Quick, name the movie: an artist looks back on his adolescence in Italy’s recent past, recalling his discovery of girls and politics, heartbreak and corruption, with a mixture of longing for bygone times and anguish from lessons learned. Maybe you thought of Fellini’s Amarcord, Bertolucci’s The Dreamers (admittedly set in Paris), or more than one film by Giuseppe Tornatore. Amend the question to “boy comes of age amid social tumult” and you can go all the way back to De Sica. Italian cinema is surpassingly rich in portraits of artists as young men, and to that prodigal canon the Open Roads series adds two more.

The Mafia Only Kills in Summer

Television host and satirist Pierfrancesco Diliberto, commonly known as Pif, makes his feature writing and directing debut with The Mafia Only Kills in Summer, a warmhearted memoir of childhood in Palermo, Sicily. The protagonist, Arturo (Alex Bisconti as a boy, later Pif himself), believes his conception occurred in tandem with a local mob massacre, ensuring his destiny would entwine with the Cosa Nostra in bizarre and bewildering ways. He falls in love at the same moment as the neighborhood don, and must find equally inventive (though less permanent) means of dispatching his rival. When his clueless but loving father, who tries to soothe Arturo’s fears with the title claim, fails to grasp the urgency of his feelings, he catches sight of Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti (the subject of Paolo Sorrentino’s operatic biopic Il Divo) relating his courtship of his wife on a talk show. Arturo grows to idolize the macabre politician, and the film tracks the development of his three obsessions—the Mafia, his beloved Flora (Ginevra Antona, then Cristiana Capotondi), and Andreotti—which, this being Sicily, are prone to intersect.

The beats of Pif’s story are familiar (addled parents, first love, dismay at the adult world), but they’re handled in an ingratiating, lighthearted vein, divested of the heavy-handedness often attendant to loss-of-innocence tales. (Arturo actually seems no less ingenuous at the fade-out.) Local characters like a whip-snapping priest, a wise judge, and even the mob bosses seem benign, imbued with the warm glow of nostalgia—Fellini by way of Damon Runyon. Miles removed from Gomorrah, the organized crime here has a genial, neighborhood feel, complemented by Santi Pulvirenti’s bouncy, playful score. If the film is ultimately less than monumental, it leaves a dolce aftertaste. The Mafia may kill in summer, but Pif’s memories survive and most enchantingly thrive.

Those Happy Years

With a title better suited to Pif, Those Happy Years recounts the childhood of writer-director Daniele Luchetti (My Brother Is an Only Child, 07) with the pensive air of maturity. Ten years old in the summer of 1974, Dario (Samuel Garofolo) registers the strained union of his parents—Guido (Kim Rossi Stuart), a convention-flouting artist dismayed by his lack of success in Rome, and Serena (Micaela Ramazzotti), a fiery housewife stirred by the women’s revolution. Guido rages to all in earshot about the need for freedom in art, but circumscribes his wife’s curiosity and confides to his mother that liberty should have its limits. When Serena furtively attends her husband’s performance art piece and answers his call for a volunteer, he is vexed—it was meant as a provocation, a statement on the public’s innate incapacity.

Aggrieved at the restraints on action imposed by those professing to champion it, Serena takes her two sons on a feminist retreat. There she’s encouraged to reclaim her fertility and explore unorthodox avenues of fulfillment. “Asking permission to be free means you’re not, inside,” she is told, and though Dario is less attuned to ideology than to capturing immodest gambols on his Super-8 camera (his newfound instrument for self-expression), the sentiments clearly find purchase.

While events are glimpsed through the boys’ eyes and narrated by the adult Dario, the film’s pivotal figure is neither he nor the jealous, frustrated Guido—it is Serena. She leaves the colony buffeted by her sexual and philosophical discoveries, and Ramazzotti gives a nuanced, multilayered portrayal, reflecting both the truth of her character and the heightened aura ascribed her by hindsight. That dichotomy is more complex here than we tend to expect—Those Happy Years might well include a question mark, as it’s by no means a valentine to youth. Dario’s coming of age lacks the usual benchmarks (first kiss, etc.), and in fact goes unnoticed by all but himself as his parents drift volcanically apart. At times the film is closer to The Squid and the Whale than to Cinema Paradiso, and while literally colorful (a lingering image is of bodies covered in paint), it’s muted by the avowed consequences of the new freedoms. “Those were happy years,” he reflects from the vista of middle age. “Too bad none of us realized it.”

This week sees the U.S. release of Rigor Mortis, a 2013 Hong Kong horror movie that raked in big bucks at the box office, then became one of the top-grossing Hong Kong movies in Taiwan. It’s won a slew of awards and played plenty of prestigious film festivals, but what actually put it on the map is the fact that it contains hopping vampires.

Granted, these hopping vampires are filtered through producer Takashi Shimizu’s gloom-o-vision gaze, and there aren’t many of them, and they don’t hop for very long. But fans of Hong Kong movies were so excited that hopping vampires were going to be onscreen again in any fashion that they fell all over themselves like three-legged puppies when this movie was announced. Why all the excitement?

Allow me to explain.

Chinese vampires are not sexy creatures of the night who dress like Karl Lagerfeld, speak European, and act like they know which wine to order. Chinese vampires are moldering corpses, so stiff with rigor mortis that they can’t bend their arms or legs, forced to hop after their prey, long fingernails extended in front of them. They’re basically blood-hungry pogo sticks that have to have the crap kicked out of them by a Taoist priest before they can be crammed back into their stinky graves.

Sammo Hung put the first hopping vampire onscreen in Encounters of the Spooky Kind (80) but he cemented the formula a few years later with Mr. Vampire (85). The unstoppable Mr. V spawned a host of copycat films (at least 31 between 1985 and 1992) that offered little more than minor, increasingly weird variations on the theme, before it all came to an end with The Musical Vampire (92), the last hopping-vampire movie on record until at least 2001.

What was Mr. V’s bulletproof recipe for a hopping vampire film?

The One-Eyebrowed Priest A stern Taoist priest, usually played by stuntman Lam Ching-ying, whose eyebrow is desperately in need of plucking. Rather than spending his time in peaceful contemplation of nature like most Taoists, he instead keeps himself busy playing an endless game of whack-a-mole with hopalong corpses that refuse to stay in the ground.

Two Stupid Assistants Lam Ching-ying’s One-Eyebrowed Priest would actually have a pretty great life if he was able to find good help, but the only people who ever respond to his Craigslist ads are, as one rival snarks in The Ultimate Vampire, “Maybe stupid or foolish, or even idiot!” That about sums it up. There’s always a dumb, cowardly one who’s ugly, and a cocky, handsome one who knows kung fu. Dummy was played by Hong Kong’s ur-dummy, Ricky Hui, in Mr. Vampire, but he kept his repeat performances to a minimum. Cocky kung fu kid was played by Chin Siu-ho who would go on to play the same part in at least five more hopping-vampire films before starring in Rigor Mortis as himself.

Billy Lau Proof that there is no God to hear our prayers, Billy Lau’s mere existence is enough to constitute a war crime. He’s cast as the self-aggrandizing Captain in Mr. Vampire, an unfortunate choice on producer Sammo Hung’s part because it meant that Lau, who will strangle babies for a paycheck, shows up in Mr. Vampire, Mr. Vampire II, Mr. Vampire III, Haunted Cop Shop I, Haunted Cop Shop II, Vampire vs. Vampire, Here Comes a Vampire, Vampire Settle on Police Camp, Vampire Kids, Mr. Vampire 1992, and Rigor Mortis. Just how horrifying is Billy Lau? You can get a good sense of his obnoxious, overbearing, shrieky screen presence by just looking at the names of the characters he’s played: Chicken, Fatty, Sneaky Ming, Lazy Bone, and Landlord.

Pretty Lady Ghost Perhaps to balance out the fact that we have to live in a world that includes Billy Lau, the gods decided that all hopping-vampire movies must also include a pretty lady ghost. She is never a vampire, and she doesn’t hop, instead she usually shows up in a separate subplot to seduce the cocky young student, giving everyone a time-out for some nonsense kung fu sex comedy. The ranks of pretty lady ghosts include Carrie Ng (Ultimate Vampire), Moon Lee (Mr. Vampire I & II), Pauline Wong (Mr. Vampire II, III, and IV, and Return of the Evil Fox), and Tiffany Lau (Vampire vs. Vampire, Here Comes a Vampire).

Juvenile Sex Jokes What’s the best aphrodisiac? Oysters? Caviar? In China, it’s being chased by a hopping vampire. While Lam Ching-ying’s One-Eyebrowed Priest flees in terror at the first sign of human sexuality, his two assistants walk around with perma-boners, lusting after every single woman they see, be she living, dead, or in the act of ripping off her head and throwing it at them. Juno Mak, director of the so-serious-it-might-pop-a-blood-vessel Rigor Mortis, said in an interview: “I wanted to be more concentrated on the drama, rather than lame, cheesy jokes,” which means he totally misunderstands the entire hopping-vampire genre because 40 percent of any hopping vampire movie is made up of nothing but lame, cheesy jokes. Hopping-vampire movies are full of pee, poop, boobie, butt, and kissing gags. They’re the kind of movies where Carrie Ng’s pretty lady ghost possesses Chin Siu-ho and causes him to instantly grow breasts as big as weather balloons that allow him to float up into the air and over a wall.

Note: While the same gruesome crew is responsible for most of Hong Kong’s hopping-vampire movies (actors Lam Ching-ying, Chin Siu-ho, Pauline Wong, and Moon Lee; producer Sammo Hung and director Ricky Lau), in Taiwan an equally dedicated crew of cinematic craftsmen have been turning out the four Hello Dracula movies about a hopping-vampire child who pees and farts on everyone. Hong Kong stole the character for Mr. Vampire II and Vampire vs. Vampire, meaning that yes, we now live in a world where miniature hopping-vampire kids play baseball with human hearts and breakdance. Deal with it.

I only watched a fraction of the hopping-vampire movies out there, but I’m here to report back on what I found.

THE CLASS OF MR. VAMPIRE

Mr. Vampire (1985) - Most Likely to Succeed 

The first and still the best, Mr. Vampire offers the most thrills and the least pee jokes, which turns out to be the golden ratio. It also contains Sammo Hung and Jackie Chan’s Chinese opera school buddy, Yuen Wah, as the titular vampire. Yuen wouldn’t play a vampire again in his career, which is too bad because his performance is so ferociously physical that the sight of his hopping, unstoppable vampire king makes the laughter die in your throat. Setpiece stacks upon setpiece as assistants are possessed, villagers turn into vampires, graves turn stinky, pretty lady ghosts switch sides, and Lam Ching-ying’s One-Eyebrowed Priest tries to keep this teetering Jenga tower of plot complications from toppling over into chaos. 

Mr. Vampire II (1986) - Most Potential

Because it trades in Chin Siu-ho for Jackie Chan and Sammo Hung’s “little brother” Yuen Biao, because it updates the Republican-era action to modern day Hong Kong, and because it features rocket launchers versus hopping vampires, you’d think that Mr. Vampire II might just be the greatest motion picture ever made. Unfortunately, no. Scientists sit around sipping juice boxes and engaging in an unforgivably long debate over whether hopping vampires are human remains or antiques. Billy Lau plays the lead role, in a performance guaranteed to make your children cry. Lam Ching-ying and Yuen Biao don’t even show up until the 40-minute mark (although to be fair, at that point they do engage in a very long, very strange action sequence involving two hopping vampires, one paper talisman that can freeze one of them at a time, and a jar of “Retardant” that makes everyone move in slow motion). A lot of the running time is given over to a rip-off of E.T.: The Extraterrestrial with a child vampire standing in for E.T. and befriending some juicy human children in an endless subplot. But the last 20 minutes sweep away any concerns over its place in Hong Kong movie heaven as the two hopping vampires go on a bouncy rampage through downtown Hong Kong, the SWAT team are called into action, and Lam Ching-ying dispenses meta-dialogue like: “My master Sammo had Spooky Encounters, now he’s met the Dead and the Deadly. Last year I caught a Mr Vampire. My name is Lin Ching-ying.”

Mr. Vampire III (1987) - Wackiest

Featuring exactly zero hopping vampires, Mr. Vampire III does however feature comedian Richard Ng turning into a giant chicken and getting his butt rubbed by a ghost, so there’s that. It’s basically Peter Jackson’s The Frighteners given the Hong Kong movie treatment, with Richard Ng (who appears in Rigor Mortis) as a fake Taoist priest who cons the gullible with the assistance of a father-son ghost team who travel inside his umbrella. He comes across a village terrorized by a witch (Pauline Wong, as usual) and her unstoppable minions who want to rip off everyone’s heads and beat them to death with their own skulls. Since the village’s population includes Billy Lau, you can understand the urge. Nevertheless, Lam Ching-ying is on hand to serve up some sweet action scenes and to dispense with all the black dog’s blood, virgin-boy urine, and yellow paper talismans that proper ghost disposal calls for. Sammo Hung makes his only on-screen appearance in the series as a waiter who sings happy birthday right before Lam Ching-ying gets punched in the face with a wooden fist on a spring (don’t ask), and Richard Ng winds up frying a ghost, and then gets chased around by the beer-battered phantom while it makes Donald Duck noises. It also contains the only political commentary of the entire series when Richard Ng tells his spooky companions: “Opposites don’t coalesce.” “What about one country, two systems?” the ghost zings back, referring to Hong Kong’s proposed governmental system of self-rule under Mainland China. In the world of Mr. Vampire, that’s about as political as it gets.

Mr. Vampire IV (1988) - Most Likely to Kick Ass

Yuen Wah returns! And his return is heralded with a blast of rip-roaring action. Lam Ching-ying is conspicuously absent, his role taken by Anthony Chan (who made a cameo as a Taoist priest at the beginning and end of the first Mr. Vampire movie, and who stars as the main Taoist priest in Rigor Mortis) as a grumpy, crotchety Taoist vampirebuster who lives next door to Wu Ma playing a Buddhist ghostbuster. Chin Siu-ho’s little brother, Chin Ka-lok, takes on the Chin Siu-ho role this time around and the first half of the movie is series of supernatural grudge fights between the feuding neighbors which are fun until they turn ugly and sadistic and a little bit rapey. The hijinks get so uncomfortable that it’s practically a relief when the hopping vampire shows up, although he’s followed by Yuen Wah playing a campy gay palace official who embodies pretty much every gross stereotype about campy gay Chinese palace officials from the Qing Dynasty. 

All of which doesn’t matter. The last half of the movie is one massive action setpiece in which an unstoppable hopping vampire goes berserk, unleashing an avalanche of escalating chaos in a series of intricate action sequences that topple one into the next like falling dominos. Chin Ka-lok is on acrobatic overdrive, Anthony Chan acquits himself well as a good guy who’s fun to hate, and the action is fueled by one wacky idea after another. Not since the first Mr. Vampire film has the hopping vampire been this scary.

THE BEST OF THE REST

Outside the Mr. Vampire series you’ve got everything from Aloha Little Vampire Story (1988) to Vampire Settle on Police Camp (1990) to Haunted Cop Shop I (1987, written by Wong Kar Wai). Here are some of the best, or at least weirdest, out there.

Vampire vs. Vampire (1989)

One of only two movies Lam Ching-ying ever directed, this is an energetic Mr. Vampire knock-off with one big difference: one of the titular vampires is a straight-outta-Taiwan Hello Dracula child vampire while the other is a Western-style “I vant to suck your blud!” vampire. Lam and his assistants keep the child vampire at home like a hopping housecat, and all seems well until a nearby Christian church becomes a bone of contention for the local militia who decide that since there aren’t enough nuns to rape they’ll burn it down instead. Amidst all the shenanigans, the head nun (famous Hong Kong soul singer, Maria Cordero) unearths a secret room containing a cranky Euro-vampire. Old school optical effects clutter the frame, hundreds of real life vampire bats are unleashed (and punched in their tiny skulls), Lam Ching-ying insists that his underwear be replaced, and, after a spooky late-night ghost lantern search (the Taoist version of a drone) Lam Ching-ying engages the Western vamp in foot to face combat. Unfortunately, being Western, the vampire is immune to all of Lam’s Taoist charms so it’s up to the child vampire to turn himself into a suicide bomber, hopping into combat in an explosive vest to save the day.

Magic Cop (1990) 

Directed by ace action choreographer Tung Wai, this update of the Mr. Vampire formula transplants Lam Ching-ying’s One-Eyebrowed Priest to modern-day Hong Kong. Here he’s a rural cop brought to the big city to shut down a drug dealer who’s using zombies as drug mules. It’s a non-stop barrage of pee jokes, action sequences, and spooky encounters—and watching Lam unleash Taoist rituals in contemporary Hong Kong never gets old. The big bad turns out to be an evil witch getting up to no good, and the fact that she’s a frost witch gives Tung an excuse to execute an impressive series of fire stunts. Japanese action heavy, Michiko Nishikawa, plays the witch and kickboxer Billy Chow features as her henchman. Needless to say, Lam Ching-ying has to kick a lot of people in the face to settle this supernatural problem.

Doctor Vampire (1990) 

Hopping is always a transitional stage for hopping vampires, since usually by the climactic end fight they’ve limbered up enough to run around and do some hitting and kicking too. So it makes sense that hopping vampires were actually just a transitional stage for the genre. By the time 1990 rolls around, Western-style vampires are on hand to sleep in coffins, suck blood, and engage in anatomically improbable sex. While Doctor Vampire may not be the best of the bunch, it’s definitely the most racist. Dr. Chiang, a Chinese doctor, heads to England for a conference and becomes possessed by an inexplicable desire to wear a cape and lick patients during surgery when he returns. “Did a vampire bite you?” a friend asks, “Such things happen in Europe, you know.” It turns out that while in Europe (portrayed as a dangerous Third World country) a vampire lady did bite him in the nuts. This causes complications with Dr. Chiang’s girlfriend, and things only get worse when said lady vampire shows up to warn her victim that her vampire master is coming for him because Chinese blood “tastes like ginseng!” Lady vampire and Dr. Chiang take time out to have a romantic candlelight dinner consisting of bloody cotton balls left over after an operation and wet scabs spread on toast. 

In the end, the Western vampire shows up, shoots laser beams out of his eyes, and gets defeated by the power of good old-fashioned Chinese opera. Although the action is relentlessly undercranked, turning the actors into wind-up toys on fast forward, and the main bad guy is often replaced by a Chinese stuntman wearing a blond mop on his head, this is the kind of fast, sloppy, hit-and-run entertainment that makes for a solid B picture from Hong Kong. It may be cheap and messy but no one’s going to go home feeling like this movie didn’t try its hardest to give them a good time.

Crazy Safari (1991)

A legendary movie, and for good reason, Crazy Safari will go down in the annals of cinema as one of the strangest movies ever made. Lam Ching-ying goes to South Africa to help a client retrieve the corpse of his venerable ancestor. As they fly back to Hong Kong, the corpse turns into a hopping vampire and falls out of the plane, only to be discovered by N!xau, the bushman from the 1980 hit The Gods Must Be Crazy. After encountering evil monkeys, having his leg swallowed up to the thigh by a snake, and fighting a rhinoceros, Lam Ching-ying and N!xau team up against evil poachers/diamond smugglers, at which point Lam Ching-ying rides an ostrich into battle. With a surprise Bruce Lee cameo, and a final fight in which the spirit of a monkey possesses a Chinese man, inspiring him to attempt awesome kung fu feats, I’m not sure if I can sell this movie any harder. You’re either fully on board at this point, or watching the crazy train vanish over the horizon while sadly waving goodbye. One final sweetener: comedy team Stephen Chow and Ng Man-tat provide voiceover narration for the entire movie that is only tangentially related to what’s happening onscreen.

The Ultimate Vampire (1991)

This may only be a so-so hopping vampire movie, but it’s an excellent debut vehicle for Andrew Lau, who was transitioning from one of Hong Kong’s best cinematographers to one of its best directors (Infernal Affairs, The Storm Riders). Rarely have the ramshackle outdoor sets that feature in this kind of movie looked so spookily blue-lit and eerie with paper lanterns swinging in the cold midnight wind. Lam Ching-ying’s idiot students unleash a problem (as usual) when they open up hell and let out all the ghosts. The vinyl-clad Hell Police (who accept bribes, by the way) show up and Lam has to go to the head of the Taoist association for help in rounding up the runaway souls. His Master employs Super Tactics, which apparently involves blowing ghosts up, much to Lam’s dismay, and then someone has an out-of-body experience and a pack of stray dogs steals their body leaving them in a world-threatening lurch (if they can’t find the body, his soul will become some kind of astral super-serial-killer). The first hopping vampires show up around the 40-minute mark when Lam’s assistants have to go suck the coffin mushrooms on Coffin Hill in the middle of Coffin Woods, which is home to an army of hopping vampires who can only be stopped when their heads are blown up. Carrie Ng is on hand as the pretty lady ghost and Lam Ching-ying is crankier than normal. 

There’s nothing wrong with The Ultimate Vampire, and it’s definitely the most atmospheric of all the hopping vampire movies, but by 1991 audiences had seen it all before and then some, and so the genre faded, making Rigor Mortis the first hopping-vampire movie to come along in ages that doesn’t play its venerable hoppers as a sight gag. But while Rigor Mortis is a good movie and everything, I miss the days when the genre wasn’t quite so serious and we were allowed bespoke freakery like this: 

Rigor Mortis and Mr. Vampire will screen at this year's NYAFF.

LINKS! LINKS! LINKS!

... Hong Kong hit scandal overdrive last week when two of the hottest stories of the day wound up being the same story!!!

Story #1: Angelica Lee has been in a bunch of art films before, but it was her 2002 horror movie The Eye that really put her over the top. Not only did she win Best Actress for her performance at the Hong Kong Film Awards and the Golden Horse Awards, but she started dating her director, Oxide Pang. The two were inseparable until 2010 when they tied the knot and ever since then, as the press says:

“Angelica has been working hard at being a good wife and mother to Oxide and his 12-year-old daughter from a previous marriage. She was even willing to use her status as a Golden Horse Awards ‘Best Actress’ to support her husband’s films, playing the lead in Oxide’s movie, Out of Inferno, last year. Netizens commented that they have ‘never seen her playing such a useless character before.’”

Why is the press so mean to poor Oxide? Because last week he was spotted making out at the movies with 26-year-old “pseudo-model” Liddy Li. The two were seen canoodling in public and making kissy face and everything. Angelica Lee retreated to her homeland of Malaysia, and Oxide came calling, begging for her forgiveness. The two even released a joint statement about the mess, although that was before Lee was spotted in a private hospital looking exhausted and now everyone wants Oxide’s blood.

Story #2: Last weekend, an unemployed air conditioner technician, Li Tak-yan, got in a dispute with another resident of his Kowloon Bay apartment building. The two men were seen arguing on security cameras, and then Li shot and killed the other man before retreating to his apartment. Police called in the SDU team who surrounded the building and sealed off the 10th floor where Li had his apartment. After standing on his balcony with a gun to his head, Li retreated inside his apartment and shot himself. He was declared dead at the hospital.

