"I like believing that people create their own obstacles": a conversation with Guy Maddin

A dark and stormy night. “Man’s weather,” we’re told. Gangsters and their respective molls hole up in an old house that resembles a skid row antique shop and envelops an inner courtyard bog that doubles as a cemetery. This place was once the home of the gang’s boss, Ulysses (Jason Patric), who’s come back to, as he puts it, return what was lost. Somewhere there’s a room where his estranged wife (Isabella Rossellini) converses with her chain-draggin’ naked narrator phantom dad (Louis Negin). There are electrified ghosts, a homemade electric chair, a radio kept tuned between stations, and a stuffed wolverine named Crispy. Organized crime meets the occult in Keyhole, a film that somehow looks like it was made in both 2012 and 1933, in both a Hollywood studio and a decrepit Winnipeg manor slated for demolition. It becomes difficult to discern the living from the dead. “I’m getting fed up with being kept in the dark,” complains one of the characters, as though he’s a medium inadvertently speaking on the audience’s behalf. Except we’re not fed up. (Right?)

Guy Maddin’s latest feature-length quasi-autobiographical philmic phantasy, his first to be shot digitally, would put you in a trance if it weren’t so crowded with riddles, antsy lyricism and pervert-hilarity. It’s based on Homer’s The Odyssey, though the characters never leave the house. Keyhole is a journey inward, and perhaps back in time, made of digressions, discoveries and double-crosses, building toward a strangely consoling finale. I met with Maddin to discuss the film on the eve of its theatrical release. He was much hairier than the last time I saw him. He looked like a Viking in a suit. 

A hairy Guy

This is a pretty long one, so I divided into parts. French parts.

1. LE BARBE

JB: I like your beard.

GM: Thanks. It gives me a new attitude. I can enter a room beard-first now.

JB: You look, I don’t know, Nordic.

GM: Thank you for not comparing me to Santa Claus.

JB: What prompted this beard?

GM: I just didn’t give a shit anymore. I quit shaving. I had to trim it a few times because it got quite ZZ Topish.

JB: I saw a recent photo of you where it looked bigger than your face.

GM: I know. Hair grows! And quickly. Turns out I’ve got some testosterone somewhere. But seriously, I just didn’t want to turn into an old woman. Nothing against women, or old women, but I just didn’t want to be one. So I grew a beard. It was getting ambiguous for a while there.

JB: I think you look like a man.

GM: Thank you!

JB: There’s often a relationship between facial hair and relationships. I know men who had facial hair and then got married and felt obliged to lose the facial hair, but in your case it seems the reverse has transpired.

GM: Most women don’t like the beards. My wife likes beards fine. Maybe she likes how it conceals my face. My beard has changed the way I talk to audiences. I used to feel more boyish, more mischievous. I could get away with saying something coy, or even lecherous.

JB: A lecherous Viking.

GM: I no longer discuss the herpes I was once so fond of. I only talk about film now.

2. LE VOILE 

JB: Speaking of concealing, Keyhole begins with this nearly naked old man drawing a curtain shut. Is that right? I don’t trust my memory. Does he open it or close it?

GM: No, he opens it… No. Wait a minute. Maybe you’re right. [Laughs]

JB: I feel better now that you can’t remember either. 

GM: Man, I’m going to have to watch it again. [Laughs] I do know that it’s Louis Negin dressed in a pair of underwear instead of the nudity he dons for the rest of the movie.

JB: Underwear is a form of concealment.

GM: I would have barely recognized Louis wearing underwear. I got so comfortable with his nudity. At one point I was shooting Isabella Rossellini with Louis in the foreground. My hands were kind of trembling, so I rested my elbows on either side of his knee. I subsequently realized that the camera was still shaking so I sandbagged it on his scrotum. But then there was something blurry in the foreground so I kept re-focusing until I realized it was his genitals. So there’s this real interesting shot in the film where you have this curtain at the top and in the middle is Isabella and at the bottom is Louis’ bag.

JB: Huh. I find your shift into digital cinematography interesting because in moving away from celluloid you’re moving away from film grain, which is also a veil, a kind of barrier between the viewer and the action. But with Keyhole, which is your fist digital feature, you keep filling the frame with gauzy drapery and fog and chains, always keeping us at a distance from the action.

GM: I think when you’re dealing with memory and things that have transpired in a home, things you take for granted until it becomes another layer of yourself, you’ve got to work with visual obstacles in order to heighten pleasure, to make memories more precious, or just to get at the memories. They also just make the shots more beautiful. I’m not the strong formalist that Jacques Tati was, shooting in 70mm with modernist furniture and architecture and supersaturated colours. I’m working with a low budget and I’ve got to create something that looks like a plausible film world, something capable of evoking memory. Obstacles really help. I like to close the frame down with genitals or bottles or knickknacks. At first my affection for obstacles was just mimicry. I love Josef von Sternberg, how he broke up a frame, with Marlene Dietrich at its centre, tucking her in beneath the shadows of veils, and then making her dialogue a kind of veil too. In the hands of other directors she’s nowhere near as interesting, just another face with an Elmer Fudd accent, really. With von Sternberg she was about as mysterious and gorgeous and powerful as a woman can get. I remember an observation I made years ago watching Buñuel movies. I don’t know that anyone ever actually raises a fork full of food to their mouth and gets it inside and chews it and swallows it, or ever successfully has sex. There’s always something that intervenes, usually of the character’s own design. I guess Buñuel’s abiding belief was that people create their own obstacles in order to heighten pleasure or make things more desirable. It seems to me like a good rule of thumb. I only have a few rules as a filmmaker. I like Hitchcock’s rule that in order to create suspense you keep the audience in the know and the characters in the dark, rather than the shock-cut horror movies that keep the characters in the know and the audience in the dark. It’s hard for me to follow that rule because I’m not the greatest storyteller in the world, but I like it. I like believing that people create their own obstacles. I think I’ve made my own career obstacles by making these things that we’re talking about right now. [Laughs]

 

3. LE TEXTE

JB: You mention storytelling and it reminds me that I’ve never really asked about the nature of your collaboration with George Toles, your co-scenarist.

