. There’s Dannion Brinkley, the Las Vegas Lazarus whose near-death experience spurred a career as caregiver and New Age guru. There’s Alex Hermant, who remains off-camera while his lightning museum in Marcenat, France is on curious display. There are trips to Cuba and Mexico, where reverence for lightning assumes religious properties. There’s also a trip to a lab where we get to peek inside the electrical currents flowing through Frith’s brain while he develops one of his spontaneous creations.

Jennifer Baichwal

Jennifer Baichwal’s previous films Let It Come Down, The True Meaning of Pictures and Manufactured Landscapes profiled author Paul Bowles and photographers Shelby Lee Adams and Edward Burtinsky respectively. In each case the subject served less as material for straight biography than as a launch pad for a discussion of larger themes extrapolated from their lives and work. Act of God breaks from Baichwal’s established model by using a chorus rather than a single subject to address its theme. The result—sculpted in part by Baichwal’s husband and cinematographer Nick de Pencier, not to mention editor Roland Schlimme—works quite well more often than not, and the coda is exquisite. I spoke with Baichwal during the film’s premiere at Hot Docs in Toronto last spring. Appropriately, her responses to my questions rarely leaned toward conclusions.

JB: Act of God proceeds along these two distinct parallel thematic trajectories. It addresses a phenomenon that directly effects only a very small number of people, yet at it also invokes ontological questions that effect everyone. Which aspect sparked the film?

JBa: My background is in philosophy and theology, so I think about these sorts of questions a lot. How much meaning can you ascribe to events before becoming deterministic? How little meaning can you ascribe before becoming nihilistic? I read James O’Reilly’s monologue Act of God, about being struck as a young man and this existential crisis that happened as a result. His description of the moment of the strike and his immediate response to it were so interesting. On one level there’s this physical event, something that can be explained by weather and science and probability, et cetera. On another it’s the perfect metaphor for this struggle between meaning and chance. So what sparked the film was really both things simultaneously. I mentioned to Michael Ondaatje that I was thinking of doing this and he suggested I talk to Paul Auster. As well, Nick has always been fascinated by lightning.

JB: Funny that someone whose medium is photography would be so fascinated by something so difficult to photograph.

JBa: Almost impossible. It’s so fleeting. But Nick taught himself to be an electrician when he was young and knows a thing or two about electricity. We wanted to shoot our own images of lightning. If you look at the existing archive, most of it’s very unsatisfying. It’s generally only about the event itself. It gives no contextual information whatsoever.

JB: Your films thus far has been to some extent profiles of artists. I wonder if Act of God somehow also emerged from a desire to understand generative acts or creativity, accidents that bring flashes of insight or inspiration.

JBa: It’s no accident, I guess, that two people in the film are writers, and one’s a musician. I always turn to art when examining questions of the human condition. Even though Auster and O’Reilly resist ascribing meaning to what happens to them they can’t help but frame it in narrative, which you could argue is another way of doing just that. If the film’s thesis is that narrative is the most basic way we can create meaning, then the parallel of that was Frith’s improvisation, which struck me almost as an existential state of being between meaning and randomness. The fact that he embodies an electrical current somehow; to be able to see what that internal electrical storm in his brain looks like; to hear Frith’s brother explain how the brain learns by being confronted by the unexpected; to hear Auster describe his essay ‘Why Write?’ as an ars poetica but without theory, just stories—these are the essential things the film tries to address.

Plugging into Fred Frith's brain

JB: By creating these narratives we’re also attempting to free ourselves of the burden of these experiences on our consciousness.

JBa: It’s true. Why does that process allow us to be free of these experiences? Is it just because it stands in for making sense where sense can’t really be made? We tell stories about these things and it’s a way or ordering, of creating coherence.

JB: Did you ever consider a more didactic approach? Bringing in some sort of authority on meteorology, say?

JBa: I did wonder at one point if we might bring in someone to talk more about the science. The funny thing is that whenever you see TV shows about lightning, for example, the emphasis is always on demystifying it, where I really kind of wanted to do exactly the opposite. I wanted it to remain a mysterious force that precipitates all of these questions. I’m never really interested in making things didactic because I feel like if these questions we’re asking were very easy to answer then the subject wouldn’t be a very interesting thing to spend five years of your life working on. I don’t think it would be interesting for a viewer to spend 80 or 90 minutes on. Making a film like this is about opening up a space to think about something that’s not easily dismissible.

JB: There’s a significant gamble making a film like this because while it is a sort of essay film you’re entirely dependent on the quality of material you get from your subjects. How do you get them to align their statements reasonably closely to the thread of your film?