Why is Hong Kong electrified? Because it turns out that Li Tak-yan is Liddy Li’s father. A slew of memes have been launched and, of course, the Daily Mail has all the shocking details, such as the fact that… Li Tak-yan never washed his shirt!!!

... In happier/sadder news, the three-fingered salute popularized in the Hunger Games books and movies as a symbol of respect and of resistance to the Capitol has been taken up by people in Thailand protesting the coup. As Col. Weerachon Sukhondhapatipak, a spokesman for the junta, said to the press: “We know it comes from the movie, and let’s say it represents resistance against the authorities.” 

People have been warned that if they are seen giving the salute in a group setting they will be arrested.

“It’s time for the poor to get rich, and for the rich to start paying,” declares Shira, the 22-year-old protagonist of Nadav Lapid’s Policeman. Founders of an Israeli protest movement that’s like a violent version of Occupy Wall Street, Shira (Yaara Pelzig) and her friends plot to kidnap a wealthy CEO at his daughter’s wedding. Once their plan is in motion, Yaron (Yiftach Klein), squad leader in an elite anti-terrorism police unit, is ordered to free the hostages, leading to an unavoidable clash between the two groups of charismatic protagonists: five police officers acting on behalf of homeland security, and four revolutionary youngsters fighting in the name of “the 99 percent.”  

Policeman, Lapid’s debut feature, was written and directed shortly before the demonstrations that broke out in summer 2011, when tens of thousands of Israelis took to the streets to protest the ever-rising cost of living. When the film was released in Israel that August, the governmental film rating authority (analogous to the MPAA in the U.S.) limited admission to 18-year-olds and up, a decision viewed by Lapid and several Israeli journalists as an attempt to censor the film’s troubling depiction of economic inequity leading to civic uprising. Following the media frenzy, the age limit was revised from 18 to 14.   

FILM COMMENT spoke with Lapid, whose film opens next Friday at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, about censorship, anarchism, and the pros and cons of working with an editor who happens to be his mother.

The opening shot depicts Yaron and his squad members—four Israeli alpha males—biking down a hill. There is a strong emphasis on their physicality throughout the film. Why did you limit the use of dialogue and focus instead on body language?

I recently read an interview with Mexican filmmaker Carlos Reygadas in which he explained that there’s a unique richness to an opening shot, because everything is still possible and unknown. The spectator’s mind can wander in infinite directions because she is not yet enslaved by the narrative. For me the opening shot was a way to put together the main assumptions and materials the film deals with. It begins with a naked land and yellow-brown hills, a place that is both paradise and hell, much like Israel—a state embodying the tensions between the reality of the desert and the fantasy of “the promised land.”

In that sense, these five “Israeli heroes” are not just passing through the land; they are, rather, conquering and appropriating it as they go along. The hills belong to them. At the end of the sequence they shout out their names and their voices echo through the empty valley. They see it as a way of putting their mark on the landscape. That’s why I think there is no need to talk. These people do not need small talk. In fact, they see small talk as a form of weakness. It is a tool of the stranger, the visitor, the one who is not at home.

At the same time, it seems that their masculinity is constantly threatened. One policeman struggles with terminal cancer, others face an internal investigation over a recent rescue mission.

The moment we have empathy towards them, their weaknesses and struggles become more apparent. The film, however, does not celebrate this inevitable decline. They begin as almost mythological figures, and as the story unfolds, they face the mediocrity of life.

We should also remember that they are serial killers in the name of homeland security. They face legal problems for having killed unarmed Palestinians civilians. Their justification is “we kill the bad ones to protect the good ones,” and this is what they believe in. But they also hide behind legal technicalities and try to manipulate the system.          

Another characteristic the five policemen share is patriotism. After the biking trip, Yaron gazes at the vast landscape and shouts: “This is the most beautiful country in the world.”

Yes, and this is the pivotal sentence of the film. For me, there is something strange in describing an empty desert as “beautiful.” This is the key to understanding the rupture between the policemen and the anarchists.  In a scene that mirrors the opening shot, Shira and her friends shoot a tree in the middle of the desert as an act of rage and hatred toward the country.

There’s a huge difference between shouting your name and shooting at a tree: It is the difference between those who feel rooted in this land, and those who feel detached and estranged from it. At the same time, detachment has its merits: it brings about a great capacity to see the blind spots others ignore. An Italian thinker once said: “My motherland is the state in which I’m ashamed.” Shira and the others are ashamed, and therefore they have the urge to struggle.

After the kidnap takes place, the policemen are confused by the fact that they are forced to deal with Israeli—rather than Palestinian—terrorists. At the same time, the young anarchists argue whether they should mention the Occupation in their manifesto.

Policeman is a film about the Israeli “collective soul.” The Palestinians are a part of this soul, even when we try to ignore their existence. They are the constant phantom of the “enemy.” Their guilt is pre-proven. I think there is no inner debate regarding the Occupation within the Israeli society since the Palestinians now function as the ultimate “other.”

The film also deals with rituals. In that sense the manifesto-writing scene is very naïve. These young people try to write a manifesto according to the way they think subversive groups write their manifestos, much like the policemen imitate cinematic heroes.

The film presents a very complex approach to violence. On the one hand, it is the thing that brings people together and creates a sense of camaraderie; on the other hand, it can have unpredictable and deadly consequences.

I agree with that observation. Violence is not only a negative force. Within a group you can find friendship, gentleness, fraternity, while the violence and aggression are targeted toward the “outsider.” The policemen are embodiments of the state, but they are not the ones making decisions. The “bad guys”—those who call the shots and send them to their missions—are invisible to us, and in a way they are the main source of violence.

Did you anticipate the 2011 civil protest in Israel when writing the film?

I think this question has two answers. Technically, I didn’t predict anything. Policeman is a pessimistic film about social immobility and incapacity to change reality, while the civic uprising was, for a short time, a surprising success. 

The second answer might be that I identified a huge elephant in the Israeli living room: social injustice and inequality. Unlike historians or sociologists, a filmmaker has the privilege of imagination. I wrote a story about an imagined group shortly before similar groups came to life. In that sense it is an interesting case of the relationship between fiction and reality.

Were you surprised by the fact that Policeman was initially limited to 18-year-old viewers?

Yes, since it was an attempt to censor the film. It provoked a wave of criticism in the press, which led to a decision to ask the film rating committee to re-watch the feature and reconsider their decision. Following this second screening, one committee member said: “I have no issues with the policemen, only with the anarchists. We wouldn’t like to give the Israeli youth dangerous ideas.” I found this to be a very sincere answer.

For me, the most surprising part was the realization that people still believe in the transformative power of cinema. The idea that an Israeli teenager will watch such a film and then purchase a gun and kidnap someone seems quite unlikely to me. As a filmmaker, I wish cinema had such power, but I tend to believe that this medium has a more limited, and less immediate, influence.

You wrote the script for Policeman during a Festival de Cannes Residence, and last month premiered your second feature, The Kindergarten Teacher, at the festival.  Could you describe your experience there?

It was a magnificent experience. Screening a film for the first time is always traumatic. You hope for the best but prepare yourself for the worst. Apart from the question of whether people will love or hate it, there is also a question of how they’ll understand it. I hope the films I make are not didactic. I want them to be open-ended and confusing, so the viewers could come up with their own answers to the questions.

In both Policeman and The Kindergarten Teacher you avoid the use of non-diegetic music. Instead, you make your characters sing.

That’s true. I feel that I don’t really know how to use a soundtrack or external music. I prefer the idea of throwing it on the character: Yaron is the one who decides when to do it. I love the idea of characters pronouncing themselves in different forms. One of the most powerful, creative, and sexy ways to pronounce oneself is by singing or dancing. Yaron listens to an album in a way that reveals his personality.

Your mother, Era Lapid, edited both your features. Could you describe the work process with her? 

A film is always a collective work. It is a constant dialogue, and sometime there are disagreements in which you—as the director—are forced to exercise your authority. I remember sitting in the editing room with my mother and telling her, “I’m the director”—to which she replied: “Well, I’m the director’s mother.”

In general, the relationship between editor and director has to move fairly quickly from the stage of politeness, otherwise no film will ever get made. We have known each other for over thirty years, so we can skip the introductions and be very open about things. My mother is not an easy person. She is very direct and not afraid to tell me the truth. It might not always be a good thing as a parent, but it sure is an advantage for an editor. 

One Day Pina Asked... has an exclusive theatrical engagement at Film Society of Lincoln Center from June 6 - 12.

One Day Pina Asked...

During a 2011 post-screening Q&A of Ishtar at the 92nd Street Y, Elaine May quipped, “Some people say it was too ahead of its time. ‘Ahead of its time’? How is that even possible!?” May’s point: the tag is nothing more than a glib sidestep, because everything is inescapably of its time, no matter how progressive. This reality comes into sharpest focus when looking at members of the avant-garde, and how they reflect and play off of each other. Chantal Akerman’s One Day Pina Asked…, shot over several months in 1982, is one such document, a quiet, distinctive portrait of Pina Bausch’s Wuppertal Dance Theater.

Already pillars of their mediums, both Chantal Akerman and Pina Bausch were considered revolutionary for overlaying larger conceptual frameworks onto autobiographical and/or shared quotidian female experience. Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce (75) is as much a work of choreography as Bausch’s pieces are, in Akerman’s words, “little films to which she adds dance.” Their respective turns toward the personal are equally thanks to Sixties feminism, American and pan-European influences, and belonging to the first post-WWII generation.

Come Dance With Me

Like Akerman in Dis-moi (80) or her 2007 installation based on her Jewish grandmother’s diaries, “Walking Next to One's Shoelaces into an Empty Fridge,” Bausch in part sought to regain what had been lost in the war. Trained in German Expressionist Dance (Ausdruckstanz)—which, along with all arms of German Expressionism, had its development prematurely halted by a Nazi ban—Bausch continued its project by putting emotional states and dramatic elements at the heart of her choreography, as well as choral elements introduced by the style’s founder Rudolf von Laban. In Bausch’s 1980 (80), featured in Akerman’s film, a chorus of dancers, dressed in fine evening wear, move together with small gestures: both men and women gingerly apply makeup from an imaginary hand compact. In Kontakthof (78), the group swarms en masse around a single female dancer, their individuality expressed through the little twists they give to their cruelty—pulling her up off the floor against her will, positioning her, aggressively groping her body and hair, or booping her nose.

The gestures are echoed in backstage footage of the dancers between numbers, applying makeup or hurriedly pulling on their costume. As Akerman notes in her voiceover at the start of the film (which abruptly disappears, only to return 40 minutes later), Bausch incorporated the personal experiences of her dancers. During interviews with the (trilingual!) troupe, one describes what happened when Bausch arrived at rehearsal and asked them what came to mind when they heard the word “love,” eliciting a range of culturally specific responses. (There’s also a comical sequence in which the dancers, running around in circles, shout three stereotypes about their respective homelands into a microphone.) Second only to the tantalizingly short interview with Bausch herself at the end of the film, the interview that lingers longest in my memory is of a young German dancer who performed an American Sign Language version of George Gershwin’s “The Man I Love.” (As he explains, he learned it while on vacation in the United States, and, because Bausch asked her dancers to tell her something they were proud of during rehersals, it was eventually incorporated into Carnations [1982].) His performance of the song through sign language is no less controlled and emotive than his dancing. Sophie Tucker’s histrionic vocals, played on a scratchy record, are juxtaposed with his signing and his monotone voicing of the lyrics in time with hers: “And. So. I’m. Waiting. For…The. Man. I. Love.”

Carnations

When we see him perform the song later in front of a large live audience, they laugh—alienation, another key component of Ausdruckstanz, Tanztheater, or any other number of dramaturgical styles, is often used for humor. Yet like all expertly deployed alienation, there’s something heartbreaking about his first performance in rehearsal, something that is somehow lost when im theater. While Wim Wenders’s 3-D Pina may be the crowd-pleasing, pumped-up version of Bausch’s dances, Akerman’s vision is far more intimate and emotive. True to both her and Bausch’s vision, One Day Pina Asked... is less an attempt at archival documentation than at expressing a feeling through movement and moment.

From an untouchable boatman floating along the Ganges (Boatman, 93), to a downtrodden trailer encampment in the California desert (Below Sea Level, 08), to a fugitive drug-cartel contract killer holed up in a motel (El Sicario, Room 164, 10), Gianfranco Rosi is attracted to those who live on the fringes of society. The director, who shoots all of his own features, does not simply document his subjects but rather immerses himself in their environments, his productions typically becoming multi-year endeavors.

The first documentary to win the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, Rosi’s new feature, Sacro GRA, weaves a tapestry of characters who colorfully embody the eccentricities of their setting. The GRA (Grande Raccordo Anulare), an impressive ring-shaped highway encircling Rome, was designed to better connect the lives of the city’s denizens but has instead produced obtrusive dividing lines. Rosi investigates this divide to discover a bustling world on the outskirts of Rome.

FILM COMMENT spoke with Rosi by phone from the eternal city, ahead of the U.S. premiere of Sacro GRA in Open Roads: New Italian Cinema at the Film Society of Lincoln Center.

The people in your films range from untouchables to fugitives to the down and out. What attracts you to these socially marginalized figures?

Well, now I have to tell you something that will disappoint you. The only one that thinks they’re marginalized is the one that feels liable. You ask the audience. Because I don’t see them as marginalized people. They live on the margin, but somehow the ones in Sacro GRA are beyond that. You saw the film, right?

Yes, excellent film.

So, it is a story of the outskirts of the city—the city that you don’t see. It’s a view of people that truly live on the margins. How do the people there move beyond social belonging? All put together, it has a very strong poetic element—the way they talk, the way they express themselves, the way they move.

For me, it’s about showing a certain kind of people. And somehow these people are able to express larger society in a different way, and that’s what fascinates me. Like in Boatman, he was beyond—the boatman was the point. The way he worked, they way he expressed himself. He was about everything.

I completely agree.

He didn’t come off as an outsider. He belonged to [his job, as a ferryman of corpses], but the way he expressed himself was about everything. He was like the god of the Boatman, you know?

I remember he also tells a folk story that mythicizes his social rank.

In my film, nobody complains. In many documentaries there’s always this complaining and explaining, or explaining and complaining. First you have people complaining about something, and then we see an explanation of why they complain about something. So in my film nobody complains about their situation. I don’t want you to know it, and I wouldn’t try to solve it. It’s quite intentional.

And in El Sicario, it is about a type of man. It’s an archetype. And at the end I am friends with them forever. I’m in touch with all of them, we write each other, we see each other, when I go home I see them. And it’s always more an archetypal figure than a social figure for me.

You’ve filmed on three continents, documenting such unique locales. How has your international background shaped you as a filmmaker?

That was my life. I was born in Africa, I lived in Turkey, I moved to New York and stayed there for many years. I have a double nationality. And even when I shot in Rome, it was like being somewhere else. I like the idea of being somewhere else. And I like using this as a pretext in order to meet people, to tell a certain story, and hopefully have this reflect on the characters themselves.

So you start with the location, and then comes the story?

I start with an encounter with a place. Then in this place, I like it to become a mythical area. A mythical city, a mythical place. And then I like to somehow create an abstraction within this place. Like Rome—the Rome I feel is a Rome people don’t recognize anymore. The place has been transformed—you don’t recognize the location anymore, this area and that area, and it is not the same anymore.

When I showed the film in Japan, people completely embraced the movie. There were like 800 people at the screening, and they were laughing at the right moment, they were smiling, suffering—everything. And the film became almost legendary. It was the transformation of the place, the transformation of the architecture—and it became a universal thing. And they all relate to that. It creates a state of interpretation that is bigger than the one I could expect.

With Sacro GRA, you’ve made essentially a plotless film.

Completely plotless! Completely!

And the landscapes dominate over the lives of the characters. Do you see the landscapes as the only true character in the film?

It’s true, but it’s also the way the landscapes are shot. The river for instance—I had never seen the river like that. When I shot that pier from the window, I was thinking of a spaceship landing in that area. And at a certain point I had to open that circle and make it a point of infinite time, and make it seem like a mental map. So for the film I was imagining this place—a route with an ambulance, a hospital, a church, a little village, some prostitutes, a river, and a few characters that they met. I had to forget that Rome is a place with three million people. And that is when a documentary becomes an interesting way of filmmaking.

Right.

And it is still a documentary because everything I filmed is absolutely true. I never manipulate anything to do this or that, or to make a character do something. I don’t do any of that. But I do feel I have to be able to grab and grasp the truth that belongs so intimately to each of them, and a little fragment of life—their life. That is what is the truth in documentary. I am not talking about the difference between fiction and non-fiction documentary. The truth is what it is. And it’s their truth, it is their moment—a portrait of them.

The character that stuck out for me was the man who records the insects in the trees.

Ah yes! I met him for two years. I would meet him and talk to him every day. His place was a place that I used to go to forget about everything. And I had been trying to figure out a way to film him, but I never knew how to place the camera. And one day he called me and said that this tree that he had planted was invaded by a squirrel. So I spent the whole day with him. And suddenly I see the light leaning—it was almost night—and I said to myself: I have to do it now. And I also put my microphone in the tree, and the next morning I listened to it and was shocked. I said, wow, what is this? I called him, and said, Francesco, you have to listen to this, on the microphone, it is so powerful. And he put the headphones on—and you remember the shot?

Yes.

And he was completely astonished. So I asked him to describe the sounds that he was hearing, and he starts talking. This a monologue no actor could ever act, so I am fascinated by this—someone who is in front of a real moment in his life, and it becomes a representation.

It’s a beautiful scene. How do you address the challenges each location uniquely brings as a filmmaker? Like trying to film in a hotel room, or in a desert, or on a boat in the Ganges.

I see each place as its own unique locality, and for every place I go, I always have to discover a new language—how to shoot, how to tell that story. When I was in India, I was supposed to do it in a certain way. In the room in El Sicario, I had to decide in five minutes what the structure was going to be of my movie. And it’s always a matter of subtraction—take it out, take it out, take it out. The challenge is not to make a story with a beginning, middle, or end, but to make the viewer face the character in a little moment of their life. That is the challenge of the language.

So the form of the film doesn’t really take shape until you start shooting?

No! Because every time is a different story, every time is a new interaction; I have to forget my previous film. The documentary for me is a beautiful line of presentation that does not happen anymore unfortunately. Nowadays, in order to make money, people have to write down the script of what they are shooting and the film becomes factually bound. They are all the same. I call them the “commission editor film.” Ninety percent of what you see, you know? It’s a commercial for the director.

I look forward to seeing your next film. It’s called Mare Nostra, is that correct?

[Laughs] It’s a completely working title. And it’s a film about Europe and what is going on now here. It is about immigrants from Africa who died on the sea. Many of the people here fear that they are being conquered by someone else—people get scared by the things they don’t know. And they are always afraid of someone that they don’t know. That is what I want to show—I want people to look at things that they don’t see every day.

Eluana Englaro is Italy’s analogue to Terri Schiavo: a woman in a vegetative state for well over a decade, whose fate became a cause célèbre when the decision was made to remove her from life support. Director Marco Bellocchio resuscitates the Englaro case in Dormant Beauty, returning to a few vital days in 2009 as things came to a head and the story riveted the nation. With a grand sweep and bursts of operatic emotion, the film uses the explosive controversy to express the troubling condition of contemporary Italy.

Instead of focusing on Eluana Englaro or portraying those closest to her, Bellocchio, who also co-wrote the script, chooses to follow several sets of fictional lovers and families in separate storylines that in some way mirror or comment on the Englaro case. The plots intersect only tangentially, but each develops a variation on a similar set of themes: human connection, the sacrifices people make for those they love, and what it means to be both dead and alive.

Looming over it all is the cacophony of an unrelenting media backdrop: a histrionic chorus of television news, Catholic outcry, and the rising political firestorm that reaches to the highest levels of government. Prime Minister Berlusconi—like President Bush in the Schiavo case—sought to manipulate the situation for political gain, and took to grandstanding and a last-minute legislative push to halt the end of life decision.

Closely following the Eluana story as it unfolds on television is a renowned film star (Isabelle Huppert, credited as “Divine Mother”) who’s put her career on hold since her daughter Rosa (an angelic, inert Carlotta Cimador) fell into a vegetative state of her own. The retired actress’s theatrical instincts are repurposed to grand effect in her latest role as grieving mother. Consumed by maternal anguish and stuck in an endless cycle of obsessive rituals—attending mass, keeping bedside vigil, willfully striding with her obedient nunnish attendants in tow—she need only enter a room and tensions rise.

Huppert’s matriarch is an imperious, stop-at-nothing diva who shrivels anyone standing in her path with a withering glance. She emasculates her supportive husband, beguiles a well-meaning priest, and daily starves her healthy son of the validation he craves. Despite the prickly exterior, Huppert instills a vein of tenderness within, a self-awareness that registers as inner torment at the cruelty her suffering is causing others—and herself. There’s a sense that the mother does care for her son, she isn’t as devout as her outward piety suggests, and she craves to have her old life back—she just can’t escape this trap of her own making.

Family relations—in particular the strained mother-son dynamic—are central in much of Bellocchio’s oeuvre. The director often juxtaposes this with the tensions arising between secularism and Catholicism, a layered struggle at the core of films such as his elegiac My Mother’s Smile (2002). Here, that interplay is further complicated by the intrusion of politics.

Developments in the Englaro case thrust mild-mannered Senator Uliano Beffardi (Toni Servillo) into an existential dilemma, as he confronts the conflict between his personal beliefs and pressure to toe the party line. Servillo wears a glum mask of weary suffering as the ever-put-upon Beffardi. The deep creases in his face testify to inner damage from years of tangling with heavy moral burdens. As Beffardi engages in subtle dialectics with fellow party members, Servillo’s controlled cadence balances knowing resignation with sincere search for a dignified way out. He imbues Beffardi with the gravitas of a classic tragic hero, a sense reinforced during a bathhouse scene with conspiring senators that evokes the Golden Age of Rome (and Hollywood). The scene—shot with high-contrast lighting, shadows, facial silhouettes, and enveloping steam, in the kind of stark compositions Bellocchio often favors—features an aged psychiatrist-politician (Roberto Herlitzka) who freely dispenses pills and advice to his fellow senators, summoning otherworldly wisdom with netherworld affect.

Nothing’s easy for the pensive Beffardi, who as a single father also struggles to maintain good relations with his cellphone-screening daughter Maria (Alba Rohrwacher), a passionate young protester aligned with the pro-life forces of church and state. Though Maria may indulge in the grown-up political games her father plays, she still dwells within her clique of schoolgirl friends. Her commitment to her cause is tested when she falls for scruffily handsome Roberto (Michele Riondino), an activist from the other side of the protest line. Maria’s doubts and worries run across Rohrwacher’s face in little tics and flashes, eyes that peer intently or demurely avert a gaze. A shot of her hesitation in a hotel foyer conveys Maria’s fragile but sure self-possession. She’s young and naïve, but her emotional delicacy is tempered by currents of resilience.

