There’s a nice moment in The Two Faces of January when, after his character has suffered a dramatic downturn, Viggo Mortensen appears in close-up. As pursued conman Chester MacFarland muses on his sorry situation in the cold morning light, Mortensen’s face looks dried-out, ashen, drained to the point of looking almost mummified. Since Mortensen appeared (very amusingly) as the William Burroughs figure in Walter Salles’s so-so On the Road, let’s invoke a Burroughsian idea here and say that this particular image is what you might call a “naked lunch” shot—it shows the moment at which all pretence is dropped, and the character is faced with the terrible truth of what’s on the end of his fork.

Mortensen doesn’t always peel away the shell of his characters quite so dramatically. The actor is generally famed for his enigmatic qualities, for his ability to play people who give away little of themselves, and whose inner nature eventually appears despite their efforts to conceal all. Most famously: the small-town diner proprietor whose gentle composure hides an ex-killer in David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence.

The actor’s sense of adventure has recently led him to sign up for films in which his characters’ enigmatic nature becomes part of a wider picture—merging with the geography, as it were. This year alone, the indefatigable polyglot has made two existential landscape dramas: Lisandro Alonso’s Jauja (speaking Danish and Spanish), and David Oelhoffen’s Algerian war drama Far From Men, a sort of Northern African Western (French, Spanish, and Arabic).

Mortensen’s natural penchant for Gary Cooper–like taciturnity served those two films well. But in Hossein Amini’s The Two Faces of January, we see something different of him—something closer to the wry urbanity of his Freud in David Cronenberg’s A Dangerous Method. As a suave, bogus adventurer in this early-Sixties-set Patricia Highsmith adaptation, Mortensen contrives a world-weary knowingness that at first suggests an American of the era attempting to channel George Sanders. Then the mask falls away to reveal the character’s coldness, emptiness, and amorality, and Mortensen’s lean, lived-in features suggest the lizard within the lounge lizard.

The Two Faces of January is an elegant film, willfully anachronistic in its fuss-free clarity. Apart from the obvious echoes that come when a film derives from Highsmith (Strangers on a Train, the various takes on Ripley), it also recalls those European-set cosmopolitan thrillers of the Fifties and Sixties—The Man Who Knew Too Much, Charade, Topkapi—that responded to the rise in postwar tourism. These films were often about the thought that Americans might be in peril venturing into the company of unknowable foreigners—but the Highsmith variation was that they were never in so much danger as they were from other Americans.

Starting in Athens in 1962, Amini’s film sets up its appearances-are-deceptive premise with bracing concision. Oscar Isaac—very good here, and somehow younger and nervier than we’ve seen him—plays Rydal, an American expat. We first see him showing a phalanx of admiring female tourists around the Parthenon; then he’s dining out with one, expertly working the dollars-to-drachmas short-change con on her. But he’s spotted by an imposing duo of apparitions in white and cream—a young woman named Colette (Kirsten Dunst) and her older husband, Chester (Mortensen). They exude grace and the scent of old money, but they’re phonies too: a hostile detective turns up at their hotel, hired by angry punters whom Chester has conned out of vast amounts of money (some of which he keeps in rolls in his suitcase, along with his Penguin copy of The Iliad).

Meanwhile, Rydal has conceived the hoots for Colette, and she seems to be sizing him up too—possibly with the tacit approval of Chester, even though he later crackles with possessive jealousy. Who knows exactly what’s going on between these three people? Is it just that Chester reminds Rydal of the archeologist dad he seems to despise? Or is there also have an obscure sexual glimmer between the two men (it’s been known in Highsmith stories)?

One way or another, it’s clear that these three people shouldn’t be spending any time together—and that they’ll soon become inseparable. Rydal finds himself helping the now fugitive couple out of Athens and into temporary hiding on Crete. As the landscape around the trio begins to expand, to become more panoramically sun-scorched, the travelers’ circumstances shrink—from five-star hotel rooms to roughing it on benches, to days dragging their cases along dusty roads near Knossos.

Best known as the screenwriter of Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive and Michael Winterbottom’s Jude, Hossein Amini makes his directing debut here with a project originally developed at Mirage (it carries a dedication to Anthony Minghella and Sydney Pollack), and inevitably the film carries a reminder of the former’s The Talented Mr. Ripley. It might not have the same swagger, but the spareness of its conception is compelling in a different way: it starts by promising escapism and glamour, then scales down, getting grittier and grubbier, ever more concentrated and claustrophobic, until you genuinely feel that its characters have nowhere to go until their story implodes.

Apart from Alberto Iglesias’s score, which piles on the Hermannisms shamelessly, January is Hitchcockian in certain time-honored ways—notably the kiss early on that’s interrupted by an unwelcome rap at the door. There’s also a tense moment at a port, in which police seem bound to find our fugitives in the crowd, but question an innocent instead (nice peppery touch in the subtitles: “Did you visit Knossos?” “Why would I go there? I was born in Crete”). Amini, who also wrote the screenplay, has a sensitivity to what his characters do and don’t understand in different languages. Hearing a Greek radio broadcast, Chester doesn’t follow a word, but guesses the gist, and asks Rydal: “Who are they describing—you or me?”