GM: It’s different each time and has evolved over the years. When I first started with Tales From Gimli Hospital, I read George the story and he suggested some changes and wrote a few lines. I think Archangel, my second feature, might have been the best balance between the two of us in terms of contributing story elements. He wrote some really musical, stylized dialogue. He’d only viewed himself as a film analyst and academic writer and instructor, so he shocked himself most pleasantly to discover he had a knack for creating things. Then he started going away and writing things and just giving them to me to make. That wasn’t a happy balance for me because I like being there from the start. I like to understand the script from the inside. Perhaps the nadir of our relationship was when he gave me Twilight of the Ice Nymphs and I don’t think I understood it but shot it anyway. That’s bad, to understand it ten years later and realize how much you’d mishandled it.

JB: I haven’t read The Odyssey in a long time…

GM: I read the Wikipedia entry.

JB: But I know George’s writing has deep roots in literature. Was that part of his role with Keyhole, to smuggle in the literary contraband?

GM: It was my idea to use The Odyssey. It’s the ultimate deadbeat-dad story, about the father who goes away and figures he’ll come back after 19 years. It reminded me of the dreams I used to have in which my dead father would return home almost every night for a decade or more to convey his displeasure at having had to live with us, that he’d found a new home that was better, that he was just coming back to pick up his aftershave or something. I’d have one minute to convince him that our family was worth living with and I could never do it. The dreams would always leave me feeling abandoned, but they also left me with this nice feeling, because I could hear my father’s voice and remember his gestures exactly. I seemed to have better access to my memories of my father when I was dreaming. So I decided that I wanted to make one last autobiographical purge, revisit my dead father dreams and combine them with some other family legends, the death of my brother, the reactions of those who remained to the absence of those who’d left, things like that. In other words, ghosts. I wanted to use The Odyssey as a basic structure for this, so the movie starts off like a preparation for a journey. About a third of the way in the various ghosts are already starting to argue amongst themselves. They push the director off the set. [Laughs] By the end it’s just ghosts talking to each other and the director might as well have left. I was just there to make sure the frames looked as good as possible, to direct the actors and make sure the light was textured. By that point the script feels like something written by a Ouija board, rather than George or me. Besides, George’s first and only attempt at a draft was three hours long. I amputated a huge voodoo subplot. I didn’t have any voodoo practitioners in my family, and I wanted to keep this as personal as possible. Though I think some might find it impenetrable.

JB: The incorporation of genre, or in this case, genres, can function as a kind of veil.

GM: Genre gives people an anchor, but I sort of cheat the genres. The ghosts are more like memories than anything especially threatening. They’re not scary. They’re just sort of sad. Meanwhile the gangsters have thrown all the guns down into the furnace. I didn’t want to have to keep track of who’s got a gun and who doesn’t. I just wanted the guns there at the beginning so we have people trying to shoot their way into a house. That was George’s great idea.

4. LE MATHÉMATIQUES, LA PARESSE 

GM: I’m usually too lazy or disorganized to keep my own diaries, so for each movie shoot I hire a diarist. Way back when Careful was shot I hired Steve Snyder, who’s a colleague of George’s at the University of Manitoba. But he rapidly became too lazy to be on set and instead just sat in the greenroom, where he’d hear secondhand complaints about what an asshole I was. So he just wrote all that down, and probably got that half-assed wrong too. When I read his diary I knew that he failed to record the facts, but there was an emotional truth to it, it seemed to capture the feelings of that shoot. He’d mythologized the events, just by being grumpy. That really emboldened me to make Cowards Bend the Knee and then Keyhole, to take things that really happened and then flip them around. It’s an old trick gleaned from my left-brain days as a math major, this thing called absolute value, where everything with a negative or a positive sign just becomes a positive entity. I like the idea of doing these absolute value treatments of things that were negative.

5. LA RÉALISATION, L'ANGOISSE 

JB: Let’s talk about your relationship with actors. I felt there was a breakthrough in Keyhole with how much ownership the actors take with their roles. Jason Patric seems perfectly comfortable adopting a performance style from another moment in film history, a little Sterling Hayden, a little Tom Neal. On the other hand he seems to be giving what is very recognizably modern, Jason Patricy performance. Do you talk to your actors about performance style, or about psychology? Do you just hand them a wolverine?

