Open House: The Kids Are All Right

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Twisted sisters: Bluebeard on DVD

Does Catherine Breillat instinctively think in pairs? There was something dizzyingly baroque to the catalogue of sexual encounters in her internationally scandalous breakout Romance (1999), while her brilliant follow-up, Fat Girl (01), felt pleasingly chamber-like by comparison. Fat Girl itself became part of a pairing, since that film was soon followed by Sex is Comedy (02), which functioned as a fascinating fictionalized meta-study of the making of a particularly arduous sex scene in its predecessor. Now comes Bluebeard (09) and, while also a period piece, it feels as lean and efficient at 80 minutes as its predecessor The Last Mistress (07) unfurled luxuriously at 115. Breillat’s films possess an unusual balance of incendiary subject matter and elegantly cool and controlled mise en scène. It’s intriguing that the sequencing of her output seems equally calculated for maximum effect. That being said, this effect only functions if people can actually see Breillat’s films. Bluebeard, which is itself another diptych, balancing one narrative within a framing device that proves to be a parallel narrative, arrives on DVD via Strand Home Video without having ever enjoyed a theatrical release in Canada. (It will actually have its Canadian premiere at this week as part of the Cinematheque Ontario's Breillat retrospective.)

The source material for Breillat’s latest is of course the familiar fairy tale first rendered into literature in the 17th century by Charles Perrault, who also delivered the beloved woman-in-peril fables Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty and Little Red Riding Hood into posterity. Unlike those other stories Bluebeard has failed to find itself repeatedly adapted into movies. The titular serial wife-killer can be found lurking in the DNA of a handful of nasty adult thrillers, but it doesn’t seem very malleable to the tirelessly sanitizing forces of Disney. Yet as an allegory of sexual curiosity and feminine oppression rich in enduringly strange detail it seems tailor-made for Breillat, whose work has brought continual rigour to such themes, sometimes employing scenes of explicit sex, sometimes not. If Breillat’s films are shocking it has more to do with what they imply about the crosscurrents of sex, power and gender than how they push the envelope on anatomical depictions. If you think you’ve got Breillat pegged as a feminist, you should be equally aware of the fact that she’s also labeled herself, quite accurately I think, as a Puritan. Bluebeard suggests that mortal punishment may indeed await young ladies who choose to penetrate the forbidden territories of eros. In fact, the movie makes this suggestion twice!

The dominant half of Bluebeard, set in what appears to be 17th century France, concerns a pair of sisters, the elder Anne (Daphné Baiwir) and the younger Marie-Catherine (Lola Créton), forced to leave their convent when their father’s death leaves their mother financially unable to continue their schooling. They return home, where the furniture is being carted away by debt collectors, mom boils their wardrobes in black, and the dinner menu consists of such humble fare as grass soup—there’s an inspired black comedian behind these scenes, though humour is an aspect of Breillat’s cinema that’s often forgotten. Salvation of a most dreadful kind arrives in the form of a handsome young messenger inviting the bereaved family to a garden party held on the grounds of the wealthy and colossally corpulent Lord Bluebeard (Dominique Thomas). It’s commonly whispered about throughout the county that Bluebeard has murdered each of his wives. The sisters go anyway. Marie-Catherine is fascinated by the seemingly gentle giant, who schools her on the local flora and recalls Cocteau’s Beast more than, say, Joseph Cotton in Shadow of a Doubt. Bluebeard is equally drawn to the wide-eyed, optimistic and barely pubescent Marie-Catherine. She accepts his proposal of marriage. Among the most memorable images in Bluebeard are those of Bluebeard’s immense paw hovering over Marie-Catherine’s tiny hand, and of Marie-Catherine nestled like the tinniest sparrow in the crook of Bluebeard’s elephantine arm. Other memorable images include a trio of paper doll-like corpses suspended from a ceiling, and the arguably gratuitous close-up of a decapitated duck, a phallic spinal stump wriggling from its neck.