It’s a cleanly executed film, with DP Marcel Zyskind retuning the initial sunny opulence into something harsher and more stifling. And the echoes of Sixties genre play out engagingly—by the time the action moves to Turkey and a chase through Istanbul’s Old Market, the period feel is so palpable that you expect Akim Tamiroff to step out from between the hanging carpets.

The Two Faces of January isn’t a revelation, just a classy, consistently engaging piece of work in a defiantly old-fashioned vein. There is something odd about it, though—I’m not sure whether this is more disappointing or perplexing—and that’s the oddly nebulous part played by Dunst. First seen as a shimmering vision in pale lemon, she seems to have stepped into the ready-to-wear Hitchcock-blonde role, but her Colette never quite congeals around that archetype. She’s strangely elusive: we know that she’s complicit in Chester’s dealings but we never quite know how she feels about them, nor how much she reciprocates Rydal’s attentions (Amini cuts away just as they seem about to kiss, and we’re left wondering, with Chester, exactly what has happened, beyond the lipstick traces he finds on a glass).

But Colette’s haziness is part of the intriguing itch that this film provokes. We don’t quite know who she is, but we know she’s cracking up just as much as her husband. She can be a hoot—she does a cross-eyed routine to amuse the boys—but sitting alone on a bus, she looks weary, puffy-eyed, broken.

The reason for her elusiveness is partly because she’s there to demarcate the battleground between the two men. But it’s also to do with Dunst herself. Embodying slightly glassy chic, as she does here, is something different for an actress who has tended to be seen as the embodiment of gauche exuberance, even when (especially when) her character is cracking up in the face of Doomsday, as in Lars von Trier’s Melancholia. But if you don’t normally think of Dunst being spiky or troubling, remember that the part that made her famous as a child is possibly the most perverse female role ever seen in a mainstream movie, a Victorian doll of an undead moppet in Interview with the Vampire.

There’s none of that perversity here, but something differently intriguing—the sight of a performer who has reached a certain peak of maturity and elegance, and who is now adding a touch of roughness to her palette. The epitome of globe-trotting glamour when first encountered, Colette starts to reveal a sour crassness, a hidebound vulgarity, as when Chester mocks her reluctance to eat shellfish in Greece, even if they are straight from the sea. She goes bratty on him, her voice taking on a harsh Brooklyn edge, and for the first time, you can imagine Dunst a little older, playing it blowsy—being brilliant at what you might call Shelley Winters roles. Or, seeing Colette weary and washed-out on the bus, you can imagine Dunst as a Hitchcock woman of the less obvious sort: it’s not such a stretch to see her as the coolly tailored fashion plate, but here you begin to detect the Barbara Bel Geddes in her, which is a more unexpected proposition.

When Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers was released in 2013, at least a handful of viewers had the same response that I did to the blacklight-lit, slo-mo heist at the film’s climax: “Oh, hey, Korine is doing Belly.”

The reference is to a 1998 film, the first and to date only feature directed by music video visionary Hype Williams, which begins with a blacklight-lit, slo-mo heist. It needs be said that the borrowing goes two ways here: early in Belly, stick-up men Tommy Bunds (DMX), Sincere (Nas), and their partners in crime cool down after a job in Tommy’s immaculate house in posh Jamaica Estates. For a little late-night entertainment, Tommy throws on Korine’s 1997 directorial debut Gummo, which plays for the boys on his big-screen projector. “Shit is bugged out,” Tommy says by way of review, while on screen two white trash boys shoot another dead with pop guns. It’s a sly inverse of the cultural-tourist racial dynamic that occurred with white boys like myself in the Nineties who were absorbing rap music videos—Williams’s primary medium.  

The Gummo cameo is one element in the dense network of allusions that Williams lays down in his first-reel pastiche. Tommy’s crib is overtly Kubrickian—a Steadicam prowls the open floor-plan, all Clockwork Orange spotless white, while Thierry Le Gouès’s black-is-beautiful photographs of ebony bodies recall the nude over Scatman Crothers’s bed in The Shining. After a bit, Sincere returns to his wife, Tionne (Tionne “T-Boz” Watkins, of the group TLC), and his more modest home in St. Albans, which is (under-)lit in shadowy mahogany tones that seem intended to recall the Corleone compound in The Godfather: Part II. (Earlier, we see a handgun being retrieved from a bathroom stall, a more direct homage to the Coppola films.) While Tommy jumps into the shower, Kurt Loder on MTV News delivers word of a new ultra-potent heroin hitting the streets, and Tommy’s girlfriend, Keisha (Taral Hicks), putting in a call to a telltale number on his pager, gets his 16-year-old sidepiece, Tamika (Tiara Marie), on the line. Tamika, who talks on a pink phone while wearing pink shorts and a pink bikini top in a pink room, looks like she’s being broadcast by MTV too—specifically, one of Williams’s color-coded videos. It’s hard to believe these spaces—Tommy’s crib, Sincere’s house, Keisha’s room—all exist in the same world, much less the same movie. Throw in the street-smart details of the script by Williams, Nas, and Anthony Bodden (Sincere notes he lives “not too far from where we grew up, right by the Vets’ hospital,” a tossed-off reference that situates the movie in a real, known New York), the touches of unexpected humor (DMX grunt-singing in the shower!), and you have the a taste of Belly, a film that, taken altogether, comes much closer to what Korine called “a pop poem” than does his own sniggery Spring Breakers.