GM: Yeah, just take this wolverine and go! [Laughs] I tend not to talk to actors. As a rule I’ve cast them just because I saw them in a play and just say, “Perform this like you did in that play.” Or “Perform it like a sleepwalker.” Or, “You know, you’re delirious!” But in the case of Jason, George and I intentionally wrote him a part where he’d have to do 80% of the work. Jason said he wanted a role where he could harness the whole picture onto himself if necessary. Doesn’t exactly make him sound like a team player, but he was up for a big challenge. He also said he didn’t want to do an old, stylized “Why I oughta…” He didn’t want to do gangsters from an Abbot and Costello movie. He wanted to stick with naturalism, but the dialogue that George writes has this mannered musicality. I like the tension between Jason’s naturalism and George’s mannerism. It creates that weird hybrid that you just described. Jason’s all about interiority… You know, it’s kinda fun to talk about performance after so many years of no one ever asking a single question about performances in my movies. Thanks!

JB: You’re welcome.

GM: Anyway, everyone in this movie was a little different. Udo Kier gave a very fine performance in a small role.

JB: It’s a very tempered Udo Kier performance.

GM: Yeah, you don’t see that very often. He was out to prove he could do that.

JB: Of all the contexts in which to prove that, it’s kind of hilarious that he’d choose one of your films.

GM: It is. [Laughs] I love his work. He was originally meant to play Big Ed, the gangster, but ACTRA had forbidden the casting of three foreigners at first and I had to take the part from Udo, which broke my heart. By the time ACTRA had changed their mind I didn’t have the heart to take Big Ed away from Daniel Enright, who does a great job with it, so Udo wound up with a smaller part, but I think it’s a better part for him. I’m still working with Udo. I just finished three weeks of shooting with him in Paris.

6. LE PASSÉ, LA FIN, LES VAGINES 

JB: I like very much the end of Keyhole, this idea of restoration, of putting things back where they belong, trying to suspend the past. It serves the story well, but it also feels like a metaphor for the whole Guy Maddin Project.

GM: Yeah, the hopelessness of it all. [Laughs] Having the father and son get together to start putting things back was the reason I made the movie. Of course, I was so lazy that when it came time to put things back we didn’t even have anything to put back. You’d think I would have had a lot of artifacts from my own childhood or something, but nope! I like the idea of having people remember things properly, just getting things right. When I go for a long walk I cast my mind back into the past. And into the future. I just contemplate my place in time. The sidewalk flowing beneath me is time’s great flow itself. Most of Keyhole was dreamt up during dog walks, as was My Winnipeg. Walking the dog and daydreaming melancholically about very funny things.

JB: Ulysses’ peeping into the keyhole is like looking deep into a vagina, looking straight into the womb, and thus back in time.

GM: In France they wouldn’t even call the movie Keyhole because it’s too common a euphemism for vaginas. They called it instead Ulysse, souviens-toi! Or Remember, Ulysses!

JB: That’s good too. It sounds nice in French.

GM: There was originally a slightly different ending, which I shot, in which Anders, the son, later on, married and living in a little bungalow, returns to his childhood home, holding the key to the front door that he gave to his drowned girlfriend. But we cut it and chose to imply that the same damned thing happen every night, a dream, perhaps dreamt by a dead person. It seemed more universal. By that point everyone’s so goddamned lost in the film it doesn’t matter anyway. So be it. 

The body, in Time

It begins with a slow push-in through a smudgy service station window on men sitting low, conversing, eating round a small table, their voices muffled. Maybe it’s only hindsight that renders this scene conspiratorial. As it closes we hear distant thunder, which feels like a prompt for this metaphysical road movie police procedural to begin. Thunder is also a calling card of sorts for Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Turkey’s most internationally renown contemporary filmmaker (Distant, Climates, Three Monkeys) and a guy who never met an ominous weather system he didn’t like.

A police convoy traverses the countryside of the film’s titular peninsula, the cars carrying men looking for a dead body. An entire scene plays out in extra-wide shot, the undulating dusky landscape and tiny figures in it a fine example of the film’s painterly beauty. Dryly comical small talk about yogurt and prostate trouble nearly recalls Tarantino (as does the grizzled senior cop’s ring tone: the theme from Love Story), but all the while the camera favours the ostensible killer sandwiched in the backseat, looking drowsy, an anxious, underfed animal. He can’t remember where the corpse is, claims he was drunk when he buried it. We surmise that it’s going to be a long night. Indeed, it’s going to be a long movie (157 minutes worth), but one in which something’s always happening, one that deftly lures you into its rhythms.

The officials on this search form a diverse crew of masculine types and an impressive gallery of moustaches. With his thinning hair and lanky form, the pensive doctor, Cemal (Muhammet Uzuner), invokes certain figures from Tarkovsky films, most especially when we hear his thoughts as he stands before a windswept field, while the prosecutor, Nusret (Taner Birsel), is a husky, middle-aged, olive-skinned Clark Gable. Cemal and Nusret’s conversations are among Once Upon a Time in Anatolia’s most captivating detours. At one point Nusret tells the story of a woman who prophesied precisely the date of her own death. He wants to know if Cemal, a man of science, can explain her morbid foresight. This topic is dropped and returned to several times, building itself along the way, constituting one of many incomplete parables in this film whose title suggests that storytelling itself is one of its themes.

When the body is finally found it almost feels incidental. Its grave is shallow. An ear pokes up from the dirt like driftwood, as though listening for something (perhaps the echo of frenzied ants from Blue Velvet, which featured an analogous dead man’s ear discovered in a field). The men huddle round the body, the prosecutor dictates a report. The body is clumsily rolled up in a carpet when they realize no one brought a body bag. This entire sequence is darkly funny and surprisingly entertaining. But once the search is wrapped and the men enter the village where the victim lived and where an autopsy will take place, things somehow become more mysterious rather than less. The accumulation of facts only compounds the enigmas surrounding the murder, raising as many philosophical questions as it does legal ones. Like the body, those questions emerge inconspicuously, in their own good time. They leave us not merely puzzled, but pierced by the feeling that so much of life is like this, existing in that broad terrain between the known and the unknown.