As with his portrait of Mussolini’s first wife in Vincere (09), Bellocchio mines political quarries primarily for insights into how public events shape and reflect private lives. Dramatic pressures build in scenes of bourgeoisie life, until the pent-up emotions are released in outbursts. While Bellocchio pulled this off with restless verve in his 1965 debut feature Fists in the Pocket, and unleashed the feverish anguish of a woman wronged to devastating impact in Vincere, with Dormant Beauty the high-strung emotions shade into the heavy-handed.

Bellocchio aims to reveal the subtle ways historic social events weave into intimate personal dramas. His parallel storylines in Dormant Beauty, however, tend to fray the emotional core he has so ably controlled in past films. Despite the awkward narrative structure, the choppy film serves as a welcome showcase for ably understated performances from veteran Toni Servillo and rising talent Alba Rohrwacher, and a coolly burning Isabelle Huppert.

Late last week—either Day 3,928 or Day 16,954 after the Death of Cinema, depending on which calendar you’re using—I sat down for dinner and drinks with a good friend who’s also freelancer in the film chat industry, and we had the same talk that we usually have, about Doomsday. Publications should serve their critics, who in turn should serve the medium that they write about, when in practice this chain of command is usually inverted! Paychecks are being gobbled up by frauds who sensationalize conventional wisdom, who won’t let any inconvenient truth get in the way of their identifying a trend, and who can’t string two clauses together, so consequently the Sweet Science of criticism has become a playground for dilettantes proudly presenting their editors with weekly mud pies, people whose only professional qualifications are a hefty parental piggybank and/or a complete lack of shame! Soundgarden’s Superunknown got an 8.5 on Pitchfork!

The Immigrant

And we also talked about James Gray’s The Immigrant which, for anyone keeping score at home, has come up in this column for the last three weeks running. The substance of the conversation was this: if film criticism can’t do anything to get people out for James Gray, what can it do?

This isn’t to say that Gray is the Greatest Living Filmmaker, or even part of that conversation—just throwing this out there, a movie by Marco Bellocchio, Dormant Beauty, opens in New York today—or that The Immigrant is a Masterpiece, or not. (The M-word is the kind of broad-side-of-a-barn superlative that one turns to when more precise language fails.) But if I were making up a scouting report on Gray, judging his potential for crossover, I wouldn’t hesitate to call him a five-tool player, the complete package. He makes movies that openly appeal to the emotions; I could plunk anyone in my extended family in front of The Immigrant, and I suspect they would at the very least respond to it. His craft is undeniable, and a source of rich sensorial pleasure. Finally and perhaps most importantly in an age where it is helpful for filmmakers to act as their own spokesmen-and-women, he talks about his work and the work of others engagingly, articulately, and entertainingly, in a bridge-and-tunnel accent that deflects any note of pretention. 

Because I entirely lack the common touch and the proselytizing spirit, the one time that I had a shot at “getting in the tank” for Gray, positively reviewing his 2007 We Own the Night with all of 200 words’ worth of real estate in The Village Voice, I used the descriptor “dolorous nocturne” and saw fit to note that Gray was “[h]elpless with comedy.” (His last two films have gone some way towards correcting this.) I never had enough pull to knock over Twiggy in a tug-of-war, and I might have less today than I had then, but Stephanie Zacharek has gone to bat for The Immigrant at the Voice, while concluding at the end of her first paragraph “In a world like this, what chance does a period melodrama like James Gray's The Immigrant have?” which is something like the ol’ Pauline Kael “There ain’t no way” when reviewing Orson Welles’s Chimes at Midnight. (I’ve made similar prognostications myself when talking about Gray—maybe it’s the fatalism endemic to his world, full of family ties that bind and strangle, that seems to invite asides about the futility of it all.) Over at Vulture, Bilge Ebiri—a critic who walks the line between accessibility and refinement as well as any that I know—has filed a piece whose headline calls Gray “American Cinema’s Secret Jewel,” a point-by-point enumeration of the particular qualities of his films, leavened with good outtakes from the ever-quotable director.  

Little Odessa

So it’s not as if the critics haven’t turned out. Yet at the date of this writing, Box Office Mojo puts The Immigrant’s earnings at $1,154,682 on 150 screens, which ain’t a lot of bread. Because Gray seems like such a sure shot, because The Immigrant is going quietly even with box-office guarantors like Edith Piaf and Avenger Hawkeye in it, I can’t help but be fascinated by the conundrum posed by its glorious failure, which is at the center of a piece posted at Esquire.com by one Jake Mulligan, rather sensationally titled “We Are Living in a Golden Age of Movies: So why is no one watching?” The answer, as put forth by Scott Tobias in “The hidden world of Video on Demand profits” at The Dissolve, is: well, maybe people are watching, just not how they used to? Tobias is writing about the increasing inscrutability of box-office figures in the years since the decline of the DVD market, as back-end profits, formerly at least faintly quantifiable in terms of units moved over the counter, have entered the shadowy realm of downloads, which most of us on the outside presently lack the means to translate into dollars-and-cents values because, per Tobias, “the money generated by VOD rentals is almost never disclosed.” In short, if understanding The Numbers has never exactly been easy, today you’re better off throwing bones or reading entrails.

As Tobias notes, this is of particular concern to independent or niche filmmakers of all stripes, who’ve seen their traditional distribution model completely upended in recent years, to the point where a theatrical run can be almost entirely symbolic, or exist solely as a means to drum up press and pull-quotes. (I believe I’ve linked the pertinent pieces about the four-walling flapdoodle elsewhere.) And yes, in some cases the theatrical run is entirely unnecessary or unwarranted—though the ratio of documentary/independent/microbudget/NoBudge directors who have a visual imagination that demands a big-screen canvas to those that don’t is probably approximately equal to the same ratio as it exists among blockbuster directors and studio brain trusts.

So maybe there’s no call to die on the hill of The Immigrant after all—maybe Gray will make out okay in the long haul and won’t have to wait seven years to make another movie, as he did after 2000’s The Yards. At any rate, Gray has it better than most up-and-coming directors. Having finished his first feature, 1994’s Little Odessa, at the Welles-appointed age of 25, he came around at the tail end of the early-Nineties indie boom, and this pedigree, combined with perseverance, dedication to a certain high-minded cinematic ideal, and craftsmanship, has made him a small but trusted name-brand. (As Gray is eager to tell anyone who will listen, all of his movies with the exception of The Yards have eventually made back their money.) And name recognition is everything: from Taschen coffee-table books to totes, the Monsters of Art House remain remarkably monetizable, as vintage fashion style guides if nothing else. As a regular New York–area rep-goer, I can attest that the DCP restoration of William Friedkin’s Sorcerer, as well as retrospectives devoted to Mizoguchi and Fassbinder, are playing to very healthy crowds. So it’s not as though audiences, in New York at least, have an intrinsic distrust of “difficult” cinema—just so long as it has the respectable patina of age on it. (It’s hard to get a line on audiences in many other North American cities, because they won’t have a chance to see any of the abovementioned movies in a theater even if they want to.)

Sorcerer

When names are so crucial, a desperation to make new ones sets in among the critical caste, either motivated by genuine enthusiasm, hubristic kingmaking, or some combination of the two, often doing the filmmakers a disservice. For example: there are several things that I like about Jeremy Saulnier’s Blue Ruin, which is the “canary in the coal mine” example given in Tobias’s piece, but given the somewhat over-the-top reviews that this modest throwback thriller has received, I can’t help but think that, in the terminology of the boxing world, “We’re bringing the kid along too quick.” (And why did folks insist on giving Ramin Bahrani, with his modest talents, that title shot?)

Filmmakers are less than ever given the luxury of finding their sea legs today, and this make-or-break environment forces critics to speak in an affected language of extremes, a problem in its own right. Though I’m obviously a homer for Gray, ideally critics—let’s distinguish them from reviewers—should be something other than fans, shouldn’t let partisanship hold themselves back from saying bad things about works that they respond to, or from saying good things about works that they don’t. Maybe critics charging themselves with advocacy, as opposed to engaging with the work at hand, are part of the problem? Or maybe the entire class should just be dissolved? Ken Loach recently suggested in a video interview with The Guardian—a newspaper which caters to upper-middle-class Islingtonians—that the culture as a whole would be improved were we to “[s]ack the critics and get ordinary punters in.” This is a larf for a few reasons: first, that Loach seems to presuppose he has an especial rapport with “ordinary punters,” as though they were his own inscribed audience. (“Oi mate, why not pop round my place and we’ll t’row on Kes, right?”) Second, that a supposedly class-struggle-conscious figure like Loach, who imagines that he has some purchase on “political struggle in the real world,” doesn’t know that the critics have, for the most part, already been sacked.

Everyone’s under fire! And a sense of embattlement runs through many of the pieces I’ve cited, though there is no consensus on what exactly is in danger. Tobias’s interest is in “independent genre films,” works that, in his estimation, have “struggled against more genteel arthouse fare. Too small for the multiplex, too rude for the older crowd that truly drives arthouse box office.” Ebiri, meanwhile, notes that Gray’s cinema, though not precisely genteel, occupies “a vanishing middle ground in an industry increasingly polarized between ginormous tentpoles and micro-budget indies.” (For what it’s worth, I’ve long heard it said that horror is the nearest thing to a safe bet in low-budget moviemaking.) It would seem that the multiplex tentpole, critic-proof if not always audience-proof, is the only consistently viable model for American movies—and even if you agree with the gist of Kristin Thompson’s 2009 essay “Don’t Knock the Blockbusters,” that the international success and positive trade-balance brought about by the export of our indigenous blockbuster product is good for “the welfare of the country as a whole,” it’s a bit of a drag for those of us who hold out hope for other kinds of American movies having a theatrical existence as well.

Bleak House

Because I am but a child in these matters, like Bleak House’s Skimpole, I won’t claim to wholly know how to account for or confront the economic woes that beset (non-blockbuster) film distribution in these United States, though on paper it seems like distribution should be easier than ever. Traditionally, the hidden “cost” of releasing a film, beyond initial outlay of budget or acquisition, was Prints & Advertising (P & A), so one would think that the much-ballyhooed switch to DCP projection would reduce this overhead considerably, now that the cost of striking prints and shipping them in huge metal canisters that you could club a bull elephant to death with has been cut out of the equation, and movies are shipped on detachable hard drives or ZIP discs or Google Glass or whatever it is. Of course the rise of one digital delivery system was paralleled by the rise of another, VOD, with its day-and-date or day-before-date, and given the choice, the pharmaceutically stoned consumer would apparently prefer to watch Nymphomaniac: Volume 2 in the same clean, well-lit home entertainment pod where they enjoy all the use of moody cinematographies in Hannibal, so apparently the savings aren’t enough to offset the new competition.

No, I’m afraid that I don’t understand the emerging business model. But the good news is—and it is good news—that nobody else does either, and anyone who acts like there’s such a thing as “conventional industry wisdom” right now is most probably a charlatan who is trying to push ahead their own agenda by pretending it’s a foregone conclusion. Culture is a pitched battle with an undecided outcome, not an inexorable matter of tectonic movements grinding us between them. Nevertheless, there are no lack of voices to announce that the day has already been carried, and much of the advice being given to aspirant participants in the Internet-era cultural economy takes the general tone of the Texas politician who once compared rape to inclement weather (“If it’s inevitable, just relax and enjoy it.”)*

At Medium, I encountered a piece by Andrea Ayres-Deets called “Writing for Readability,” which proposes to lay out ground rules for catering to Internet readers, essentially making the case for extreme utilitarian functionality, arguing that any style can only beleaguer a reader’s overtaxed, slushy gray matter. In so briskly synopsizing the piece, I am trying to follow its advice—there’s a picture of a brain accompanying it, so I guess it must be true! This K.I.S.S. credo may be blamed for the ascent of the think piece, which might better be called the Thought Piece, as it favors a single easily summarized idea, whereas the old horse-drawn review or essay could accommodate many. The quality of these thoughts I do not have to remind you of: YA books are teh bad! The National rules, Poptimism drools! Cultural Vegetables! And, of course, the occasional status quo toadying disguised as no-nonsense truth-telling. Via CriticWire, I have been pointed towards a labeled “Think Piece” at some backwater site called Pajiba.com, written by its publisher, which seems to be a lengthy self-justification for running a lot of hacky celebrity gossip stories. (Or at least I think that’s what it was about; true to Ayres-Deets’s prescription, I kinda just skipped around.) There’s little that’s funnier than people in journalism petitioning for sympathy by talking about the bottom line, rather than doing what they’re supposed to be doing—which is holding the line. (“I’m just a helpless vessel riding the storm-toss’d seas of the market! What can I do but crank out recaps and listicles by the score, for tuppence-a-pop?”)

The only thing that I know with any certitude is this: whatever the beat you’re covering, there’s always something interesting going on, but it rarely happens in the same place or in precisely the same way twice. If you’ve been waiting around for a reprise of Such-and-Such New Wave or Seventies New American Cinema or Punk Rock, you have a better chance of catching Jesus on his next go-around. The arts do have a tendency to flourish in decadence, though, and this is heartening, for this current edifice, founded on a bluffed understanding of the new playing field, is but erected on shifting sands, and destined to come down in good time. “You’ll Never Believe What Happens Next!” will look as quaint as roadside Burma-Shave ads; BuzzFeed will be a historical curio like the proto-tabloid New York Graphic; and we’ll all look back and laugh from an inestimably more terrible future.

* If you find this comparison to that comparison offensive, I would urge you to write an incensed Tweet about it.

Agnieszka Holland’s absorbing, intelligent account of the fallout resulting from a young Czech student’s symbolic self-immolation at the close of the Prague Spring was produced for HBO Europe as a three-episode miniseries. That Burning Bush arrived in North America—at its full runtime of well over four hours—via a series of festival screenings and a two-week Film Forum run speaks both to the vagaries of international distribution and to the increasingly fading line between movie and TV aesthetics.

European filmmakers have always been quicker to recognize the possibilities of television than their American counterparts. Bergman, Fassbinder and Godard made some of their finest work for the small screen, often editing the result for U.S. exhibition. (More recent examples of this trend include Raul Ruiz’s magisterial Mysteries of Lisbon and Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s occasionally thrilling yet finally unsatisfying Penance.) But though they are structured in some respects like TV series, carefully parceling their action out into coherent stand-alone episodes, films like Fanny and Alexander or Berlin Alexanderplatz tend to move more like movies. With their convoluted visual syntax, subtle uses of color and shade, thematic concealments, puzzling elisions, and temporal disruptions, they practically ask to be watched on a big screen in a darkened theater over extended periods of time. 

Holland, a veteran filmmaker who got her start working under Andrzej Wajda and Krzysztof Zanussi during an especially fertile period of Polish cinema history, has spent her career moving back and forth between the big screen and the small. Her recent directing credits include episodes of The Killing, Treme, and The Wire, and the visual language of Burning Bush is rooted in the conventions of contemporary A-list American TV drama: smooth, graceful camera movements, seamless editing, sophisticated but relatively straightforward-realist color palettes and lighting schemes (“handsome,” one might call them, although maybe one shouldn’t). Here, as in the majority of TV dramas, the images’ expressive range is somewhat restricted—in part due to the tighter time and budgetary restrictions faced even by well-funded TV shows, but also, one feels, in order to keep the formal qualities of the image from getting in the way of the development of character or the conveyance of narrative information.

That narrative begins with what turns out to be its central incident—the self-immolation by 20-year-old Jan Palach in Prague’s packed Wenceslas Square on January 16, 1969, five months after the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia—and soon splits into a handful of parallel strands. The way the movie zigzags between each of its several subplots is a feat of narrative structure only somewhat dampened by the score’s annoying habit of sliding into metronomic, pulsing patterns whenever the various storylines come to a head—a blunt device that makes for one of the movie’s most unfortunate nods to TV-drama convention. Ivan Trojan’s blunt-edged but honest police chief, ordered to pre-empt future acts of violent dissent (in the film, the Party authorities prefer the term “suicides”), is a major player in the first episode, but by episode two the film’s center has shifted decisively to Dagmar Burešová (Tatiana Pauhofová), a young lawyer who agrees to take the case of Palach’s bereaved mother and brother after the high-ranking Communist parliament member Vilém Nový (Martin Huba) gives a speech accusing the boy of having intended to fake his own death.

The question underlying the trial—and coming to surface in some of the film’s strongest, most challenging passages—is whether Palach’s deed was an honorable self-sacrifice, a desperate act performed under desperate circumstances, an unjustified rejection of life or, worse, a sign of madness. It was not, a colleague tells Burešová in one scene, the act of a normal man. (She replies that life under occupation is rarely what you’d call normal, either.) Young people can be willing to give their lives away too cheaply, an older resistance sympathizer insists to a group of student protestors. (Or they know what causes are worth a high price, the leader of the group, played by Vojtěch Kotek, snaps back.) If the film ends up—in a coda comprised of newsreel footage from the epochal Palach Week protests 20 years later—unequivocally celebrating Palach as a martyr for a noble cause, it is with full awareness that his initial sacrifice produced a chain of accidental, additional, involuntary martyrs.

One of Burning Bush’s strengths is its refusal to entirely demonize its villains or lionize its heroes. Burešová’s husband, a talented doctor, is one of the movie’s most sympathetic characters, but he can also be too rigid in his principles, to the point of coldly refusing to recognize his kind superior’s attempts to get him off the hook when the powers that be  frame him for slander. And her longtime coworker, who hands over a key piece of evidence to the authorities in exchange for his daughter’s safety, supplies one of the film’s most affecting subplots. There are, however, a handful too many such appeals for sympathy. An otherwise slimy government official and an aging, dotty Party secretary must give over a suspicious amount of their limited screen time to gratuitous mentions of their children and grandchildren, as if the fact of their having families were enough to mitigate in their defense. (This problem cuts both ways; Burešová’s scenes with her two cherubic young daughters strike me as occasionally over-determined.)

Vilém Nový himself is one of the film’s best-drawn secondary figures, an aging, weary bureaucrat who once struggled to outpace the shadow of a prison sentence and now appears hardened by years of calculated misrule. “I am looking for the truth,” he tells Burešová in their single off-the-record conversation near the end of the film. When she answers him incredulously—“But you know that it’s all a lie”—he tells her that she doesn’t understand a thing: “I am a politician. And for a politician, the truth is what is beneficial for the nation.” That line manages both to throw the rest of the movie in focus and broaden its philosophical scope, but it also establishes a somewhat questionable moral dichotomy between truth-seekers like Burešová and Palach, out to uncover the raw, objective facts of the matter about life under communist rule, and cynical, Machiavellian relativists like Nový and his comrades.

What this dichotomy obscures is that Palach, more perhaps than any other figure portrayed the film, dealt more in symbolic than literal truths. His farewell letter billed him as part of a group of “torches” that most likely never existed, and his self-immolation was nothing if not a way of turning himself into a symbol for an oppressed people. It is this symbol that Burešová, among others, struggled to protect and preserve. Holland’s film shows passionately, urgently and convincingly that their struggle was both necessary and fully justified, which is, in the end, another way of saying that it was beneficial for the nation. Whether Burešová’s image of Palach’s act was true because it was beneficial or beneficial because it was true is a question perhaps no movie—or TV series—could answer.

Chronic dissatisfaction, self-absorption, financial dependence, laziness—the dominant traits of the Gen Y gene are hardly desirable when it comes to generating the lead character of a film. That doesn’t stop German writer-director Jan Ole Gerster from making his first feature, A Coffee in Berlin, about a young and unemployed grad-school dropout and his meanderings through the German capital. Berlin remains a popular nesting ground for aimless youth, and what keeps the film energized is the way our protagonist Niko (Tom Schilling) fits right in his homeland, the paradigmatic lost boy in his carefree habitat. It’s yet another tribute to being young, confused, and alone in a big city—a cinematic elegy that feels formulaic but is still budding with the special kind of poetic love a filmmaker shares with his favorite city.

The proverbial pain in the ass that plagues Nikko throughout the film is that nobody will give him a cup of coffee. It’s supposed to be funny, but the gimmick feels almost patronizingly clichéd, distracting from the stronger aspects of the film. Some stylistic flourishes liven things up—an original jazz score by Cherilyn MacNeil and The Major Minors (which is sweet and snappy but could use a little heat), and crisp black-and-white vignettes of Berlin, shot in digital by Philipp Kirsamer. But like the plot, these choices feel a little overdone, as if they were taken from a director’s manual of reliable techniques for expressing nostalgia in movies (spanning from Italian neorealism, to the French New Wave, to more recent “mumblecore” films).

Even so, A Coffee in Berlin redeems itself thematically by offering some intriguing new insights into being young today. The screenplay highlights how so many adults assume in advance that they’re dealing with a bunch of entitled brats, when really it’s not so simple. Gerster’s seriocomic dialogue between Nikko and his superiors—including a harsh psychologist (Andreas Schröders), a grandiose actor friend (Marc Hosemann), his rich dad (Ulrich Noethen)—is harrowingly accurate when it comes to capturing the mutual air of condescension that often wafts between younger and older people. Niko might be a dropout and a smart aleck, but it’s clear that he means well, and maybe that’s why so many people keep spilling their souls to him—for example, his neighbor Karl (Justus von Dohnányi), who brings Niko meatballs as a pretext to rant about his lousy marriage, and a high-school peer Julika (Friederike Kempter), who is quick to open up about severe trauma from her past. With Niko as a witness, the story produces a series of unflattering characterizations of men and women whose dreams of romance, fame, and riches never came true.

Part of the film’s nostalgic charm is how the characters sometimes communicate a great deal without dialogue through subtle changes in countenance, like Buster Keaton but a bit more subdued. A modern mime hardened by cynicism, Schilling manages to capture the worn-out sentiments of his generation in a few frowns and eye rolls. Gerster’s comic pacing often ends scenes with just the right touch of pathos. One memorable sequence involves Niko giving the last of his change to a sleeping homeless man, only to reach back in his cup after the ATM swallows his cash card, all the while observed from the sidelines by a pretty girl with deadpan eyes. At such moments, watching Niko is both funny and poignant, like watching a lethargic cat chase a laser pointer, caught up in a losing game from the start.

The theme of feeling lost in the real world, I think, has been better expressed by mumblecore pioneers—A Coffee in Berlin is too on the nose with its metaphors and brimming with archetypes to feel believable. Then again, Gerster’s embrace of caricature might be intended to tell us that even if life seems like a cruel joke at times, we still have to play by its rules. Niko at one point asks: “You know when you get the feeling that the people all around you are kinda strange somehow? But when you think about it a little longer, you realize it’s not the others but you who’s the problem?” As we mull over melancholic thoughts evoked by the sentiment, the film lapses into reveries of Berlin in all its graffitied splendor, and for a fleeting moment none of it seems to matter.

