Know what? Not that funny...

Peter and Paul, the young antagonists in Funny Games, Aryan, clad in stark white, exuding a sort of studied, robotic idea of politeness, seem to spread through the isolated world of the film like some chillingly disaffected infectious disease. These boys move from one country house, one family, to another, each time seeking to exact a more or less identical program of horrifically violent disaster. They begin by penetrating the home through feigning innocence and asking an innocuous favour. They then disarm the resident patriarch and engage the entire clan in a game of terror whose rules are childishly simple yet hopelessly fixed in the assailants' favour. Watching their campaign unfold is like bearing witness to a nightmare of such deadening inevitability as to be, above all, wearying.

For those who’ve followed the work of Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke, watching Funny Games will also provoke considerable, perhaps undesirable, déjà vu. Haneke is not only remaking his own 1997 Austrian film of the same name, but delivering a shot-by-shot duplication: the story, characters, even the lighting, props and layout of the house and surroundings where it all takes place, everything has been lovingly recreated, only this time in English and with English-language actors. The duplication is so precise that while watching the new film the viewer can’t help but become distracted by the most incidental shift in detail. (Hey, there’s soymilk in the fridge this time!)

With regard to the performances, as someone who doesn’t speak German it’s hard to gauge what’s largely a matter of linguistic familiarity. While the characters are virtually unrecognizable as human beings, even sociopathic human beings, Peter and Paul, here played by Brady Corbet and Michael Pitt, do seem slightly more textured. Their victims, Ann, George and little Georgie, likewise have one or two moments that caught me off guard. Executive producer Naomi Watts, who seems to possess a special interest in horror/fantasy remakes (see The Ring, The Ring 2, King Kong and, coming soon, The Birds) is certainly committed, and begins the film with a bit more vulnerability than Susanne Lothar, her 1997 counterpart. Tim Roth, in a role previously played by the late Ulrich Mühe, creates what for me is by far the film’s most affecting moment, the scene in which George, suffering unimaginable shock, barely able to stand, asks his wife to forgive him for not being able to somehow prevent the catastrophe that’s beset their family. Overall however, both versions prompted exactly the same response in me: intrigue, followed by a period of extreme anxiety and repulsion, followed by utter, exasperating boredom, and, once the film was through, a degree of grudging intellectual appreciation.

The ostensible point of Funny Games, in both versions, is to function as a critique of the commodification of violence in movies. The critique filters into the film through numerous, highly calculated attempts at subverting audience expectations. We might expect to see exciting, dynamic violence; we might expect suspense; we might expect to see the antagonists undone by some mixture of ingenuity on the part of their adversaries and unpredictable forces from the world beyond this house under siege: Haneke denies us all of these things. The problem is that what he’s put in their place are the sort of winky alienation techniques you might expect from some annoyingly smarty-pants film student, such as having the antagonists condescendingly talk directly to the camera or, in the film’s most tiresome scene, pick up a remote control and rewind back a few minutes so they can correct events in a way that suits them better. There are simply no identifiable rules, no interior logic, to Funny Games, a fact which no doubt upsets our bourgeois notions of cathartic drama, but nonetheless does little to implicate us any further in what’s unfolding, because to implicate us we’d need to care a lot more.

Let me be clear: I greatly admire the films Haneke’s made since the first Funny Games. Code Unknown, The Piano Teacher, Time of the Wolf and Caché all seem to succeed where both versions of Funny Games fail: they make a deeply troubling spectacle of violence and withhold certain pieces of what would normally be crucial information as a way to coerce our more active participation with the narrative and the many layers of significance inherent in it. In his Cineaste review of the film, Robert Koehler suggests that Funny Games “is best addressed not in terms of whether it actually works on screen, but as an object that spews out ideas.” I agree that you do indeed need to actually see Funny Games to be able to appreciate the ideas it has to offer. But do you need to see it in two languages? Do you even need to see it twice? And furthermore, does a thriller or horror film need to be so loftily schematic and relentlessly cold in order to engage us in questioning how we consume and/or become disaffected by violence? If viewers are required to be self-reflexive anyway, could they not be just as provoked by a smart genre film, say one by Hitchcock, Verhoven or Cronenberg, that’s infused with ideas, auto-critiques and still delivers the goods with regards to emotional investment in story and characters?