Images '12: Desolation spectacle poetry history

The music, made of a single voice and some stringed instrument I can’t place, is as desolate as the wintry landscapes. And those landscapes are pretty damned desolate. (Alaskan landscapes, as it turns out, though they could be, are meant to be, anywhere cold and vast and glorious and terrifying.) These places are offered to us via portentous push-ins, the eeriness completed by the solitary figures standing within them, dwarfed by them, figures wearing snorkeled parkas so that the person inside could be any race or gender, everymen, epic-men, either very still, beholding the place, entranced, or walking toward us, boldly, perhaps ready to conquer. But mostly their backs are turned, and this itself is a tip-off, something that speaks of a certain relationship to camera, to power, to the gaze. This confrontation-by-refusal technique has been used before, its intention made more explicit, in previous work from filmmaker and installation artist John Akomfrah, who was born in Ghana, raised in the UK, developed his body of work as part of the Black Audio Film Collective, and tells stories about immigrant experience.

The Nine Muses, last night’s opening gala of the 2012 Images Festival here in Toronto, is Akomfrah’s most recent film, an audio-visual palimpsest of: 1. Archival footage collage of African, Caribbean and South Asians in Britain in the 1950s and ’60s, working, walking, speaking, singing, and, in a particularly memorable moment, regarding—with back to the camera—a brick wall upon which “KEEP BRITAIN WHITE” has been spray-painted, 2. Readings of canonical texts from Western literature, everything from Dante to Shakespeare to Homer to Joyce to Beckett to Milton, being read by disembodied voices, among them Richard Burton and Michael Sheen, 3. Music, original music by Trevor Mathison and, as I recall, Wagner and Part, and 4. Those desolate wintry landscapes, along with other less desolate or at least more industrialized landscapes, presumably in England, where a black man sits, hides, contemplates, looks back at the camera... Am I forgetting something? Probably. The film pulls you into its undertow and washes over you as much as it pricks your critical faculties, your emotions and memories. All these elements coalesce to form a film-monument to the struggle of the Other, the push/pull of assimilation and assertion.

 

John Akomfrah on stage at The Royal, last night

“You get settled,” one of the on-screen figures in the archival footage tells us, “then you become part of the strangeness.”  I think the speaker may be someone famous or important. I apologize for not being able to tell you who it was, but to be honest if one really wants to absorb the full force of all detail that’s contained in The Nine Muses a hefty volume of footnotes would be required. But this density, even when opaque, holds its own sway. Who are we to think we can take all this in? The film is an experience, a force of nature. It’s mythical, epic, and not easily digestible. Though Akomfrah’s Q&A with TIFF Artistic Director and one-time Images programmer Cameron Bailey—the pair are old friends—went a long way toward unpacking it. All in all, a truly impressive beginning to the 25^th installment of this remarkable event. But much, much more is to come, including work from James Benning, Ben Rivers, and… Yo La Tengo! 

Abattoir blues

Reverend Richard Lopez stands before the state cemetery, its rows of diminutive white crosses bearing no names, only numbers. He talks about his work as a Texas prison chaplain, the importance of making God’s presence felt by the condemned in their final moments. He talks about communing with nature, about nearly running over a squirrel with his golf cart; he’s almost laughing, and then, so suddenly, almost in tears as his monologue swerves into his feelings about ministering men toward death. It’s astonishing, how much transpires in the first six minutes of Werner Herzog’s Into the Abyss, a film so saturated with pain you want to wring it from your clothes afterward.

Herzog’s subsequent subject, Michael Perry, is all smiles, buggy eyes, boyish Alfred E. Newman head, higher power-speak, the manic cheerfulness of denial. Their conversation occurred eight days before Perry’s execution. Off-camera, though visible as a reflection in the prison Plexiglas, Herzog makes his opposition to capital punishment clear from the start of their interview, but offers no bullshit about being Perry’s buddy or trying to exonerate him. You can’t help but feel sympathy for this goofy kid staring into that titular abyss, but just as those sympathies burble up Herzog cuts straight to police video records of the bloodied scene of the crimes committed by Perry and Jason Burkett ten years earlier.

Circularity is a steady motif in Herzog’s filmography, whose highlights stretch from Aguirre: Wrath of God to Cave of Forgotten Dreams. With Into the Abyss, now on DVD and blu-ray, this circularity becomes an ethic as much as an aesthetic. We return again and again throughout this, among the most straightforward—the film is comprised mostly of interviews and features no characteristic Herzog editorializing voice-over—and most powerful of Herzog’s documentaries, to the crimes and their unfathomable senselessness. Perry and Burkett, whose testimonies conflict, each placing blame on the other, were convicted for killing Sandra Stotler, apparently for no other reason than to steal her Camaro, and then killing her son Adam and his best friend Jeremy Richardson, apparently for no other reason that to acquire the clicker that opens the gate of the community where Stotler lived. Perry got death; Burkett got life imprisonment. 