Mosab Yousef, the eldest son of a Hamas leader, spent over a decade as an undercover agent working for Shin Bet, Israel’s espionage and counterterrorism agency. At great personal risk, he helped head off numerous suicide bombings and provided critical information about Hamas operations and its organizational hierarchy. Director Nadav Schirman delves into this story in The Green Prince, crafting a spare documentary thriller about terrorism and espionage in the Middle East.

Although inspired by Mosab’s memoir, Son of Hamas, the film does not simply recount the life of the Palestinian scion accused of betraying his family and his people. Instead, Schirman’s third documentary feature hones in on the unlikely yet enduring relationship Mosab forged with his Shin Bet handler, Gonen Ben Itzhak, over their years working together. Centering the film on interviews with Mosab and Gonen, Schirman distills a tight emotional core bound up in the evolving dynamic between these two compelling figures. After initially facing off against each other, the pair eventually turned against their respective organizations, sacrificing their positions of privilege but preserving their humanity.

The Green Prince screens this Saturday in the Human Rights Watch Film Festival at the Film Society of Lincoln Center and opens for a theatrical run on August 8. FILM COMMENT spoke by phone with Schirman in a conversation that virtually became a class in the art of interviewing (or handling spies...).

When did you realize that these two were articulate and charismatic enough for the entire film to revolve around their telling the story?

First I read Mosab’s book, Son of Hamas, and I was struck by how little we knew about Hamas. I’ve lived in Israel a very long time. I’m partly Israeli. And I realized Hamas were our neighbors and we know nothing about them. And Mosab’s book offered an insider’s perspective of Hamas which grabbed me. Then I was introduced to Gonen, his handler. And when I understood the nature of their relationship, the way it was and the way it is today, the evolution of their relationship, I was struck. Also, Mosab’s identity crisis was fascinating. This film comes after two films where I dealt with identity crisis at this level [The Champagne Spy, 07, and In the Dark Room, 13].

So that was the first step that led to this. What happened afterwards was that I spent a lot of time with both gentlemen trying to establish a relationship of trust, or to see if we could get to a relationship of trust. It was obvious to me that I wanted them to take me to the darkest corners of their emotional connection to their story.

How did you gain that trust with them?

I was very candid about my intentions. I knew that they would undergo a journey and that it would be unlike any other interview situation that they had been in. For Gonen, it was very hard to reveal himself, as a Shin Bet agent who’s used to operating in the shadows. For Mosab, he had told his story many times in his book and in speaking engagements, but I wanted to tell it in a very different way, in a more emotional way. And they were. And this was just the beginning, because then my role was to create a setting which would throw them off their guard. Because these two gentlemen are used to interrogations, to deceit. Their tradecraft is lying and deceit, layers and layers of those. So they’re not normal interview partners.

What did you do to prepare for the interviews to prevent them from getting the better of you?

That was the most interesting part of the filmmaking. First of all, we built a set that was five meters tall. It was very, very tall. I wanted to build a set that would be reminiscent of an interrogation room but is a bit more abstract than that. It’s more like the room of their isolation. Because these two gentlemen made choices which ultimately led to their isolation—from their families, from their people. So we created this massive set, which you see only partly in the film, but it’s there. We sat each one of them in this set surrounded by five-meter concrete walls. It’s massive, it makes you feel very small. It’s very intimidating. And then we use this device which was invented by Errol Morris called the Interrotron.

Yes, he uses it in films like Standard Operating Procedure.

We used the Interrotron to create this first-person contact and to be able to look them in the eye, because you want to see the body language. You don’t only want to hear the words that are spoken, you want to be able to perceive the truth or the untruth which emanates from the body language—from the movement of the eye, from the tilting of the head. So it was imperative to use this device.

And then the way that I conducted the interrogation, especially with Mosab, at times it got to be very heated. There were things that he wouldn’t want to go into. And we had agreed at the beginning that he would allow me to push him. I made that bond with him, saying, listen, if you will allow it, I will push, and I will probe, and I will lead you into the darkest corners of this story. And he was brave enough to allow this.

At one point, we connected him to a lie detector, Gonen as well—as they were in their interrogation, back in the Shin Bet. With Mosab, we were talking about the way he was interrogated by the Israelis. And I had a small stool and handcuffs, like they used on him, and a hood. He even put the hood and the handcuffs on himself. He sort of relived that moment by doing this. These were not easy times to reinvest in.

Where did you find that you had to push hardest with Mosab to get responses? Where was he most hesitant to respond?

The trickiest part—and this is not only for me as a film director, but also for Shin Bet handlers—is the whole issue of motivation. What motivates somebody to betray their family and to work for the enemy? And motivation, I’ve learned, is something that changes over time. The issue of motivation was the most difficult one. Mosab in his own process also had to come to terms with what he was doing. I was like, how can you sleep at night, under the same roof as your parents, all throughout this period? How could you sleep there at night, knowing you were betraying them and working with their own worst enemy? And I remember him saying, well, I slept very well, because I used my pay to provide for the family, I was keeping my father alive by working with his enemy, I was preventing him from going to prison, or later, when I got him arrested, it saved his life. I was helping my mother. So essentially, I was helping my family. And trying to understand how he really lived that, in his consciousness back then, was he torn at all? These were difficult times. That and the whole story of the rape were very dark.

And what was interesting with the Interrotron was I would bring Gonen in and have Gonen ask Mosab certain questions, or then I would take Mosab and I would have Mosab question Gonen via the Interrotron.

Was this your first time using the Interrotron?

I used it on my previous film, In the Dark Room [13]. It was the story of the wife and daughter of Carlos the Jackal. I knew that Magdalena Kopp, the wife of Carlos the Jackal, had baggage. She was hiding a lot of things. And she was used to being interrogated by the French police when she was arrested. This is very effective with people who are used to interviews or interrogations, because there’s a lot you can do with this eye contact. Body language, the energy which it transports, communicates a lot. So it was essential to be able to communicate this to the audience as well.

But you know what was most interesting? Gonen at some point came to me and said, listen, Nadav, I’m used to handling people. But here, I feel totally handled by you. And then I realized that what we do as film directors—building the set, using the Interrotron, applying different interview techniques, bringing one to interview the other and so forth—it’s basically handling. It’s getting the person to do something which they may not naturally do. In the process, I remember talking to one of the heads of the Shin Bet, who was talking about interrogation methods that they use. And I was struck by how similar it is to directing. These guys, they would create a mise en scène for two weeks just to get to a confession sometimes.

Gonen talks in the film about preparing for his interrogation sessions with Mosab and other people he tried to turn into agents. What kind of background research did you do on Gonen and Mosab?

One thing which was very tricky was that I did not want to talk to Mosab or Gonen about this story. Because I wanted it to be fresh while we were shooting. So while I was building the relationship with them, I had to talk about a great many things, except about the story. So this was very tricky. And then I had to research around them. Meeting with other operatives, people from the Shin Bet, and doing a lot of research, so that I would have enough ammunition to bounce things back.

One of the preparations was [figuring out] the way that you want to tell the story. On the one hand, there is the narrative approach to the interview—you want to make sure you get the right narrative points, your ducks in a row—and then the second part is the emotional connection to the story. And there I would say the biggest preparation is creating that bond with both these gentlemen. The more interesting part came from their willingness to question themselves and their own narrative.

The film is built just around the interviews with Mosab and Gonen. You didn’t include any interviews with other people. Both of them are interviewed, and they’re interviewed separately from each other, never together. How did you settle on this approach?

This came about through the editing process. What’s very interesting about making this kind of documentary is that you’re ultimately writing the film in the editing room. We had interviewed a lot more people that gave context and different shades and flavor to the story. But in the process of editing, we realized that ultimately this was the story of a relationship. It was a story of a relationship between two people who start off as best of enemies and end up being best of friends.

I remember having seen Darren Aronofsky talking about the way he wrote the screenplay for Requiem for a Dream, and all of a sudden after the second, third or fifth draft, he was struck by the fact that it wouldn’t be the story of the characters, it would be the story of addiction itself. And he rewrote the whole script under this prism, and let the narrative arc be the arc of addiction. And the characters are serving the arc. Having that in mind, I said, OK, let’s try to tell the story of this relationship. So we shed whatever was extraneous to this central narrative of this relationship.

It’s interesting, the similarities between the two men despite their differences. They both turn against either their families or their organizations: Mosab with Hamas and his father, and then Gonen bends the rules of Shin Bet and it gets him kicked out.

You know what’s amazing? This is a real-life story and the drama of it is classic. It’s classic Shakespeare, it’s classic Aristotle, it’s classic drama. And if you analyze the dramatic beats of the story, you will be struck by just how perfectly dramatic they are. And I realize it often, doing documentaries, that the real-life stories are just much more dramatic than fiction. Fiction tends to be generic, a lot of times fiction tries to imitate life. And the young generation of filmmakers are trying to imitate other movies that they saw, which imitate life. Then come these real-life stories which are almost perfect drama. Like snowflakes that have this almost perfect shape.

Were you tempted at all to make a fictional version of this story?

No, I was certain that I wanted to do a documentary. There is a fiction [feature] being made now. Jamie Patricof is going to produce it. He produced The Place Beyond the Pines, The Notebook, The Hills Have Eyes.

I remember what happened to me with The Champagne Spy. All the Hollywood studios and big producers wanted to get into the fiction adaptation of this. And I remember it feeling like homework. You put all your passion into telling the story one way, and then you’ve got to tell it in a different way. And what’s exciting about documentary filmmaking is that everything is possible. I mean, look at The Act of Killing, look at Bombay Beach, The Imposter, Searching for Sugarman. There is no mold, you know? Working in feature documentary, especially today, is very exciting, just because the genre is so open.

It seems that you’re drawn to the people in these shadow trades. Your three documentary films all deal with these people.

That’s one way of looking at it. The way I look at it is that all these three films are about family relationships, or relationships put under a great amount of pressure. The Champagne Spy is about a son who discovers that his father is a Mossad agent. This relationship between father and son takes you into the world of espionage, and reveals the personal and psychological toll of espionage. And In the Dark Room is the relationship between the daughter and the wife of the most wanted terrorist in the world, and how it is to grow up the daughter of the most wanted terrorist in the world, or the wife of this man. So this background setting of espionage and terrorism is just the pressure cooker in which you put these relationships.

Your first two films are directly about the parent-child relationship. The Green Prince also has Mosab’s relationship with his father Hassan, but there’s also this relationship that emerges between Mosab and Gonen. And it becomes almost filial, brotherly, paternal.

This is very interesting. Gonen was a star in the Shin Bet. He had more sources in his area than anybody else. And his way was very different than the normal Shin Bet agent, who’s much more macho, using a strong hand. Gonen is very soft. I remember him telling me, you know, the difference between me and the other handlers is that after I meet a source, I don’t wash my hands like the other handlers. And the source feels it. They know it. And Gonen’s very human approach is what led him to be a star in the system. I asked, what do you think motivate these people? Is it money? Favors? And he said the biggest successes were with orphans. And then we started talking about the role of the father in Palestinian society, and how important the father is, and how the whole family structure evolves around the father, and what happens when the father is not there, when the father is dead, or imprisoned, then the son becomes weaker and more exposed to the pressures of that society. And then comes the Shin Bet handler. He takes on the role of the father, of the protector.

But what you said about them being brothers is also very true, because they became like brothers. Today, Mosab is staying at Gonen’s place in Israel, since the film opened and he’s there now. So there is that relationship. And also between Jews and Arabs. There is that sort of brothers, cousins, love-hate, Cain-Abel type relationship. And you see it also in the film, the more distant and alienated Mosab becomes from his family and from his father, the closer he comes to Gonen.

Looking at the framing of the film, you open with a foreword about the peace deal between Rabin and Arafat, and then talk about Rabin’s assassination. And then you end the film with this friendship that emerges between an Israeli and a Palestinian. I think there’s a parallel there, and I’m wondering what your intention was, in setting it up that way.

That’s crazy, man! That’s crazy! I never thought of this. This is not intended, but it’s totally true what you are saying. It’s about people, ultimately. Rabin and Arafat were the two people who had the courage to step against their own systems and try to make it work. It didn’t work, you know? And then Rabin was killed. But it was led by these people. And then at the end of the film what you have is, you have these two people, these two individuals, these two humans, who went against the grain of their own systems and became best of friends. Mosab set out to kill Gonen. Gonen set out to manipulate the shit out of Mosab. But they took risks in the process. They lost everything, they lost their families, they lost their jobs, they lost a lot of things. But they gained this friendship.

But as you say, with Rabin and then with Gonen and Mosab, the people who take this different, outside approach, and are willing to challenge things, they seem to come to bad ends, they get kicked out of organizations or worse.

If you work in a corporation, you know the feeling very well. You may disagree with what the system wants. And you have a choice, you either go with the system and subdue your own moral compass, or you listen to your own moral compass and try to follow it, and you may find yourself ousted from the system. And whether this is good or bad, you write your own history. It’s the individual inside the system, and how you act as an individual inside the system.

How has the film been received, either from what you’ve personally seen or in the media response?

We just opened in Israel and I was very surprised. I’ve lived a long time in Israel. Israelis never get to their feet. They’re a very cynical people. But when the premieres were over, there was applause, and then Mosab and Gonen got on the stage, and they got standing ovations which wouldn’t stop. 

The peace process collapsed the week that the film opened. Maybe the film gave people something to be optimistic about. And I remember, for Mosab it was very special, because maybe this also gave him a sense of closure.

We Are the Best! is wrapping up the second week of its New York run, having engendered enough positive press and word of mouth to ensure itself a happy VOD afterlife. (A typical note, struck by the reviewer for The Guardian: “When was the last time you left a cinema wanting to hug everyone involved in the film you just watched?”) The film, Lukas Moodysson’s first in four years, was adapted from a 2008 graphic novel called Never Goodnight, a firsthand reminiscence of punking out in early-Eighties Sweden by Coco Moodysson. (Its identification character is, not coincidentally, named “Bobo.”) It follows the formation of a punk trio in Stockholm in 1982 by three girls on the edge of adolescence, and the subsequent adversities that they face. Lukas and Coco, who are husband and wife, were born in 1969 and 1970 respectively, and are of age to remember the period, the texture of which the movie gets down with scrupulous attention, while the girls’ misadventures are soundtracked with exhumed seven-inches including KSMB’s “Sex Noll Två.”

We Are the Best!

I saw We Are the Best! a couple of months ago when it was making the festival rounds, but only felt any urge to write about it after reading Richard Brody’s takedown, titled “Shiny, Happy, Fake Sweden,” in his New Yorker–hosted blog The Front Row. I find more of value in the movie than Brody does, but I’m not picking up the topic because of any overwhelming desire to stick up for it—as he notes, WAtB!, which is enjoying near-unanimous approval according to review aggregators, doesn’t lack for defenders. I’m interested, rather, in looking at how the movie interfaces with the musical and social phenomenon of punk rock, and where it fits within the context of the punk-rock movie.

Brody’s objection to We Are the Best! is based in a belief that it feeds “fantasies of a virtually infinite tolerance,” noting how easy everything appears to be for punks in Sweden, where rebellion takes place in state-sponsored comfort, with the local youth center providing the kids a rehearsal space and instruments, and even lining up an out-of-town gig so that they can lap up the exhilaration of a hostile crowd’s boos, although without too much risk of things getting really out of line.

The timeline is important here. Pop-culture years are like dog years for the young, so 1982 is roughly a half-century removed from 1977. This means that the girls, played by Mira Barkhammer (tomboy Bobo), Mira Grosin (spark-plug Klara), and Liv LeMoyne (Christian-convert Hedvig), aren’t on the front lines of anything. The girls’ classmates aren’t freaked out by their Renée Falconetti haircuts—they’re condescending, making a show of just how not shocked they are, for fashion has moved on from punk while the girls have not. (Klara’s older brother, a former punker, has since lost his liberty spikes and graduated to Joy Division.)

Where We are the Best! has been second-guessed elsewhere, it’s usually on the grounds of the film’s introducing friction by way of boy trouble, which begins when the trio cold-call the members of a band based in a neighboring town and take a train out to meet them. Everything that leads up to the meeting, it should be said, feels absolutely true, for the isolation of belonging to a minority subcultural identity can lead to a heedless reaching out towards anyone anywhere nearby who’s part of the same tribe, a trust both quaintly touching and, sometimes, dangerous. That danger isn't a factor here: the boys in the band are contemporaries, equally inexperienced, and the only thing that’s on the line is a bit of puppy-love heartache. What doesn’t come into play is the fact that punk, being a magnet for youthful rebellion, is also a refuge for unsavory old dudes, scene vets perfectly willing to flatter adolescents with the fact that someone older seems to be taking them seriously, and take advantage of their stature.

If we were watching three girls with shaved heads playing punk shows somewhere in Sweden outside of a large and cosmopolitan city, we might have a very different and more troubling movie on our hands, and in 2014 there are surely places in these United States where showing up for school with your hair dyed pink is still an open affront and an invitation for passing motorists to peg you with insults and empties when you’re on your way home. Bobo, Klara, and Hedvig escape most of that sort of flak, in part because of their extreme youth, which is a sticking point for Ebert.com reviewer Godfrey Cheshire, whose two-star review complains that the Moodyssons’ focus on such young subjects “effectively infantilizes punk.” (Fine, but I’ll bet you a copy of Old Skull’s Get Outta School that infantilization has always been part of punk’s arsenal of offenses.)

I’m not inclined to chastise the Moodyssons for making a movie that showcases their version of what punk is or was or could’ve been—here, a space outside of official adult and school culture in which to craft an identity and foster a sense of self-worth—rather than another. Why, though, should We Are the Best! be about punk rather than any other niche extracurricular hobby? I’m not sure that it makes much difference that it is. If anything, showing the application of punk’s universal prescription for disobedience to a particularly Swedish context may say more about national culture than the subculture. Perhaps the defining aspect of rebellion in wealthy Scandinavian countries, where a base-level prosperity is virtually guaranteed by small populations and a surfeit of natural materials, and where permissiveness is woven into the fabric of national identity, is the invention of an enemy—see the xenophobia of Norwegian Black Metal, based on a fantasy of encroaching foreign hordes in what is in actual fact one of the most uniform gene pools on the planet.

The defiant healthiness of We Are the Best! puts it at odds with the punk movies made during the period that it depicts, in which punking out is depicted as a variety of acting out, a reflexive response to fraying social fabric and insupportable home life by Kids of the Black Hole. The hippie-generation parents in WAtB! are alternately distracted and doofy, but there’s little sense that any of their benign neglect is going to lead to genuine depredation, a point underscored by scenes of the girls spare-changing.

The punk-rock movie constitutes a subgenre unto itself, to which We Are the Best! putatively belongs—for our purposes, I am talking about movies that have punk rockers (as classically understood), rather than movies which might be said to express a punk attitude, like Robert Bresson’s The Devil, Probably, which no less an authority than Richard Hell called “by far the most punk movie ever made.” Thinking of fiction features contemporary to We Are the Best!’s “Reagan Brezhnev fuck off!” period, I turn immediately to Penelope Spheeris’s Suburbia (1983) and Dennis Hopper’s Out of the Blue (1980).

Say what you will about Suburbia, it doesn’t stint on the sense of youth in danger: within the film’s first five minutes, we see a toddler being fatally mauled by a stray Doberman pinscher! My friends and I used to get quite a larf out of Spheeris’s movie when I was a young punk myself, particularly from quoting the maladroit line readings by scenesters-cum-actors like skinhead Timothy O’Brien (“You. And. Your. Drugs. This. Is. What. I. Think. Of. Your. Drugs.”) and Michael “Flea” Balzary. Also greatly cherished was a scene at a D.I. show where, during a performance of “Richard Hung Himself,” a New Wave pixie who has obviously wandered into the wrong venue has her clothes ripped off by the crowd, and is left naked in the middle of a jeering circle to shriek in hysterics while singer Casey Royer helplessly upbraids the perps from the stage. (“Leave her alone you homos… Perfect example of a punk rock aggressiveness.”) My friends and I dismissed this as punksploitation sensationalism—the movie was produced by Roger Corman for his New World Pictures, after all, and could therefore be expected to have roughly the same relationship to real hardcore punk as Bucket of Blood had to the Village Beat scene. But writer-director Spheeris had been on the front lines of California hardcore c. 1980 while filming her documentary The Decline of Western Civilization, and even if the staging of the assault at the show feels utterly false in every detail, it’s very likely that Spheeris knew something we didn’t about the sexual bullying and general loutishness that went on in the scene at that time.

Out of the Blue

“Punk is not sexual,” says Linda Manz’s Cebe in Out of the Blue, to no one in particular. “It’s just aggression.” (If you haven’t seen the movie, maybe you’ve heard the sound bite on the song “Kill All Hippies” from Primal Scream’s XTRMNTR album.) She’s sitting in the cab of a wrecked 18-wheeler, sending out messages in a bottle via the CB radio, which is where her nickname comes from. (Her truck driver father, away in the slammer when the movie starts, left her with the handle, and a hefty freight of psychological problems.) Out of the Blue was Hopper’s first directing job since The Last Movie in 1971, and one that he backed his way into, though it seems tailor-made to the concerns of a man who worshipped at the altar of James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause. In the period preceding the shoot, Hopper had been in Mexico City trying to set up an adaptation of B. Traven’s The Death Ship, investigating the decease of the mysterious German author and ingesting God-knows-what his free time. Hopper was signed on to play Cebe's father in the movie, originally titled Cebe, but when co-scenarist and first-time director Leonard Yakir was yanked eight days into the shoot, producer Paul Lewis, who’d worked with Hopper on both Easy Rider and The Last Movie, slotted Hopper into the director’s chair, and apparently signed off on his flying in his Last Movie survivor Don Gordon for a part and rewriting the script to minimize the role of Canadian earthquake Raymond Burr as a child psychiatrist. (For all of their individuality and anthropological acumen, both Suburbia and Out of the Blue carry the vestiges of the Fifties JD movie.)

Out of the Blue played BAMcinématek last month as part of a 12-film series titled “Punk Rock Girls,” which opened with a preview screening of We Are the Best!, the rest of the slate including the likes of the Nancy Dowd–scripted Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains and Derek Jarman’s 1978 Jubilee, which features roles for formidable female punks like Siouxsie Sioux and all three of The Slits. Like Out of the Blue, which takes place on the shabby fringes of blue-collar Vancouver, these movies have desolate backdrops—a postapocalyptic Britain in Jubilee, a dead-end central Pennsylvania in Fabulous Stains. Cebe, however, doesn’t even enjoy the camaraderie of bandmates in her purgatory. She has girlfriends her own age, but have feathered hair and dress to fit in. You wonder if Cebe’s ever actually met a punker, or if the idea of punk rock is just something that floated to her over the radio waves from the outside world, something that she seized on and embellished what little she knew of—Johnny Rotten, safety pins—with her own imagination. (She mostly seems to listen to Elvis and Neil Young, whose 1979 “Hey Hey, My My” provides the film its title.) I can’t think of another film that so perfectly encapsulates how, in the absence of readily available older-sibling instruction or searchable and downloadable identity, kids left to forage for their own thing rummaged up very idiosyncratic and entirely bizarre handmade identities. When I was 14 years old, for example, I was regularly going to school in a polyester Goodwill blazer in plaid Easter colors accessorized with a three-foot length of industrial chain, worn entirely for cosmetic purposes, which made a tremendous clatter whenever I sat down in the classroom. I am certain that I looked literally insane, which is the risk you run when you make things up as you go along.