Caché: The murderers are among us

Making good on one of the enigmatic triggers that gradually evaporated in the mirror-miasma of David Lynch’s Lost Highway, Austrian writer/director Michael Haneke’s Caché begins with a VHS tape left on a doorstep, a little act of psychological terrorism perfectly blurring the innocuous and the sinister. The tape reveals only hours of the same fixed shot of the exterior of the recipients’ Parisian home. They come and go, unknowing while nothing happens, their walls remaining uncompromised—at least, physically.

Yet the tape-maker has more than succeeded in his act of invasion: the camera may never move into the house but the tape does (and more soon follow), along with some crude cryptic drawings, penetrating not only personal boundaries but psychic ones buried in the troubled memories of Georges (Daniel Auteuil). Like the tape-maker, Georges prefers to keep his thoughts and motivations hidden, even from his wife Anne (Juliette Binoche, superb) and pre-teen son Pierrot (Lester Makedonsky). And the tape becomes a catalyst for mistrust, which spreads like a contagion through the family.

In his chillingly clean, understated exploitation of the thriller genre, Haneke manipulates our frames of perception from the film’s opening moment, offering us suspense but no privileged information, no sudden close-ups constructed to clarify intent, no transitions that might guide us toward an easier contextualizing of what we’re watching, whether it be surveillance, dramatic action, memory or fragment of a dream. Everything in Caché is presented in the same directorial deadpan, which functions all the better toward implicating us in the very deep murk lying just outside the film’s periphery.

By accident or design, Georges is being led back 40 years to unpleasant childhood experiences shared with Majid (Maurice Bénichou), the son of an Algerian couple once briefly employed by Georges’s family. Georges’s guilt is, in fact, the true engine of the story, and Auteuil’s heavily guarded panic inspires both our identification and our dread. This is a remarkable performance that draws no attention to itself—indeed, rather than play for the camera, Auteuil’s Georges becomes so fearful of hidden viewers as to be afflicted with pretend calm that he can’t let go of no matter where he is.

But where we in the audience are being led as witnesses of Georges’s fruitless search for resolution is toward equally confrontational if unspoken questions of long-term responsibility that reach far beyond a single character’s psychological closets and into the collective consciousness: the failures of the integrationist model of French citizenship, France’s ghastly mistreatment of Algerians, and, broadening the historical scope, global paranoia about terror and Islam. For all the ambiguity, perhaps the one certainty we share with Georges is the knowledge that our sense of home comes at a terrible cost to others.

The evocation of home is as questionable on a literal level as it is on the figurative: the neatly arranged walls of books that envelope Georges and Anne’s place, while signifying educated, rationalist, middle-class comfort, are eerily echoed by the representational walls of fake books that envelope the set of the literary chat show Georges hosts. The tension between reality and theatre is left suspended in Caché; there is a deliberate lack of release (though you’re advised to sit through the closing credits if you want every chance at closure). This tension then hovers disconcertingly in our consciousness as we leave the theatre and try to make sense of the film, its final triumph being the way it finally denies a solid form to its bogeyman, knowing full well that he’s lurking inside the formless fluids of our minds.

Viridiana: the follies of desire

A quick survey of Entertainment Weekly’s recent “25 Most Controversial Movies Ever” proves that even terms like “controversial” can be baldly co-opted by commercial interests. How else can we account for the presence of Ron Howard’s New Agey, theologically egalitarian, soft-on-the-Vatican adaptation of The Da Vinci Code scoring Number 13? Was anybody actually offended by that movie? Did anyone take it seriously enough to be offended? Did Howard even take it seriously?

I’m not proposing that anyone actually take Entertainment Weekly seriously, but it says something about the narrow range of the mainstream media’s cultural radar when Da Vinci ranks so prominently while Luis Buñuel’s Viridiana doesn’t even make EW’s final cut. Deliciously provocative, caustically insightful, hounded by censors and legal troubles, Viridiana was controversial in the richest sense. It’s the work a seasoned master, playfully confronting the deep-rooted socio-religious ideology that shaped his own life.

After making such an early splash with the scandalous Un chien andalou (1928) and L’age d’or (30), Buñuel underwent years of sporadic activity before reinventing himself in Mexico, where he made numerous films in quick succession, some of which (like 1950’s Los Olvidados) are among his masterworks. He’d garnered an international reputation and proved that, with age, even the most maverick artists earn grudging acceptance by the establishment.