The other half of Bluebeard features another pair of sisters, the elder Marie-Anne (Lola Giovannetti) and the younger Catherine (Marilou Lopes-Benites), their costumes placing the period sometime in the middle of the 20th century, making their belated appearance something of a flash-forward. They sneak into the family’s off-limits attic where Catherine finds a book and, much to her sister’s repulsion—though, crucially, not her direct refusal—she begins to read the sordid story of Bluebeard aloud. Between passages they discuss somewhat related matters, including their humorously imaginative notions of what the term “homosexual” means. What’s most interesting in these short, often sinisterly playful scenes isn’t necessarily how they reflect a reading, both literal and analytical, of the movie’s primary text, but how they contribute to a particular idea of sisterhood as a potentially volatile testing ground for the push and pull of adolescent transgression. And it is no surprise that in each case the younger, braver, potentially doomed sister is named after Bluebeard’s writer/director. The original French title of Fat Girl, incidentally, was À ma soeur! You’ve got to wonder just what it would be like to be Catherine Breillat’s sister. The final minutes of Bluebeard make you glad you don’t have first-hand experience.

Inception: Leave the dreaming to us

They move through cities that fold in on themselves, that resemble immense cemeteries, that erode into seas; through zero-gravity hotel corridors, across bridges, between skyscrapers, over arctic tundra, and into hidden chambers. The protagonists in Christopher Nolan’s Inception are in many ways your archetypical assemblage of criminal experts convening for the perfect heist, speaking in action movie boilerplate, wearing nifty duds, yet here the crime unfolds not in some bustling metropolis but rather in the vast and intricate dream worlds of the mark… or is it the dream of the criminal? If everyone’s sharing the same dream, can the dream “belong” to only one of the dreamers? While we try to sort this all out we can marvel at the scenery. The worlds within worlds invoked here are overwhelmingly impressive in terms of scale. Nolan, a great craftsman, has been given the resources to dream, and he dreams very, very big. I’m not sure he dreams very deep.

Master infiltrator Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) is normally hired to extract information from the dreams he burgles, but a vaguely sinister, unfathomably affluent new client (Ken Watanabe) wants Cobb instead to plant information in his target’s unconscious mind. The goal is to penetrate the dreams of Robert Fischer (Cillian Murphy), the son of a dying industrialist, and convince him to divvy up dad’s monopoly. Cobb has something ugly in his past—like all Nolan’s protagonists, he’s so ridden with guilt it’s turning toxic—and remuneration includes his hassle-free passage home to the US, where he’s a wanted man, so Cobb accepts, introducing the one-last-gig trope into Inception’s genre touchstones. Cobb gathers his cohorts: the supporting ensemble includes an unusually stuffy Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Bronson’s charismatic and dexterous Tom Hardy, Ellen Page, giving by far the film’s most natural performance, and Dileep Rao, that annoying magical guy from Drag Me to Hell. Gradually the group’s adventure becomes less about messing with Fischer’s business sense than it does staving off Cobb’s inner demons. Cobb’s been rattled by dream-encounters with his hysterical wife (Marion Cotillard), or at least his memory of her, with increasing frequency. He’s apparently in danger of slipping into this permanent, gray matter-draining REM state forever. Or, you know, something really bad, anyway.

Much time is spent establishing the rules of psychic corporate espionage—the unspecified injections used to plunge participants deep enough into sleep, the mental tricks required to navigate one’s way through another’s dreams without getting lost, the necessity of a dream architect, a sort of production designer of the future—though much of how this business really fails or functions is nonetheless left pretty sketchy. Nolan seems more concerned with the idea of inner logic than he does in its actual exploration. Still, there are enough intriguing details—the reliance on personal totems to ground the dreamers, such as Cobb’s tiny metal top, being chief among them—to satisfy one’s sense of having entered a world with some reasonably consistent chains of cause and effect, and the final scene, a cliffhanger of sorts, works to the film’s overall strengths.

More distracting is the sheer aneurotic, humourless tidiness of Nolan’s dream worlds, which bear little resemblance to the amorphous, murky, slippery dreams most of us experience, places far more vividly and idiosyncratically realized by filmmakers like David Cronenberg, Luis Buñuel, David Lynch, Richard Linklater, or Andrei Tarkovsky, a key influence on Inception’s morbid love story. The realms Inception traverses feel closer to some science fiction novelist’s notion of virtual reality than they do to the places we visit in out sleep. But if these realms fail to resonate as a reflection of our dreams at least they provide terrain for an unusually fantastical crime thriller, one which revels in elegantly edited set pieces that each fit snugly into their respective slots in the writer-director’s intricate stratagem. Inception is an exhausting film—and I actually think it kind of needs to be—and is more problematic the more you think about it. It’s also easily the most stimulating spectacle movie you’ll find on the menu this summer.

David Shields tries to make it real... but compared to what? Plus: Lermontov!

