New Film: Of Time and the City

Of Time and the City represents both writer-director Terence Davies's first foray into documentary filmmaking and the Liverpudlian auteur's return to a non-fiction first-person after his obversely objective 2000 pinnacle The House of Mirth. Following more than a decade-and-a-half after his pair of autobiographical masterpieces, Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988) and The Long Day Closes (1992) - the former ranking as the finest British film since at least that nation's 1940s golden age, and the latter, the best of the rest - Of Time and the City likewise charts the pocked terrain of Davies's younger years, articulating his formative discontent via a jarringly emphatic first-person voice-over and the film's constituent found footage.

Davies's latest reveals a devout young Catholic whose faith never crystallized, transforming itself in the process to the "born-again" atheism that the director professes today. In this use of terminology, Davies marks his kinship with fellow UK northerner Morrissey, who twice used the phrase in early nineties tracks "Black-Eyed Susan" and "Nobody Loves Us." Of course, the similarities between the two extend well beyond this militant anti-religion: first, there is each's homosexuality, which to take the testimony of either has more often than not been experienced as loneliness; second, there is the remarkable directness of both Davies's and Morrissey's art; third, there is the miserablism that this candor takes in both instances; fourth, there is Davies's and Morrissey's related taste for the witty, well-constructed pop song, in supposed contradistinction to the bête noire's of the film director, The Beatles; and fifth, there is the romance of each for Britain's war-restricted, proletarian past, much more of which, it must be said, Davies lived through (the director was born in 1945 and the singer in 1959).

This last point of contact can be seen in the songwriter's referenced taste for the British kitchen-sink realism of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (Karl Reisz, 1960) and This Sporting Life (Lindsay Anderson, 1963), which was a milieu it seems that Davies was raised in. Much of Of Time and the City's content in fact is concerned with the life of the factory houses of an older Liverpool that have since been raised (pictured) to be replaced by the depressing tower blocks that have come to define international skylines in the post-1960s world. Davies, like so many others, manages to romanticize these older working poor residences, in spite of the often unhappy childhood he spent there - and in spite of even the choking, polluted skies that his images showcase. In an originary critique of modernist architecture, the alienated vertical arrangement of flats disallows communal, empathetic existence. By comparison, the factory houses of Davies's youth promise a familial existence introduced by the under-class romances of Peggy Lee's "The Folks who Live on the Hill" (a perfectly selected piece of pop music for Of Time and the City) and Morrissey's "double bed, and a stalwart lover for sure" in his "I Want the One I Can't Have." All that remains now is the detritus and spray paint decorating the already decaying tower-flat walls.

Ultimately, there is a conservatism - and even according to Lisa K. Broad a classicism (beyond his stated taste for classical music) - to Davies's art, which can be seen not only in his nostalgia, but in the fludity of his montage. Namely, Of Time and the City, in spite of its compendium format, does not read as fragmentary, but rather as a continuous flow of an evanesced time that clearly suits the film's Proustian narration (Davies has long been singularly indebted to the French writer). In fact, as Broad continues, Of Time and the City lacks the epistemic skepticism of the modernist, archival documentary: this is a Liverpool he knows, and which he will endeavor actively to reconstruct. It is by the same measure no My Winnipeg (Guy Maddin, 2007) - again, Davies is far too concerned with lived experienced, unmediated by a surreal counter-reality. In sum, one can see in Of Time and the City how Liverpool, already the stuff of fiction, made Davies, whereas My Winnipeg shows a city remade in Maddin's perverse, Freudian preoccupations.

Returning to Davies film alone, the succession of images in Of Time and the City does not, at least in this writer's first viewing of the work, sustain the perfect organic progressions established in say Humphrey Jennings and Stewart McAllister's Listen to Britain (1942). Rather, in somewhat less impressive fashion, Davies models his latest after the more impressionistic editing of the Jennings's nonetheless striking London Can Take It! (1940) and Words for Battle (1941), with which it shares an overtly poetic soundtrack. Indeed, though Davies has since his Distant Voices... earned the status as the British cinema's new Humphrey Jennings - which is to say its greatest active poet - it is only with Of Time and the City that this inheritence has been made explicit. Thus, if Of Time and the City is not quite another Davies masterpiece, it is nonetheless central to the art of Britain's leading living director.