A quarter century after the end of The Civil War, Spanish authorities decided to thaw their previously icy relations with their most notorious filmmaking progeny. Invited home under the auspices of the Franco regime he once fled from, Buñuel, a few restrictions aside, was given free reign. Viridiana was completed just in time for the 1961 Cannes Film Festival, where it won the Palme d’Or and was declared blasphemous by the Vatican’s newspaper. The director of the Spanish Film Institute who approved the production was dismissed, the film was disowned by Spain and all prints were ordered destroyed. It was never shown there until 1977.

Picking up thematically where Nazarín (58) left off, Viridiana concerns a young nun (Silvia Pinal) who accepts an invitation from her Uncle Jaime (the marvellously melancholy Fernando Rey) to pay him a final visit before entering the convent. Jaime reveals his fetishistic obsession with his dead wife, whom Viridiana closely resembles, convincing Viridiana to dress as her before pleading with her to maintain the role permanently and live on his estate as his spouse. Viridiana leaves in disgust.

Jaime eventually finds a perverse way of making Viridiana stay, but once settled she endeavours to transform his home into a house of Christian charity, inviting vagabonds to work on the estate in return for food and shelter. The benefactors inevitably abuse Viridiana’s charity, making a wild party in her absence, climaxing in a portrait where the drunken bums are positioned at the banquet table in imitation of Da Vinci’s ‘Last Supper.’

With characteristic cool, Buñuel claimed he never set out to blaspheme, and to a degree this seems genuine. Many of Viridiana’s controversial details (the crucifix switch-blade, the tortured dogs) are taken directly from Buñuel’s experiences of Spanish life. His characterization of Viridiana isn’t mocking but sympathetic. Characters aren’t judged morally, but rendered as complex and deeply human in all their weaknesses and strengths, their acts of malice or altruism. Guided by Buñuel’s increasingly elegant, quietly strange camerawork (highlighted by his jarring, erotic isolation of legs), Viridiana is unsparingly, blackly comic, but a keenly observed portrait of the follies of desire.

A French documentary on Buñuel found on Criterion's DVD of Viridiana, features comments by a Jesuit priest from the seminary where Buñuel studied. “Even in his most irreligious films,” the priest says, “some traces of religion can always be found.” This testimony is in keeping with Buñuel's famous anti-declaration "I'm still an atheist, thank God."  If Buñuel could truly offend, it’s only because his films are founded in belief and wonder. And that’s something you’d never say about Ron Howard.

Bring us your huddled masses: Emanuele Crialese ushers us toward the Golden Door

The original Italian title for writer/ director Emanuele Crialese’s most recent work was Nuovo- mondo, but the film began circulating festivals in 2006, only months after the release of Terrence Malick’s The New World. Presumably re-titled so as to avoid being confused with Malick’s atmospheric masterwork, Nuovomondo was ultimately released, in English-speaking countries at least, as Golden Door. The shift, however frustrating it may have been for the filmmakers, was ultimately fortuitous: Crialese’s follow-up to Respiro is a work at once grounded in carefully detailed history and strangely elevated by a sense of grand mystery. Its characters, most of them Italian peasants, embark on a journey to early 20th century America as pilgrims undertaking a journey of mystical significance. The New World they move toward, which is rumoured to yield vegetables the size of horses and trees that grow money, indeed beacons them like some utopian portal made of precious materials. And Crialese’s simultaneously beguiling and terrifying vision of their movement is suitably poetic, intoxicated with the immigrant’s persistent optimism.

With the exception of westerns and their later counterpart, the road movie, travel, the actual movement from one geographical space to another, has traditionally been compressed in movies, forsaken in favour of depicting the destination. But what was once conveyed through a fleeting image of a broken line working its way across a map is itself the very subject of much of Golden Door. Like millions of others, journeying to the New World for poor Sicilian farmer Salvatore Mancuso (Vincenzo Amato, nearly unrecognizable from his memorable turn in Respiro) and his family represents an act of faith and will ultimately result in their being basically torn apart. From the opening images of Salvatore and his eldest son climbing a rocky hillside with stones in their mouths, hoping to receive answers from God as to what to do with their frustrated lives, there’s an immediate sense that adventure and necessity collaborate in this realm, however uneasily. To dream of a new life in a new place requires tremendous sacrifice as well as tremendous imagination.