This would’ve been in 1994, not long after Kurt Cobain had quoted “Hey Hey, My My” in his suicide note. Turning away from a fucked home situation to cobble together an identity out of spare parts in a nowhere Northwest, Cebe might be Cobain’s female counterpart—she’s the right age to be his twin sister. Cebe never gets a shot at finding a creative outlet, however. The nearest she comes is on a runaway trip into the city, being invited to sit in behind the kit for Vancouver band The Pointed Sticks after their drummer takes her under his wing in an interaction that’s halfway between big-brother benevolent and predatory. (The bands plays “Out of Luck,” released via Stiff Records, and “Somebody’s Mom.”) To draw out the punk/Bresson comparison, this brief moment of release and glimpse at another, outside life is Cebe’s version of the bumper-car ride in Mouchette.

Another State of Mind

Before going onstage, the drummer is harassed by some kid with a camcorder asking “What does punk rock mean to you?”, probably a film-school dropout taping shows. A handful of embedded documentary reportages on punk, asking essentially that question, were in fact completed, including the abovementioned Decline of Western Civilization, and Adam Small and Peter Stuart’s Another State of Mind. (Rumors of Decline coming to DVD remain exactly that, as it’s apparently snared in a Gordian knot of rights issues, while Another State is on disc, and can be watched in its entirety on YouTube.) Small and Stuart’s film follows Youth Brigade and Social Distortion on a monthlong, cross-country tour over summer 1982 in a customized school bus, including a visit to Ian MacKaye, Minor Threat, and the Dischord House in Washington, D.C. The tour is the brainchild of blowhard Youth Brigade frontman Shawn Stern, organized under the auspices of the Better Youth Organization (BYO), intended to proselytize for punk positivity, but road life shows the Los Angelinos a grimmer and stranger reality. It’s a film of characters glanced who appear for only a scene, but stay in the memory for a lifetime, and if you’re looking for an antidote to We Are the Best! and its positivity, look no further than Marcel, Manon, and the grim, grim scene in Montreal. (As for the co-directors, I’m not sure what Stuart has been up to, but Adam Small recently a story credit on another great American road movie, 2013’s Jackass Presents: Bad Grandpa.) 

In the last decade or so, however, the dearth of documentaries that were there to witness this particular chapter of history has been more than overcompensated for by those that have popped up to enshrine it. There’s been a bumper crop of rock docs, safe-bet low-overhead movies that, by catering to an inscribed fanbase, practically guarantee that they’ll break even, punk subjects having proved particularly popular. These movies, almost without exception, are completely extraneous—why would anyone waste years of their lives on a live-action MOJO article?—but they’re nice to drift off to, and I go through them like Pocky. Last weekend I caught up with Sini Anderson’s 2013 documentary The Punk Singer, about Bikini Kill and Le Tigre frontwoman Kathleen Hanna, recounting her career and premature retirement to address medical complications relating to Lyme disease.

Cobain is one of the players in Anderson’s movie—Hanna spray-painted “Kurt Smells Like Teen Spirit” on Cobain’s wall, and so gave a title to his band’s breakthrough hit. He also apparently warrants a chapter in a new tome called Twee: The Gentle Revolution in Music, Books, Television, Fashion, and Film by Marc Spitz, whose previous credits include co-authoring We Got the Neutron Bomb: The Untold Story of L.A. Punk with Brendan Mullen. I haven’t read Spitz’s book, but I did read a review of it by Judy Berman in Flavorwire which wonders why riot grrrl is “relegated to a few accusatory footnotes” in Spitz’s history. It should receive more attention—but not, as Berman suggests, because of affinity. Riot grrrl’s abstemious, finger-wagging, purer-than-pure attitudes created a Lord of the Flies contest to see who’d get the conch and be allowed speak for the scene, and this sent defectors to apolitical Twee in droves. In this respect, riot grrrl was the XX chromosome mirror image of PC, radicalized hardcore/punk, where zines like the Tim Yohannon–edited Maximum Rock n’ Roll and HeartattaCk were attempting to dictate and police a party line. In this case, the pushback came from punk-identified music that took high dudgeon at the surplus of high dudgeon, self-consciously unimportant pop-punk like Screeching Weasel’s “Nicaragua” (“I don't give a fuck about Nicaragua… I don't care about suburban white kids/ Trying to show they've got compassion/ Politics are boring/ Your politics are fucking boring…”) or, more articulately, Jawbreaker’s one-two of “Indictment” and “Boxcar” (“It means nothing, selling kids to other kids…”). I think about the punctilious correctness and snitchy, gossipy callout culture that flourished in both riot grrrl and hardcore frequently, as I see it every day, on a far grander scale, in the outrage economy of the Internet.

In both riot grrrl and “evolved” hardcore there was a distinct element of liberal-arts enlightenment arriving to castigate what, in its ‘80s incarnation, was a phenomenon largely aligned with the working class. A challenge to that homosocial status quo, however, was overdue to come from somewhere. “You can get hurt, you can, if you’re a girl,” says one female interviewee in a section of Another State of Mind devoted to slam-dancing, concluding: “From a girl’s point of view, I don’t think that slamming’s advisable. I think it’s pretty stupid, but it’s a good way to get your aggressions out for a guy.”

This is yet another issue that never arises in We Are the Best!, while figures like Hanna and MacKaye actively opposed the tendency for bully-boys to dominate the pit and the scene. The history of scenes in general is defined by opposing impulses of inclusivity and exclusivity: Being open to anyone who would like to be involved, yet setting up standards of behavior and cred checkpoints to keep out the phonies. If card-carrying subculture membership, as We Are the Best! would have it, is a means to create a feeling of specialness through a shared secret, then the power is dispelled when the secret becomes everyone’s property.

Heavy Metal in Baghdad

There’s no great threat of this in 1982, as Bobo and Klara’s classmates take pleasure in taunting them with the news that “Punk is dead,” a claim made often enough to warrant investigation. The Silver Jews’ “Tennessee” begins with David Berman crooning “Punk rock died when the first kid said / ‘Punk’s not dead, punk’s not dead!’” which by my reckoning means a crib death. If, however, we’re talking about a particular style of small-band music with identifiable traits, no different than rumba or honky-tonk, punk will be alive as long as there are a significant number of people interested in playing and listening to it. If, instead, we are talking about a culture defined by opposition, negation, and the creation of an alternative economy, things become rather trickier. For starters, it’s harder and harder to épater le indigenous bourgeois these days, so Western audiences have been responsive to narratives that find the front lines of the subculture wars abroad, in documentaries like Heavy Metal in Baghdad (2007), No One Knows About Persian Cats (2009), and Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer (2013), which raise the stakes that Brody finds so appallingly low in We Are the Best!.

As every generation gets the punk it deserves, so every period picture is about two periods, the one it depicts and the one it was made in. In looking at We Are the Best! and the responses it has evoked, then, it’s worth asking what this says about the popular perception of punk in 2014, as well as 1982. In part, the movie supplies a contemporary demand for affirmation by way of Strong Female Characters, the desired “culture of praise” spoken of in The Punk Singer, here playing out in a three-person nucleus of mutual support, today institutionalized in girl-power rock camps. (I seem to recall Kim Deal having a hearty laugh at that last phenomenon on a radio interview.) I believe this is what Brody is objecting to in part, much as he objected to Manohla Dargis once suggesting that the Film Society of Lincoln Center foster “cinematic culture by means of educational programs,” in his piece earlier this year called “Keep the Movies Unschooled.” 

The subhed of the Guardian review quoted earlier states that We Are the Best! “will appeal to anyone who has ever been a teenager”—which is odd, considering that a relatively small fraction of people have experienced as teenagers anything like what the girls in WAtB! do, and in fact are more likely to have picked on someone like them than gone out-of-step themselves. The once-crucial cred checkpoints that I referred to above have, however, been bypassed and invalidated by life online, which reduces the risk of leading with one’s chin into hostile terrain (record store, VFW hall, pit). Consequently, the once-exclusive cabals of punk and hardcore have become public property—consider the universal indignity that greeted the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s “Punk: Chaos to Couture” show last year. “It’s not about the clothes,” we all cried as one. “It’s about the spirit!” When, as reported earlier this year in the PBS Frontline documentary “Generation Like,” the phrase “sell-out” has literally ceased to have any meaning to contemporary youth culture, we need a reassuring touchstone for authenticity. Punk is that touchstone.

I’m sympathetic to many aspects of We Are the Best!—the ensemble cast is a small miracle—but even with the best of intentions, it utlimately participates in the ongoing, backward-looking fetishization of yesterday’s tropes of DIY authenticity. At absolute worst, this means re-enactments of the teenaged basement-show experience for LARPing twentysomethings who lacked the intrepidity to experience it the first time around, and photoshopped cut-and-paste flyers for nonentity hype-zeppelins like Perfect Pussy. When it's sorely necessary to revise time-tested Us Vs. Them dichotomies to apply to a Brave New World that has a shape-shifting Them, there’s no more craven opt-out than saying I Like That Old-Time Punk Rock ’n’ Roll.

1. The thematic ambition and complexity of Lav Diaz’s Norte, The End of History is simply astonishing. The comprehensive thematic orientation of the film is political: it examines how cumulative political catastrophes in recent Philippine history have created a society where the gap between rich and poor has created terrible suffering for the poor and moral corruption for the wealthy.

Diaz’s second thematic dimension is psychological: the narrative is organized to show how political and economic dislocations have invaded family life, which is itself made dysfunctional by the traumatic breaking up of families under economic pressure. Parental authority in families is shown as being constantly absent or in disrepair in Norte, to the endless detriment of all family members.

The third thematic dimension of Norte is spiritual. Almost every character in the film addresses the possibility of a spiritual response to the atmosphere of social/economic/familial crisis that envelops them. The film takes a remarkably varied, delicately ambivalent view of these modes of spiritual response, including everything from derisive satire of neuroses unsuccessfully masked by the spiritual, to a tentative embrace of it.

To attempt to seriously braid the political, the psychological, and the spiritual in a single narrative system! Who besides Ford, Mizoguchi, Dreyer, and Rossellini have successfully tried? (And not even their best attempts were flawless.) Norte is a work that deserves consideration in the same terms and contexts as the work of these masters.

2. One could write a small book in delineating the complex conversation that Diaz and his screenwriter are having in this film with Dostoevsky and the whole tradition of Russian realist fiction of the late 19th century. The source for a number of its scenes is Crime and Punishment, though Diaz at the press conference was quick to point out that the book was an “inspiration,” not something he was trying to adapt. 

If you know Dostoevsky, you know that Norte’s depiction of Fabian’s relationship with his intellectual pals owes as much to The Possessed as to Crime and Punishment. Stavrogin is the intellectual who destroys those around him and never stops being shadowed by the demonic appeal of suicide. This is as true of Fabian as is his proximity to the model of Raskolnikov. And Joaquin, who evolves spiritually during his long imprisonment, spontaneously returning goodness for evil, has clear links to Myshkin in The Idiot.

Yet at the same time, in the character of Fabian’s moronic landowning sister Diaz inscribes a ruthlessly clever satire of one of Dostoevsky’s most dubious sentiments, shared to some extent by Tolstoy: that uprooted cosmopolitan intellectuals need to “go back to the land” and get in touch with the peasants and their innate spirituality. So while the film is, in certain ways, dedicated to Dostoevsky’s insights, it announces its independence from them at the same time.

3. Diaz has a visual-narrative style that is unique in its diversity and strangeness. A few of its characteristics: a fondness for filming in long master shots, varied by remarkably subtle reframing camera movements; a constant, brilliant evocation of off-screen space and how it affects us by disorienting our relation to the reality we are seeing and the narrative arcs we are following; the combination of skillful theatrical acting with work by others who seem to be scrupulously chosen nonprofessionals; and harsh contrasts between dialogue scenes of intellectual and psychological complexity, and scenes of wordless behavior. In many ways Diaz is fruitfully an über-traditional realist on the 19th-century model; in other ways his minimalism, austerity, and taste for allegory mark him as a stylized modernist, heir to Mizoguchi, Bresson, Fassbinder, Hou Hsiao-hsien, and Edward Yang.

4. I will hazard one more hypothesis about how to think about Diaz's style which I can only characterize as uncanny. Living in both the Philippines and New York City, Diaz is the first great filmmaker to be equally and decisively marked by the West and the East. The West gives him a taste for psychologism and very elaborate narrative construction. The East gives him the taste and talent for impassive allegorical mural-images that compress historical-political themes into single comprehensive images. The combination is not like anything you’ve ever seen before.

Norte, The End of History opens Friday at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, and a special monthly retrospective of Lav Diaz's films begins on Sunday with Melancholia. This article was originally published online last September when Norte screened in the New York Film Festival. For more on Diaz, read "Dostoevsky Variations" by Noel Vera from the September/October 2013 issue.

“I understand that we need to conform to the current rules,” Chinese director Ning Hao said recently when asked about the Mainland Chinese censorship process. “After all, kids may watch it as well, and we need to take all the audiences into consideration.” 

Crazy Stone

In another interview, the director responsible for some of the most gonzo black comedies ever made about the failures of human nature responded to Oliver Stone’s recent comments that Chinese filmmakers need to make movies about sensitive subjects by saying, “He is being belligerent…Some questions or areas are sensitive. Chinese films need to get back the right of free speech little by little.”

It is very hard for anyone possessing even the slightest shred of cynicism in their soul to read these carefully calibrated comments without wincing. They sound like the worst kind of coached speech, specifically designed to appeal to the Communist party’s aging bosses who demand conformity from their filmmakers. Then again, maybe that says more about the reader than about Ning. We’ll never actually know what happened behind the scenes in his four-year battle with party censorship.

Ning is China’s break-out comedy director who abandoned making art films like Incense (03) and Mongolian Ping Pong (05), that mostly appealed to an international film festival audience, to make comedies that appealed specifically to a Chinese audience. His first comedy, Crazy Stone (06), about a bunch of rapacious bastards fighting over a piece of jade, was shot for just $493,000. Featuring con men, jewel thieves, crossbow murders, and general class warfare, this ultra-local comedy made $3.78 million at the box office. 

Crazy Racer

Next came his best movie to date, Crazy Racer (09), a 15-car-pileup of a farce about a washed up bike racer who becomes a messenger after getting caught in a doping scandal. On offer were flaming turtles, some insanely inventive CGI, missing drugs, a badass Thai transsexual martial artist, and an apocalyptic final chase. Box office take? $15.9 million. The world was Ning’s oyster and for his next movie he requested his biggest budget yet: $3.29 million. He got it from China Film Group, the country’s largest film company. Called No Man’s Land, this was going to be Ning’s breakthrough movie.

An action comedy about a grandstanding, money-hungry lawyer who drives to the remote desert region of Xinjiang to defend a poacher, and then gets embroiled in an escalating series of violent misunderstandings as he races home to make his own self-aggrandizing book launch party, No Man’s Land is like The Road Warrior with more jokes. Shooting started in 2009 way out in Xinjiang, with a planned April 2010 release. However, after the movie was completed, Zhao Baohua, a screenwriter and member of SARFT, the State Administration of Radio, Film, and Television, wrote on his blog that No Man’s Land was “depraved,” “gratuitous,” “out of touch with reality,” and that Ning had “forgotten his social responsibility as an artist.” He then added that any movie that SARFT bans is a movie that’s basically fit for the wastebasket. 

Well, that put the brakes on things. 

Blind Shaft

For a movie to be released in China it has to be approved by SARFT, a very old, very complex Maoist-era bureaucracy that is in charge of film, television, and radio standards. The issue of censorship in China is a complicated one, and one that often gets misrepresented in the West. Ever since the Nineties when Western distributors realized that slapping “Banned in China” on their movies was a good way to drum up ticket sales, being banned has been an asset with overseas sales to the point where when director Li Shaohong won “Best Feature Film” at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2005 she proclaimed it a victory for free expression since her movie was banned in China. The press all patted themselves on the back for being advocates for free expression and everyone felt very smug. A few days later Li apologized. She hadn’t actually submitted her film to SARFT for approval yet, so there was no way they could have banned it. It just sounded like a good thing to say at the time.

Other movies, like Blind Shaft in 2003, were banned in China not because it somehow dealt with sensitive subject matter but because it was shot without permission in working coal mines and the director never got location permits. It would be the same situation in the U.S. If you shot an indie film in a factory and you never got a signed location agreement, then fat chance selling your movie to a distributor. But the American distributor put “Banned in China” on their press materials for Blind Shaft because that sells tickets.

Then there are directors who jump the line. Zhang Yimou, Lou Ye, and Jiang Wen have all been blacklisted and kept from making movies for five years because they submitted movies to Cannes before getting a final cut approved by SARFT. Movies have been blocked for content before (most notably when a blacklist circulated in 1994) and movies have been pulled for content (most notably Lost in Beijing) but a lot of banned directors recover. Jiang Wen went on from his ban to make one of China’s highest-grossing movies of all time (Let the Bullets Fly), while Zhang Yimou directed the Beijing Olympics opening ceremony and became the figurehead of the Chinese film business. Lou Ye has become a highly acclaimed international art-house director.

No Man's Land

Censorship is almost too clumsy a word to use for what SARFT does. They don’t ban movies so much as send subtle messages about what is and isn’t allowed. Personal relationships are important, and timing is key. The worst period of time was late 2007 and 2008 when China was scrubbing itself to present a squeaky clean image to the world for the Beijing Olympics. It was a one-year period when most producers, distributors, and directors simply stopped submitting films to SARFT because the signal had gone out: it was a sensitive time for the country and anything submitted would be delayed and subjected to extra scrutiny. 

Being “banned” by SARFT is actually difficult. Most directors engage in a dance with the administration that can sometimes last a long time. First they submit a film and then they’re asked to make changes. And asked to make changes. And asked to make changes. For three years—as Ning was. He kept recutting and recutting and recutting No Man’s Land trying to get his movie approved. Ultimately, Ning recut his movie three times and resubmitted it each time. 

“I easily lose interest when I have to do the same thing over and over again,” Ning says. “They told me that there was something wrong with the film, that some parts of the plot were inappropriate. I didn’t see why they were inappropriate, but okay, I took it back. I was very busy shooting other films and didn’t have time to waste on [No Man’s Land] and it took ages to edit and re-cut.”

No Man's Land

During the time No Man’s Land was lost in limbo, a smaller company, Beijing Galloping Horse, gave Ning a chance to make a movie about a gold heist set in the 1930s when China was occupied by Japan. Movies set during the Japanese occupation of China are considered okay by SARFT since the Japanese are always portrayed as the bad guys and the Chinese are always brave heroes fighting for freedom. The movie was called Guns n’Roses (12) after Ning’s favorite band. It was a fun movie but it didn’t have the bite of Crazy Stone or Crazy Racer. Nevertheless, it was a big hit for Ning, reassuring his No Man’s Land investors that he could still win SARFT approval for a movie, and becoming the third-biggest local hit of the first half of 2012.

When he was interviewed about the fate of No Man’s Land during the release of Guns n’Roses Ning seemed resigned to its fate. “No Man’s Land is an old chapter,” he said. “I have moved on. For me, the most important thing is what I’ve learned making the film. No Man’s Land discusses the relationship between man’s animal instincts and social responsibility. I now have a better understanding of the subject. That’s good enough for me.”

But after three rounds of modification over three years, Ning unexpectedly got a note from SARFT in October 2013 telling him that No Man’s Land was approved for a December 3 release. “I will frame the note and save it as a keepsake—it is very meaningful,” he said in an interview. Then he went on to say: “But now I’ve had enough of this film and won’t shoot another in this ilk . . . Life is short, I don’t have time to waste always on the same project.”

No Man's Land

The film made $20 million in its first week, moved up to take in another $15 million its second, and stands as the biggest hit of Ning’s career. He’s also started realizing that having a career in filmmaking in China is the kind of business that requires diplomacy. What other explanation can one find for his giving the conciliatory quotes at the top of this article? Or, in another interview, when asked about being forced to change the movie’s ending by SARFT: “The original ending was too cold, and I didn’t want the audience to feel like I slammed the door at their faces and screamed at them to get out.” 

Now, Ning describes his SARFT process as a good thing, one that helped his film. He’s even stepped up to be one of the loudest voices criticizing Oliver Stone over Stone’s recent comments regarding the Chinese film industry.

But to say that Ning’s recent actions are not his own choice is to rob him of agency and reduce him to some one-dimensional point a Western journalist wants to make. Stone’s comments about China are very stupid and the kind of thing only someone arrogant and out of touch with the world would say. Frankly, it’s surprising that Ning didn’t smack him in the mouth. 

And while I haven’t seen the original cut of No Man’s Land, the current cut is still an exceptionally good movie, something the Coen Brothers would make if they were firing on all cylinders and had a taste for well-executed action. And the controversial new ending? It’s actually kind of sad and depressing and definitely in line with the rest of the movie, not overly optimistic or jarring at all. 

How much freedom does Ning have? How much is No Man’s Land his vision, and how much is it hobbled by SARFT? Unfortunately, that’s a private matter between a director and his film censor. The rest of us can only speculate.

LINKS! LINKS! LINKS!

Monsterz

... Hideo Nakata, the director behind The Ring, just remade the Korean warring psychics movie Haunters as Monsterz. The original film is a fantastically weird superhero movie that should appeal to anyone who liked M. Night Shyamalan’s Unbreakable. Nakata’s remake is… pretty bad according to most sources. The meanest is Derek Elley who calls it “feeble.” Here’s a long interview with Nakata on the film.

... Hit Korean comedy, Miss Granny (about an old lady who swaps bodies with a young woman), is currently the number-two movie at the Korean box office, right after Frozen. The mammoth blockbuster has even been picked up for a Chinese remake, which is currently shooting, directed by Leste Peng (the man behind Singaporean horror hit, The Heirloom). 

Sea Fog

... Bong Joon-Ho–produced disaster-at-sea movie, Sea Fog, ran into difficulties following the sinking of the ferry in Korea that killed over 200 high school students. But good news for the producers is that it’s been slated for a Korean release in August, farther away from the ferry disaster, and it’s been sold to Japan, France, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore.