David Shields

I think I've underlined more passages in my copy of David Shields’ Reality Hunger: A Manifesto (Knopf, $28.95) than any other book I own. This initially struck me as inherently impressive, until I noticed how many of these passages seemed familiar, those stray lines that echo Roland Barthes, Walter Benjamin, or W.G. Sebald, or the paragraph of dictums taken directly from another manifesto, that of the Dogme 95 movement. I make a habit of learning as little about a book before reading it as possible, so forgive me for being slow on the uptake. Though it’s no secret, I didn’t clue into the fact that not only does Shields include un-attributed quotations in Reality Hunger but that such quotes, sometimes altered by Shields, constitute the bulk of the book, which is about a lot of things—far too many things, in fact, to be a coherent manifesto—but is perhaps above all, or at its best, a defense of collage and appropriation as a fecund and arguably unavoidable MO for artists. (Shields’ sources are listed in the back of the book, though he urges us to rip those pages out and ignore their content in the spirit of… well, we’ll get to that. The problem with this isn’t that readers are such sticklers for copyright law but that we, you know, like to read, and might want to find out who wrote something especially juicy so as to follow our interests.)

Andy Kaufman: master of reality

Reality Hunger contains 618 texts, written or selected by Shields, designed to collectively argue our living in a period in which, to paraphrase Michael Moore’s Oscar acceptance speech, quoted by Shields, we hunger for reality because our daily lives are so inundated with fiction, ie: politics, advertising, junk journalism. We crave art and entertainment that responds to and interacts with the real. We embrace whatever promises to deliver it: memoirs, sample-heavy hip-hop, YouTube karaoke, reality TV. Yet Shields assures us, quite rightly, that reality, or at least randomness, has been infiltrating the artifices of art for millennia—even the Bible is a work of assemblage. Something Shields doesn’t explain is how exactly one is supposed to find their dose of unfiltered reality through programs that are painstakingly designed works of wish fulfillment, soap opera by another name. Shields is anti-narrative, but reality TV appeals to viewers precisely because of its resilience of classical narrative. Despite his inclusion of a tired reexamination of the James Frey controversy and a For Dummies history of DJ culture, Shields is obviously a smart, immensely curious guy with an impeccable radar for cultural shifts, and Reality Hunger is a fun, oddly breezy, engrossing read. But while the argument being built here—an extension of Jonathan Lethem’s landmark essay ‘The Ecstasy of Influence,’ published in Harper’s in 2007—is fascinating, it’s also a mess. Nearly everything intrigues, yet little holds up to close scrutiny.

Lil Wayne: keeping it real?

Manifestos require monsters to rally against, preferably ones long embedded in the establishment. Shields’ main monster, after copyright law, is the novel, and his criticisms of it yield this book’s most overpowering wafts of horseshit. He champions personal essayists over novelists because they “keep looking at their own lives from different angles.” Yet dozens of the authors whose work Shields upholds as helping to sate our reality hunger write books we still call novels—the list includes Proust, Joyce, and Beckett—while there’s surely no limit to the number of personal essays out there that are both crap literature and complete failures at critical self-examination. Uninterested in the fiction part of fiction, Shields wants to do away with reading “700 pages” of story—an exaggeration, since few contemporary novels are even half that length—and just get to the point already. But what is the point of a novel, and can it be distilled without losing its resonance? What exactly is a novel anyway? What’s a memoir? And what the hell is “reality” supposed to be? Is there really more of it in The Bachelor than in Moby Dick? Is Lil Wayne more in touch with it than Gabriel García Márquez? For the record, Shields, directly or indirectly, asks similar questions. The mystery is how can he ask them and still arrive at some of the half-baked conclusions he posits. It doesn’t sound as provocative, but in many respects Reality Hunger is basically a fresh plea to continue applying rigour to the postmodern project, especially if we boil postmodernism down to staying alert to form and accident and a willingness to negotiate the fourth wall. This is no small achievement.

Lermontov: before moustache

Shields asks: “Is there a sense in which a writer’s vision gets more thoroughly and beautifully tested in a book of linked stories than it does in a collection of miscellaneous stories or in a novel? …I’m thinking of Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time, Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son.” (You’ll note that two of Shields’ examples were called novels by their authors.) Anyway, I like this question very much and, having already read and enjoyed two of these titles I decided to read the third. I bought a dog-eared copy of A Hero of Our Time years ago, my knowledge of Lermontov limited to the facts surrounding his untimely death and references to him made by Solyony in Three Sisters. Plus, I liked his moustache.