The themes of Golden Door might sound severe, even miserable, but Crialese’s approach to Salvatore’s story is in fact graceful, enigmatic, often warmly humorous and frequently spectacular. There’s a magnificent moment when we see masses of Italians huddled tightly from overhead before a great metallic groan begins to pull them apart, a widening stretch of sea water opening between them like an abyss. Once the ship Salvatore and his family boards sets sail, Crialese’s imagery becomes strikingly divided into smooth lateral pans aboveboard, where passengers in their finest suits attempt to maintain a civilized comportment, and unstable hand-held camerawork below, where the passengers are divided by gender and sleep in claustrophobic proximity to one and other. At the film’s mid-point, all of these passengers will be tossed about like fish in the belly of a giant steel whale and Crialese’s camera stays there with them, their cries of panic the only sounds to rise above the crashing of waves beyond.

Whatever mortal havoc the emigrants survive (and, sadly, some don’t) can hardly prepare them for what awaits once they reach the fog-enshrouded Ellis Island. US Immigration officials, considering themselves enlightened by the pseudo-science of Eugenics, run their applicants through countless inane tests to make sure that their citizenry will not suffer contamination from any sub-standard foreign genes. Single women meanwhile must undergo the sometimes humiliating, often surprising ritual of accepting marriage proposals from complete strangers hoping to purchase a wife. Some of these encounters are absolutely heartbreaking, yet others, like the contract agreed upon between Salvatore and the bewitchingly modern Englishwoman with the mysterious past he met onboard (Charlotte Gainsbourg, sporting a red mane that makes her look like an exotic bird), are utterly charming. Rife with anxiety, but charming nonetheless.

I won’t try to fool you into thinking Golden Door is action-packed. It moves with an almost hypnotic rhythm, its tone largely observational and unassuming, marked by occasional impressionistic spells characterized by the use of slow-motion and anachronistic but thematically appropriate music. (Curiously, it used for its finale Nina Simone’s driving rendition of ‘Sinnerman’ the same year that David Lynch used the song to back up the rousing closing credit sequence of Inland Empire.) There are also detours into complete fantasy, dreams where the Promised Land’s rivers of milk truly flow free and Salvatore must swim to reach some parcel of earth along with so man others. And it’s intriguing to me that Golden Door fuses planes of both grim realism and dreamy reverie. Perhaps Crialese really was channeling the same spirit as Malick when he came up with his own Nuovomondo –there’s a lot to be said for summoning up the past through such a rich lens of imagination.

3 Women: Altman's puzzling, oneiric, flawed masterpiece

Sometime in 1977, while his wife was frighteningly ill and in hospital, Robert Altman went home to get some much-needed sleep and literally dreamed of his next movie. All he knew was that it would be set in a desert, have something to do with identity theft, star Shelley Duvall and Sissy Spacek, and be called 3 Women. Those were the days before Altman’s commercial cred was lost, M*A*S*H and Nashville were still fresh victories, and all Altman had to do was stop by the 20th Century Fox studios on his way to the airport, throw his skeleton of a pitch at Alan Ladd Jr. and within minutes he had a picture deal. He didn’t even miss his flight.

3 Women is an enigmatic jewel from that magic period of freedom for Altman. His dream infused the film not only with raw materials of cast, theme and setting, but with a strange atmosphere of aquatic veils, exaggerated colours, a weird dialogue of opacity and transparency through steam, reflections, shadows and rising heat. Yet it also delved into a small, isolated pocket of the US swathed with a loneliness and frailty amidst dusty kitsch Americana (mini-golf, shooting ranges and dirt bikes) and superficiality. It’s perplexing as all hell, and I’m not certain it ever quite reaches the full circle it strives for, but it makes as crystalline and lasting an impression as anything Altman’s ever done.

The first moments are transporting: A woman painting a mural is seen through a tumbling aquarium. And then we see an indoor pool, following elephantine legs which intermingle with more aged torsos walking and wading. Gerald Busby’s atonal score heightens the slightly alien aura. The pool is a spa for the elderly and infirm, a place where young women gently guide patients through simple exercises. The spa’s model employee is Millie (Duvall), an oddly beautiful and utterly by-the-book young woman possessing a certain women’s magazine glamour. We meet Millie as she trains Pinky (Spacek), a new employee who seems even younger, eager though mischievous. “You’re a little like me, aren’t you?” Millie says to Pinky at one point, and Pinky takes the comment to heart: what immediately begins between the two women is hard to put your finger on, but it’s as though Pinky initially exists devoid of some essence of personality, and her hero worship of Millie becomes something both more profound and sinister.