... One of Japan’s strangest, but greatest, cultural treasures is the Takarazuka theater where women play all the roles in musicals, some original, some adaptations. There have been Takarazuka performances of Gone With the Wind, concentration camp memoirs, and everything in between. Japan’s great manga artist, Osamu Tezuka, is a huge fan of the company and they had a big influence on his style. Now, they’re celebrating their 100th anniversary!

... It’s controversy time! The Globe Theater is touring North Korea with their adaptation of Hamlet. Amnesty International is not amused.

... Finally, the Thai Film Archive has a YouTube channel. Wisekwai is pointing readers in the direction of its non-English-friendly videos, which include fragments of Thailand’s very first feature film, Double Luck, and Thailand’s first animated film, The Miraculous Incident.

Marin Karmitz, the founder of French production and distribution group MK2, may seem like a walking paradox: a one-time director of militant leftist films who now heads one of the most powerful film companies on the international scene, a rich man who claims to have never let go of his Marxist ideals. Another sixties activist rationalizing his capitalist success? The reality seems more complex.

Born in Romania in 1938, Karmitz emigrated to France with his family in 1948 and soon started finding himself—or, more likely, putting himself—in the right place at the right time. He assistant-directed Agnès Varda’s directorial debut Cléo from 5 to 7 and Jean-Luc Godard’s short La Paresse, began his own career as a director with a short written by Marguerite Duras, filmed an adaptation of Samuel Beckett’s Play, and was at the heart of the political ferment of May ’68, working in the new leftist press and directing politically committed features. The traditional distribution system’s refusal to screen his final film as a director, Blow by Blow, led Karmitz to open his first movie theater in Paris and gradually build up a chain of multiplexes that has focused on building movie theaters in underserved, often working-class neighborhoods and screening original-version, subtitled foreign films in a market that previously favored dubbing.

Most importantly, Karmitz has been a steadfast friend to great filmmakers, allowing directors like Godard, Chabrol and Alain Resnais to make a “second first feature” when commercial failures had closed all other doors. He has produced all of Abbas Kiarostami’s features since 1999 and has worked with directors including Gus Van Sant, Hong Sang-soo, Michael Haneke, Claire Denis, and Krzysztof Kieslowski.   

MoMA is currently celebrating the MK2 Distribution Group’s 40th anniversary with a carte blanche series. FILM COMMENT took the opportunity to speak to Marin Karmitz about his journey from director to mogul, the role of a hands-on producer, and his complicated relationship with Jean-Luc Godard.

Camarades

You founded MK2 in 1966 to produce your own features as a director. Was that because you needed your own company to direct political films?

I’ve always been extremely concerned with my freedom. I’m well suited to a state of natural wildness and permanent revolt. So before MK2, I had founded MK, a short-film production company, so I could make the films I wanted to make, namely two films particularly incongruous to the production system of the time, respectively written by Marguerite Duras and Samuel Beckett. French law required me to have a separate company for feature films, so I founded MK2 to continue being free to do what I wanted. I had met producers who offered to do features with me, but I could feel I wouldn’t be comfortable, that I wasn’t going to be free.

Your second feature, Camarades (70), was your first political film.

Well, May ’68 had happened in the meantime. After that, it was hard for me to consider going back to doing things the way I had always done them. For many of us at the time, there was a delineation between before and after May ’68. What came after ’68 for me was Camarades, then Blow for Blow [72]. Camarades was an intermediary stage, because it was an adaptation of a Cesare Pavese novel by a young worker I had met in ’68. I consider Blow for Blow far more successful and profound, given the context of the period.

Blow for Blow was made the same year as Godard’s Tout Va Bien and dealt with the same subject: a strike in a women’s factory.   

I had known Godard for a long time. I met him when he had a cameo in Cléo from 5 to 7, then I was his assistant—or rather his slave, which is a very pleasant position to be in when your boss is Godard. Jean-Luc and I were reunited in May ’68 through a project to change French cinema. He and I were part of a group with Claude Chabrol and some others. We raised a little hell in all the do-gooder thinking of the other groups which had formed, with a completely crazy project to make movie-going free. In fact, it wasn’t that crazy: it foreshadowed what would happen in the Eighties with French cable channel Canal Plus offering people subscriptions to have unlimited access to movies. That’s what we were proposing, more or less: you paid a cultural tax, people made films, and you could go to as many movies as you wanted. Godard and I participated in all that, then both of us took pictures for the leftist newspaper J’Accuse, which paved the way for La Cause du Peuple and Libération. Libération and MK2 cinemas are the two major cultural expressions of May ’68 and were both founded in 1974. It’s an enlightening parallel, particularly since Libération is on the verge of going under and we’re still working—I don’t know if we’re succeeding—but we’re working.

It all has to do with the question of how culture deals with money, how a cultural institution can survive when it is militant, leftist, involved in reality, leading political struggles and making enemies and not simply being a neutral organism. I followed the principle of relying on your own strength. I founded my own company, with the idea of individual freedom and autonomy within a collective scheme. Libération needed to rely purely on the collective scheme due to the cost of running a newspaper and to follow the ideal of collective work—which I applied in Blow for Blow. The poster was of one hundred working women, all of us were listed in alphabetical order. It’s similar to what Libération was doing, except that I was personally taking the financial risks. So I had a very concrete relationship with the industrial banking system, which implies a constant back and forth on my part between the center and the margins.

Blow for Blow

Godard criticized Blow for Blow, stating that he thought you were moving too fast by trying to let the working people speak for themselves with the traditional tools of cinema.

You have to look at our respective histories. I had a Marxist education from an early age. I was also confronted with serious historical realities: the war, the Germans, immigration, then the war in Algeria. Godard is Swiss. He is in a tradition of the solitary artist facing the world, society, and politics. I was coming from a different perspective because I had experienced collective struggles to change the world. So Blow for Blow and Tout Va Bien have the same subject, but he and I had different relationships to the same reality. My approach was connected to the new momentum brought by ’68. I wanted to express this collective joy and generosity and give the floor to all these women I had met through my photo stories for J’Accuse. Godard covered the same stories of strikes I did, but with a different idea of the strike. His point of view was always that of Jean-Luc seeing the strike. Mine was, how can I show these strikers from the inside, not from the outside like the reporter standing right next to me? I tried to change the point of view in the photos I took. At the time, intellectuals really divided over our two films, because they provided two different conceptions of the artist and politics—or the artist and history, if you’d rather.

People took sides in a radical way. For example, my film came out when a young worker called Overnay died. We collected money in the theaters showing my film to pay for the funeral. Jane Fonda came and joined us. She had just shot Godard’s film but was openly displaying that she agreed with my point of view. I released my film by taking it from one factory or neighborhood to the next, screening it in villages and backyards. Godard’s film was distributed by an American company. There’s a famous letter Truffaut sent to Godard, taking him to task and writing that “Karmitz needed Jane Fonda and Yves Montand more than you did.” That’s Jean-Luc’s contradictory nature: he made a completely personal film about a women workers’ strike, but with American money and Jane Fonda and Yves Montand. Why not? Both our perspectives make sense and have existed throughout history.

Ultimately, it comes down to your objective. Mine was to contribute something new to what can be called documentary fiction, a school of cinema that has existed since the Lumière Brothers. I see myself as a descendant of the Lumière Brothers, while Godard is a descendant of Méliès. I tried to make my contribution in the Lumière vein, which is to make a work of art from raw reality. Godard asks how you transform that reality from the get-go, how you create a world. Jean-Luc’s films are concerned with an immediate transformation of reality. There are very few connections with reality in his way of shooting or his language. He is clearly no longer involved in story, psychology, all those kinds of references, but in a certain discourse containing images and music. But I have tremendous admiration for what he does.

Every Man for Himself

Many theaters refused to show Blow for Blow. Is that why you founded your own movie theaters and became a distributor?

Censorship did not come from the state, it came from the industrial system. Here again, my need for freedom led me to refuse to be forced into silence by economic pressure. So I distributed the film myself. By doing so, I realized there was a profound change taking place in the French distribution system, which was the arrival of major distribution networks. There were all these formerly isolated theaters now joining programming networks, eventually resulting in the two contemporary distribution networks in France, Pathé-Gaumont and UGC. These two programming networks’ intense concentration reinforced the industrial capitalist weight of film distribution. I reacted as an activist, thinking in terms of counterculture and counter-power. Even if we only had one distribution outlet, at least it would express something else. The difference was not only in the films we showed, but in the architecture and the way of showing films. I set up a bookstore and had art and photo shows, concerts. Most importantly, we had debates and strove for a cinema that was at the core of the city.

Why did you start producing other directors’ films?

I began to produce after opening the theaters. I noticed that certain films were in prison. I don’t like putting people in prison, especially when it’s unjustified or because they have the “wrong” opinion. My movie theater was founded with the idea of creating a zone for freedom. Having the theaters required a distribution company. I couldn’t make a film and dump it in the theater—I needed to create a structure for finding other screens, convincing other allies, expanding the release, dealing with the press etc. So the distribution company was our first counterattack in defense of freedom. At the time, I couldn’t produce, because my political positions made it impossible for me to cohabitate with the political and economic system in place. I did not have access to the center of power, I couldn’t take out loans. I was only able to produce thanks to the success of a film I distributed, the Taviani brothers’ Padre Padrone. I used the money to produce Godard’s Every Man for Himself and Yannick Bellon’s Rape of Love, which was about rape, a subject rarely treated on screen at the time. But I had always proceeded with the idea of returning to production as quickly as possible. The rest was only to support films. I needed to make films or participate in their creation. The question was how. I found a roundabout way of coming back to creating films.

As I said earlier, I’ve always had to go back and forth between the center—power and money—and the margins to do what I’ve done. But these incursions into the center were often very painful and cost me a great deal on a personal level. I sacrificed my career as a director to do that. And at the time I was quite a well-known director, including in the U.S. When I showed Camarades at the New York Film Festival in 1970, it was incredible. The film ends with the singing of the Internationale. At the end of the screening, a spotlight came on to show me standing in the balcony and the entire audience was standing, singing the Internationale with their fists raised. Anyhow, production came later, but it’s the heart of what I do. It’s clearly where I need to be. Everything else serves as a tool—tools that need to be used intelligently.

Story of Women

What does being a producer mean to you?

I’ve always said it’s being a “publisher and merchant” of films. I don’t think you can simply be a producer. That’s one of many producers’ great weaknesses and one of the studios’ great strengths. The studios’ strength is that they are producers—well, they were producers, and from time to time they still are—and distributors of films. They are able to conceive both the making of their films and their global release.

Producing is helping to give birth to the film. It’s being involved in all the choices that happen before the shoot: the script, the actors, the locations, the costumes. For example, Claude Chabrol hated dealing with locations and costumes. For his Story of Women, which was set during World War II in a working class area, I decided we needed to shoot in the provinces. I knew Claude was much more relaxed there. He had his whole crew close at hand, he saw them every night. That creates an atmosphere like with a theater company. It improves the work. People don’t go home every night and argue with their partners. They have to be careful because the rest of the crew is in the neighboring rooms and can hear their arguments. So we shot in Dieppe. I personally chose the locations and decided to challenge Chabrol with 10 feet x 6 feet rooms. I knew he loved those kind of limitations. Shortly before the shoot, I told him, “on set, there will be room for you, the camera operator, and the camera. That’s it. I’d like you to show me how you deal with such small locations.” He was wild with joy!  Another example: on L’Enfer, which was set before the war, Emmanuelle Béart absolutely wanted to wear wedge heels, which were trendy at the time we were shooting. I couldn’t accept that. Claude didn’t want to deal with it, he never wanted to deal with costumes. But I have a rule when it comes to costumes, which is that the most perfect costumes are those in Renoir’s Une partie de campagne. As simple as can be. Those costumes have not aged a day. That’s my director’s point of view coming out, but as a producer, I’ve always found it was pretty good. That’s what makes the difference between a dated movie and one you can watch for decades. Even if it’s a costume picture, it remains a modern movie. That’s what it means to be a producer, in concrete terms. It’s the script, the hiring of the crew, and how you finance the film. To paraphrase Godard, who said that the tracking shot was a moral question, I’ve always said that production is a moral question. Today in France there’s all this controversy about actors being overpaid. It’s astounding to me because there are no ethics behind it. What is a salary? What is someone’s work worth? Why is he paid this amount? What is it to make a film freely? The idea behind most films today is how much money can be made—for the producer, the actors, the director etc. But they don’t think about what it costs them in terms of freedom. My approach is to turn limitations into zones of freedom. It took me a long time to learn that. I learned it thanks to Godard, actually. He was in a bad mood one day when we were making Every Man for Himself and he told me I wasn’t a good producer. It wasn’t pleasant to hear, but it was Godard. I learned so much from him that I’m willing to tolerate his nasty remarks. I really asked myself what he meant by that and after 20 films, when I was making Alain Resnais’s Mélo, I understood that producing was transforming a limitation into freedom. And that’s everything.

My work as a producer continues after the film is finished. To stick with Godard, when we premiered Every Man for Himself at Cannes, the critical reception was simply disastrous. So I spent the summer calling up every one of the critics and telling them Jean-Luc had paid careful attention to their criticisms and reedited the film. I would invite them to a private screening of the film, only when they showed up at the lab, Marguerite Duras, Michel Foucault, or Jean-Paul Sartre would be there. And they loved the film, of course. So the critic saw a different film, though Jean-Luc had not changed a frame. And when the film was released in October, some of those same critics wrote rave reviews, and it went on to become his greatest commercial success.

Mélo

Did you ever have problems with directors reluctant to accept your level of involvement?

Never with the greats. Never with Chabrol, never with Godard. On the contrary. Recently Godard asked to see me because he wanted me to distribute one of his films. So I go to Rolle and he shows me his film. He has digital equipment all over the place but works on a 35mm editing table. I say: “Look, Jean-Luc, this part seems a little long, this other part is not so great.” He answers: “All right, I’m going to talk to Anne-Marie [Miéville].” He calls me up two days later and says, “We wanted to thank you, because we tried what you suggested and you were right, it’s better.” I’ve only had problems with those who are average—it may even be what made me think they were average. When I started to have these problems, I realized these directors were so self-confident, or give such an impression of being self-confident, that they have contempt for the entire world and don’t know how to listen. That lack of listening makes them small. One of the great gifts of intelligence is to be able to listen. The smallest of the small among those I’ve met is Abdellatif Kechiche. Kechiche made production very painful for me. He really made me realize that I don’t want to do all this work for people like him.

Now I’m drastically selective. I choose the people who give me something, with whom there is an exchange. I’m done with people who take and don’t give. I don’t have any more time to lose. I don’t ask directors to make me a lot of money—I’ve reached the age where I don’t need a lot of money and I have other things in mind. I want to make good movies. I want to make movies that contribute something to me and to cinema. Obviously I’m going to produce the next Abbas Kiarostami film, because it’s a pleasure. A joy. The initial cut of Abbas’s last film, Like Someone in Love, was 135 minutes. We sat at the editing table together, watched the film scene by scene, talked about it, and he came back with a 110- minute film. And all that was accomplished through the pleasure of discussion. Working in cinema is working collectively. The producer’s role is like that of a tennis player’s coach. You have to hit the ball back to the director so he can improve his game. What helps is having a person across from him with whom he can have a dialogue.

In France, there’s no dialogue possible. People put you in a category, the producer category or the rich man category, and from that moment on you’re stuck in a position that has nothing to do with you. Here in New York I can feel that people are listening. We don’t have that in France anymore. France is so self-satisfied that it’s becoming unlivable. So now I tend to work with more foreign directors: we’re going to be working with Naomi Kawase, Jia Zhang-ke, Kiarostami and, I hope, Atiq Rahimi. I’m very happy we’ll be having a dialogue with directors in four countries around the world.

There are no young French filmmakers that inspire you?

No. Well, there are interesting things but I don’t know the directors. And I think that they wouldn’t be able to handle the level at which I set the bar. You have to be pretty tough to handle that. You have to want it. And you have to have thought about life a lot. But look how enjoyable it is for me to work with Xavier Dolan. I don’t have someone like him in France. It’s not that I don’t want that, I just can’t find it. But Xavier Dolan came to us, he’s asking for what we can offer. I tell him over and over that he has to remain a free man. He must not sell his soul to the devil. The devil being all these people who are going to offer him things after his success at Cannes. It’s important that someone say that to him—not so he works with me again, but so that he remain who he is, a free young man. That’s important.

Translated by Nicholas Elliott

Norte, The End of History is the new short film by Lav Diaz—OK, that’s the facile joke out of the way. Yes, at four hours, Norte qualifies as one of the Filipino director’s shorter features—a mere divertissement compared to the nine-hour Heremias: Book One (06) or the ten-and-a-half-hour Evolution of a Filipino Family (04). But it’s also true that Norte doesn’t feel long in the least: with its narrative economy, clarity, and gently purposeful forward drive, the film is as streamlined and as watchable as any contemporary mainstream narrative, if not more so. At the risk of repeating a weary truism about the relativity of film time, Norte feels a lot shorter than the arduous grind of many an artificially busy Hollywood production.

In any case, length alone is not necessarily these films’ defining element. What’s distinctive is the way that Diaz balances design and contingency, so that a film’s duration emerges from the play of these elements. If I remember correctly Diaz’s description of his methods when he came to Britain two years ago to the AV Festival in Tyneside, his films are unusually open to chance: if characters come and go as though following their own unpredictable will, sometimes disappearing abruptly from the action, it’s often because an actor will drop out unexpectedly in mid-shoot (and these shoots can be both fragmentary and very extended) and the film will have to accommodate that. What’s more, Diaz has a cavalier attitude to scripts: Norte, for example, began with a structured script (it’s credited to the director and Rody Vera) but Diaz would write new material before each day’s shooting.

All this relates to duration insofar as each film to a great extent narrates its own coming into being; watching one from start to finish is akin to participating in its creation. It’s not for nothing that Diaz has, albeit partly in jest, dubbed his viewers as “warriors”: not just because they’ve achieved feats of endurance, but because the very nature of his films implies comradeship, sharing a venture outside the common domain of cinema (a typical Diaz character is the guerrilla or social outsider seen hacking through dense countryside).

Norte, however, is something of a departure for Diaz, even though it’s immediately recognizable as his work. It’s his first color feature, shot this time not by Diaz himself but by Larry Manda. And it’s a much more structured and condensed piece than, say, the leisurely zigzagging of Melancholia (09). The narrative takes some surprising detours, but is essentially very simple and is built on a set of basic oppositions: rich/poor, good/evil, crime/punishment. In fact, it’s essentially Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, except that it imagines what would happen if some long-suffering innocent took the rap for Raskolnikov.

The film starts with a five-minute fixed shot, a café scene in which a group of urban intellectuals sit talking, half seriously, half facetiously, about philosophy, history, and law. The Raskolnikov figure is the reportedly brilliant young Fabian (Sid Lucero); to the dismay of his peers and his former teachers, he has abandoned the studies that apparently destined him for the sort of law career that might have shone a redeeming light on the murk of Filipino public life. But the jaded Fabian is hung up on a set of ideas that, depending on how he phrases them, resemble disillusioned idealism, end-of-all-meaning nihilism, and mere slick sophistry: he may claim to be committed to “a new kind of understanding… beyond everything,” but the line that ultimately emerges is brutally reactionary, a belief in the self-elected brightest and best arrogating the right to identify and eliminate the bad elements in society.

We may think at first that Fabian is simply a poseur, addicted to the rush of his own rhetoric. But he emerges as a pretty creepy figure: claiming that he feels bad about having an affair with his college pal’s girlfriend, then displaying his “honesty” by humiliating her in public (at which point the guys all close ranks and say, hey, it’s water under the bridge). Deciding that the blight in society is embodied in a moneylender named Magda (a boisterous turn by Miles Canapi), he kills her and her daughter (one on screen, the other off, in a grippingly staged shot) and makes off with a haul of pawned valuables.

Meanwhile a poor couple named Joaquin (Archie Alemania) and Eliza (Angeli Bayani) have been struggling to support their children, and thanks to Magda, have had to abandon their dream of starting a food business. Joaquin gets the rap for Magda’s murder, and long sequences follow the couple as they cope with his imprisonment. Eliza sells vegetables and, with her sister, raises the children in an impoverished yet somewhat idyllic riverside setting. Meanwhile Joaquin—despite other prisoners’ attempt to strip him of his illusions—holds onto his dream of reunion with his family.

The film’s opposition of good and bad faith is problematic in that a character like Fabian is bound to be more interesting than Joaquin and Eliza, who represent an ideal of proletarian endurance that’s not so far from traditional icons of Christian suffering. Joaquin is beaten up by prison “daddy” Wakwak (Soliman Cruz), but no one can turn the other cheek quite like this gentle country boy, and before long Joaquin is tending to an ailing Wakwak, the former oppressor at last expiring with a gasped “Forgive me”—at Christmas, mark you. Joaquin and Eliza, who seem to have a psychic link while they’re apart—invoked by two aerial sequences connecting their separate locations—have little to characterize them except gentle tenacity. Fabian, on the other hand, is a figure of complex perversity, with a backstory emerging in the final stretch that establishes him as more comprehensively fucked up than we could have imagined.

Politically, then, it’s problematic that the working-class heroes are ciphers with little to say for themselves, while its moneyed villain is a creature of light and shade with more than enough to say, and very stylishly so. Yet in using such broad strokes, Diaz knows what he’s doing. The nature of the very basic opposition in Norte is true to both 19th-century narrative (the fevered complexity of Raskolnikov versus the schematic simplicity, or purity if you prefer, of “poor folk” like Sonya) and to older Christian narratives of redemption and martyrdom.

But in any case, the film subverts its apparent commitment to Christian codes of patience and compassion. Running from his crime, Fabian meets a pleasant bunch of young people who turn out to be born-again Christians; at one of their meetings, he unburdens himself incoherently, before rushing out in a frenzy. And the character who is most densely wreathed in clouds of beatification comes a cropper in a shocking scene.

As I understand it, then, the wronged couple’s tenacity is less a Christian matter than something in the nature of a hard truth about Filipino history: the message is that the islands’ poor have always been screwed over and will have to tough it out until society changes radically. But for that to happen, the film suggests, the educated ruling class, people like Fabian and his law friends, will have to commit themselves to something more decisive than making blasé quips about how things have always gone wrong in the Philippines. It’s hard to get a grip on the film without a knowledge of the nation’s history, but early on the discussion in Fabian’s circle revolves around 19th-century events and the deaths of revolutionary heroes such as Andres Bonifacio. It’s also significant that the film is shot around the Northern province of Ilocos Norte, where the dictator Ferdinand Marcos was born, himself a one-time law student. Fabian’s café-society suavity and invocation of modish postmodern ideas shouldn’t blind us to the reality of his murderous potential.