New Film: The Wrestler

Darren Aronofsky's The Wrestler, from a Robert D. Siegel screenplay, provides the past year's most intelligent - and unexpected - use of a cinematic inter-text: Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ (2004). Quoting from the prophet Isaiah (chapt. 53), Marisa Tomei's stripper Cassidy compares Micky Rourke's eponymous Randy "The Ram" Robinson to the Messiah: "he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities, the punishment that brought us peace was upon him, and by his wounds we are healed." Significantly, Cassidy closes the quote by citing the Gibson film rather than the Biblical text, thus positioning The Wrestler as an inheritor of The Passion's particular exegesis - namely, that Christ's suffering (for mankind's sin) is the fault of all persons - as well as to its disfiguring violence. The Wrestler demands a similar, however secular, accounting of its spectators complicity in 'The Ram's' physical degeneration. With extreme caution, this line might be extended to Rourke's real-life decay in the public eye; regardless, the effects of the performer's lifestyle secure the film's unmistakable authenticity.

A second, implicit point-of-reference can be found in the similiarities shared between The Wrestler and the works of Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne.^ Most directly, Aronofsky and cinematographer Maryse Alberti's behind-the-shoulder camera work recalls the Dardenne brothers' 2002 The Son, which needless to say procured a Christian allegory of its own. The Wrestler's highly-identificatory mise-en-scène emphathetically showcases the everyday physical effects of the title activity and years of drug use (both professionally-enhancing and not) for Randy, as well as the bodily stress of the shoot and the self-medicating again for Rourke. Like his 2000 Requium for a Dream, Aronofsky has succeeded in creating an almost unimaginably mimetic art. While in both cases the films can be difficult to watch, even if The Wrestler does not even come close to Requium... in this regard, the director's latest separates itself once again for its thoughtful self-positioning within the aforesaid cinematic traditions.

The Wrestler likewise manages to artfully externalize its protagonist's physical and emotional distress. Like 'The Ram's' time-ravaged physique, Aronofsky's locations secure the same sense of a life ending, with their mid-winter, treeless settings: chief among these is the New Jersey trailer park in which Randy lives (which happens to recall another of the Dardenne's films, 1999's Cannes-prize winner Rosetta). Of course, this late year setting does form a background for one of the film's most winning passages - namely, the deserted NJ boardwalk where Randy and his estranged daughter (Evan Rachel Wood) return to the location of many of the pair's all-too-rare shared memories. In a tightly-framed medium close-up, Randy delivers an urgent, and truly heart-breaking monologue to the daughter, whom he admits he tried to forget. At least momentarily, The Wrestler shows itself to be among the most hopeful of this year's films. This scene's opening also shows the picture's, as well as 'The Ram's wit, in his choice of belated gifts for his daughter.

Of course, Aronofsky and Siegel deny us this happy ending. Randy is much too far degraded (in every respect) to achieve permanent reconciliation and restoration. While his 'performance' at his new deli-counter job again showcases his humor and hints at redemptive possibilities - Randy demonstrates a real aptitude with his customers that Arnofosky compares to the wrestling ring (with its back-stage passageway and the filmmakers' use of non-diegetic crowd cues) - a subsequent strip-club encounter with Cassidy deflates the newly rejuvenated Randy, setting off the course of events that will bring 'The Ram' back to the ring one last time.

The film's conclusive match reunites 'The Ram' with 1980s era-opponent 'The Ayatollah' in an unmissable reference to former WWF heavy The Iron Sheik, who famously (among former wrestling aficionados, as this writer was in his childhood) lost his title to Hulk Hogan. Indeed, local color is also supplied with a title credit sequence that includes magazine covers - including industry standard Pro Wrestling Illustrated - and by the participation of real-life grapplers, who really do experience a wear-and-tear in the ring, thanks to the razor blades and chair backs that bring the 'fake' sport to life. Among the film's most harrowing set-pieces is an autograph signing where Randy's compatriots - who it should be added never fail to act warmly towards the aging champion - wait for a very small number of fans, as they sit in their wheel chairs or with their catheters drooping below their pant legs'.

While Rourke does not in reality belong to this world in the same way, his Randy 'The Ram' Robinson is a flawlessly drawn and instantiated entry into their universe. In other words, Rourke deserves all the many accolades he has received for his extraordinary performance. Tomei's still beautiful, though similarly-near retirement Cassidy holds the screen with the former, in no small measure thanks to the actress's physical performance - which is to say her topless dancing. She is every bit as convincing in this role as Rourke is as a worn 1980s legend. (The film's 1980 period detail, including a perfectly placed Guns-N-Roses standard, does much to enchance The Wrestler's authentic characterizations.) Indeed, Arnofosky and Siegel's narrative, structured on its parrallelisms - their jobs, children and so on (she is the much better preserved) - is very much their story.

While there can be no denying the centrality of Rourke's epic performance in carrying the film, The Wrestler is nonetheless more than the sum or his or even their performances (Wood too is of note). Indeed, by virtue of its smart assimilation of sources and its mimetic formal articulation of content, Aronofsky's work is among best American films of the previous year, making the film very deserving of a 'Best Picture' nomination (certainly above frontrunners Slumdog Millionaire, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Milk) in addition to its sure-thing acting nominations.