For all its emphasis on theme, ambiguity and aesthetic, refined performances are crucial to 3 Women. Duvall is simultaneously beguiling and pathetic as Millie, nurturing her attractiveness yet living in a virtual vacuum of human affection, and the magic of her performance is partially attributable to the fact that she practically invented her character, writing the diaries we hear her read, the shopping lists and recipes (Duvall even bought the groceries to make Millie’s ridiculous cheese spray hors d’oeurves). And Spacek transforms so seamlessly in the film’s second half of metaphysics and narrative leaps, going from child to temperamental seductress and back to child again. As well, both are funny, wearing their characters’ abundant eccentricities as though they were totally normal.

3 Women clearly owes something to Ingmar Bergman’s Persona, but it lives in its own separate world with its own psychic implications. Everything in 3 Women conspires to some larger, unspoken event: the Bohdi Wind murals of sexual monsters painted in empty swimming pools by Willie (Janice Rule), the third woman of the title; the snobbish twins at the spa who seem content to communicate only with each other; the appearance of an elderly couple who may or may not be Pinky’s parents but who haunt Millie with their otherness and repellent age. What does it all mean? The good news is that the audio commentary Altman provided for Criterion's DVD release a few years back is often illuminating without ever trying to explain it all. The rest is up to us.

Vivre le peau nouveau: Eyes Without a Face

Firstly, it’s a movie consumed with surfaces: a woman in a shiny black leather raincoat stalks Paris in an equally slick, black, beetle-like Citroën; black water at night swirling like an abyss; trees along a roadside at night awash in an x-ray glow of headlights; a carefully-placed pearl choker of milky white; stainless steel medical equipment that reflects hard light in its immaculate cleanliness; a satin gown that renders the wearer a perfect little doll, one whose face is encased in a smooth, immobile mask devoid of human flaw; and in that mask a sight so tragic and gruesome that the frozen camera can’t turn away, can only mercifully fade to black.

Originally released to much outrage and disgust in 1960, George Franju’s Eyes Without a Face (Les Yeux sans visage) was too well crafted to be dismissed as just another exploitation horror flick. Nobody seemed to know what to do with it, and so it was destined to achieve its classic status only gradually. It's still absolutely chilling and quite singular, a skin-crawling tale of obsession, arrogance and murder both lyrical and clinical. As Carlos Clarens wrote in his 1967 Illustrated History of the Horror Film, with only his second feature (after numerous shorts and documentaries), Franju had lit upon “the elusive alliance of poetry and terror.”

Doctor Génessier (Pierre Brasseur) works in a clinic near his sprawling estate outside Paris. Though highly regarded for his advances in plastic surgery, Génessier has withdrawn from social life following the disappearance of his daughter Christiane (Edith Scob), who literally lost her face in an accident in which Génessier was the driver. Everyone, her fiancé included, assumes Christiane has suicided; she’s in fact secretly confined in her father’s mansion, awaiting the experimental surgery that her father has promised will give her back her face, surgery requiring the face of another, unwilling, donor.

Synopses don’t suit Eyes Without a Face. The story, simple as a fairy tale, builds at a deliberate pace, offering information in short doses and building suspense with little exposition. Early scenes in which Génessier’s devoted assistant Louise (Alida Valli of The Third Man) prowls the Latin Quarter, smoking cigarettes and sizing up young women are presented ambiguously, and Franju gives an ominous degree of attention to simple movements through doors, down corridors, up stairs, as though our sense of architecture were essential to our understanding of the drama silently unfolding. It’s weird, and through its unsettling weirdness works very well.

I mentioned surfaces: the cold brilliance of this story, cleanly adapted by the team of Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac (Les Diaboliques, Vertigo) from Jean Redon’s novel, lies in our peculiar attachment to our faces, that body part most closely associated with our sense of identity, thus the surface reflects unseen depths. But ironically, though Franju lingers on many faces throughout, its probably Christiane’s mask that, while unspeakably creepy, is also the most affecting face in the movie. Animated only by voice and gestures made by her thin limbs, the mask becomes a haunted and haunting thing, with Scob constituting the movie’s closest thing to a truly sympathetic person.

