Ain't no life nowhere...

The Man in question is David Bowie, extremely famous several times over by then, yet still arguably about as close to a space alien as a famous person can get. He falls to Honeyville, New Mexico, which is, strictly speaking, Earth, though it certainly seems like one of Western civilization’s weirder outposts. The film’s director is the great Nicolas Roeg, who already had a masterpiece or three under his belt (Performance, Walkabout, Don’t Look Now), as well as some substantial industry cred and star magnetism, despite the fact that his films were audaciously adventurous with form and occasionally baffling in content. (This was the 1970s.) So don’t look too surprised if The Man Who Fell to Earth leaves you feeling a little lost in space. It is indeed far out. Some might say too far. Every time Rip Torn turns up in the film he has this look on his face that seems to say, “What the fuck am I doing here?” It’s a fair question.

Soft-spoken, elfin-bodied Thomas Jerome Newton (Bowie) turns up one day with flaming orange hair, a British passport and a handful of enormously valuable patents. He finds himself a good patent lawyer (Buck Henry) and a brilliant scientific consultant (Torn) and starts up a massive global communications corporation—but what he really wants is just water, a glass here, an ocean there. His home planet has been suffering a massive drought, his own family is dying from lack of H₂O, and he’s heard that Earth is swimming in the stuff. So he sets up shop, trying to develop a long-term project. Really, really long-term. People around him get old as it goes along. He takes up with a chambermaid (Candy Clark). He settles in, makes himself a life on Earth, develops a dependency on the booze. But does he ever really become one of us? Can he? Would he want to?

Plot and backstory are both far clearer in Walter Tevis’ eponymous source novel than they are in Roeg’s film, which was scripted by Paul Mayersberg. What Roeg seems primarily interested in with The Man Who Fell to Earth is Newton’s prolonged fish-out-of-water experience of our world, which through Newton’s eyes looks far weirder and more sinister than anything glimpsed in the brief flashbacks to Newton’s extraterrestrial, dune-traversing past. Though not quite as overtly, apocalyptically condemning a portrait of the modern materialist world as what was on display in Walkabout, the television culture, abuse of alcohol, gun accessibility, general ugliness and casual consumerism on display in this film is, in its way, pretty alienating. But then so is the insistent vagueness of the dialogue. (“What are they like, your children?” “They’re like children. Exactly like children.”) So is the poor man’s Pink Floyd soundtrack. And so is the film’s meandering nature. So much of what made Roeg’s previous films (and some of his later ones) so sensorially rich can be found in the colours, montage, sound design and inspired ellipses of The Man Who Fell to Earth—no one else could have made it. Yet it lacks the urgency, the sustained energy and, more satirical than genuinely insightful, the depth those other films have. Still very much worth a visit, this Man may leave you longing for other, warmer planets. 

TIFF '12: Sound and visions

I’m walking down a very long, almost intestinal, amber-lit, fully carpeted, labyrinthine corridor in Toronto’s Fairmont Royal York Hotel, built in 1929, though there’s been some sort of hotel on that site since 1843. (“…you’ve always been here, Mr. Torrance.”) It’s an old place by Canadian standards, creaky, trance-inducing, seemingly out of time while you wander its quietest, windowless passages. And an ideal place to meet with Rodney Ascher and Tim Kirk, director and producer, respectively, of Room 237, the new essay film that explores a multitude of deep readings, some verging on conspiracy theories, of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. The film is very fun, nerdy and obsessive, ridiculous and compelling; in some ways feels to me like a parody of film criticism at its most niggling and caffeinated. The film made a big splash at Sundance and Cannes and is now a major highlight at the 2012 Toronto International Film Festival, which as I finally sit down to write something on it is just a few days from closing.