JBa: Finding the right stories is part of the process. When we went to France, for example, we didn’t know that Alex Hermant was going to say that he didn’t want to be on camera. We went a long way to interview him—the guy wasn’t in Paris, he was in the mountains. We went there with the kids and my mother, who was there to take care of them. So when Hermant laid this on us, Nick and I just looked at each other and thought, Well, this must be the essential thing about this person. This is the key to him. Let’s use it. Your relationship with our subjects is the most important element in any documentary. Unless there’s some exchange of vulnerability, some sense of authenticity, it’s not going to work. Finding a place where you can communicate can sometimes take days. Sometimes it can happen immediately. With Paul Bowles it took 30 hours to reach that place. With James O’Reilly, just the act of taking him back to this place where he hadn’t been for 30 years, watching him walking around trying to find the site for two days, watching him perform this spontaneous recreation, it seemed to find us all together in that place we needed to be. Because we didn’t set up that recreation. I could never set that up. I just don’t do that. I feel like I can always tell the directed act in a documentary. The person walking away thoughtfully, or whatever. You can always tell when it’s something they’ve been told to do.

JB: That’s something that Herzog seems to have mastered though, the created/spontaneous act. Of course he also made numerous fictional films before he was able to do that. But I was thinking that you do have one very Herzogian character in your film, this Dannion Brinkley. Were you ever concerned about the authenticity of his testimony?

JBa: There’s something completely bizarre and coincidental about him living in Las Vegas, the city of odds. When I asked him why he lived there he said it was the most spiritual place on earth. [Laughs] I don’t quite agree with that. But I absolutely believe that Dannion’s transformation is real. I’m sure there’ll be people who feel what he’s saying is untrue. But in some ways it’s not important whether you believe him or not. I wanted his story to be told the way he wanted to tell it.

Baichwal and Nick de Pencier at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival

JB: Given that Act of God is so much about the search for meaning, I wonder if you feel like your own beliefs have made their way into the film, even if only through some unconscious process.

JBa: It’s impossible for me not to be in every frame in some way. It’s not like these stories are somehow being directly transmitted and there’s no author behind it all. There’s no question that we—Nick, our editor Roland, myself—had an enormous impact on how those stories were told. Yet despite the fact that I would disagree strenuously that objectivity is ever possible in documentary, I do think truth is possible. We tried to shape things to retain as much fidelity to how people tell their own stories as possible with the tools at our disposal. It’s the way the whole is framed that’s very much informed by my own personal questions about these things. And also my lack of an answer. I don’t mind living in that uncertain place.

Conflict of interest: Inglorious Basterds

The first chapter of Inglorious Basterds finds SS Colonel Hans Landa (Christopher Waltz) visiting the home of stoic French farmer Perrier LaPadite (Denis Menochet). Like a vampire, Landa, in studious French, cordially requests to be let inside, where he sits and enjoys a glass of fresh milk. The rolling pastoral beauty framed by every window of LaPadite’s modest abode subtly contrasts the strange glare reflected off the heavy wooden table, offering just the faintest suggestion of interrogation—which for all the politesse is of course precisely what’s underway. Landa’s worldly, chatty, digressive. He’s like the sensitive Nazi aesthete from Jean-Pierre Melville’s La Silence de la mer, but more assured and far more menacing. He’s also a lot more entertaining. The tension escalates conspicuoulsy, buffered by diversions, like Landa’s deadpan reveal of an absurdly large accoutrement. The scene’s climax, like that of the movie as a whole, promises to be explosive.

Quentin Tarantino’s latest magnum opus is, unsurprisingly given its author, a rather wordy war movie. This scene between Landa and LaPadite is but the first of what we might call variations on the theme of double talk and games of life-or-death deceit. Tarantino’s war is fought with language, which gives the apparent advantage to Landa, in a bravura performance from Waltz, since over the course of this chamber epic we hear him speak articulately in no less than four different tongues. But linguistic Euro-sophistication isn’t everything—what of the invincibly confident Native American-imbued hillbillyisms of Lieutenant Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt), the cool British pith of Lieutenant Archie Hicox (Michael Fassbender), or the theatrically trained good-time sass of UFA starlet and secret spy for the allies Bridget van Hammersmark (Diane Kruger)? Watching these shamelessly colorful characters verbally spar is one of the great pleasures of Inglorious Basterds. The others have a lot to do with sheer audacity. The score fuses ‘Für Elise’ with Morricone. Later on we get a Riefenstahl homage set to David Bowie. Hitler appears, in a cape, like James Brown. Churchill sits in on a meeting, frozen in iconic wax museum pose. Goebbels turns up too. As things chug along, swerving vertiginously from one locale and set of players to another, some dying spectacularly, you start to notice that the Second World War isn’t going along quite as you remembered it. Tarantino’s war isn’t Spielberg’s. It isn’t even Paul Verhoven’s. Inglorious Basterds is inspired revisionist comic melodrama, and it’s absolutely fucking bananas.

