Film Comment Selects: A Week Alone (2007)

The robust intelligence who runs Tativille recommended I see Celina Murga's A Week Alone, and I happily obliged. Regrettably the only film I managed to catch at Film Comment Selects (someday I'll possess you, Jerichow and Revanche!), it's an entrancing tale about the childhood rituals inside a gated community outside of Buenos Aires. Winner of the best director prize at last year's Thessaloniki Film Festival, Murga's mise-en-scene is unerringly precise and layered, using the paraphenalia of youth (bottles of Nesquik, video games, bracelets, studded t-shirts) to establish the daily rhythms and power structure of a household. A tale loosely told but finely detailed, the first half establishes the lazy tempo of a group of rich kids left alone for a weekend, led by the teenager Maria. They hide 'n seek and Marco Polo to their hearts content in the deathly serene subdivision. Langorous tracking shots follow the kids through the greenery. Innocent, edenic, and eerie. It feels like the entire adult population has disappeared, leaving their twentysomething nanny, Estelle, as the only adult presence.

The turning point of the film is the arrival of Fernando, Estelle's brother. His appearance (from outside!) reveals the cloistered nature of Mary's brood, who are never seen outside the complex (Maria claims she's been to Buenos Aires a couple times, but wasn't a big fan). As Murga backs away from the family's POV, the extent of the subdivision's security apparatus is shown, with its armed guards and "copycops." Fernando is not allowed to enter the complex until a phalanx of phone calls is made to the AWOL parents. Pulling back the veil away from the idyllic first half, the neighborhood gains the feel of a fascist Club Med.

Murga allows Fernando's difference to permeate the children's routines slowly. They ask where he's from (Entre Ríos) so many times it becomes an incantation. He sneaks into the sides of frames, observing the ping pong and girl talk just like us, unsettling some of the male kids, intriguing the girls, including Maria and her pre-teen cousin, Sofi.

Murga displays this new arrangement of power through new rituals. Where once Maria held back on the way to school to abscond with her cousin, she now trails behind alone, eyeing Fernando. These small punctures in their routine build to a bit of childish vandalism, and their resulting capture by the copycops exposes the fissures of the group. Sofi, as elegantly laid out through the film, is a bridging agent, able to communicate with Estelle on a level beyond master-servant. She declares her urge to receive her First Communion, and inquires about her nanny's private life. This curiosity about the world outside her compound keeps this makeshift family from disintegrating.

Tativille already beat me to the punch on writing about this one, but I couldn't help it. So much so that I've already ordered her debut, Ana and the Others. More please.

Film Comment Selects: Twilight's Last Gleaming (1977)

"There are no midgets in the military." So says Burt Lancaster in stentorian tones 2/3 of the way through Twilight's Last Gleaming, Robert Aldrich's 1977 political thriller. This after Paul Winfield, who broke out of jail with Lancaster to take over a nuclear missile silo, pesters him with wild theories about how the army is hiding snipers outside. With little people. It's the comic highlight of an otherwise white-knuckled, angry affair.

It's Aldrich's Vietnam protest film - as Lancaster plays a General railroaded into prison for protesting decisions made during the war. The key to his ransom demands in the silo is the release of the minutes from a National Security Council meeting that declares that the war was unwinnable, but that it should be continued anyway in order to send a message to the Soviet Union. Without the release of this document, Lancaster threatens to launch the missiles. Aldrich doesn't shy away from the madness of this action, incinerating an entire city out of outrage because of the unjust death of one's countrymen, but instead throws his indignation behind the forces that would drive a man to such ends.

Those forces are icily played by Joseph Cotten(!) as the cynical Secretary of State and Richard Widmark (!!) as a shoot-first general eager to solve the problem by dropping a small nuke into the silo. President Charles Durning is a bit of a pushover, naturally. Aldrich shows the back and forth of the negotiations with an extensive and expert use of split-screen, especially during the General's attempt to drop the nuke, when Lancaster and Winfield argue about the government's attentions in one frame, the army operatives descend the elevator shaft to drop the nuke in another, and the Joint Chiefs watch the operation on monitors in the third. It's a dizzying and remarkably tense sequence, making up for some of the overwrought speechifying that takes over it's final third.

Film Comment Selects: The Wedding Director, 13 Lakes, Ten Skies

The Wedding Director (2006)
Last year I was introduced to Marco Bellochio with two stateside releases, of My Mother's Smile (a.k.a. The Religion Hour) (2002) and Good Morning, Night (2003). I preferred the former, a conspiratorial look into the process of Catholic canonization, as Sergio Castellito skeptically confronts his mother's impending sainthood. A moody piece about airbrushing the fatal flaws of deceased loved ones, it created a suffocating atmosphere where cute school teachers are Catholic spies and the only man Castellito can trust is his half-crazed murderer of a brother. Good Morning, Night was a nuanced drama re-enacting the 1978 kidnapping and murder by the Red Brigades of Aldo Moro, president of Italy's center-left Christian-Democratic party.

The Wedding Director is decidedly a lesser accomplishment, although it has its pleasures. An absurdist comedy with shades of 8 1/2, it follows Castellito's famed film director after he runs off to Naples following an accusation of sexual molestation at an audition from one of his actresses. Once there, he stumbles his way into a job; that of filming the wedding of a princess, and a rather enigmatic one at that. She speaks in flirtatious whispers and coy glances before running off without explanation. It goes without saying that it's an arranged and unwanted marriage, and that Castellito falls rapturously in love.... The director is thrust into a florid melodrama of his own making, and the self-reflexive jokes come fast and obvious. The rest of the film becomes a descent into Castellito's and Bellochio's fanciful imagination, a variety of surreally comic vignettes strung together without really cohering, the quality of each varying wildly. One peak is the story of another director who fakes his own death in order to win a year-end award; another is the opening wedding sequence, where the bride's train becomes a death trap of snapped heels and bruised knees.