Museum Hours

Room 237 is essentially constructed from a combination of intricate visual montage, music and voice-over, which, at least in terms of form, makes the experience of it not entirely dissimilar to that of some other notable TIFF ’12 titles, such as Miguel Gomes’ selectively soundtracked Tabu, a gorgeous, spellbinding film that’s at once a work of romantic cinema and a critique of romantic cinema, or Jem Cohen’s lovely Museum Hours, with its many moving passages of voice-over monologue from a Viennese museum guard who befriends Montrealer Mary Margaret O’Hara, in town to visit a comatose cousin, or Sophie Fiennes’ The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology, which once again deposits sweaty Slovenian critical theorist Slavoj Žižek into myriad movies and lets him talk and talk and talk, or Terrence Malick’s To the Wonder, which even more than Tree of Life feels like a fluid palimpsest of collective memories: I know there were some scenes of actual dialogue in the film, but the overall impression it left me with was one of a stream of internal voices asking questions, images of fingers brushing walls, trees, objects and bodies, of landscapes and music and drifting emotional states. It’s a good thing, I think, that Malick is working more steadily these days, making more films with more manageable runtimes (ie: under two hours), so that every new Malick movie is less of a monumental cinema event, so that something like To the Wonder can simply be regarded as another step in this singular director’s path, part of a larger whole, an ongoing exploration. Flawed or not, I’d still rather enter into any of Malick’s cinema spaces than I would watch most normal movies.

Berberian Sound Studio

Heightening tension between sound and image feels to me like a running theme this year. In Peter Strickland’s wonderfully paranoid and funny, eerie and elegantly crafted Berberian Sound Studio Toby Jones plays a late ’70s sound mixer who travels to Rome to work on a trashy Giallo film and gradually seems to be sucked into some wormhole hybrid of the fictive aural realm he’s cutting and pasting together and his own personal world of quiet English despair. In Pablo Berger’s Blancanieves, Snow White is transferred to the milieu of bullfighting in 1920s Spain, rendered as a black and white, silent melodrama brimming with bold music, some of it flamenco-inspired, all of it totally overcooked. Every scene is belaboured; Berger makes a self-congratulatory meal of every variation on the familiar tale; for all its ostensible large-scale emotions Blancenieves feels like an utterly academic formalist exercise, a parade of impeccably shot and edited clichés. The final scenes are almost great, until a single teardrop contaminates everything with faux ambiguity and supposed depth.

Death in the family

It’s all about family in the end, so let’s talk about the family first. Chris (Emile Hirsch) is a young man with big, bad ideas and even bigger, badder debts to some very dangerous men. He’s cursed with a father so dumb that by comparison he assumes he must be a genius. That father, Ansel (Thomas Haden Church), seems perpetually cowed by life. Ansel likes long underwear and monster truck rallies and shitty beer. He has a beautiful little moment when he enters the greasy spoon where Sharla (Gina Gershon), his wife, works: while scanning the room he spots a beer bottle abandoned by a previous customer with a finger of suds remaining in the bottom, and he swigs it. Sharla is a piece of work, a slattern schemer on the smallest of scales but armed with a road-tested, outsized sex appeal. She enters the film bush-first—a first for non-pornographic American cinema?—and when the rest of her gradually makes it into the frame she’s all erect nipples, big hair in curlers and mascara seemingly applied by Tammy Faye Baker’s personal make-up artist. Much later she will be charged with a task involving a drumstick that really needs to be seen to be understood.

Then there’s Dottie (Juno Temple), still a nymphette at 20, a kewpie doll busting at the seams, with a savant-like air yet far more observant than she gets credit for. She is an object of unnerving fantasies for Chris and of strange desire for the final member of our makeshift clan. Killer Joe Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) is a detective and contract killer from Dallas. He comes to this Texas backwater to assassinate Chris and Dottie’s coke-dealing mother, Ansel’s first wife, a character never seen but much reviled. When it turns out that Chris can’t come up with payment for the matricidal hit, Joe takes Dottie as collateral. He’s not so much pure-lusty as entranced; he recognizes something in her. Like Humbert Humbert, Joe seems drawn to Dottie as a way to recapture the innocent bliss of pubescent sexual awakening. Ansel doesn’t mind any of this, as though pimping and parenting are second cousins. “Might just do her some good,” he muses.