Lermontov: with moustache

The hero in question is Pechorin, an officer and a pretty nasty piece of work: romantic, manipulative, charismatic, cynical, unable to empathize with others, exhausted by life’s disappointments: “One just goes on living out of curiosity, waiting for something new. It’s absurd and annoying.” How emblematic Pechorin is of mid-19th century Russian society I’m unsure, but regarding Shields’ question about linked stories, A Hero of Our Time does seem to reach its heights of character development and social critique through the deployment of varied anecdotes and genres. We learn about Pechorin through stories told by a man who once knew him, by a fleeting encounter with a writer, by news of his fate, and by his (edited) journals, which describe a love affair, a duel, and, in the book’s chilling final chapter, an evening spent debating determinism and death with a man about to die. Once you’ve read this slim but rich novel it becomes impossible to imagine how this character in all his complexities could be conveyed without Lermontov’s pattern of hearsay, memory, and private rumination, of external and internal portraiture. So all credit to Shields for, however it might contradict his thesis, pointing out the links between literary works of 1992, 1979, and 1840, and for getting me to finally read a masterpiece that’s been sitting on my shelf since about 1994.

Scentless Apprentice

Balthazar (Nicolas Cage) had been searching for the “Prime Merlinian” for 1270 years and in all that time never caught wind of this invention called shampoo. He did however develop a liking for ultra-long rawhide trench coats and other such comic book Goth super-stylings and at some point wisely chose to base himself in New York City, a place where one can go out wearing such flamboyant vestments without drawing too much unwanted attention.

Balthazar was biding time running a grimy midtown antique shop when he first met Dave (Jay Baruchel) back in 2000, but Dave was just a little kid then and not quite ready to assume his duties as savior of the world. Ten years later Dave’s grown into a nerdy genius physics major at NYU, and when Balthazar’s old nemesis Horvath (Alfred Molina) is resurrected from a pillar of roaches Dave’s belated date with destiny finally arrives. He’s taken under Balthazar’s wing, is ordered to wear pointy shoes, and learns how to make molecules vibrate faster and cough up plasma bolts and fireballs, both of which, it should be said, look pretty awesome. Indeed, the fairly seamless parade of luminous special effects in Disney’s The Sorcerer’s Apprentice is by far the best thing in the movie, whose story is entirely mechanical, formulaic enough that you can take naps and not miss a thing, and whose performances range from pleasant to annoying.

Director John Turteltaub’s been making movies for all ages for ages, among them Cool Runnings, 3 Ninjas, Disney’s The Kid and both National Treasure movies, which I guess is where he became pals with Cage, who repeatedly flings his locks and trench coat but isn’t let off the leash enough here to be very interesting even as pure camp. Canada’s own Baruchel meanwhile delivers hunchy, squirmy, fidgety affectations that seemed fairly purposeful in The Trotsky but here just get distracting and oblivious to the vibe conjured by his collaborators, especially his token love interest (Teresa Palmer). You have to wonder, did they bother to ask Michael Cera?

In any case Turteltaub’s doesn’t give his actors enough space to fully play the comedy, but he keeps things jumping at least, letting our eyes roam all over as, for example, we watch a Chinese dragon careen through Chinatown or a brassy bull bash up Battery Park. Yet for all the expensive location work there isn’t a single scene in The Sorcerer’s Apprentice that actually resembles New York in the slightest. Too bad, since all that hocus-pocus would probably feel more magical if it were unleashed in settings that felt more like real life.

Fear and Desire, weird attempts at male bonding: More Columbia Film Noir on DVD

The hero is thick-necked, gravel-voiced, steely-eyed, a strapping young veteran who looks imposing yet is passive by nature. He’s lonely, in hiding, and complains of weariness, yet the most mundane gesture of kindness turns him into as bashful a boy as Tobey Maguire. There’s a scene where he’s camping somewhere near Moose, Wyoming, with an older friend, a doctor, graying, fatherly and kind, and that much more arresting in his gentleness for being recognizable as the ten-gallon hat-wearing grotesque who flirts with and is robbed by Janet Leigh in Psycho (1960). The men settle down to lunch over a fire and the doc gets to explaining how much it means to him that the hero never put the moves on his lovely young wife. This is before they spot the car skidding off the nearby road and go to help and wind up the captives of two bank robbers, one a sadist and the other Brian Keith. The sequence is strange, haunting for its specificity and simplicity that slips so quickly into something like nightmare. It’s from a too-little known picture called Nightfall (57), directed by Jacques Tourneur, based on a novel by David Goodis, and is emblematic of what makes film noir such genuinely rich terrain. It’s not the clichés, which are false anyway—there were never half as many detectives in trench coats or femme fatales in noir as people seem to think—but the way these films cloud the frontiers of the everyday and the chimerical.