Uncontrollable and uncooperative, flesh itself is an independent force in Eyes Without a Face, a sort of precedent for David Cronenberg’s flesh-driven films. But by the wondrous, beautiful final images, aflutter with newly released doves, dogs and leaves caressed by evening breeze, we see that Eyes Without a Face is also about the spirit, adrift in a world full only of imperfect houses in which in can dwell.

Off the beaten track: Riding Toward Everywhere

I live near train tracks. I hear them mostly late at night, when aching dreams of escape are given freer reign. I love trains with a childish awe, but the tracks have been made absurdly inaccessible, the fencing around them formidable. You cross over or under these fortressed tracks and the passing trains seem like some disorderly mirage, the poltergeist of some rumbling, colossal, transient machine from the distant past. It makes you wonder: do people still hitch rides on these beasts? Paying passengers hardly even use them anymore. What ever happened to that most glorious of victimless crimes, freight hopping?

William T. Vollmann has asked similar questions, but unlike me –unlike most of us these days– he’s taken it upon himself to answer them through first-hand investigation. Though he’s pushing 50 and still recovering from pelvic surgery and some minor strokes, Riding Toward Everywhere (Ecco, $31.95) finds Vollmann packing up his orange bucket and backpack, dragging along a friend or two, and riding the rails. The numbers of fellow travelers he encounters have diminished since the days of Jack London or Thomas Wolfe, or even Jack Kerouac, three among the many American writers he cites and forges a literary dialogue across the ages with here. But most of those who still practice this particular form of wandering are prompted by the same thing most trainhoppers have always been prompted by: need, desperation, lack of opportunity, poverty. Vollmann, as he makes clear right from the start, suffers from at most one of these ailments. He’s not a hobo but, as he puts it, a fauxbeau, a dilettante who when he desires need only wait for the train to slow or stop, jump off, and find himself a warm bed and a hot meal.

“Contempt for my privileged railroad follies may or may not be warranted,” Vollmann writes. “The question is what I make of them.” He points out that even Thoreau had a safety net to rescue him from any genuine peril during his submergence into Walden’s wilderness –but does that make his observations of the life left behind and the one adopted in exchange any less resonant? Vollmann’s reasons for trainhopping are many. His interest in those who live outside the dictates of the approved (if difficult to acquire) state of prosperity and ambition have informed much of his previous work, his travels to Afghanistan and the Arctic, and most notably his recent book Poor People. Much of this new book is indeed concerned with those he meets and learns from during his travels, as well as the graffiti they leave behind as traces of their vagabond musings, their frustrations and madness. But for all that, what seems to bring Vollmann to the rails is finally a much baser, more personal urge: to get out of Here -wherever Here may be– and find Everywhere.

“The lives I could have lived or at least imaged living teased me,” Vollmann writes at one point while gazing out from his perch on the iron horse, and elsewhere: “how luxurious it is to travel I care not where for no good reason!” Vollmann is a divorced parent, a man who confesses to finding his inner rage growing with age, who doesn’t own a cell phone or a credit card, who’s sick with anger over the direction his country has been taking in this new century of increasingly compromised liberties. He is a great, persuasive believer in civil disobedience. Though much older and much more practical than the likes of say, Chris McCandless, Vollmann needs to flee the grid, at least for a time. (Who doesn’t?) Vollmann searches for the same thing most artists or anyone with a wandering spirit seeks: the epiphanies granted by freedom. Why else do so many of the book’s evocative accompanying photographs feature open doors looking out on the fragmentary promise of some thrilling expanse?

Admittedly, as Riding Toward Everywhere chugs along it does get repetitive, its romantic viewpoint and Zen laughter a little hackneyed, and sometimes its existential questions begin to feel generic. Vollmann often asks what’s wrong with aimlessness, and at times the shapelessness of this book answers him back loud and clear. But Vollmann never goes too long without bringing his ramshackle narrative back to deeper, more specific questions about identity, nomadism, solitude, solidarity, and being lost in life. What works best for me here is the first essay in particular, in which Vollmann writes a great deal about his father, all the ways in which their lives, their choices and their politics conflict. But for all their differences Vollmann clearly admires his father and recognizes how much their perspectives have to do with the eras in which they reached manhood and the idea of American life that seemed possible during these times. And in one of the most touching moments in Riding Toward Everywhere Vollmann dreams that his father is riding the rails with him. In this dream Vollmann’s train crosses not only space but time, taking him through an emotional detour as revealing of his truest longings as other parts of Riding Toward Everywhere reveal Vollmann’s most fundamental flaws. Put together all of these aspects might tucker you out, but I think you’ll still be glad for taking the journey.