^ It has been brought to my attention that Todd McCarthy makes the same comparison. If I noticed this after reading McCarthy (I cannot remember now if I did) I would like to cite the Variety critic. If I did not, then there really must be something to this convergence.

New Film: Wendy and Lucy

Kelly Reichardt's Wendy and Lucy, from a Jonathan Raymond story, commences with a credit sequence of freight trains arriving at a rail yard, followed by the eponymous Wendy (Michelle Williams) walking her companion Lucy (a yellow retriever mix) across an Oregon meadow. Reichardt's camera maintains an exceptional distance from her protagonists, signaling Wendy and Lucy's ensuing visual objectivity over an exceedingly long take. A woman's hum (subsequently revealed to be Wendy's) counters the image track. Following the film's title card, Lucy escapes into the woods, providing the first of two master-pet separations. Shortly, Wendy finds her canine amid a group of drifters, fireside, with whom she shares her plans to move to Alaska.

Wendy, like this briefly-glimpsed collective, exists on society's margins. Living with Lucy in her 1988 Honda, Wendy very carefully tabulates her relatively meager savings as she journeys to Ketchikan. After being woken the next morning by an insistent, if apologetic security guard (Wally Dalton), Wendy discovers that her car has stopped running. (As she correctly, later instructs her mechanic, her serpentine belt has cracked.) After pushing her vehicle onto the street, and discovering that she has little dog food remaining, Wendy sets off into the ditches where she begins to pick up discarded cans. In line to convert her findings into cash, Wendy willingly gives her bag to a crippled gent who likewise waits outside the can collection machine. (Indeed, a second act of charity will reinforce this emphasis.) As such, Reichardt establishes the same charity-oriented social vision that she introduced similarly at the conclusion of 2006's Old Joy.

With little cash in hand, Wendy thereafter proceeds to shoplift in a nearby supermarket. Catching the protagonist in the act, a straight-laced young employee (John Robinson) drags Wendy into his supervisor's office, where he piously offers that a person who cannot afford to care for a dog should not have one. Persuaded by the young man's screed, the said supervisor has Wendy arrested, leading to a long morning and afternoon in a local jail - and an unhelpful (to say the least) $50 fine. Returning to the scene of the crime, where she tied Lucy up before entering, Wendy finds her pet missing once again, setting off a frantic search that will occupy much of the brief 80-minute picture's remaining duration. Accordingly, Wendy and Lucy directly adopts Umberto D.'s (Vittorio De Sica, 1952) narrative conceit, with which it shares the lost dog plot-point.

Reichardt also summons the memory of De Sica's Bicycle Thieves (1948), and particularly the economic precariousness of that film's protagonists, which is undermined likewise with the loss of its income earner's loss of their primary means of transportation. However, Reichardt's De Sica retread makes no effort to explain how Wendy came to be in the position she is in, given her organizational abilities, the fact that she does not seem to have a substance-abuse problem, and yes, her physical beauty. If the situation in postwar Italy, as described by De Sica and Zavattini, can be considered at least somewhat normative - or at least plausible to the modern American spectator - Wendy's is another matter. While it might be clear enough that there are such economically marginal - and susceptible - figures, especially in this newly-minted recession-era US, making Wendy and Lucy particularly timely to be sure, the question of how such persons are made remains (apart from the very brief suggestion that she is lacking a familial safety net).

Ultimately, Williams's Wendy is a particularly implausible instantiation of the economically at-risk young American. While Reichardt might be afforded some latitude for her casting choice, given Williams's strong performance, her failure to explain how this outlier came into being does weaken the impact of her narrative diagnosis. This leaves the film's viewer wondering how rather than fully allowing for their empathetic participation. In other words, Wendy and Lucy suffers from its unwavering anchoring in Wendy's present, its objectivity in some sense, which is equally the film's aesthetic virtue. Nevertheless, Reichardt, in building on the socially-engaged point-of-view displayed in Old Joy, continues to show herself to be a genuine auteur of the twenty-first century American independent cinema.

New Film: Summer Hours / L'Heure d'été (Co- written by Michael J. Anderson & Lisa K. Broad)

Warning: the following post contains spoilers.

Writer-director Olivier Assayas's Summer Hours (L'Heure d'été, 2008), the second in a series of films commissioned by the Musee d'Orsay, opens on a group of children as they scurry through an emerald country estate. The eponymous season is rendered with exacting precision. Assayas and cinematographer Eric Gautier's exceedingly mobile camera pans between multiple figures as it searches for a narrative subject. On the macro level, the film's principle theme becomes immediately clear: the life of the three generations that have congregated to celebrate matriarch Hélène's (Edith Scob) birthday. Among these are her two sons, Frédéric (Charles Berling) and Jérémie (Jérémie Renier), and daughter Adrienne (Juliette Binoche). The latter two no longer live in France, with Jérémie in China and Adrienne in New York. Thus, when the question of the estate's sale comes up subsequently, the younger two siblings side with selling (as the family home no longer possesses a utility).