It's a failure, but a rather enchanting one.



13 Lakes (2004) and Ten Skies (2004)
James Benning's two avant-garde nature films hold as much tension and mystery as any mass market potboiler. The films consist of 13 and 10 ten-minute static takes of their respective subjects, with the sound recorded on site (although it is not necessarily synchronous). The images shift and shudder in unexpected ways, as the eye traces the exhaust from a microscopic jet plane or the subtle undulations of ice on Lake Superior. This is not to say one's attention is riveted throughout - they are made to let the mind wander - one can take them in leisurely or rigorously, but they always manage to arrest your gaze in the end. Anyway, you should read Michael Anderson on these, he's thought longer and deeper about these works. Here he is on 13 Lakes at Senses of Cinema, and on 10 Skies at Tativille.

Film Comment Selects: Retribution (2006)

Kiyoshi Kurosawa hasn't had a film of his released in the states since his two wonderfully quirky 2003 releases, Bright Future and Doppleganger. 2005's Loft popped up at a few festivals (including '06's Film Comment Selects) but soon disappeared from the international marketplace. According to Derek Elley at Variety, it was a DV-lensed horror film about a romance novelist haunted by a mummy. Sounds like a return to his genre roots, albeit an unsuccessful one (although still tapped for a remake, according to Elley).

I'm happy to report that Retribution, while firmly in the J-Horror ghost film genre, stands up to Kurosawa's high standards. The soulfully sullen Koji Yakusho (cleansing the stink of Babel) is Yoshioka, a violent homicide detective who questions his sanity when all the evidence from a recent drowning murder points to himself. Soon similar drownings pop up across Tokyo, deflecting suspicion from Yoshioka, but there's the matter of a spectral woman in a red dress...

The strength of Retribution lies in its impeccable compositions (he's fond of frames within frames here, of doorways and the false frames of mirrors), and in turn how these compositions induce a sense of decay that transcends the central ghost story. Every shot contains a puddle or artfully composed audio of water dripping - all of Tokyo seems about to be drowned. This idea is far more frightening than the woman in red (although I expect Riona Hazuki's inexpressive porcelain doll features to haunt my dreams for a few nights), and expertly put across.

It's Japanese title, Sakebi, means The Scream, and it's no lie. If you have sensitive ears, I'd stay away from this one.

Film Comment Selects: Exiled (2006)

Johnnie To is a master. There's no more doubt in my mind after seeing Exiled, the second film this prolific HK director made last year (the other, Triad Election, the sequel to '05's Election, opens at Film Forum on April 25.

Screening as a part of the eclectic Film Comment Selects series at the Walter Reade Theatre in Lincoln Center, it's a tightly scripted action film centered around the friendship of four gangsters. It's a pseudo-sequel to 1999's The Mission (a must rent for me now), containing the same cast playing different characters.

Mark Olsen's description in the press notes compares the film to both Leone and Peckinpah, and I'd have to agree with him. The ritualistic action sequences that favor grand operatic gestures over realism are pure Leone, while the fatalistic attitude of a group of men whose moral codes are passe in the modern age is derived from Peckinpah, while the final shootout is a direct homage to The Wild Bunch.

But enough about the past...the film is bracing from the start, as To is a brilliant crafter of opening sequences (see the astonishing long take that opensBreaking News for a further example). Two duos descend upon a humble corner house. In succession they knock on a woman's door, looking for a man named Wo. In the exact same shot-countershot set-up, the woman disavows Wo's existence. Then, in a high angle crane shot, we see the two groups relax in a nearby public garden. Their leaders, Simon Yam and Anthony Wong, share a cigar. Everyone lights up. Then a blue moving truck rumbles into view, and they wordlessly descend upon it, staring at the man inside but allowing him to enter. A cowardly cop drives up, only to be driven off by the pinpoint shooting of a aluminum can sitting near his feet. Yam and Wong follow Wo up the stairs, setting up a classic Leone-esque standoff that begins the story proper.

What's amazing about this opener is how much story and character information is dispensed without saying a word. The woman's stubborness is deepened as the film progresses, eventually becoming a central element. The cop shows up throughout the film, a self-consciously comic counterpoint (he retires at midnight!) to the pistol opera happening around him. The cigar lighting belies a deep friendship between Yam and Wong that is explored and problematized through each succsessive action sequence. The blue truck becomes an escape vehicle, which then breaks down - another motif repeated throughout. The aluminum can returns in the final shootout as an ingenius way to time the quickness of the battle. The economy and grace of his storytelling is astounding (and I've only mentioned a few of the patterns he introduces), especially considering that he produces two films a year.

And it's all anchored by Anthony Wong's face (sitting, above), one seemingly forged for the cinema - with drooping jowls, cavernous pockmarks, and perpetual sunglasses. His stonefaced charisma introduces a note of comic tension into every shot he's in - making Exiled a very funny film among it's many other virtues. He's a brilliant comedian, something which I noticed in the otherwise drab drag racing hit Initial D.

And oh those action sequences. Flowing curtains, doors flying end over end, the unexpected uses of tarpaulin, and luxuriant slow-motion caused some dumbfounded grins to perk up my non-cinematic visage.

Exiled was picked up by Magnolia Pictures, but no release date has been set, as far as I can tell.