Boys to Men: Cidade dos Homens

Dead End Hill, the rather in- auspiciously named favela that provides the setting for much of City of Men, is a ram- shackle maze of post-urban life where anarchy and violence are indistinguishable from the banalities of everyday existence. In this grimly alluring slum of Rio de Janeiro, a city that still resembles some seaside paradise if you squint a little and regard it from a safe distance, violent death is at once terrifyingly unpredictable and a visitor so regular as to deserve its own table setting. In one of City of Men’s many memorable scenes, a conversation between two men is interrupted by the sounding of a single gunshot somewhere nearby. The men look at each other and pause for just a moment, as though waiting for more, before one matter-of-factly says the other, “One less.”

This scene gives the impression that City of Men, a sequel of sorts to Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund’s 2002 film City of God, as well as a feature-length follow-up to the Brazilian television series of the same name, is a film corroded with cynicism. Yet City of Men, while plunging the viewer into an infernal milieu –one representative of the sort that more and more of the world is sliding toward– finally employs despair and chaos as a method of putting the persistence of hope in greater relief. City of God drew much of its abundant exhilaration and grotesquerie from the fact that the vicious gangsters inhabiting its streets were mostly still kids; in City of Men, which Meirelles co-produced, the boys that survived the previous film are now growing into adults, and, while plagued with even more cause for resignation or madness, some of them endeavour to forge new lives for themselves and the families they’re already beginning to create. The final scene elegantly evokes their baby steps toward a brighter future.

In a rapid, rhythmical sequence of cross-cuts that set the tone for what’s to come, the story opens, somewhat confusingly at first, by introducing Dead End Hill’s dominant, heavily-armed gang, led by the Madrugadão (Jonathan Haagensen, whose deep, puffy eyes and broad face mirror the brooding handsomeness of Benicio Del Toro), and two pals each on the cusp of official manhood, the charming, thick-bodied Ace and the boyishly handsome, more innocent Wallace (Douglas Silva and Darlan Cunha, both of whom played roles in City of God). Ace already has a wife and son he feels far from ready for. So oblivious to parental obligation is Ace that he actually leaves his toddler son at the beach. Wallace meanwhile searches for his own father, a man sufficiently disreputable for Wallace’s family to refuse to provide even his first name.

Co-written by director Paolo Morelli, who helmed several episodes of the series, and Elena Soarez, the film is as smartly informed by the burdens and legacies of fathers and sons as Soarez’s script for House of Sand was by the innate links between mothers and daughters. Around the same time that gang warfare breaks out in Dead End Hill, approximately half-way through the story, Wallace tracks down his dad begins a tentative relationship, one soon fraught with the revelations of his dad’s blood-soaked past and ongoing criminal activities. In a plot twist that effectively echoes classical myth, the father’s history of violence runs concurrent with that of Ace’s father, and the lifelong friends become the inheritors of a shared past of horror and tragic folly, events whose consequences threaten to determine their own futures darkly.

Not unlike the density of domiciles crammed into the hillside slum, City of Men crams an awful lot of narrative into 110 minutes, yet it does so fluidly, and often thrillingly, with a masterful interweaving of flashbacks that flesh out the present and sometimes intriguingly contradict the spoken testaments given by those who lived through the past. Morelli doesn’t infuse the film with quite the same level of stylistic flourish that Meirelles brought to City of God, but he comes pretty close, particularly in the way his camerawork conveys a striking sense of the Hill’s vertical labyrinth. What’s more, Morelli is telling a story that, with all due respect to City of God, greatly surpasses its predecessor in sheer heart. In tracing the geometries of genes, family names, and social determinism, City of Men builds to a tremendously moving series of climaxes. It might be too much to expect a third film in this cycle to be as great, but I’d be more than happy to see them give it a whirl.

A gentle push: Charlie Bartlett

An actual person resembling the titular teenage hero of Charlie Bartlett probably doesn’t exist and never could. Amiable, politically gifted, and imminently resourceful –by which I mean stinking rich– Charlie (Anton Yelchin) is the reincarnation of Ferris Bueller for a generation of kids even more image-conscious and choked by ideologies of consumerism and control than that of Bueller’s Reagan era preppies. Kicked out of several private schools, Charlie goes to public school and, devising an admirably clever scheme to accumulate hordes of prescription drugs, becomes a pusher of Prozac and Ritalin to classmates of every faction. He also turns the school’s boy’s room into a therapist’s office, offering an ear, a shoulder, and instant meds to all at cut-rate prices. And Charlie likes his work, because above all, Charlie just wants to be liked.