The net ingredients for Killer Joe, the second of Pullitzer Prize-winning playwright Tracy Letts’ stage works to be adapted for the screen by William Friedkin (the first was Bug, a marvelous manic showcase for Michael Shannon), are about as lurid and tabloid-like as any going. The characters range from eerie to appalling to manifestations of some hot’n’sizzly kind of primal evil. And you can never take your eyes off of them and, provided you have the stomach for this grade of soot-black humour, they are funny as all hell. The sharply constructed story, which could be seen as a tract on the perils of inbreeding, feels like Sam Shepard channeling Jim Thompson, the direction is bracing and nasty, but also weirdly clean and to-the-point, the performances are across the board fully committed, emboldened by outrageousness, figures from Greek tragedy mired in the murk of the Southern gothic grotesque. Again, depending on your tastes, Killer Joe is either a must-see or must-avoid. Either way you’ll probably want to shower after. And steer clear of deep-fried chicken for a while. 

Action movies

A boy, working at a garage, does a favour for an elderly woman, and steals her wallet. A young woman discovers she’s going to lose her factory job and physically assaults her employer in protest. In both cases the characters are followed by the camera as though in hot pursuit—the word “dogged” always comes to mind. The camera is handheld but there’s no phony, pseudo-documentary shakiness. The décors and mise en scène are unadorned as can be, the close-ups often bracingly tight and off-kilter. Yet there is a sense of masterful control to how every moment unfolds, and the result is moment-to-moment riveting. The characters always have tasks, and the stakes are high.

The boy, Igor (Jérémie Renier), has been pulled out of school to work at the garage, but his father (Olivier Gourmet) winds up pulling him out of the garage too, so that he can focus his energies on assisting him with the maintenance of illegal migrant workers, one of whom falls prey to an accident and before perishing asks Igor to make him a promise, one which breaks through the boy’s preternatural cynicism. The girl, Rosetta (Émilie Dequenne), lives with her alcoholic mother in a trailer and is desperate to improve her situation, to have a normal life, above all, a job, something she seeks with a tremendous fierceness. Her energy seems uncontainable: in a single breathless sequence, we see her confront her mother’s lover, steal the bottle he’s brought along with him, smash the bottle, get chased by the boyfriend through the trailer park, then spot a guy on a dirt bike, tackle him to the ground and start to wrestle. It’s almost an action movie.

But let me clarify: the boy and the girl are in two different movies, the first being La promesse, the second Rosetta. But these films are connected by a strict yet liberating formal, narrative and, yes, moral rigour of the highest order. These films, the first made in 1996, the second in 1999, both new on DVD and Blu-ray from the Criterion Collection, represent a genuine revelation, not only for Belgium’s fraternal filmmaking collaborators Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, who had made documentaries before producing two disappointing fiction films and needed to find a new, essentially sui generis way of working, but for cinema itself: they launched a body of work both radical and humble, austere and galvanizing. Each movie begins in media res, offers no exposition, no score, nothing beyond the diegetic; each demonstrates relationships only through action, and follows its protagonist with a rough and tumble loyalty that ultimately feels like the closest thing to true, deeper love that the movies can give us. The plights of Igor and of Rosetta are indeed dire, but the last thing these films want is to wallow in pity, and the stunning lead performances do nothing to ingratiate themselves. They crackle, they plunge, they examine—they move (in both senses of the word). The Dardennes won the Palme d’Or for Rosetta and would get another for L’enfant in 2005. Perhaps they’ll win another, because, since La promesse, theirs is also one of the most consistent bodies of work in cinema, and even if you were to peg them as having a formula, the work remains fresh because there is something in that formula that cannot help but come alive every time out: a pure, durable curiosity and belief in the power and the will of the underdog.