Playing perversely with convention and expectation, Tarantino doesn’t introduce his one bonafide star until a good half-hour into the movie. Pitt’s outsized Raines is the leader of the so-called Basterds, a special squad of tough motherfucking Jews who, as Raines cheerfully puts it, “are in the Nazi-killing business—and business is a-booming!” Every Nazi they encounter meets with death and a scalping or is marked for life by a giant swastika carved into their foreheads. They’re less somber and a lot more Jewish-looking than the boys in Defiance. Hostel writer/director Eli Roth shows up to play “the Bear Jew,” whose specialty is clobbering Nazis to death with a baseball bat. But despite sharing their name with the movie they’re only in about a third of it. This is no reason to complain.

The lynchpin in the structure of Inglorious Basterds—as elaborate and deceptively tight as that of Pulp Fiction—is Shosanna Dreyfus (Mélanie Laurent), a survivor of a massacre overseen by Landa. He lets her flee, it seems, for pure sport. Years later she turns up in Paris with a new gentile identity and a cinema to manage. Her icy allure, combined with her respect for filmmakers and ace projectionist, snags the heartstrings of Nazi hero Frederick Zoller (Daniel Brühl). He’s recently wrapped a movie about how he earned the Iron Cross—he plays himself—and he wants the film to have its gala premiere at Shosanna’s theatre. (The scene in which she begins to realize she’s in danger of becoming a Nazi collaborator plays out as she adjusts the marquee to announce Henri-George Clouzot’s German-produced Le Corbeau—it wouldn’t be a Tarantino movie without clever nods to a lot of other movies.) Hitler himself is to be present for the premiere, and refusal of the offer seems out of the question. But Shosanna has a plan. It involves the 350 nitrate prints stored in the cinema’s basement and a really big face. (For explication on the flammability of nitrate Tarantino gives us a quick lesson, making use of scenes from Hitchcock’s Sabotage.)

Am I giving too much away? Is it any comfort to know that there’s much, much more? I suppose those who insist on the horrors of history being handled with kid gloves, or even, you know, sensitivity, should be warned that Inglorious Basterds is wildly irreverent, and the Holocaust remains a strictly peripheral event. But the film holds our great collective fantasies of what could be as something of sacred value. It’s also among the best ensemble films of the last decade, showcasing the talents of Waltz, Kruger and yes, even Pitt, with sublime results. If there’s anything to groan over in the film it’s merely the few overt exhibitions of Tarantino’s insufferable ego. He has the impudence to close the film with Rains announcing that his latest bloody swastika may just be his masterpiece, the implication being that Tarantino wants you to know that Inglorious Basterds is his. The thing is, I feel no compulsion to argue with him.

Wild men on the verge of a nervous breakdown: Cassavetes' Husbands on DVD

We first see them in a series of snapshots, four shirtless guys in their early 40s mugging for the camera in beefcake poses by the pool. We then see them in motion, whittled down to a trio now that one of them has suddenly died—we’ll never know him as more than a frozen ghost, hardly mentioned yet looming over everything that follows—and they all wear black suits, white shirts, black overcoats. Like they’re all on the same team. The funeral ends and instead of going home to their families they go out to get very drunk, staying up all night, singing in the streets and then going to a gym in the early morning to play basketball and swim, one long fury of masculine desperation to assert their aliveness. This desperation will consume the full two hours and 20 minutes and by the time its all over the exhaustion and the wreckage feel cleansing and dirty at the same time, like sweating through some arduous outdoor task on a scorching summer’s day. That’s John Cassavetes’ Husbands (1970).