Nightfall is one of titles available on the new Columbia Pictures Film Noir Classics Two, which closely follows the format of its predecessor in that its selections are all from the ’50s, its weakest stars Kim Novak, its most established classic stars Glenn Ford and Gloria Grahame and is directed by Fritz Lang, and its most curious entry is directed by Irving Lerner and stars Vince Edwards as a compelling yet entirely unfeeling antihero. Fortunately, for all the similarities in the line-ups of these box sets, they nonetheless each feature utterly distinctive and almost uniformly sublime works, most of them long unavailable.

Tourneur, probably most remembered for the canonical Out of the Past (47), and for Cat People (42), I Walked with a Zombie (43) and The Leopard Man (43), the first three horror pictures produced by Val Lewton at RKO, was a very special filmmaker, one who seemed intuitively drawn to noir material. His approach was subtle and engrossing in a way that causes you to wonder what you did and did not actually see during his films once they’re done and you’re left to piece them back together in your memory. Throughout Nightfall, trusting the high drama of Goodis’ narrative to provide forward movement, Tourneur seems attuned to the small, to the behavioral, such as in a second conversational scene between two men that slyly juxtaposes the first, the one where, in an almost comically inappropriate moment, the sadistic bank robber suddenly really needs to know why Brian Keith doesn’t seem to like him much.

Such passages of seemingly non-essential exchanges also permeate Karlson’s The Brothers Rico (57), based on a story by Georges Simenon. It begins and ends scenes of domesticity and emphasizes paternal and familial concerns—rather aptly, given that it’s basically a gangster picture, and a very, very good one. Richard Conte plays a former mob accountant now running a lucrative laundry business in Florida. He receives a call from his old benefactor, a two-faced mobster eloquently embodied by the kindly doctor who turns out to be a cold-blooded alien in Invasion of the Body Snatchers (56), and is sent on an arduous cross-country errand to find his errant brother, a journey which becomes only more devastating and violent as it goes along—though all the while, Conte, convincingly tormented, keeps calling home to speak with his wife, with whom he’s trying to adopt an orphan.

The contrast between such wonderfully detailed works as Nightfall and The Brothers Rico and something like Pushover (54), the aforementioned Kim Novak vehicle, is striking. The story is virtually a series of semaphores, a shopping list of all the noir clichés alluded to above. It even has otherwise straight-laced bachelor Fred MacMurray falling for a blonde in tight sweaters who draws him into plotting murder and theft in a limp resuscitation of Double Indemnity (44) dynamics. There’s not a single moment in which MacMurray and Novak’s chemistry feels anything more than pure artifice.

Yet it would be misleading to say that mining the essential ingredients of noir is in any way negates the possibility of invention or sheer genre mastery. Human Desire (54), directed by Lang, based on a novel by Émile Zola, which had been adapted previously by Jean Renior as Le bête humaine (38), features a number of identifiably noir elements yet in no way depends on them to automatically supply gravity or style in and of themselves, partly because Zola wrote decades before Dashiell Hammett or James M. Cain, and partly because Lang and his collaborators have crafted a work so deeply immersed in the complexities of desperation, complacency, and, well, desire.

Glenn Ford returns from Korea with no greater ambition than to return to his earlier life as a small town locomotive engineer, but chance deposits him in a lonesome passenger car at night with Gloria Grahame, only moments after Grahame’s husband kills a man in a fit of jealous rage. Bathed in industrial gloom—the cinematographer is Burnett Guffey, who also shot Nightfall and Brothers Rico—Human Desire explores a lot of territory in a short amount of screen time, touching on postwar transience and the threat of the newly independent woman, on different kinds of marriage and urges most of us never even know we have, manifesting in Ford’s gripping Grahame’s curls with violent passion as they secretly kiss in the shacks of the train yards. Grahame is especially fascinating, sexy, and sad here, an object of erotic currency, wanted but never accepted. She seems always to have been cast as the lover of violent men, but in this case we learn things about her past that might explain her choices—only thing is, we never really know the truth about her, not even in that final, ostensibly explanatory dismal little sequence where she’s confronted by her hulking husband while Ford rides up front, willfully oblivious to all of it, dreaming of something safe and banal.