This description may make you expect something schematic, but that’s far from the truth. What partly makes Norte so compelling is Diaz’s extraordinary mise en scène, and the way that he and DP Manda use the widescreen frame. The film is threaded through with visual metaphors of imprisonment. Fabian initially occupies a tiny apartment that he fancies as a chic embodiment of Japanese simplicity, but that is really the first of the cells he fashions for himself; later, when he blocks out his windows in anguish, even the blanket he puts up has a bar pattern. By contrast, there’s a strange spaciousness to the actual crowded cell that Joaquin occupies—it extends across the screen like a proscenium stage in a sequence that has a guitar-strumming prisoner offering a musical interlude, like a campfire song in a Western. Manda’s lighting sculpts these spaces beautifully, while little visual clues help build up a novelistic density. The photo of a pet dog in Fabian’s apartment tells us that he’s one of those sentimentalists who love animals but despise humans; hanging over his head after he’s killed Magda, the picture signals his bestial nature. And just when we’d forgotten about it, the dog returns in time for a startling conclusion.

Also, just when we’d forgotten an early discussion about the device of the deus ex machina, Diaz throws in one of those, in a way that will have you grinding your teeth if you expected things to turn out neatly, but that lovers of enigmatic twists (à la Dumont, Reygadas, Apichatpong) will no doubt relish. So any thought of Diaz as a director who makes it all up as he goes along is comprehensively belied by a tightly structured narrative that, for all its length and languid pacing, contains very little dead time. It’s only in the third hour that we begin to experience the slowness of the new life that Joaquin and Eliza must endure apart (connoisseurs of still contemplativeness will love a four-minute take of Eliza and her sister sitting out at night musing on their future).

Shown in Cannes last year in Un Certain Regard, Norte was widely acclaimed as a highlight of the festival, a supposedly “impossible” (if not unwatchable) director thus being officially received into the realm of the possible. For some of Diaz’s committed warrior following, this—together with the film’s composed coherence and its full-color beauty—may well characterize Norte as a compromise, but really, you’d have to be as cranky an extremist as Fabian to see it that way. The film is a marvel of simplicity, depth, and deviousness too.

The Young Ones

Last Monday, word went around that Rik Mayall, the English comedian, had died at the age of 56. He was buried yesterday. And while I’m not a great believer in the RIP industry and the chasing of hearses for content, once a week I fill this space with whatever is on my mind, and in this particular case, that something happens to be Rik Mayall.

Mayall was born in 1958 in Harlow, Essex, but raised in the West Midlands, an identification which would leave a deep impression on his comedy. In 1975, Mayall entered the University of Manchester, and there met future collaborators Ade Edmondson, Ben Elton, and Lise Mayer. Mayall and Edmondson began performing as a two-man act called 20th Century Coyote while still at university, and after graduation they gained a degree of infamy at London’s Comedy Store, where Mayall rolled out the characters that would soon make his name. (Such was the popularity of Mayall and other young comedians at the Comedy Store that they eventually broke away to create their own venue, The Comic Strip.)

Mayall made his first real impact on television by way of a character never widely known to American audiences, a shut-in Midlander named Kevin Turvey. On each episode of the sketch show A Kick Up the Eighties, which first aired on BBC2 in fall of 1981, Kevin would appear to deliver a digressive, stream-of-consciousness monologue in direct-address to “armchair Britain,” single takes infused with a nervous energy by Mayall’s fidgety presence, his slightly askance, lazy-eyed stare, and choppy done-over-the-sink-at-home haircut. This combined to give Kevin the air of not being quite all right, an impression furthered by his fixation on cornflakes and casual references to being sick on himself. Kevin’s monologues were labeled investigative reports, though his investigations never seem to take him much further afield that the Tesco in his native Redditch, and he would usually forget his topic before he even began, becoming flustered and distracted by niceties of language and wholly irrelevant details. Kevin’s topics included “Death,” “Nasty Little Sticky Things” and, more than once “Sex” though, despite a hang-up on a local girl named Theresa Kelly, Kevin had seemingly never “done it,” per se—a quality that he shared with many a Mayall character in years to come, including “Richie” Richard in Bottom (1991-95).

The most celebrated of Mayall’s unfuckables was broadcast into British living rooms the following year with the debut of The Young Ones, written by Mayall, Elton, and Mayer. Set in a dilapidated student house that wobbles like it’s fit to blow over any second, The Young Ones concerns four undergraduates at Scumbag College, among them Edmondson’s pimply human-wrecking-ball punker, Vyvyan, and a simpering self-proclaimed “People’s Poet” in New Waver togs named Rick, played by Mayall. Rick, who works himself into a state of near-constant spluttering indignation over such topics as South Africa and the pop singer Cliff Richard, whom he venerates, preeningly vents his outrage by spitting frightful verse in a loathsome lisp. Mayall played Rick with a stoat-like overbite, reminiscent of that affected by Monty Python in their “Upper-Class Twit of the Year” skit, and in such a mercilessly shrill manner that you wanted to inflict grievous bodily harm on his person. (Later, Mayall would prove just as repellent as a right-winger. Through four series of The New Statesman he played conniving Conservative MP Alan B’Stard from Haltemprice, the archetypal Tory scum, and a posh sociopath to give Patrick Bateman or Gregory Crutwell in Naked a run for their money.)

The Young Ones

Among the various elements that made up The Young Ones’ obscene mulligatawny stew were frequent detours from the narrative proper, rather like Kevin Turvey’s random, useless footnotes. These included appearances by guest-act bands, noxious puppets, and standalone blackout skits. For example: in the first episode, “Demolition,” Vyvyan busts through a wall and stumbles into a grim, grave Eastern European domestic drama that resembles something from Béla Tarr’s The Turin Horse. Later, Rick switches on the television to watch a new young adult–oriented program called Nozin’ Aroun’, only to kick in the set in disgust when the host, a cheery twit in a Clash tee, starts sucking up to “very special guest Roland Percival, who’s Careers Officer at East London Poly,” a gray-haired establishment plant in a natty suit. The significance of this gesture is clear: unlike the Nozin’ Aroun’s of the world—programs that used the trappings of youth culture to perpetuate the status quo—The Young Ones was the real thing, a one-for-us moment when an identifiably counterculture comic sensibility overflowed into the view of the broader public, something like the how the debut of Saturday Night Live had been received by American viewers years earlier.

Mayall’s impact on U.K. comedy seems akin to kicking in the telly, but to approximate the point of view of armchair Britain in 1982 is outside the ken of my experience, and the reason that I was compelled to write about him is because his work has meant a great deal to me personally. Mayall entered my life sometime around 1991, when I was a preadolescent Anglophile—it’s a condition that it’s best to get through when you’re a kid, like Chicken Pox—and The Young Ones was part of the imported PBS slate of Britcoms that I indiscriminately lapped up, along with Blackadder (in which Mayall had a recurring role as Lord Flashheart and the descendants of his line), Red Dwarf, and quite anything else featuring an English accent, with the exception of Are You Being Served? (The particular yellow shade of Mr. Humphries’ teeth was just a little much to stomach.) And while I didn’t know it then, even my favorite American program at the time, Fox’s Get a Life, was indebted to The Young Ones—conceived after producer/director David Mirkin and star Chris Elliott had failed to launch a U.S. adaptation of the BBC show with the title Oh No, Not Them! (Get a Life, which also took great relish in periodically killing off its protagonist, brought some of The Young Ones’ nonsensical, non sequitur humor to the American sitcom, in the process connecting to a tradition of native comic surrealism at least as old as Million Dollar Legs and Hellzapoppin’.)

Blackadder

Whatever sense of humor that I have today, then, has been in some way shaped by Rik Mayall. The reason that I singled out 1991 above, however, is because that was the year of Drop Dead Fred, Mayall’s most noteworthy big screen role and, for about six to eight months, my favorite movie. (After making my mother rent Drop Dead Fred on something like a weekly basis during this period, UHF eventually regained the top slot.) It is a strange thing to, as a theoretically more discriminating adult, revisit the formative works of one’s childhood. These things, when encountered at a certain vulnerable age, write themselves onto the gray matter like initials in wet concrete. Practically every time that I refresh a page on my web browser, I hear in my head the “Reload!” from the video game Lethal Enforcers; every time I wash dishes I hear the “Dish washer” speech from Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story… What, then, might repeated exposures to Drop Dead Fred have done to me?

As with all great children’s movies, Drop Dead Fred kicks off with a scene of sexual humiliation. Mousy Lizzie Cronin (Phoebe Cates) is trying to reconcile with her husband, Charles (Tim Matheson), a loathsome yuppie who runs a Jaguar dealership, and who has strayed into an affair. He rebuffs Lizzie, and this sends her into a tailspin which ends with her sleeping in her childhood bedroom at the stately, coldly perfect home of her overbearing mother (Marsha Mason). There Lizzie discovers a taped-shut jack-in-the-box which, when opened, spews out a bouncing ball of return-of-the-repressed Id, in the form of her nearly-forgotten girlhood imaginary friend, Drop Dead Fred (Mayall). Fred is an overgrown 4-year-old, violent, needlessly destructive, abrasive, obnoxious, and with an orangutan’s sense of fun that tends towards booger-flicking and poo-flinging—in short, he’s everything that prim, deferent Lizzie is not. Fred’s all-around horridness extends to his appearance: he wears a variety of putrid, pupil-searing yellow-and-green ensembles, and has bright orange hair which is at one point done up in such a way that he resembles like a lit match. (Fred can also pop his eyes out like a cartoon wolf, earning the dubious distinction of beating Jim Carrey’s The Mask to the live-action cartoon thing by a couple of years.)

Drop Dead Fred

The ’do also lends Fred a passing resemblance to John “Rotten” Lydon, and his therapeutic credo—“When something’s not working right, the best thing is to tear it apart to make it better”—is quite close to the “Rip it up and start again” of post-punk. Anarchist Hobbes to Lizzie’s Calvin, Fred reintroduces an element of chaos to her life, though his therapy contains more than a measure of abuse, as he manhandles her body in public so that she seems to have lost control of it. It’s a variation on the “Stop hitting yourself” routine so beloved of older siblings, and because no one but Lizzie can see Fred, to the outside observer she appears to be having a mental breakdown during these Tourette’s fits, or to be belligerently Drop Dead Drunk. The latter metaphorical reading is supported by the presence in the movie of Carrie Fisher, a very public recovering alcoholic, in the role of Lizzie’s friend—though this wasn’t picked up on by critics, including the Washington Post reviewer, who even thought to disparagingly compare Drop Dead Fred to 1950’s Harvey, which featured Jimmy Stewart as a tippling fantasist. (I should mention that Fisher’s character lives on a paddle-steamer houseboat in the Mississippi River, and that for some reason the movie takes place in Minneapolis.)

It seems possible that Drop Dead Fred was greenlit thanks to the success of Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice, which likewise features invisible nemeses wreaking havoc on snooty upper-middle-class cunts, or thanks to the brief popularity of the “acting out” subgenre (Home Alone, Problem Child). But Drop Dead Fred, which carries a PG-13 rating for swearing, sex, and scatology, isn’t one of those “Movies for kids that adults can enjoy too!” I’m actually not sure what demographic it was intended for, or if enjoyment even enters into the equation—this would be a Carmelo Bene production if Mayall’s performance were any more deliberately grating.

Drop Dead Fred

Un film de Ate de Jong, Drop Dead Fred is an unlikely candidate for auteur appreciation. Mayall’s is the personality that asserts itself most clearly upon the material—or, better to say, terrorizes it. A scan of the involved personnel reveals that the original story was written by a woman named Elizabeth Livingston, while the screenplay is credited to Carlos Davis and Anthony Fingleton, and none of the three have particularly robust bodies of work. (Fingleton, however, was a silver medalist for the backstroke in the British Empire and Commonwealth Games, and his autobiography Swimming Upstream, which apparently addresses his troubled relationship with his father while growing up in Australia, was made into a 2003 feature film of the same name directed by Russell Mulcahy.) As for de Jong, I must withhold comment until I’ve seen any of the 13 other feature films that the Dutch-born director has been credited with since 1976—1995’s All Men are Mortal, a Simone de Beauvoir adaptation starring Irene Jacob and co-written by Variety’s Steven Gaydos, certainly piqued my interest.

Talking of de Beauvoir, though, it’s worth wondering if Drop Dead Fred could be reclaimed for feminism, being as it is a story of female disobedience. The movie takes the form of a fractured fairy tale, featuring a pre-credits scene in which a young Lizzie rejects “Happily ever after” nostrums, responding to the ending of a bedtime story with “What a pile of shit!” (“She made me puke,” Fred later says of Cinderella. “I remember the ugly sisters, they were great!”) I’m not sure, though, how much scrutiny Drop Dead Fred’s gender politics would bear up under. In flashbacks we see that Lizzie’s mother, dubbed “megabeast” by Fred, is to blame for everything that subsequently went wrong in her daughter’s life, while Lizzie’s father is absolved for everything but his diffidence. (He’s an easygoing Englishman named Nigel, aligned by his accent to Fred, who plays the role of substitute father, this one able to stand up to mum.)

Drop Dead Fred

Drop Dead Fred currently owns a 5.7 User Rating on IMDb, although it is fondly enough recalled—or at least its premise is still regarded as being monetizable enough—to have spawned persistent rumors of a remake to star Russell Brand. (Who, in his current role of earnest, dissident deep-thinker, has something of the quality of People’s Poet Rik.) I will not make any inordinately grand claims for Drop Dead Fred, though having recently reviewed it on a 360p YouTube video, I can confirm that it more than works, and that Mayall’s performance, on top of being extravagantly unpleasant, is at times deeply touching. In the course of writing this, I realized that Drop Dead Fred’s release and subsequent reign as my favorite movie coincided almost perfectly with my own parents’ divorce, and that this is probably not unrelated to my fondness for the movie and my great feeling of warmth for Rik Mayall and his screen persona, so defiantly repellent. Though I never so much as saw Mayall in the flesh, I feel with his passing that I have lost a childhood friend, and so I offer a eulogy paraphrasing the words of Drop Dead Fred:

“GOOD-BYE FOREVER! I’M SORRY YOU DIED HORRIBLY!”

I came into the San Francisco International Film Festival straight from a horror festival. Perhaps bingeing on movies that weren’t exactly going for subtlety altered my senses, but what greeted me in SF felt like the perfect antidote: a handful of memorable, effectively understated films across a variety genres.

All About the Feathers

Neto Villalobos’s All About the Feathers—the first Costa Rican film to play the SFIFF in its 57-year history—is a mellow, somewhat screwball comedy that matches the demeanor of its protagonist Chalo, a wholly likeable but dispirited security guard who’s set on breaking into the thriving yet illegal cock-fighting game to liven up his life and make some cash in the process. He finally gets ahold of a nice-looking rooster—appropriately named Rocky—and is determined to make a champion out of him. Chalo and audiences alike grow very fond of the mischievous Rocky, and man and bird provide the grounding for an unusual buddy film. Chalo also makes some new human friends—including an endearingly awkward teenage boy he meets on the bus and a trusty woman who works nearby as a maid—and they help him on his new endeavor that may just turn out to be more trouble than it’s worth. Generally as light as Rocky’s feathers, the movie gets its occasional tension from the risk of Rocky wandering off, or worse, losing a fight (but have no fear, we are subjected to no more than a few moments of beak-to-beak combat).

It’s a very promising debut for Villalobos, who also produced, wrote, and edited the film that, with its naturalistic feel, cast of mostly nonprofessionals, and dry humor and charm, is far less precious than it sounds. New Yorkers can catch it next month at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, where the film will screen as part of Latinbeat.

The Reconstruction

On the surface, the solitary oil worker at the center of The Reconstruction couldn’t be more unlike the affable Chalo. The film opens with an expressionless Eduardo (Diego Peretti) driving right on past the scene of a car crash, cold to a woman’s frantic screams for help, his actions immediately putting his character into serious question. That he has a chip on his shoulder is clear, but learning why takes more time. So in return for a little patience we are invited to get to know him, and the sad details of his life, as he dutifully if uncomfortably takes over the task of tending to an old friend’s store—as well as his wife and two daughters—after his sudden death. The broken-hearted widow quietly accepts Eduardo’s presence, while the girls are more forthcoming in questioning his gruff behavior and atrocious table manners. Naturally, a bond develops. And one particularly striking scene in which the widow reaches in to caress Eduardo while he’s showering—one lost soul grasping for another—defines the movie, which arouses profound feeling with few words, and is devastating in all its simplicity.

Argentinian director Juan Taratuto and Peretti have in the past collaborated on two fluffy romantic comedies. I have not seen them, but if they are half as effective in making people laugh as The Reconstruction is in making them cry, I will hunt them down right now (they’ve never been released in the U.S.).

Coherence

And, finally, the fest’s third highlight was an intriguingly lo-fi sci-fi Twilight Zone–ish offering playfully called Coherence. Despite an introductory scene that involves a disrupted cell-phone call between a couple announcing word of an impending comet, followed by the mysterious cracking of the woman’s iPhone screen, the film initially looks to be a typical chamber drama, as a group of friends gather for a dinner party. But beyond the human dimension, James Ward Byrkit’s Coherence is a true tale for the technological age. At first, things start to go slowly awry: with electricity out, cell and Internet service down, the four couples are at a loss—they even have to refer to a science-nerd book for guidance! Yet because it not only reminds us that we may have forgotten how to function without our gadgets, Coherence is also a tale for all ages, in that it’s also about people losing track of their very selves. That’s quite literally expressed here as it emerges that each guest appears to have a double (or perhaps more)—a development that sets off an evening of fear, doubt, and mind-bending puzzle-solving. The film, set mostly within the walls of one house, has deservedly won a few screenplay and audience awards over the course of its festival travels.

The One I Love

It’s also worth noting that Coherence positively outclassed another fest selection with a doppelgänger twist, The One I Love, in which an on-the-rocks couple, played by Mark Duplass and Elisabeth Moss, go away to the country to try to spice up their marriage, but when they encounter alternate, “improved” versions of themselves in the neighboring guesthouse, all manner of confusion and jealousy ensues. But whereas that film, also clocking in at a crisp 90 minutes (give or take a few minutes), becomes grating and tiresome, Coherence—a movie better experienced than described—leaves you craving more. You can get your first taste in theaters today.

A Tale of Autumn

In a representative scene from an Eric Rohmer film, a handsome high school philosophy teacher and a much younger woman—his former student and ex-lover—are sitting on the sculpted rock wall of a garden having a candid conversation about romantic love. He has one arm around her shoulder and both eyes fixed on her with unconcealed desire, a situation to which she, a radiantly beautiful frizzy-haired brunette with a sweater tied casually around her chest, doesn’t seem to object. He is complaining about his romantic lot, as Rohmer’s men often tend to when they are, by most standards, romantically successful. He can’t find a woman to settle down with, he tells her, and his frequent flings with his students often lead to regrets and complications. “You love that,” she answers. “You thrive on ambiguity.” “Not all the time,” he replies. “Maybe for what I call the shreds of life, the parts that are half-dreamt and half-lived. But for the solid part—and I don’t necessarily think that one is deeper than the other—I hate it.”

That scene takes place about ten minutes into A Tale of Autumn, the last of the “Tales of the Four Seasons” that Rohmer made between 1990 and 1998, but it might have come from any entry in the quartet. These are the first of Rohmer’s late romances: deceptively airy fables whose narratives depend almost entirely on chance occurrences, and whose characters relate to their surroundings with an odd mixture of lucid intensity and dreamy detachment. Like Rohmer’s six early “moral tales,” they all involve upper-to-middle class French men and women working through matters of the heart in costal and country settings. Both series are centrally concerned with questions of freedom, fidelity, faith and control; both are shot in roughly the same simple, elegant visual language, bathed in soft, dappled natural light; both make recurring (sometimes interchangeable) use of the same handful of narrative set-ups, many of which involve conditions—absent partners, overlapping vacations, weather troubles—ideally suited to spontaneous romantic encounters; and both are constructed so that those encounters are at once catalyzed and endlessly delayed by talk.

By the time he made the seasonal tales, however, Rohmer was in his seventies. For all his willingness to re-use the same methods and devices, he was a markedly different filmmaker; or rather, his tales had started to engage with moral or ethical questions in a different way. Rohmer’s earlier films were never simply illustrations of moral lessons—it is, one suspects, this sort of thing that he hoped to ironically suggest when he gave the moral tales their collective name—and yet they do, in a sense, take moral positions, if only by aligning the viewer decisively with the sympathies of certain characters as opposed to others. The men in My Night at Maud’s, La Collectioneuse, and Love in the Afternoon are always being educated or taught lessons by the women, whether they know it or not—and it is these lessons, rather than the halfhearted justifications the men make to themselves, that determine the movie’s moral orientation.

A Tale of Springtime

The seasonal tales show Rohmer’s moral thinking at a still more nuanced and sophisticated stage. Here, it’s rarely easy to commit oneself fully to the moral position of any one character to the exclusion of the others. Instead, the film becomes a space in which philosophical questions can be explored and tested out, a closed arena in which characters have the chance to trace out the implications of their positions under carefully controlled circumstances. The outcomes of these experiments are never pre-ordained; part of the thrill of watching the seasonal tales is wondering how, and to what extent, each character will find their positions vindicated in the end.

What makes these philosophical experiments feel so excitingly open in their outcomes and their trajectories is that they are being performed—or rather, improvised on the fly—by people who don’t always know what they’re doing. The seasonal tales are populated by a mixture of dreamers and realists, eggheads and sensualists, innocents and canny manipulators, but all the characters in the series are vulnerable in different degrees to the seductions and cajoleries of nature, commerce, money, pleasure, rest, work, sex, and—especially—one another. In contrast to the moral tales, three of the four films have female protagonists. The heroine of A Tale of Winter is faced with the same choice as many of Rohmer’s men—three eligible romantic partners, two imperfect and nearby, one idealized and far away—but responds to the challenge with a degree of willpower and decisiveness that few of the director’s male protagonists can ever muster up. In A Tale of Springtime, a young philosophy teacher with another absent boyfriend moves temporarily in with an even younger female conservatory student—and takes control magnificently when the girl tries to set her new roommate up with her father. A Tale of Autumn, which concerns the attempts of a happily married middle-aged woman to net a man for her winemaker friend, is the closest the series comes to the tone of Shakespearean comedy: its cruel deceptions; its precarious balance of levity and weight; its deep anxiety over the contingency of happiness and love.

A Summer’s Tale initially seems like the odd installment out. Like its protagonist—the only male hero in the series—it lolls along lazily and indecisively, indulging in lengthy life-story conversations and stealing moments of pleasure from, among other things, the ebb and flow of a sea shanty, the weather of Brittany, and the faces and bodies of its three female leads. Gaspard (Melvil Poupaud) is an aspiring young musician who winds up—it’s not entirely clear how—bumming around post-graduation in a friend’s home on France’s Northwestern coast at the peak of the summer vacation. He comes off initially as surly and antisocial; the company he likes best is, it seems, that of his acoustic guitar. He is waiting for his on-and-off girlfriend Léna (Aurélia Nolin) to arrive, but his heart—despite his own protestations, to himself and others—isn’t in it. He seems more intrigued by two girls he meets during the wait: Solène (Gwenaëlle Simon), whose powerful sexual presence and rigid sense of propriety both intimidates and attracts him, and Margot (Amanda Langlet), an ethnologist with whom he strikes up a fast friendship.