Some say it’s one of the messier or more troublesome Cassavetes films, maybe not the best place for the uninitiated to start. That may be true, yet so much of what makes Cassavetes great is present and accounted for: the scenes that we crash into with no buffering transitions, that seem to go on and on with no direction until some startling emotional truth just happens before out eyes, where humour erupts out of the bursts of craziness and someone’s always shouting over someone else, often to tell that person, however dubiously or confusedly, that they love them. The only essential Cassavetes ingredient missing here might be women, that half of the human race we suspect that Cassavetes trusted in far more, a trust that can be seen as either respect and admiration or as condescension and bewilderment. Husbands is very much about men—the truly inspired combo of Ben Gazzara, Peter Falk, and Cassavetes himself, with those Satan eyebrows—manly men fearful of women, who treasure their male friendships and the affectations these friendships encourage, men clinging to each other like life preservers in a tempest. Men who seem hopeless with women but more hopeless without them. The fourth musketeer dies and in some loopy method of mourning his disappearance they all go to London to gamble, gallivant and sweet-talk ladies who seem as on edge as they are. That’s about it for story, so watch it for something else. Maybe consolation.

Husbands followed Faces (68), which was a big hit for Cassavetes and a milestone for independent film. Cassavetes knew he wanted Falk and Gazzara, both of them actors who made an enormous impression on the stage but were dissatisfied with what came their way in film and were gradually fazed out of the studio rolodexes. He got some money in Italy and he had a valiant producer in Al Ruban. The script, so it’s been said, was just a blueprint and there was a great deal of improvisation developed between the men, who became best friends through the process. It’s interesting to note that the male leads were all highly trained actors who got a lot of rehearsal time, while the women were mostly non-professionals who had to work on the fly—were the women genuinely that much more “natural” on screen, or did Cassavetes just want more time with the boys? There’s an interesting debate here, but in the end the results speak for themselves. Every performance is wild and immaculate. Each of these men are by turns terrifying, repellent, very moving, and insanely, almost nonsensically funny. “We’ve got five children between us,” Falk tells Cassavetes, “I hope they’re individual!” Cassavetes’ camera, wrangled by an unseasoned but very game Victor Kemper, is utterly devoted to letting the unbridled interactions play out, in bars and public bathrooms, in hotels, in terrorized living rooms, and on the street, often in close-ups that careen to catch the action, close-ups so tight that they become abstract, of faces, hair, mouths, feet, hands, hands covering faces, hands inside faces. Nearly 40 years on, Husbands, like much Cassavetes, boasts an intimacy that still feels exceptionally rare in film.

Sony’s new disc marks the first time Husbands and been on DVD, and they’re done a terrific job of it, using a version longer and reputedly much better than many of the shorter ones that have circulated in the past. The transfer is lovely and the sound mix impressively crisp given the chaotic nature of dialogue, especially in the more crowded scenes. There’s a very good half-hour documentary with enlightening comments from Ruban and Gazzara, who obviously found Cassavetes’ unorthodox and often financially foolish methods at once punishing and the most rewarding events of their careers. Marshall Fine, whose Accidental Genius: How John Cassavetes Invented the American Independent Film came out a few years back, gives an informative, affectionate yet skeptical commentary track. Husbands, to be sure, can be a difficult film to digest, and the appendices in this package can help a viewer to deepen their experience of it without claiming to dissect it.

Bearing witness to the inferno (by proxy): Senselessness

Horacio Castellanos Moya

An unnamed writer arrives in an unnamed Latin American country to copyedit 1,100 pages of testimony taken from the survivors of atrocities committed against indigenous communities by their own military forces. Overseen by the Catholic Church and a small legion of international human rights workers, the incendiary report awaits only this final polish from the foreign writer before being made public. The writer’s job, as he sees it, is to “make sure that the Catholic hands about to touch the balls of the military tiger were clean and had even gotten a manicure…” The writer, recently slandered in his own country for politically correct misinterpretations of critiques he made of his country’s president in a national newspaper, has taken the work for essentially cynical reasons. He’s here for the remittance and to escape an unpleasant situation, and it behooves him to approach his work dispassionately.

Yet the writer immediately finds himself marveling at the primitive poeticisms of the Cakchiquel Indians who describe their trauma in curious phrases such as “I am not complete in the mind.” The writer jots down several such phrases in his personal notebook and even commits them to memory, repeating them to everyone he meets. He also however finds himself tormented by the sheer horror of what he’s charged with reading and revising, the steady, massive and dark waves of torture, rape and mutilation remembered by witnesses, one of whom even suggests that it is only with the forgetting the names of the victims that they will finally rest in peace.