But back to the film's opening. Here, Assayas presents the first of three passages centering on the country home. Each of these focuses on one of the family's three generations, with Hélène the first emphasis and her grandchildren the last. After opening gifts from her children, she consults with Frédéric on how she wishes he will manage her estate after she passes. Much of the still striking seventy-five year-old's wealth derives from the art collected by her long-deceased artist uncle Paul Berthier, which includes a pair of Corot's that grace one of the residence's hallways. That Hélène shows a greater attachment to his art is not only a matter of her closer familial relation; as we learn subsequently, she was his last great love.

Yet, this skeleton is not entirely consequential to Summer Hours. Rather, Assayas's film is at its core a work of familial disintegration precipitated by Hélène's death. (Summer Hours resonates directly with the director's fine 1998 Late August, Early September, in both its emphasis on death and its seasonal precision.) With Hélène's passing, once again, Jérémie and Adrienne each opt for their financial gain, as reasonable as it is in their circumstances, over preserving the estate as a family retreat. In this way, Assayas traces the transition from a communal (family-centered) mode existence shared by Hélène's contemporaries to the more individualistic drive maintained by her children, whose lives are otherwise absent, contained in the film's many ellipses. The second generation's country home set-piece, following a heated discussion with the family's tax attorney in which Assayas's mise-en-scène divides into a confrontational shot/reverse-shot chain, and a subsequent brotherly reconciliation in which we discover details of their late father's life, depicts their preparation of the estate for sale. Assayas and Gautier maintain the low-key, interior lighting of the opening passage in this instance, though it is now the detritus of the homestead rather than Hélène's embodied presence, bathed in a deep cyan, and her implied recollections - in addition to a remarked upon Taiwanese flavor, Assayas's film showcases the influence of Andrei Tarkovsky and particularly The Mirror (1975) - that has become the camera's content.

The film's final generation moves into view with the revelation that Frédéric's eldest daughter has been arrested for shoplifting (in addition to her possession of a small quantity of pot). Again this dramatic peak comes to very little in the narrative, though it does serve to shift the film's focus. Shortly thereafter, Frédéric's two children hold a party in their soon-to-be-vacated family estate. With Summer Hours's camera once again mobilized and frequently shifting its human subjects, Assayas not only procures another communal life but concisely references his own masterful Cold Water (1994) - which here is updated in Summer Hour's shift into the present, with the incumbent new musical styles to match. Yet, Assayas also recognizes that there is sadness, at least for Frédéric's daughter, underwriting the conviviality. In an intimate conversation with her boyfriend, she notes teary-eyed that her grandmother once remarked that she would bring her children to this place. The liquidation of her family's heritage will indeed have consequences.

These consequences also include Frédéric and his wife's uncanny experience of their family art in the Musee d'Orsay. Though as his wife notes there are positive social values that derive from their bequeathing the art, its experience loses the personal dimension that it held in the family home. (In part, this passage seems to fulfill the film's commission, along with the behind-the-scenes documentation in which we see a miraculous restoration of a shattered Degas.) Much to Assayas's credit, we feel this loss as the pair look on at an art nouveau desk. In the end, Summer Hour's strength is precisely his articulation of such feelings, and of the details of a family life that extend well beyond the limits of the frame, beneath the film's surface representations and well into Hélène's past. Like A Christmas Tale (Arnaud Desplechin, 2008), with which Summer Hours forms a diptych of sorts (as each centers on the return of family members to their parental home) Summer Hours brings a family into vivid existence.

Of course, Summer Hours's differences with A Christmas Tale are far more instructive than its similarities: Assayas's film is all subtlety, refinement, economy and silence; it refuses temporal disjunction and stylistic disunity. To contrast, A Christmas Tale possesses the impulse to tell everything; the narrative is constantly moving beyond itself in its many acts of digression. Yet in both cases, this is contemporary French cinema at its very best. One film recommends itself above the other primarily on the basis of one's aesthetic inclinations, on their feelings toward stylistic unity/disunity, freedom/control, and so on. Consequently, this piece's two writers split on their preferences with Anderson inclining slightly toward the Assayas and Broad in favor of the Desplechin. Yet we agree wholeheartedly that Summer Hours is Assayas at his absolute peak.

IFC Films will distribute Summer Hours theatrically in 2009. In the meantime, the film is available on an Artificial Eye, region 2 [UK] DVD.