Lastly, City of Fear (58) finds Vince Edwards escaping from prison with what he believes is a canister of high-grade heroin. It’s actually a radioactive substance called “Cobat-60” that could spell doom for the entire city of Los Angeles if not disposed of quickly. Reuniting Edwards with Lerner immediately after the terrific Murder by Contract (58), City of Fear is slightly less a character study, preoccupied as it is with a larger civic canvas and authorities in heated debate about whether or not to go public with the threat of contamination and the panic it will surely incite. Lerner makes inspired use of limited resources with montages of mobilizing city officials and focuses on the handful of interesting and entertaining lowlifes with whom Edwards meets, not to mention the fragments of billboard advertising that provide subliminal commentary on the action. Excitingly scored and beautifully photographed by Lucien Ballard, it’s the most neo-noir of the noirs here, a little self-conscious, but playfully so, and just one of four very good reasons to invest in this tour of the obscure peripheries of America’s sunlit ’50s.

Solitary Man: No comfort for old salesmen

The title is ironic, though the movie itself at times seems to be not entirely aware of this, nonsensically launching its opening credit sequence with Johnny Cash’s rendition of the titular Neil Diamond ditty about a young man’s unease with cheating women, which is rather the opposite of what’s going on here. Six years after the mere mention of a potential heart problem prompted a late mid-life crisis and a catastrophic and very public personal meltdown, career car peddler Ben Kalmen (Michael Douglas) seems capable of just about anything other than being alone. He may have split from his wife Nancy (Susan Sarandon in a pretty thankless supporting role), but most nights he’s on the prowl for fresh flesh, preferably under 40, which according to Ben is the threshold beyond which the body “thickens.”

Not only do women support the sating of Ben’s carnal desires, or more to the point, his self-esteem, they also supply him with important business contacts—Ben’s heavily reliant on nepotism since being arrested for fraud. See, the problem isn’t so much that Ben has sex with the barely legal daughter (Imogen Poots, very good) of his rich girlfriend Jordan (Mary-Louise Parker), but that he was going out with the rich girlfriend in the first place. Jordan is only the most luscious embodiment—thickened or no—of Ben’s desperate cynicism in action. He’s using her, shamelessly. When push comes to shove comes to shit-kicking, which it will once that daughterly dalliance comes to light, it appears Ben will give up or sell-out just about anybody, including his adoring grandson, the subject of some emotional blackmail undertaken by Ben’s daughter, Susan (Jenna Fischer).

Solitary Man, which opens in Toronto tomorrow, was co-directed by journeyman scenarists Brian Koppelman and David Levien, who previously collaborated in this same capacity for 2001’s Knockaround Guys. I vaguely remember feeling some sympathy for that earlier picture despite its finally rather hackneyed ensemble crime caper premise, and that more or less lines up with my response to Solitary Man. I found myself rooting for the movie right to the end, enjoying certain audacious twists and its willingness to let its hero sink pretty low while ostensibly en route to redemption, and Douglas gives a beautifully modulated, unapologetic, and detailed performance. But Ben seems oblivious, his mind made up about what mercenary tactics one must engage in to succeed in life, which results in some fun, pretty crude, and not devoid of truth life lessons offered by Ben to gawky college sophomore Dan (Jesse Eisenberg). I think what ultimately makes Solitary Man less than satisfying is that it strives to embrace the virtues of friendship, family, and solidarity, yet, even in Nancy’s eleventh-hour offer of rescue from still greater disaster, the whole movie, like Ben, remains fundamentally solipsistic. Not a single character besides Ben emerges as anything more than a functionary.

Everything merges with the night: New Directions renews Borges with Everything and Nothing

Among the most memorable moments in Jorge Luis Borges’ 1939 melancholy story ‘Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote’ is the comparative analysis of a passage from Miguel Cervantes’ Don Quixote with a like passage from the unfinished Quixote written by the recently deceased Menard, a writer who sought not to “compose another Quixote… but the Quixote itself.” The passages in question are, inevitably, identical—or so it might appear. Borges notes a “vivid” contrast in style. He finds Menard’s Quixote “more subtle” than Cervantes’. Each time I revisit ‘Pierre Menard’ I laugh at this masterstroke of absurdity, yet upon consideration the conceit isn’t absurd in the slightest. Borges attests that Menard’s quixotic desire to re-create Don Quixote enriches the art of reading. Time changes words, context changes the nature of literary ambition—what Milan Kundera refers to as the “consciousness of continuity”—and Borges, a great advocate for re-reading, implies that every reading of a text offers us a new text.