The writer turns to drinking and cultivating sexual encounters to provide a balm to his agitated mind. His crudity and crassness with regards to the women he seeks to seduce makes a striking, blackly comic contrast to the ostensible solemnity of his task. Reading about violence perpetrated against human flesh only seems to make him crave more contact with human flesh, preferably when it covers a body roughly akin to that of Demi Moore. The contrast between the unimaginable suffering of many and the festering, petty, carnal obsessions of one might cause the reader to find kinship between Horacio Castellanos Moya’s Senselessness (New Directions, $17.50) and numerous novels by Martin Amis. But Castellanos Moya’s prose in this, his first novel to be translated into English, by Katherine Silver, isn’t quite as merrily misanthropic as Amis, bless his black heart, can often seem. As the writer’s paranoia balloons to terrifying proportions over the course of his work; as he realizes that the memories he’s being exposed to can’t be shut out through fleeting and typically less than satisfying pleasures; as he begins to acknowledge the titular senselessness of the supposed identification that he, a well-fed writer, feels with the impoverished survivors of massacres, to the point of appropriating their words to express his own feelings, Castellanos Moya imbues his protagonist—who bears more than a few similarities with his creator—with a certain sympathy. Who among us is capable of fully digesting, of making any sense of, stories of abysmal slaughter?

The prose style of Senselessness is actually most in keeping with that of Thomas Bernhard, especially its long, fluid sentences, which read not as leisurely digressions or opportunities for pedantry but rather as anxiety-riddled bursts of compulsive extrapolations from a guy on the verge of totally losing his shit. Written in the warts-and-all first person, Senselessness’ rambling sentences give a vivid sense of a protagonist utterly overwhelmed, tense as a wire designed to asphyxiate, with every period punching into the page like a drowning man coming up for air. The evocation of burgeoning madness can probably be most accurately aligned to Gogol or Kafka—whom we can also trace in the novel’s dichotomy of bureaucratic abstraction and looming threat of genuine violence. The short, sharp finale has the effect of reminding us that terror cannot be confined to the frontiers of the third world.

In a sly bit of self-referral, there’s a moment in Senselessness when the writer, already beginning to feel les than complete in the mind, declares his new goal of “not wallowing in any of the testimonies that I would never turn into a novel, because nobody in his right mind would be interested in writing or publishing or reading yet another novel about murdered indigenous peoples…” Well, so much for that idea. But Castellanos Moya’s contribution this genre, if we can call it that, is hardly a work of unbridled bathos and hand wringing. It doesn’t pretend to contain in any neat fashion the atrocities the writer reads about (which are presumably modeled after similar crimes committed in Guatemala). In fact Senselessness is about our inability to do precisely this, no matter what our proximity is to the events in question.

Castellanos Moya circa 1980

Castellanos Moya’s own proximity to atrocity has fluxuated vertiginously. Born in Honduras in 1957 but raised in El Salvador, he has been a citizen of Guatemala, Canada, Costa Rica, Spain, Germany, and Mexico, where he spent 12 years as a journalist and political analyst. He now lives in Pittsburgh, living in exile as part of the City of Asylum Project. In a recent interview he stated his intense distaste with being identified as a political novelist, though he admits that his earliest memory is of a bombing that destroyed the porch of his grandparents’ house back when his grandfather was the president of a nationalist party and conspiring the oust a liberal government, so perhaps politics is something he would be incapable of excising from his work if he wanted to. In any case his is another vagabond and unsentimental voice from Latin American literature that the rest of us would do well to listen to. As we stand back and try to comprehend the chaos that continues to unfold in the rest of the Americas Castellanos Moya can help us to decipher not only the experiences of those who live there, but of us too, in our watching.

All things must pass: Summer Hours

It is in part a story about things of weight, a property, a house, the objects amassed inside it, some of which are cultural artifacts of immense value, some purely functional yet shot through with significance for those who’ve handled them, enjoyed them, disliked them, known them in some way. It’s about, to paraphrase one of the characters, the residue of a life with its memories and its secrets. It’s about the burden of inheritance. An elderly woman leaves her three adult children with items to put in order—that pretty much the gist of the story here. But it says a lot about Summer Hours (L’heure d’été) that it both opens and closes with children scampering through the woods, whether in the midst of a treasure hunt or traipsing along the bridge to adulthood, on the cusp of some tender new sensual awakening. The presence of youth along its perimeter imbues this fundamentally adult tale with unmistakable lightness, as do the gliding camerawork and the naturalness of the marvelous cast’s collective presence. Such lightness is finally the only method of approaching material so brimming with emotional complexity.