Into the Abyss has more in common with Krzysztof Kieślowski's A Short Film About Killing than it does your garden variety true-crime exposé. Exuding equal parts compassion and interrogational rigour, Herzog’s interest lies primarily in surveying the culture in which such appalling, idiotic violence festers. He speaks to the criminals and their relatives, including Burkett’s father, also incarcerated; to relatives of the victims, including Lisa Stotler-Ballounto, who lost her entire family to random tragedies over a period of six years; to locals whose lives and careers are connected to the penal system; and to varied citizens of Conroe, where the crimes took place, and neighbouring Cut and Shoot, including a guy named Jared, who knew Burkett, who also did time in prison, and who recalls how he was once stabbed through the chest with a screwdriver and never bothered to go to hospital for it. This film is, among other things, a study in how families can fall disastrously apart, and how a place and its laws can create a closed circuit of deterministic despair, where murder, both illegal and institutionalized, infects everything in its vicinity. 

Circularity: the final testimony in Into the Abyss rhymes with the first. Fred Allen was captain of the death house team. He supervised over 120 executions before suffering a nervous breakdown, resigning, despite the loss of his pension, and reversing his previous endorsement of capital punishment. Allen remains haunted by the ghosts who crowd his abbreviated career, and Herzog listens well as Allen tries to assess the meaning of his overwhelming experiences. We’re left, after hearing all these stories, with a sense of our collective, unreasonably durable faith in the possibility of redemption, and of our fascination with life, however fraught, death, however absurd, and whatever might come after. And, as another of Herzog’s subjects—his most surprising—assures us, we also catch a glimmer of the way fresh hope can spring from even the most abysmal of situations. 

Transferences: More on A Dangerous Method

It is my misfortune that my life means nothing to me without the joy of love, of tempestuous, eternally changing love… Return to me, in this moment of my need, some of the love and guilt and altruism which I was able to give to you at the time of your illness. Now it is I who am ill.

     Uncompleted letter from C.G. Jung to Sabina Spielrein, 4 December 1908

I keep thinking about hysteria, how we depict it. When I first saw David Cronenberg’s A Dangerous Method last September I noted a fair bit of eye-rolling and presumptuous dismissal regarding Keira Knightley’s embodiment of Sabina Spielrein. Spielrein’s admittance to the Burghölzli psychiatric hospital, quite literally kicking and screaming all the way, jumpstarts the film and, it would seem, instantly made certain viewers uneasy. I guess some felt that Knightley was exaggerating Spielrein’s behavior, but I can’t help but think she got it just right. The early years of psychoanalysis coincided with a period in which hysteria remained a blanket diagnosis bestowed almost exclusively to women—it was considered a feminine condition. With this in the air, I can only imagine that being labeled hysterical was, in a way, a prompt to act out some collective idea of what hysterics are supposed to do. I don’t mean that Knightley’s Spielrein is anything less than genuinely traumatized; I simply suggest that the parameters of her behaviour are subject to context.

A Dangerous Method is out on DVD and blu-ray now, so I watched the film a third time. Those initial scenes with Spielrein were only more compelling, rich with details, each containing some aspect of the character’s psychic malaise. That moment when she’s asked her very first question by Michel Fassbender’s Jung, the brilliant young doctor who will cure her with Freud’s method, identify her sexual trauma, and become her secret lover somewhere along the way: jaw jutting, elbows arched in the roasted-chicken pose, the word “humiliation” yanked up from the depths of her viscera as though snagged on a fishhook. Even in relatively calmer moments, she seems trapped inside a state of ceaseless panic, caught, gasping for air, in the dragnet of some trawler that never sleeps. In terms of finding a balance, Knightley punctuates the early scenes with a great deal of mischievous humour, and later in the film she will develop her Spielrein into an articulate and innovative young doctor in her own right, successfully negotiating precarious relationships personal and professional and coming to terms with her knotty desires, while never quite losing traces of the wild neurotic we first met. 

Another thing I began to appreciate only more on a third viewing: Cronenberg and his editor Ronald Sanders’ knack for knowing when to exit one scene and enter the next, cutting from the image of a hand to one of handwriting, from one coat to another, from Jung commenting on the limitations of certain doctors to an arresting outdoor portrait of Vincent Cassel’s Otto Gross, the other brilliant young Freudian analyst whose radical notions about polygamy and freedom-at-all-costs threaten to compromise the new science he might otherwise help to legitimize. The Jung-Gross friendship, built on a sort of tag-team analysis (Jung would analyze Gross and then Gross would turn around and analyze Jung), is one of the film’s jewels. It’s sort of sad yet perfect when Gross, not even wearing a shirt, climbs a ladder and goes over the high stone wall surrounding the Burghölzli and disappears from the narrative. Once he’s gone it’s as though, to use a very Cronenbergian metaphor, Jung becomes infected by Gross’ provocative assertions. And never quite recovers. The belief in mysticism seems to surge in Jung as he slips deeper and deeper into anxieties founded in insatiable ambition, sexual-romantic dissatisfaction, and the feeling of being unmoored from his great but now frustrated father figure—the film implies that it’s this mysticism above all that divides the pragmatic Freud from his protégé. (And Cronenberg the materialist seems to relate more to Freud here than Jung.

I’m grateful for Entertainment One’s handsomely transferred home video release of A Dangerous Method, which will hopefully draw more viewers. But the extras, or rather the lack thereof, is disappointing. There are brief, choppy, annoying edited interviews with cast and crew that never let the subjects get very far into anything. And there’s no Cronenberg audio commentary track, which strikes me as a misreading of the sort of things that make people buy DVDs—even those who didn’t particularly care for A Dangerous Method might be persuaded to pick up the disc if it had been endowed with a commentary track, given that Cronenberg’s one of the most articulate filmmakers out there and has a way of making even dubious choices seem thoughtful. Those in Canada who want the disc with commentary will have to buy the US Sony Pictures Classics edition.  