The durability, or should we say re-readability, of Borges’ work, not to mention its considerable foresight with regards to the still-unfolding destinies of art and technology, is surely the central reason why there have been so many Borges collections, the latest in English being Everything and Nothing (New Directions, $12.50), one of ND’s ‘Pearl’ series of affordable, sturdy paperbacks with clean, modern designs. The back cover informs us that Everything and Nothing “collects the best of Borges’ highly influential stories and essays,” a claim obviously open to dispute—there is no ‘Aleph’ here, no ‘Funes the Memorious’—yet finally untroubling, since what matters to me at least is that there remain enticing, accessible editions of Borges out there to be discovered by new generations, and for such purposes Everything and Nothing is a welcome new product. ‘Pierre Menard’ opens the book, followed by ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,’ which describes the contents of the eleventh volume of A First Encyclopedia of Tlön, a book left in a bar by one Herbert Ashe, a deceased English railway engineer. The Encyclopedia offers some of the philosophical notions held by the inhabitants of Tlön, a presumably non-existent planet that nevertheless boasts sophisticated theories of time, views metaphysics as a branch of fantastic literature, and believes that all books are the work of a single atemporal and anonymous author.

The sequencing of these stories is inspired, since there are fascinating and provocative ideas raised in ‘Tlön’—particularly those concerning literature and authorship—that enrich our reading of ‘Pierre Menard’ retroactively. This tactic seems to backfire however in the placement of ‘Borges and I’ just before ‘Everything and Nothing,’ two pieces whose too-obvious similarities discourage the reader from appreciating their disparate characters. A relatively minor offense, of course, and quickly forgiven once we move onto Everything and Nothing’s final selections, a pair of lectures taken from the elegant and elegiac late collection Seven Nights. In ‘Nightmares’ Borges considers the possibility that dreams are a form of fiction, that life may be a dream and we are all each dreaming each other, that dreams may be our “most ancient aesthetic activity.” In ‘Blindness’ he considers the secret virtues of the titular affliction, comparing his own blindness with that of other authors throughout history, as well as other librarians, noting the irony of his—it turns out, non-unique—situation of being appointed director of Argentina’s National Library just as he was seriously beginning to lose his sight. He ends this moving essay with a phrase from Goethe: “everything near becomes distant.” Typically for Borges, with a minimum of words, Goethe’s words are ruminated upon in such a way that its application to the condition of blindness balloons outward until each of us seem caught up in this sense of all things slipping out of our grasp, the universe expanding and urging us to never forget that we are on unstable ground and must never cease to reach out for new sources of wonder, and warmth.

José Saramago, 1922-2010

Speaking of blindness... the great Portuguese novelist and controversial polemicist José Saramago died on 18 June, and if the announcement of his departure shocked me it wasn’t because of his age—he was 87—but his sheer productivity right up to the end. How many examples in literature do we have of authors who created such a bold, challenging and prolific body of work at an age as advanced as Saramago’s during his last two decades of robust busyness? (I’m sure Borges would have an answer.) Like many Anglophone readers I discovered Saramago with his Nobel Prize-winning Blindness, published in translation in 1997 and written when the author was already a septuagenarian. I’ve read everything since, which is a lot, and not much that was written beforehand, something I look forward to remedying. Blindness concerns a plague that renders nearly all of humanity blind, and its sentences that go on for pages, with several exchanges of dialogue mounting atop one another so that it can become difficult to discern who’s speaking, struck me as a brilliant way of making the reader almost feel as blind, in some sense, as the characters. When I first read Blindness I hadn’t yet realized that pretty much all of Saramago’s fiction is written in the same style. Yet this style lends itself to a seemingly infinite number of uses.