Olivier Assayas is a filmmaker of special dexterity. He makes films that are boldly audacious and films that are quietly arresting, films that are international and cool and films that are local and intimate. Irma Vep and demonlover roughly fall into the former category, Summer Hours very much into the latter. Prompted in part by a commission from the Musee d’Orsay—who previously produced Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Flight of the Red Balloon—the siblings at its centre are diasporic enough to reflect Assayas’ global sensibility, but the setting and the themes are thoroughly invested in home and heritage. Frédéric (Charles Berling) is an economist living in Paris with his family. He’s just published an iconoclastic book yet his instincts are firmly rooted in tradition, in what can be passed from one generation to another. Adrienne (Juliette Binoche) by contrast is a designer who favours bright colours and crisp modern simplicity. She lives in New York (and is so entrenched in Americaness she’s actually marrying Clint Eastwood’s son). Jérémie (Jérémie Renier) has roamed the farthest of the three, working as a supervisor for Puma in China and is now in the costly process of moving his wife and three kids there to start a new life. When the film opens the siblings share a rare reunion with their mother Hélène (Edith Scob) to celebrate her 75th birthday. In the midst of the gathering Hélène will take Frédéric aside to go over some of her house’s inventory for the umpteenth time, the Corot paintings and Louis Majorelle desk, and the notebooks and sketches of great uncle Paul Berthier, whose work is still sought after and who may or may not have had an affair with Hélène decades ago. Soon enough Hélène will be gone and all this “bric-a-brac from another era” (her words) will, much to Frédéric’s chagrin, have to be sold off. Life goes on.

The eloquence of Summer Hours comes from the way Assayas, along with his cast and crew—including regular ace cinematographer Eric Gauthier—convey this sense of life’s hopelessly forward movement, without a trace of theatrics yet flowing with overwhelming emotion. Even if your family bears not the slightest resemblance to this one their negotiations and disappointments and sudden recoveries will resonate, not through any awkward straining toward making things “universal” but rather through its very particularity. Each character is so fully drawn as to feel warmly recognizable before they even say much. In that first scene with the treasure hunt in the woods surrounding Hélène’s house a blank piece of paper is found. One of the kids correctly guesses that the paper holds a clue but that the clue’s written in invisible ink. Watching Summer Hours the second time I had to smile at this very elegant little prelude to what’s to come, a chronicle of managing the residue of the past where the secret message this residue carries waits invisibly for the characters to decipher and digest. It says: just take a deep breath, and let go.

It's no fun being an illegal alien—or changing into one: District 9

Not invaders so much as castaways, the aliens wash up over Johannesburg, their great ship looming, suspended and ominously silent for a long while until we humans finally break in and discover the lot of them ailing and with no place to go. More than two decades later the aliens have become the new gypsies, a nationless people unwanted, feared, segregated, blamed for all sorts of things. They’re already loosely confined to zone, but our story begins proper when a private multinational is hired to round them all up and send them to a more remote colony, out of sight, out of mind, herded into the ghetto.

District 9 takes a rather visionary approach to our anxious dreams of extraterrestrial first contact, picking up cues from a lot of great science fiction prose, the sort that rarely gets made into movies. (It’s also entirely possible that parts of its story were inspired by Stanley Kramer’s 1958 film The Defiant Ones.) By rendering the aliens as ostracized refugees in South Africa the film opens the doors wide to invite all manner of metaphorical interpretation, grounding its narrative in the landscape of apartheid and having human characters of all racial backgrounds disparage their visitors with reactionary, colonialist rhetoric, their intolerance made ostensibly acceptable by the humanoid yet crustacean-like aliens’ all too evident Otherness. But this remarkable feature debut from South African-Canadian filmmaker Neill Blomkamp, made under the auspices of producer Peter Jackson, also functions quite nicely as engrossing comic book stuff. In fact, the deeper it ventures into pulp territory the better it gets.

Wikus Van De Merwe (Sharlto Copley) is our unlikely protagonist, a naïve, clownish, moustached bureaucrat who earns his high profile position of supervising the relocation project through pure nepotism. He’s a Kafkaesque tragic character in more ways than one, having first been ill-prepared for a mission fraught with issues of miscommunication and conflicting agendas, and then coming into contact with an alien fluid that infects him with some mysterious gene-altering virus. Wikus could never be mistaken for a hero—it’s only his process of transfiguration, and his sudden value to military strategists, that forces him to become heroic. He gets lucky, and his sheer will to survive is strong. He becomes an unwitting symbol for the possibility of racial conciliation, and embarks on a bloody adventure that slowly turns desperate self-interest into something far grander.