Going underground

Based on Robert Marhsall’s In the Sewers of Lvov, In Darkness is a German-Canadian co-production, directed by Poland’s Agnieszka Holland (Europa Europa) and scripted by Canadian screenwriter David F. Shamoon. It chronicles the true story of Polish sewer inspector Leopold Socha and the handful of Jews he helped to shelter during the Nazi occupation. Boiled down to its protagonist’s arc, In Darkness could be summed up as your archetypical mercenary who recovers his humanity story. Socha begins the film a casually anti-Semitic cynic, robbing houses, looting vacated ghettos and shamelessly hustling the Jewish families who have nowhere left to turn; by the end he’s sacrificing his own safety to ensure their survival. The film is more complicated scene-by-scene, with self-interest, desperation and altruism—not to mention a surprising amount of lust—so thoroughly interwoven as to become inextricable, right up to the final scene, when those left alive return to the surface, squinting and confused, and are greeted by Socha and his wife with a lovely cake to nibble on as Socha proudly declares to all passersby that these pale creatures are “my Jews.” While Socha is necessarily the film’s protagonist, Holland and Shamoon steer clear of Schindler’s List bullshit, ie: making too much the hero of this courageous Aryan.

I’m torn when it comes to the proliferation of Holocaust films. So long as there are stories to be told, perspectives to be gained, part of me thinks, By all means, keep them coming. Yet there’s something precarious about these stories, at least in film form, accumulating to the point where we become inured to their impact by becoming to comfortable with what amounts to a “Holocaust genre,” a notion that strikes me as inherently appalling. Does In Darkness slip into Holocaust tropes? A little, I think. The very notion of hiding in the sewers, though grounded in history, feels more metaphorical than literal, more poetic than palpable. More subtly, yet more importantly, the draining of most colours from the film’s palate, besides feeling hackneyed by this point, is a too-obvious emphasis of the misery endured under occupation; it makes the world of the film feel stylized, and, crucially, less real. And if there’s anything that any Holocaust narrative should remain duty-bound to uphold it’s the sense that these events, even when fictionalized and wrangled up in filmic artifice, did happen, could happen, and remain fiercely, unbearably real.

Jiro worship

Sukiyabashi Jiro is a subterranean sushi joint near Tokyo’s Ginza Station. The place serves nothing but sushi, has only ten seats, and the toilet’s down the hall. It’s also the only restaurant of its kind on Earth to have earned Michelin’s full three stars, and a 20-piece meal starts somewhere in the neighbourhood of $300. The proprietor is one Jiro Ono, 85. He’s been making sushi almost daily for 75 years—Jiro hates holidays—and has no retirement plan, despite the fact that his eldest son Yoshikazu has been his apprentice since he was 19 and, though now in his 50s, has yet to take over the family business. Still, even if Sukiyabashi Jiro were to become Sukiyabashi Yoshikazu, would the clientele embrace anything less than sushi shaped by the master’s aged but nimble hands?

David Gelb’s Jiro Dreams of Sushi is both an alluring high-protein documentary about rarified dining experiences and the cult of personality that can form around chefs and an unobtrusive study of Japanese mores and fraught family dynamics. Jiro’s parents barely raised him; he left home to start what would become his career at the age of nine. Jiro was clearly preternaturally ambitious, a born-workaholic and natural disciplinarian and, given his roots, a kid with nowhere to go but up. Yoshikazu meanwhile grew up under the shadow of his globally revered father and, as the charismatic food critic who provides much of the film’s best commentary puts it, he’d have to make sushi twice as good as his dad in order to convince anyone that he was his equal. Both men retain a stoic, if occasionally dryly humorous, persona, so whatever unspoken tensions linger between them can only be inferred.

There are diverting excursions to Jiro’s childhood home and, most entertainingly, to a fish auction, but much of this documentary stays pretty close to the highly regulated lives of its central characters. Gelb shapes his film with handsomely diffused images of food, faces and urban spaces, impressively fluid travelling shots, lots of slow-motion and the celestial strains of Phillip Glass—for a film about simplicity and austerity Jiro Dreams of Sushi is awfully decorative in its storytelling techniques. Yet mostly it works quite wonderfully. 

"...if you can touch the skin you can touch the spiritual...": Tran Anh Hung on Norwegian Wood

A story of sexual discovery, devastating loss, self-realization and all kinds of love in various geometries, set amidst the political unrest of Tokyo university life in the late 1960s, Norwegian Wood is the fifth feature from Tran Anh Hung, who’s works include The Scent of Green Papaya and The Vertical Ray of the Sun. Tran’s films possess a sensual languor, a vivid fecundity, a certain tenderness and grace that, despite the fact that he was born in Vietnam, lives in France, and doesn’t speak Japanese, made Tran an ideal filmmaker to adapt Haruki Murakami’s beloved 1987 heartbreaker-breakthrough, the author’s sole novel that contains no elements of the fantastical, in which the shy yet charismatic Toru Watanabe wrestles with irrepressible youthful desires, ambiguous relationships, an innate resistance to the youth movements enveloping him, and the suicides of more than one of his closest friends.

