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. 

Exit stage left, then keep dancing

The first space is just a stage, a place we expect dance to happen, but that stage soon feels like a world, one made of some coffee-like soil, one whose inhabitants were long ago condemned to wear only beige, where a fearsome collective anxiety accumulates with the appearance of a red slip. The inhabitants’ gestures read as self-flagellation, their bodies move in a manner that’s captivatingly neurotic, addled, electrified, as though possessed by some great and mysterious force. This is a world that German choreographer Pina Bausch built.

I’ve never seen Bausch’s work performed live, so her death in 2009 came with the extra sting of knowing that I’d truly missed something. But Bausch lives on, not only through ongoing revivals but also through this remarkable film from her compatriot Wim Wenders, whose undisguised reverence infuses this, his best work in more than a dozen years. That he made it in 3D, a format traditionally reserved for the biggest and often dumbest sort of genre pictures, is itself remarkable. Photographed by Hélène Louvart, Pina is both the most straightforwardly conceived and best employment of 3D I’ve seen—if you’re going to film something normally experienced in three dimensions, why not shoot it so that it looks three-dimensional? The bottom line is that, however variable his later films may be, Wenders has always possessed an unfailing eye for texture, shadow, colour, and sweeping cinematic splendour, and he’s one of very few filmmakers who has thus far managed to incorporate 3D without sacrificing beauty.

Beauty—a mischievous, obsessive, intelligent, enigmatic beauty—could be said to be one of the subjects of Pina, which is neither biographical documentary nor a performance film in the strictest sense. It’s an homage, by Wenders, his collaborators, and also Bausch’s collaborators, who appear in the film not as talking heads but in silent portraits over which their spoken memories of Bausch float. “Meeting Pina was like finding a language,” says one of her wildly diverse dancers, and Wenders ensures that we understand what’s meant by language in this context: Bausch developed an essentially immutable, bodily vocabulary that swayed playfully between the primal and the sophisticated. Pina shows us dancers dancing with veal chops in ballet slippers outside a factory, having strange encounters on elevated trams, or marching with expressionistic smiles across fields in formal wear. Perhaps best of all, Wenders includes a generous except from Bausch’s famous Café Müller—a work some filmgoers will recognize from Almodóvar’s Talk to Her, which used the dance both as its opening scene and perhaps its source material—in which women scurry blind through a room crowded with tables and chairs while men yank the furniture out of their trajectories. It is, among other things, a testament to the balance of trance-like surrender and devotional support that combine to make art this dynamic, alluring and haunting.

Shit his dad says

The title of the source material, a memoir by poet and playwright Nick Flynn, is Another Bullshit Night in Suck City. The title of the movie, scripted and directed by Paul Weitz, is Being Flynn. I don’t know about you, but this discrepancy in tone already gave me pause—would this adaptation suck all the bite from the book and replace it with middlebrow Hollywood bullshit? The good news is: not really. Being Flynn exudes polished, pedestrian, professional directorial style, but its heart’s in the right place, by which I mean a tough-minded, tough-love kind of place. This is the story about a boy trying to become a man while living in the dual-shadow of a suicided mother and a long-absent, crazy motherfucker of a father who returns to this boy’s life when he shows up one night looking for a bed at the homeless shelter where the boy works. Too late, obviously, to make up for lost time—the boy’s now in his 20s—but just in time to challenge the boy’s undigested notions about maybe-kinda becoming a writer. Jonathan Flynn never published a word in his life, yet even as a going-on-elderly homeless drunken babbler, he remains convinced of his innate literary genius. And of his son Nick’s inheritance of this genius.

So yes, like many a memoir this is also the story of a writer discovering his craft. Thankfully, rather than spending time watching the writer try to write, Being Flynn focuses on the experiences that engender literary insight. Nick (Paul Dano) is uneasy with any career path that might make explicit his creative desire, so, following his father’s oft-stated and, as it turns out, ironic dictum that “we are put on this earth to help other people,” he works night shifts trying to give a modicum of comfort to the city’s downtrodden. The movie’s depiction of life at the shelter gets a surprising number of things right, partially through casting the likes of Lily Taylor, Wes Studi and Eddie Rouse as Nick’s more experienced colleagues, partially through Weitz’s uncondescending framing of the shelter’s clients.

Nick may be Being Flynn’s protagonist but its star performance is unquestionably Robert De Niro’s Jonathan. The movie wisely capitalizes on De Niro’s iconic status, rendering Jonathan as a variation on Travis Bickle some 30-odd years after Taxi Driver. Not just because Jonathan’s last job was driving cab, but because, like Travis, Jonathan regards himself as possessing some rarefied, god-like view of mankind in all its frailty, a view that allows him to go on manic, fevered rants against homosexuals, women and racial minorities. Neither Weitz nor De Niro strain to ingratiate Jonathan to us, understanding that it’s up to Nick to figure out how to come to terms with his father’s less palatable attitudes. And without resorting to mere camp, De Niro has an awful lot of fun with Jonathan, singing “You Are MEE-eee!” to his son from his skinny cot or throwing a tantrum while wearing a makeshift toga. And Jonathan does have things to teach his son about what it means to be a writer. The key midpoint scene involves Jonathan calling his son on the fact that he’s working at the shelter to gather material. Nick, horrified, denies this. Indeed, it isn’t the whole truth, but, make no mistake, it is a truth, and the proof is in Flynn’s book and in this flawed but very worthwhile movie.