District 9 is wildly ambitious. By its brilliantly realized finale these ambitions are surprisingly fulfilled. Its difficulties arise mostly through a sense of uncertainty with form. Of the more mature filmmakers one might imagine taking on such a project—Paul Verhoven or David Cronenberg spring to mind—I can’t think of any who would have stuck with the limiting faux documentary approach developed by Blomkamp and his co-scenarist Terri Tatchell, which simply causes a lot of unnecessary problems. Opening with the news show style commentaries and character introductions offers the filmmakers a perfectly legitimate—if rather generic—opportunity to get a lot of exposition out of the way. But they continue to try and convince us that we’re watching a kind of documentary long afterwards, and it’s only when the form’s limitations become too constraining—we eventually need to see characters in situations that no diegetically-placed camera could possibly capture—that the film starts breaking its own rules and things get confused. With its handheld, vérité aesthetic, the faux doc format allows filmmakers to cheat certain things that a more classical approach is less forgiving of, but Blomkamp hardly seems like he’s trying to make The Blair Witch Project—on the contrary, he seems a skilled craftsman, so I can’t help but wonder why he didn’t go al the way and embrace the aesthetic demands of an unmistakably fiction film when his story started begging for it.

So District 9 gets off to a wobbly, distracting start, but rest assured it will more than make up for it, partially just because the story is so well-structured and the political—at times outright satirical—undercurrents so rich. Copley compliments this by hurling himself into the squirm-inducing physicality of the role and surrendering completely to the risky notion of the totally bumbling protagonist. Wikus is definitely not cut from the Cronenbergian model of the reflective hero fascinated by his own terrifying metamorphosis. The guy is really an idiot, and through it serves the drama effectively the meager redemption he finds is hard-won. This is what makes this sort of story work, the understanding that heroism is always a balance of character and circumstance, and once in while the latter grossly outweighs the former. In any case, it’s a must-see for anyone with even the slightest appetite for smart spectacle. It sure beats the hell out of the rest of the current summer stock.

Half-baked: Julie & Julia

We start with two Americans in postwar Paris, Julia (Meryl Streep) and Paul Child (Stanley Tucci), ardent foodies and happy in mid-life love, swooning over the richness of their new culinary and cultural digs while Paul shows his photos and continues his diplomatic career and Julia figures out what to do with her life between mouth-watering meals and afternoon delights—healthy appetites in the kitchen are matched, we learn, in the bedroom. Tucci’s terrific as always while Streep goes beyond deft impersonation, at her comic best and captivatingly sensual in a goofy sort of way. So far, so good. Or at the very least effortlessly diverting. If only it weren’t for the other half of the movie.

Nora Ephron’s Julie & Julia isn’t a bio-pic about Julie Child but rather an attempt to craft a diptych from two separate stories of self-realization, that of Child’s discovery of her finesse with cuisine and charisma with instruction and of Queens-based Julie Powell (Amy Adams) and her discovery that maybe she really is the writer she always dreamed she’d be. To say that the former trajectory overshadows the latter would be a gross understatement. Child is a beloved and singular cultural icon and influential author. Powell started a hit blog based on following Child’s recipes. More to the point, Streep and Tucci’s portrait of marriage is moving, complex and resonant, bursting with unspoken negotiations between lovers who each convey an ample sense of history both separately and as a unit. The sense of togetherness found between Adams and Chris Messina, who pays Julie’s amiably Tony Danza-like husband Eric, is by contrast vacuous, propped up by tedious boilerplate squabbles and cuddling on the couch. It doesn’t help that Julie herself, characterized here as openly self-centered and seemingly without much of anything of her own to say, is basically insufferable. And it takes some pretty lousy writing to make Amy Adams insufferable.

The concept of Julie & Julia is, I think, inherently flawed, and Ephron’s method of connecting Child’s memoir My Life in France with Powell’s book is largely facile and undernourished. Their stories evoke parallels in only the most obvious ways, and Ephron has a tough time sculpting a satisfying movie out of either of them. The imbalance is exacerbated by stereotypical romanticizing of Paris and dismissal of dreary old Queens, which, granted, is hardly the most beautiful of the five boroughs but is not without its appeal either. Julie & Julia seems all too content to stay on the surface of things, to be all glaze and no filling, and it largely comes down to Streep, Tucci and a few other stellar costars to make this at least half of a good movie.