The lead performances by Kenichi Matsuyama, Kiko Mizuhara and Rinko Kikuchi, who most of you will probably recognize from her Oscar-nominated turn in Babel, balance varied degrees of physical or social awkwardness with glimpses of inner turmoil and sudden sparks of preternatural wisdom. The photography by Mark Lee Ping Bin, best-known for his collaborations with Hou Hsiao-hsien and Wong Kar-wai, would seem almost too sublimely pretty if it weren’t so utterly precise, governed by the dictates of narrative and close attention to the actor’s impulses. The music by Radiohead’s Johnny Greenwood, who previously scored There Will Be Blood, seems born of a bubbling caldron of romantic-modernist strife. And the sweaters are to die for. (Costume credit goes to Tran Nu Yên-Khê, the writer/director’s wife and frequent star.)

I think we cover a fair amount of ground in the conversation transcribed below, so I’ll refrain from whipping up much in the way of analysis here. I spoke with Tran while he was visiting Toronto last October.

Tran Anh Hung during production on Norwegian Wood

JB: Norwegian Wood is arguably Murakami’s most overtly personal work. Certain elements seem almost autobiographical. Do you feel any kind of similarly personal connection?

Tran: Yes, but only because of the broad themes. Someone finds first love and then loses it, someone is first confronted with grief, or first has to accept the consequences of major life decisions—all this is universal. On a certain level it could have happened to anyone. I think the international success of the book comes from this.

JB: But there’s also this specific theme of suicide and its effect on those left in its wake, the suggestion that when you encounter suicide at a young age it throws a shadow over everything in your life from that point on. All of the choices Watanabe makes after coming into contact with suicide seem influenced by that contact.

Tran: This is true, but we have to recognize that suicide is also a narrative mechanism. The suicide of Kizumi at the beginning of the movie is traumatic for Naoko, and the mechanism starts to work on her when she has sex with Watanabe. Suddenly she doesn’t understand why she couldn’t make it with Kizuki yet now she can make it with a boy she doesn’t love. This mechanism is at work throughout the story. Life is just experience. You can only harness the beauty of experience through art. As an artist you have to find out how to express experience so that the audience can draw the beauty from it. You want the audience to leave the theatre carrying some trace of that beauty with them.

JB: Norwegian Wood closes on quite a bracing note, just the black screen and those final words spoken about how Watanabe’s friends will be 17 and 21 forever, while he has to continue to grow older.

Tran: Yes, I’m quite proud of that. [Laughs] Those words exist somewhere in the book, but to pluck them out and place them at the end feels very right, better than anything I would have created by myself.

JB: I imagine Norwegian Wood demanded a very different development process for you. Your preceding films are rather spare in incident and you give a lot of room for scenes to breathe; with Norwegian Wood you have a great deal of plot to manage. Did you find that process enjoyable? Or was it frustrating?

Tran: Everything that is difficult in the creative process is enjoyable. I like having problems to solve. When you move from one form to another, you have to build emotion from the devices specific to the new form. For example, you have this sequence where you see Watanabe mourning by the sea, then in the next scene he’s making love with a woman, then in the next scene he calls another woman and says, “I love you.” It’s disturbing. Normally such behavior is not acceptable. But when you’ve surrendered to this story it seems acceptable. My challenge is to make an audience intuit this without fully understanding exactly what happened. When Reiko asks Watanabe to make love to her, it’s a rescue scene. Meaning that by making love to her he would give back to her what she has lost—her sexuality. By saving her he feels his guilt towards Naoko lighten. Which means he can reclaim his life and tell Midori that he loves her.

JB: The book has a framing device: a man—the narrator—sits on a plane, hears some music, and is drawn into the past. So it’s all channeled through memory. In the movie that framing device survives only through a very sparing use of voice-over. Did you ever think of structuring the movie similarly, as a memory collage?

Tran: No. Structures relying on flashbacks feel too mechanical. I don’t really like them. But there’s a more important reason. Normally when you move back and forth between present and past you need to show how the past changed or influenced the present somehow. In the book there’s nothing like that. It’s just a voice. So for me to follow this structure I would need to create other events happening in the present. I prefer to focus on the past. To show the wound when it’s fresh. Using a little voice-over was just a way of bringing the melancholy out of the story.

JB: I guess if you tried to weave in the present then you’d be stuck shooting a lot of coverage of some guy on an airplane, thinking.

Tran: [Laughs] Yes. Airplane, then hotel room... Not really interesting.

JB: Murakami’s characters tend to be very composed, at least externally. Your rendering of Norwegian Wood features at least two elements that seem to counter that. One is your allowance of Naoko to succumb to these tempests of convulsive weeping. The other is Johnny Greenwood’s music, which expresses a lot of high emotion.

Tran: Murakami’s characters are always meant to be normal people. Given the romantic nature of this story he could have created moments where the characters go really crazy, do spectacular things. But he always stays with normal people. That’s a great strength. Everyone can identify with his characters. So I had to maintain that aspect while at the same time give voice to the romantic side of things. Johnny Greenwood has a special talent for creating very serious, very dark music that has this captivating beauty. I don’t like the idea of creating so many variations in music. I wanted it to speak to the deep, dark parts of the characters.

JB: I like that you say that, because the movie strikes me as having a very bold sort of sonic division. The diegetic sound serves one purpose, the popular music serves one purpose, and the score serves one purpose.

Tran: Yes. I’m happy about that.