I don’t really mind that Charlie himself is such an artificial character. The situations he engineers are pretty fun, and the improbable scope of his powers of persuasion and appeal to the masses thanks to his pharmaceutical operation implies a sly commentary on the loathsome hypocrisies of American drug culture: the pills Charlie pedals are legal, but just as formidable as the illegal ones commonly sought by teens. He also in his daydream world has one of the most charming teen movie moms in recent memory (the lovely Hope Davis), an endearingly clueless, well-dressed tippler too far removed from everyday life to really know how what a normal parent is supposed to do.

What I find more problematic is how wildly unrealistic everything else is in Charlie Bartlett, namely the risibly innocent high schoolers that so easily band together for whatever cause, who all treat Charlie like a God, who (save Tyler Hilton’s appealing bully-for-hire with a sensitive side) each fall into some lame stereotype, who seem universally oblivious to the fact that Charlie’s advice is mostly based on common sense. Charlie’s peers are mostly just a backdrop to a air-brushed fantasy of teen life that could have packed a little more of a comic edge if injected with a dose of real risk, something absent even in the film’s quickie but blandly maudlin suicide attempt scene. It also goes on way too long and ends with one of those singing in the auditorium finales that make any self-respecting teenager gag. Still, the highlights are still more winsome than the vast majority of comedies out there right now.

Undercurrents, and then some: Jia Zhang-ke's Still Life

Hong Shen and Sanming Han, the central characters in Jia Zhang-ke’s Golden Lion-winning film Still Life, never meet. Rather, they navigate kindred routes through drowning places, each in search of an errant spouse, each bearing witness to a world in the process of a systematic vanishing. Jia, whose previous films include Platform and Unknown Pleasures, has developed a directorial perspective that, while often constructed around potent, beautiful images, is very specifically concerned with the evocation of the unseen. With Still Life, which functions in part as a documentary about the flooding of villages and the displacement of over 1,500,000 people resulting from China’s colossal Three Gorges Dam Project, the unseen takes on a new level of resonance: the lost world that once lined the Yangtze River is in a sense still there, located somewhere in Jia’s frame. It’s just that it’s underwater.

Shen, a former miner, attempts to find the bought wife who left him 16 years ago with their unborn child. Upon his arrival in Fengjie he hires a mercenary motorcyclist to take him to his wife’s address, yet all that’s left of her street is a small, grassy knoll nosing up through the water’s surface. Shen manages to track down his brother-in-law, who explains that his wife has gone down-river to find work but will eventually return. Shen procures local work and opts to wait. The main industry in the region is, unsurprisingly, demolition. Walls and buildings tumble down all around him as Shen walks from one place to another. Even the place where he’s managed to find cheap accommodation gets tagged by government officials with the dreaded line of spray paint that indicates where the water will reach next.

The performance style in Still Life, as with other Jia films, tends toward the placid, yet one of the film’s more lively exchanges finds Shen talking to a charismatic young coworker who, hearing of Shen’s search, waxes philosophical about how Shen is a nostalgic man living in very un-nostalgic times. But is he? The Three Gorges Dam Project is arguably nurturing an epidemic of nostalgia, uprooting so many families from their homes and driving them to parts unknown. Jia, too cultivates an atmosphere of melancholy through striking images of lone individuals gazing out at crumbling vistas, or through his always beguiling and surprising push-ins on endearing figures, like in the scene where a little kid in underwear enters Shen’s room, steals one of his cigarettes and lights up.

Sanming doesn’t appear until 40 minutes into Still Life, but the timing of her entrance is shrewd: a more assertive character than Shen, she raises the level of urgency in the film with her presence, coming to Fengjie not to reunite with her husband but to demand a divorce. Ultimately she and Shen function jointly as a sort of Janus-head in the scheme of Jia’s examination, two modern Chinese landing in a 2000-year-old community condemned to death in the name of industry, poised on the precipice of cataclysmic social change, one face looking back, the other forward, both momentarily transfixed with destruction. And Still Life, Jia’s poetic entry into the cinema of ecological alienation, will transfix you, too.