Glimpsing Christ on the mean streets of Abel Ferrara's New York: Bad Lieutenant returns

There are films—we sometimes call them character studies—we’re best advised to watch and re-watch without concern for continuity or sweep, suspense or forward-motion. We marvel at, or are at least compelled by, the individual moments that hover somewhere in the haze of the whole, suspended like some fleeting exhibit. I hadn’t seen Abel Ferrara’s cult film Bad Lieutenant (1992) in at least a decade, and I returned to it with one wave of fascinated, slightly nauseated familiarity after another. It concerns a haggard, brazenly corrupt middle aged cop (Harvey Keitel) and his tentative, confused emergence from what seems a very long tour—going back as far, perhaps, as Taxi Driver (76)—through the special internal inferno that awaits god’s lonely men when dwelling in the crowded, sordid Petri dish that is, or was, New York City. To my surprise the film resonated more with me now that when I was younger and inclined to feel impressed by anything affecting a post-Scorsese, gritty, skuzzy, rock and roll verisimilitude. Bad Lieutenant is audacious, somewhat pretentious, perhaps excessive. It’s also harrowing, genuinely crazy in its construction, slyer than it at first seems, and facilitates one of the great raw, only partially comprehensible, out-on-a-limb star performances.

Some of those moments: Keitel’s unnamed Lieutenant stumbling, stoned out of his mind, listening to Johnny Ace croon ‘Pledging My Love’ in some strange woman’s apartment, eyes shut, his bulldog torso naked, his arms extended in some Christ-like pose or perhaps an attempt to fly, emitting this weird whimpering sound like my dog used to make when he wanted something and knew he wouldn’t get it if he barked; Keitel hunched over the driver’s side window of a car, two big haired sisters from Jersey in the front seat, a misty rain rendering the three of them seemingly isolated in the night, while he gets one of them to expose her ass and the other to perform a pantomime fellatio; Keitel, already buzzing with the possibility of his own redemption, getting high with two already severely incapacitated crackhead rapists on a crack house couch. Save the last of these, you might have to work to remember where such scenes fall in the course of the narrative. But you’re unlikely to forget the scenes themselves. They stain your brain, like those traces of certain drugs that we’re told never really go away.

There are so many beautifully selected details in Bad Lieutenant: the Jesus blanket and plastic cover on the sofa of the polite Puerto Rican dealer’s apartment; the door that always gets stuck in the tiny, wallpapered apartment of Keitel’s pretty, intermittently articulate junky pal Zoë (played the film’s co-writer, the late Zoë Lund); the gum that Keitel asks the Jersey girl to spit into his hand. Yet the choice of ‘Pledging My Love’ is especially inspired. Johnny Ace killed himself back in ’54 playing Russian roulette, and such recklessness is perfectly aligned to what’s presented as the status quo for the Keitel character. Within the first 15 minutes we’ve seen him drinking, snorting, screwing, stealing, harassing and gambling himself into oblivion. Another actor might have tried to make the character ingratiating or, even worse, confused his self-destruction with diabolical glee. But Keitel makes everything he does seem more pathetic than fiendishly cruel. He somehow lets us know that this creature possesses a soul. He pours his heart into it, without judgment, and his abandon can result in bizarre black humour, which works too—take the moment where he gets so upset listening to a baseball game while driving his car that he shoots his radio. Ferrara says he originally conceived the film as a comedy anyway—lots of movies have protagonists with one vice, why not make one where the he has every vice?

I emphasize the fragmentary nature of Bad Lieutenant, but it does actually have a sort of rudimentary story, which was based on a real 1981 incident. A young, pretty nun is viciously raped by two young thugs, and the investigation is thwarted by the nun’s refusal to give police any information about her assailants. Yet Ferrara—who always was half exploitation filmmaker, half would-be Pasolini—is barely interested in the investigation’s dramatic potential. What matters to him is the nun’s Christ-like feat of forgiveness, which Keitel has such a hard time believing yet is clearly inspired by—if such utter scum can be forgiven, there may still be hope for him. This leads to some wincingly cheesy Jesus apparitions, but what’s more memorable are the actions it prompts in Keitel, ramping up to a brilliantly stark, poetic finale.

Abel Ferrara

Lion’s Gate’s new special edition of Bad Lieutenant features a rambling but frequently informative commentary track by Ferrara and cinematographer Ken Kelsch. It also features a superb half-hour documentary about the making of the film, which is something in itself: the guerilla tactics of the shooting sound truly insane; Christopher Walken, who’d just starred in Ferrara’s King of New York (90), was originally slated to play the lead, but dropped out because he didn’t think he could deliver; fellow actor Victor Argo had to convince Keitel to do the role, and Keitel was apparently going through some severe personal turmoil that fed his performance. Yet for all the chaos in both its content and genesis Bad Lieutenant survives as something sharp, focused and brutal, direct and rigorous. It deserves to be seen again, and not just by the faithful.