JB: I was also very drawn to your use of landscape, the specificity brought to looking at the geography of living spaces, the fact that the camera, in my memory at least, seems to be moving almost constantly. There’s the sense that these characters and their intimate story are always set within a larger, very particular landscape.

Tran: I think this is very important. You need to have the physical feeling of a movie. Watanabe’s life is suspended, floating, so you need to find a way to shoot every scene to create a sense of that instability. Every set that we built, every space that we used needed to allow us to move a certain way. Every landscape needed to give wings, somehow, to the emotions of the characters. To be lyrical. That mourning sequence by the sea, for instance. Because what Watanabe is feeling is very primitive, something inside all of us, something that was probably inside the first man on Earth, I needed to find a place that resembled the beginning of life. Only rocks and the violence of the water and the wind. It’s all very essential. All this violence needs to be forceful enough to break through Watanabe’s reserve, to let loose the tears. You cannot explain this to the audience—they just need to feel it. And they way we did this, with this combination of elements, is something that you can do only with movies. When I wake up in the morning it’s precisely this kind of challenging that I’m seeking, that I’m looking forward to as a filmmaker.

JB: Are you familiar with the work of Hiroshi Sugimoto?

Tran: No.

Mediterranean Sea, Hiroshi Sugimoto

JB: Because he has this very famous series of photographs of the sea that have been gleaned from all over the world but in each case the composition is identical.

Tran: Ah, yes! Now that you describe it, of course.

JB: His whole rationale behind that series is very similar to what you were saying about finding a landscape that erases all traces of history, that reflects an idea of landscape—or rather seascape—that exists in some primordial part of the brain.

Tran: Yes, I’ve seen some of these. They are very beautiful.

JB: I want to ask you a little more about camera movement, because it seems like no matter how much activity is transpiring within a scene—I’m thinking specifically about the bit where Watanabe moves through the university campus, with demonstrators passing by—the camera seems to give this feeling of isolation and loneliness to Watanabe that I don’t think we would have found if the camera remained fixed. I don’t know if your approach to camera movement or mise en scène has any sort of overriding philosophy behind it…

Tran: No. It’s only about emotions. The camera in this movie needs to give you the feeling that things are unsettled. You cannot seize the moment easily. Yet, though you may not remember it, there are a lot of scenes where the camera is still… Well, still but not really. [Laughs] Okay, it’s usually moving a little bit.

JB: Something distinctive about your films, something that’s become increasingly precious as we interact more and more with digital media, is their emphasis on sensuality. In the weather, the objects, the way you frame hands and faces and bodies, there’s this sense that we’re being asked to really feel what it’s like to touch things.

Tran: Yes. My idea is that you cannot touch the spiritual directly, but if you can touch the skin you can touch the spiritual, so let’s give the skin to the audience. Everything I’m dong with costumes, lights, locations, everything needs to be there to make the skin more palpable. I don’t need everything to be natural, but I don’t like it when it’s purely symbolic either. Like in The Tree of Life, when you see movement that’s too symbolic I don’t like it. But the movies need to be sensual. People need to feel things. Rain, wind, other people, everything that makes contact with the skin is very important. Paradoxically, I use digital cameras to capture the right feeling of skin. Celluloid has these grains in it, and somehow it puts a layer on top of the skin. With digital cameras you don’t have that anymore. So now I’m shooting all my movies with digital cameras. I don’t want that layer. I want always to touch.

A dogged faith in redemption

“An animal can only take so much humiliation,” explains Joseph (Peter Mullan), “before it snaps, fights back.” Our protagonist is referring to a neighbourhood dog that eventually attacks a child, but the implication is clear from Tyrannosaur’s opening scene, in which Joseph, in one of his alcoholic rages, kicks a dog, his own dog, to death: Joseph’s the animal here, and his is a fury with no coherent target upon which to vent itself. He’s been beaten by life and beats back blindly whenever that fury surges. He’s not an easy guy to be with, and Tyrannosaur isn’t an easy film to sit through, but I think there are at least some of you reading this who’ll find a sober sort of reward from seeing Joseph’s story unfold in this earnest, well-crafted exercise in British miserablism, actor Paddy Conisdine’s feature debut as writer/director.

The setting is somewhere in Northern England. Joseph’s unemployed, a widower wading in the deep end of middle-age and frequently deep in his cups. He hangs out in public houses even though everyone seems to piss him off. An altercation leaves him hiding in a thrift store. He crouches behind a rack of sweaters, trembling, clutching a pool cue, tells the store’s clerk that he’s Robert De Niro. She prays for him. Hannah (Olivia Coleman) seems kind and gentle and big on Jesus. Joseph has none of it. “God’s not my fucking daddy,” he snarls at her. “My daddy was a cunt, but at least he knew he was a cunt.” So much for conversion. Yet this encounter will prompt changes for Joseph and Hannah both. They become close after Hannah flees home following a particularly sad and evil scene of domestic rape. Later you might get to wondering if maybe Joseph couldn’t reach out to Hannah until he saw her all beaten up. At one point Hannah says she feels safe with him, but how do you gauge such a statement when it comes from someone already so shattered by abuse?

Tyrannosaur’s abundant sadism is somewhat balanced by Considine’s sensitivity to behavior and space, to interiors that sooner or later darken, though the penumbra brings with it rich greens and golds. His film is above all a showcase for Mullan, an old hand at stunned, wounded brutes who wield cruelty as an emotional shield (My Name is Joe—again!), and Coleman, whose complexity and vulnerability are nothing short of a revelation.