Saramago’s prose, exalted in structure, colloquial in word choice, seem simultaneously carved in stone and transcribed from the most intimate conversations. His ongoing critique of consumer culture, which was perhaps most eloquent and compelling in The Cave, which will forever change how you look at West Edmonton Mall, was often aligned directly with his mercurial Marxism, and his fantastical conceits were often regarded, or at least marketed, as allegories. Yet Saramago’s best stories were far too humane, spontaneous, organic, and mysterious to be neatly summed up in any sort of one-to-one metaphorical framework or reduced to didacticism. My experience with his novels has usually gone like this: I enter immediately engrossed and fascinated; halfway through, the seemingly endless digressions are wearing me out; by the end, the grand conclusion arises as though from a fog, my mind is sufficiently blown, and I treasure every page, even the ones that frustrated me, and feel like I’ve genuinely been through something, something that has caused me not to feel closer to Saramago’s world view, but to rigorously question my own. As our world continues to rumble forth his contentious, often poetic voice will be missed, but his texts remain, and thanks to the inherent sluggishness of translation, it seems we still have some new ones to look forward to.

Waiting for the King: Mystery Train on DVD

Mystery Train (1989) opens with a sort of image that recurs with almost dreamlike regularity throughout the work of Jim Jarmusch: the world as seen from a moving train. Traveling abroad for the first time, teenage Yokohamans Mitzuko (Youki Kudoh) and Jun (Masatoshi Nagase) are drawing near Memphis. The shape of their window recalls the widescreen aspect ratio. Through it American landscapes pass like some cinematic travelogue. Soon they’ll disembark and, like the protagonists of the fantasy in which some fissure in reality allows one to slip from the audience and into the movie, Mitzuko and Jun will explore the largely abandoned streets of a mythical place.

They’ve come to Memphis as rock and roll pilgrims, dressed for the part, Mitzuko in her black leather jacket with the wonderfully ridiculous ‘MISTER BABY’ emblazoned on the back, the taciturn and flamboyantly affected Jun sporting a vintage rockabilly ensemble topped with immaculate pompadour. They debate whether Elvis or Carl Perkins was the real king. Mitzuko keeps a notebook filled with images that compare Elvis’ visage with those of the Buddha or the Statue of Liberty. As is often the case in Jarmusch’s work, especially the immediately preceding films, American culture attains substance when appropriated by outsiders. Through their eyes Jarmusch’s comic confluence of history, geography, legend and everyday absurdities chug into life.

Mitzuko and Jun’s holiday, in which they taste sexual freedom, confront the eerie indifference of realized desire, and confirm that it is indeed cool to be 18 and far from home and in Memphis, is the first of Mystery Train’s three distinct yet interconnected and chronologically simultaneous episodes—another Jarmusch motif, variations on a theme. In the second tale, Luisa (Nicoletta Braschi, excellent), forced to overnight in Memphis while en route to Italy with her dead husband’s remains in tow, wanders the city and attempts to fend off petty grifters with little success before spending the night with a lonesome chatterbox (Elizabeth Bracco) and a confused ghost (Stephen Jones). In the third, a drunken Englishman (The Clash’s Joe Strummer), also ostentatiously pompadoured, suffering from the loss of his job and his woman, takes to Memphis’ streets with a workmate (Rick Avilles), a barber (Steve Buscemi) and a gun, eventually getting into some serious trouble and winding up at the nexus where all Mystery Train’s routes converge, a somewhat seedy hotel overseen by a red-suited night clerk (outré R&B singer Screamin’ Jay Hawkins) and his comparatively diminutive bell hop (Cinqué Lee), a vaguely Beckett-like pair whose brief scenes of interaction constitute some of the film’s finest moments of elegantly evoked down-time.

Photographed in Edward Hopper muted tones by Robby Müller, who had already shot Down By Law (86) for Jarmusch, Mystery Train is a gorgeously composed and carefully coloured film whose dramatic trajectories are in each case essentially a lark, elevating the simplest of conflicts to the level of finely crafted art. Themes of the misleading significance of familial bonds—Buscemi’s wonderful as the barber thrown for a loop when he discovers his brother-in-law never actually married his sister—and the dangers of living in a city lorded over by ghosts and undercut by racism and poverty provide these stories with just enough gravity to keep them grounded, yet at bottom Mystery Train is a superb example of a certain strain of deadpan, unhurried comedy over which Jarmusch possesses a singular mastery.

It’s also a remarkable document of not only a great and neglected American city, but of several mavericks of cultural importance—Hawkins and Strummer, Tom Waits and Rufus Thomas—coming together to play. This final element of Mystery Train is nicely highlighted on Criterion’s new DVD and Blu-ray packages, which feature excerpts from a documentary about Hawkins and a short film that tracks changes in Memphis from the birth of Sun Studios to the making of Mystery Train and right up to the present.