A Summer's Tale

Rohmer is brilliant at capturing the peculiar nature of platonic straight-guy-straight-girl friendships, with their occasional crosscurrents of unspoken desire and their potential, however unrealized, to transform into courtships or love affairs. In Gaspard and Margot’s case, the fault lines lie in his evident attraction to her, the gap between her social ease and his hermitlike social discomfort, their mutual need for acknowledgment and her desire to be trusted with more than he is willing to give her. The pair’s interactions nearly always take the form of rambling, mobile conversations, but the tensions between them—and their methods of resolving those tensions—emerge most clearly in the way they glance back at each other simultaneously after waving goodbye for the day, the way she casually, good-naturedly rebuffs him after he first kisses her, or the way, near the end of the film, they sit together in the woods stroking each other’s arms and shoulders at once absentmindedly and imploringly, having succeeded in channeling their sexual tension into a deeper, more comfortable kind of intimacy. “It’s easier to be yourself with a friend than with a lover,” she tells him then. “You don’t have to pretend.” Her behavior throughout the scene, all glinting eyes and self-assured poise, manages to be both a confirmation of this point and a virtuosic, carefully modulated social performance.

Solène, like Margot, selects Gaspard as a potential companion and pursues him in spite—or possibly because of—his failure to commit. For him, she is the more carnal counterpart to the flinty, fickle Léna: more comfortable with her own sexuality, surer of her desires and more direct in their expression. (Likewise, with her windswept dark hair, pouting lips and full figure, she makes a striking physical contrast with Léna’s more straight-laced brand of slim, blonde beauty.) In one of the movie’s most prolonged romantic teases, she invites Gaspard to spend an afternoon and evening at sea by her easygoing uncle’s place, then, when she seems about to go to bed with him, tells him that she never sleeps with men she’s just met. The emergence of her “principles” unsettles him, in part by uniting her with the two women he associates with the limits and codes of, respectively, friendship (Margot) and chivalry (Léna). Eventually, he over-commits himself to each of the three. Like the heroes of the moral tales, he is brought to the brink of making a decisive choice; unlike most of them, he is “saved” by being given a sudden, unexpected out.

The waterside summer setting, the chronically passive man, the conspiratorial friend, the lusty, forward brunette, the chilly, distant blonde: so far, so Claire’s Knee. But unlike that film, A Summer’s Tale rarely concerns itself with judging its hero or exposing his self-delusions. Instead, the primary issue at stake here is the same problem that runs through all the seasonal tales: the characters’ struggle to preserve their autonomy, or at least their idea of their autonomy, despite the fact that their lives appear to be governed by circumstances outside of their control. Rohmer has always structured his narratives around chance occurrences and accidental run-ins, but it’s in the seasonal tales that this principle becomes a real and present problem for the movies’ characters. Jeanne happens to meet Natacha at a party early in A Tale of Springtime, happens to find herself alone with the girl’s father much later after a series of improbable coincidences force two other major characters out of the picture, and redeems herself after falling out with Natacha by means of a miraculous chance discovery. Chance, in effect, makes a problem for her and then solves it, just as it does—even more dramatically—to Félicie in A Tale of Winter, and, in the end, to Gaspard in A Summer’s Tale. (By contrast, Isabelle and Rosine in A Tale of Autumn make scrupulous efforts to place the other film’s characters into circumstances over which the two of them have total control. Whether or not they succeed is one of the movie’s many open questions.)

A Summer's Tale

The first two seasonal tales seem to end happily. The twist that comes in the last minutes of A Summer’s Tale is slightly more ambiguous; its status as a happy ending depends on how much you are willing to dignify Gaspard’s inability to choose between the three women competing for his affections. But the fact that all three films end on miraculous, unprompted reversals should, I think, be a cause for some concern, in the same way that the readiness of the lovers in A Midsummer Night’s Dream to change their affections at the turn of a dime should be a cause for concern. Gaspard is happy enough to have sheer chance do his work for him, but it’s not at all clear that he ought to be satisfied with the results. The way the camera watches Margot walk away in the movie’s final moments has a similar effect to the way it lingers on Jeanne’s apartment—with its associations of both domestic happiness and imprisonment­—at the end of A Tale of Springtime, or the way it sticks with a group of previously unglimpsed schoolkids, all of them oblivious to the miracle that we have just witnessed, in the closing bars of A Tale of Winter, as if to say: can chance be trusted to work things out for the better, let alone the best? And if not, what is there for us to do about it?

The deeper ambiguity of the seasonal tales, however, is that this riddle somehow finds its expression in a series of films that—in the sensuousness of their textures, the worldly, practical slant of their language and the causal, offhand grace of their movements—seem in many respects to share the horreur de l’ambiguïté expressed by that philosophy teacher early in A Tale of Autumn. The toughest, softest, sexiest and most concrete film of the four, A Summer’s Tale could be said to operate in the series as the “solid part” in contrast to A Tale of Winter’s blurring of the boundaries between life and dream. If its lacks its predecessor’s subtlety and depth, it compensates with its own abundance of more immediate pleasures. It’s perhaps the series’ final ambiguity that, in the final assessment, one part is no deeper than the other. 

Entering its 13th year, the New York Asian Film Festival is no longer a brazen upstart. Now it’s something of an institution, having migrated from the dank cinephilic swamps of Anthology Film Archives to the rarified air of the Film Society at Lincoln Center, where this edition runs from June 27 to July 14. But it has retained its proselytizing spirit, stumping for disreputable genre titles past and present and giving them the gala treatment. Its programmers were also the first to give substantial stateside retrospectives to the likes of Tsui Hark and this year they honor the life and career of producer Run Run Shaw in an eight-film sidebar (with four screening in 35mm: Killers on Wheels, The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires, The Magic Blade, and Seeding of a Ghost). The fest’s 60 features run the gamut from tear-jerking dictionary-editing dramas to gonzo yakuza bloodbaths, sharing a common vibrancy no matter the subject matter.

Cold Eyes

If there’s a theme to this year’s festival, it’s surveillance. Almost all of the big-budget blockbusters on display are post-Snowden artifacts, in which police work is a matter of having enough eyes in the sky. The Korean thriller Cold Eyes remakes the 2007 Hong Kong hit Eye in the Sky, about a Special Crimes Unit surveillance team that is tracking down a ghostly team of  heisters. The unit is like an all-seeing organism that circulates through the city streets ever expanding its vision, its anonymous members valorized as silent sentinels of justice. The opening is a corker, thrusting the viewer into a near-wordless tracking operation that wends its way from subway car to street to café. It’s not even clear who is following who—the fun lies in following the eye-line matches to suss out the tracker from the prey.

Kenneth Bi’s Control is more skeptical of the modern surveillance society. A Mabuse-like villain in a futuristic Chinese metropolis has seized operation of the city’s security cameras, and forces a randomly selected ordinary citizen, an insurance salesman, to do his dirty bidding. Even dirtier is Andy Lau’s cop in the bombastic action spectacular Firestorm 3D, who uses and abuses the surveillance tools at his disposal. The outrageous final-act battle rivals Commando for sheer body count.

Why Don’t You Play in Hell?

In Sion Sono’s propulsive Why Don’t You Play in Hell? (which is co-presented by Japan Cuts: The New York Festival of Contemporary Japanese Cinema), it’s not the law that’s documenting your every move, but the DIY film club called “The Fuck Bombers.” This group of ne’er-do-well teens in the Japan suburbs hang out at their local shuttered movie theater and dream of making the next martial arts masterpiece. Consumer-video cameras constantly whirring—film is a luxury they desire but can’t afford—they try to turn their lives into their art, and they succeed when they get stuck in the middle of a bloody yakuza war. It’s a mournful, madcap, and cartoonishly violent ode to 35mm and the guerrilla filmmaking spirit, one that collapses the distance between filmmaking and film loving. It is as wild, joyful and unpredictable as his upskirt-photography epic Love Exposure (08), and will receive a theatrical release later this year from Drafthouse Films.

The other big name Japanese auteur on display is Kiyoshi Kurosawa. After four years of inactivity following his art-house drama Tokyo Sonata (08), he directed the television series Penance, and in 2013 made two features. The first, REAL, was an inert lump of psychical sci-fi, but NYAFF selection Seventh Code is a slender and delightful tale of Japanese spies in Russia. Only an hour long, and starring pop star Atsuko Maeda, it’s his most unusual feature since Bright Future (03). Maeda plays Akiko, a seemingly heartbroken girl who follows the dashing Mr. Matsunaga (Ryohei Suzuki) all around Vladivostok in order to win him back. It soon becomes clear that Matsunaga is involved in shady dealings with Russian mobsters, with Akiko hiding secrets of her own. The film then shifts under your feet from sad-sack romance to conspiratorial spy film. With all its open-air game playing, it recalls Jacques Rivette’s debut Paris Belongs to Us, and hopefully represents a creative reset for the enormously talented director.

Apolitical Romance

The cheekily titled Apolitical Romance is the romantic comedy which Seventh Code initially appears to be. A satisfying take on the nerdy guy/wacky girl formula popularized by Jae-young Kwak’s My Sassy Girl, it throws together Taiwanese Gundam nerd Chen (Bryan Chang) with aggressive Mainlander Chin (Huang Lu), who is searching for her grandmother’s first love. The Taiwanese production gets a lot of mileage out of the political tensions, with Chin repeatedly calling Taiwan a “province” and singing a children’s song about Mao in front of a statue of Chiang Kai-shek. Nicely balancing the abrasive and the sweet, including several tender portraits of the elderly Taipei community, Apolitical Romance shows that the genre still has some life left in it.

The same could be said for two well-mounted dramas, the coming-of-age film Au revoir l’été and the middlebrow tearjerker The Great Passage. Plotwise Au revoir l’été is the standard-issue wayward-teen drama, but it works on atmosphere and the central performance of wide-eyed loner Fumi Nikaido (also essential to Why Don’t You Play in Hell?). Setting the story in a podunk seaside town, director Koji Fukada captures the grimy plasticine look of a “love hotel” as well as the cozy nooks of a bourgeois academic’s home.

Au revoir l'été

The Great Passage, an irresistible drama about the editing of a dictionary, was engineered to win prizes, and it dutifully swept the Japanese Academy Awards. A sage old editor wants to make a dictionary “of the moment,” one that captures a language in development, with all the slang and argot that is heard on the streets. An epic undertaking that is also constantly shifting with the times, the book absorbs the lives of its obsessive editors and researchers. The movie hits all the expected beats, but director Yuya Ishii (who also made the wonderful Sawako Decides), gets fine, underplayed performances from his cast of curmudgeonly character actors. And it performs the remarkable feat of making five rounds of proofreading into one of the tensest sequences of the festival.

No Man’s Land is more shocking than any typo. A pessimistic neonoir set in the desert provinces of China, the film was shot in 2009 and shelved by the country’s censors. Perhaps because actor-director Ning Hao has become very popular in the interim, it was finally released into Mainland theaters in 2013, and was a sizable hit (for more on the film’s circuitous path to theaters, see Grady Hendrix’s Kaiju Shakedown entry). One can see why the authorities objected. Ning Hao’s relentlessly cynical portrait of capitalism run amok follows a slick lawyer into the Northwest borderlands, where he gets mixed up with a sociopathic falcon poacher and a demented family of gas-station extortionists. Each successive character is more reprehensible than the last, cutting out their pounds of flesh until there’s nothing left but cash and bones.

This Friday, audiences in the U.S. will get to see the foreign-film distribution equivalent of a Sophie’s choice: the result of a director forced to pick between two undesirable options. Bong Joon Ho, probably Korea’s most consistently successful big-budget director, capable of pleasing millions of ticket buyers and hundreds of film critics simultaneously, made a science-fiction epic, Snowpiercer, to launch his international career. Unlike his comrade Kim Jee-woon who made his international debut with a forgettable $45 million Arnold Schwarzenegger B-movie (The Last Stand, 13), or Park Chan-wook (Snowpiercer’s producer) who took a small budget to make a small English-language movie (Stoker, 13), Bong did what is becoming more and more common: he split the difference. Taking Korean money, an English-language script, and a bunch of American and British actors, he headed to Europe to shoot, then sold his movie internationally, treating America as just one more foreign territory rather than as the promised land.

Unfortunately, he sold those English-language rights to the Weinstein Company who, in typical Weinstein fashion, declared that American audiences were morons who couldn’t follow the plot and so they’d have to cut 20 minutes from the film and add voiceover narration to the ending in order to render Bong’s film comprehensible to this nation of presumed mouth-breathers. Bong held out for seven months, but finally he took the choice the Weinsteins offered him, trading a wide release for artistic control. So now this big-budget ($39 million) science-fiction epic (with over $80 million and counting at the global box office) starring Chris Evans (Captain America himself, and star of the top-grossing American movie of 2014), Academy Award winner Octavia Spencer (The Help), Song Kang-Ho (The Host), Jamie Bell (Billy Elliot), Academy Award winner Tilda Swinton (Only Lovers Left Alive), John Hurt (The Elephant Man), Ed Harris (Pollock), and Alison Pill (Scott Pilgrim vs. the World) is creeping onto seven screens in five cities on June 27, before expanding to 50 more screens the following week. Transformers 4 opens the same day on 4,000 screens.

If you actually get to see Snowpiercer—and it will be available in short order on Region 1 DVD and VOD even if it’s not coming to a theater near you—you’ll probably be baffled as to exactly what brain-boiling complexity dreamed up by these foreign devils the Weinsteins thought they were protecting us from. The movie could not be more straightforward. In the future, an untested solution to global warming accidentally freezes the planet. Seventeen years later, the last survivors live on a train that never stops circling the globe. The poor people live in the rear of the train while the rich people live in the front. When the movie begins, a gang of revolutionaries led by Chris Evans decide to fight their way forward and take over the engine thus… making the world a better place? Getting more carbs in their diet? They haven’t really thought that part through yet. Nevertheless, it would be hard to come up with a more intuitive plot. Rear = bad. Front = good. 

And yet it’s this perceived predictability that becomes the movie’s greatest strength. Watching Snowpiercer is like having the crap beaten out of you by a judo master: the weight of your own expectations keep dumping you on the floor. The predictable sci-fi blockbuster plot points keep getting overturned in ways both large and small. This is one of the few big science-fiction films in a long time to feature a truly multiethnic cast of heroes (although the villains are all Anglo). And there are also plenty of spoiler-ific macro-surprises having to do with plot and character (you’ve heard it before, but: no one is who they seem). Most unexpectedly for a movie of this size, the Michael Bay money shot of pyrotechnic bukkake comes as an afterthought. The grand climax of Bong’s movie is a pair of monologues, one delivered by Chris Evans and the other by Ed Harris, that land like body blows.

Then there are the micro-surprises that constantly goose your attention. Song Kang-ho steals a fur coat in the background of one shot, in what’s apparently a funny bit of character detail to show that this impulsive junkie is behaving true to form. Nope, it turns out to be a key element in his master plan. John Hurt, playing Gilliam (as in Terry), the grizzled elder statesman of the rear of the train, tells his exhausted warriors to “wash off their blood” in a bit of phony multiplex poetry. Not so much: later he reveals that it was a way to inspect wounds and determine who could keep moving forward. Even the production design gets in on the act with a bunch of hoodlums in balaclavas who appear out of nowhere, but disconcertingly their balaclavas don’t have eyeholes—only mouth holes.

Being unpredictable is regarded by Hollywood execs the same way food poisoning is regarded by wedding planners, especially when you’re in big-budget sci-fi territory. Why did Transformers: Extinction of the Dark Fallen make a zillion bucks and Guillermo del Toro’s Pacific Rim make zero? Hollywood’s takeaway was that audiences must like their science fiction to be completely predictable. Bong’s Snowpiercer falls closer to Terry Gilliam’s Brazil or 12 Monkeys than it does to Captain America 3: Snakes on a Train, and that’s an invitation to stick a movie on the shelf and forget about it. Who wants to be the guy who greenlights another Alien: Resurrection?

But Bong’s movies get their energy from volatile moments that are less literal and more poetic. At the climax of his debut feature, Barking Dogs Never Bite (00), a crowd of spectators materializes out of nowhere to cheer on a chase between the two main characters as if it’s the Olympics. And the ending of Memories of Murder (03) is a character moment that feels emotionally accurate, but would never happen in real life (despite being based on actual events). Same with Snowpiercer. As the grubby revolutionaries make their way towards the front of the train, they encounter a high-end sushi restaurant. Behind the elegant counter, enormous windows show the frozen ruins of the old world rushing by. No one engaged in the violent overthrow of a totalitarian government would ever stop for a sushi break, and yet there’s something emotionally resonant about these people sitting down to eat the stereotypical meal of the one percent as the ruins of our civilization pass behind them like little more than nice scenery. It’s a moment of pure cinema that you feel in your heart, not your head, and this movie is full of them. 

But in another judo throw, what ultimately makes Snowpiercer powerful is not its unpredictability or its poetry, but its literalism. Throughout the movie, the oppressors—played by Tilda Swinton as the aborted, buck-toothed love child of Margaret Thatcher and a white rabbit, and Ed Harris as the ultimate bad daddy in a bachelor pad complete with hotplate—emphasize repeatedly that “Everyone must stay in their place to ensure order.” That’s a pretty standard bad-guy line from a million different action movies, on an intellectual par with “I’ll get you, my pretty, and your little dog, too,” but Bong takes it very literally. The train in Snowpiercer is a closed ecosystem. If one person is born, another has to die, or the entire species faces extinction. There’s simply nowhere else to go, and no alternatives. It’s a chilling representation of real-world limitations, especially for bleeding-heart liberals like myself.

It’s a tenet of liberal humanism that everyone should have hopes and dreams and we should strive to give everyone the opportunity to achieve those dreams. Reach for the stars! Have an education! You can be anything you want to be! We pay lip service to those ideals—but like the train in Snowpiercer, consumer lifestyles demand the existence of poor people. I need dishwashers whose biggest dream is $8 an hour or I can’t afford to go out to a nice restaurant. I need Chinese people to get cancer making iPhones because otherwise I won’t be able to afford one. I may beat the drum for equality until my arms are sore, but the fact is that I live in a system in which I receive a vast amount of benefit thanks to the exploitation of people further down the economic ladder. And as much as I like to think otherwise, I spend most of my day advancing my own interests, making money, and paying my mortgage, and not a lot of time changing the world. Why should I? This is a very comfortable system for me.

And that’s the heart of Bong’s movie. The question Bong asks with Snowpiercer is whether a world that requires some people to work for poverty-level wages so that others can afford $1.99 flip-flops is even a world worth saving. Bong seems to be putting forward the tough truth that capitalism requires exploitation, and if we’re not comfortable with that fact, then self-annihilation is the only alternative. Maybe after 2,000 years, if this deeply flawed system is the best we can come up with, then it’s time to call a halt to this experiment, blow it all up, and let the animals have the planet again. 

And maybe the Weinsteins, whose marketing has often trafficked in fuzzy NPR-esque humanism, knew what they were doing after all. Bong’s message that our species has failed is tough to swallow, and as an American who believes in redemption, second chances, and that it’s never too late to address income inequality and global warming, it practically made me break out in hives. Yet that tough-minded conservative attitude is the engine that drives this film, and to ignore it means that you’re missing Bong’s point.

LINKS! LINKS! LINKS!

... Want another point of view on Snowpiercer? Derek Elley of FilmBiz Asia didn’t like it very much. He advises director Bong to “get back to what he does best.” I’m sure everyone involved in the production is grateful for Mr. Elley’s thoughtful advice.

King Naresuan V

... On May 22, the Royal Thai Armed Forces staged a military coup and installed the newspeak-named National Council for Peace and Order, which declared martial law, implemented a curfew, banned political gatherings, arrested protestors, and took over the media. Now they’ve launched a “Happiness Campaign” which requires the World Cup to be broadcast for free, gives people free haircuts, and distributes free tickets to the latest movie in the national Thai film franchise, King Naresuan V. Happy Dystopia, everyone!

... It’s the team-up you’ve never asked for! Adrien Brody! John Cusack! Jackie Chan with a soul patch! All in the most expensive Chinese movie of all time ($65 million) directed by Daniel Lee (14 Blades). Shooting has already begun on Dragon Blade, the story of a legion of Roman centurions who wind up in China around 48 B.C. The movie is expected to come out in 2015.

... You capitalist running dogs can keep your 3-D movies—because North Korea, the home of the brilliant comrade, young master, and outstanding leader Kim Jong-un, has 4-D movies! Suck it, enemies of this highly dignified socialist country. The 4-D experience is brought to you via “rhythmic facilities” that “give pleasure to the people,” and it all sounds light-years ahead of anything we have here in the backwards West. In this amazing 8-minute news clip (in English) from North Korea, one audience member exclaims: “I have just flew around the world and seen the Ancient Roman Empire, the Eiffel Tower of France, and pyramids and sphinx in Egypt.” Who needs air travel when these wonders can all be yours without leaving the lap of the outstanding leader? “My hands were itching to catch the fish,” one young comrade exclaims. I’ll say! When 84% of the households in North Korea report “poor or borderline” food consumption, I bet those fish look delicious. Thank you for letting us look at them, Comrade Kim!

... The latest big Bollywood release, Ek Villain, seems to be an unauthorized musical remake of I Saw the Devil, the Korean movie by Kim Jee-woon, only with more CGI dolphins and butterflies. The director of Ek Villain, Mohit Suri, denies these rumors but since his 2007 movie, Awarapan, was an unauthorized musical remake of Kim Jee-woon’s A Bittersweet Life, people are having a hard time believing him. “That’s just one dialogue that I have taken from the Korean film’s promo,” Suri explains. “I have taken another dialogue from the film Jack Reacher . . . I wasn’t born with dialogues in my head!” 

Golden Chicken 3

... Don’t know who Sandra Ng is? Then get yourself to the New York Asian Film Festival (June 27 - July 14). Ng started out in Hong Kong as a comedienne making any movie that was thrown her way, but over the years she’s developed into one of the city’s best-loved stars, most notably for her role playing a lesbian pimp, Sister 13, in the Young and Dangerous series, and for her role as an irrepressibly optimistic hooker in the Golden Chicken films. Celebrating sex in all its varieties, and fighting for everyone’s right to get laid no matter their race, religion, disability, or marital status, Sandra Ng has become a middle-aged, sex-positive hero, and she’ll be getting the Queen of Comedy Star Asia Award on the festival’s opening weekend.

... Ning Hao is clearly back with a vengeance. A trailer is up for his new movie, Xin hua lu fang, about two friends who hit the road to repair their broken hearts. Ning says that he made the film to make up for some personal regrets after shooting No Man's Land.