I am hardly the first or only person to think of “pastiche” when it comes to Williams. The 2007 book Medium Cool: Music Videos from Soundies to Cellphones contains an essay called “Paradoxes of Pastiche: Spike Jonze, Hype Williams, and the Race of the Postmodern Auteur” by one Roger Beebe, which begins by noting that it was only in the early Nineties that the names of music-video directors began to be added to the credits shown at the beginning and end of a video, joining the artist name, song and album title, and record label. This afforded the music-video director of the Nineties an unprecedented level of public name-recognition, which in turn tended to facilitate crossover into feature-film direction. Alex Proyas, Dominic Sena, David Fincher, and F. Gary Gray had already made the jump when Antoine Fuqua’s The Replacement Killers and Williams’s Belly were released in 1998. They were followed across the breach by Spike Jonze’s Being John Malkovich and Mark Pellington’s Arlington Road in ’99, Tarsem Singh’s The Cell and McG’s Charlie’s Angels in 2000, and Michel Gondry’s Human Nature and Jonathan Glazer’s Sexy Beast in ’01. The transition has since become so commonplace that it hardly bears commenting on.

Hype would appear to be a more than usually publicity-averse figure—he notably declined to be interviewed for a 2008 oral history piece on Belly in King magazine—so I have only a handful of interviews to draw on in composing a biographical sketch. Born Harold Williams, his sobriquet comes from the time when he was a 12-year-old graffiti artist, tagging as “Hype 1” and “Hype Love.” He grew up in Hollis, Queens, went to Andrew Jackson High School in Cambria Heights—also the alma mater of LL Cool J and 50 Cent—and studied film at Adelphi University in Garden City, Long Island. Somewhere around this time he began an apprenticeship at Classic Concepts Video Productions under the tutelage of “Uncle” Ralph McDaniels, whose program Video Music Box has aired on public television in New York since 1984, and is widely considered to have been the precursor for Yo! MTV Raps and BET’s Rap City. “We gave him his first videos,” McDaniels said of Williams, “[the ones] that we didn’t have the time to do.”

These cast-offs, presumably, included the likes of “We Want Money” by B.W.P. (Bytches with Problems), a group, per Wikipedia “well known for their sexually explicit and otherwise misandric lyrics . . . often referred to as a female version of 2 Live Crew,” and Main Source’s “Just Hangin’ Out.” For M.O.P. (Mash Out Posse), the Brooklyn duo of Billy Danze and Lil’ Fame, he shot the video for the 1993 single “How About Some Hardcore,” which appeared on the House Party 3 soundtrack—the clip begins with the intersection of St. Marks and Saratoga Avenues in Brownsville, reminiscent of the scroll along the Linden Boulevard street sign that opens Belly.

At this point in the history of the East Coast hip-hop video was still ruled by the hard-desperate-looking-dudes-in-black-hoodies-mean-mugging-while-hanging-out-around-a-flaming-barrel-on-a-piece-of-waste-ground-that’s-probably-million-dollar-condos-by-now, a mode that Williams both perfected and exceeded in his video for Wu-Tang Clan’s “…Ain't Nuthing Ta F’ Wit.” Williams was still following trends, though the time wasn’t far off when he would be starting them. The video for Notorious B.I.G.’s “Big Poppa,” with Puffy pruning in a hot tub with high sloshed-champagne content, was proudly labeled a Big Dog Films Production, and Williams’ company would slurp up high-profile commissions like so much Welch’s Grape as the rap video continued to develop into something more eccentric, more colorful, more lavish, just plain more.

1997 was Hype Williams’s annus mirabilis, with videos for Busta Rhymes’s “Put Your Hands Where My Eyes Could See,” Missy Elliott’s “The Rain (Sup Dupa Fly),” Notorious B.I.G.’s “Mo Money, Mo Problems” (feat. Puff Daddy, Ma$e), the MTV Music Award–winning “I’ll Be Missing You,” Puff’s cash-in funeral dirge for Biggie, and “Feel So Good,” the coming-out for Ma$e who, no matter what he said, was intended to replace Notorious. Williams was the official court artist during the heyday of Bad Boy Records, who in turn were the official soundtrack of the second Clinton term’s deceptive dot com prosperity. This is about as close as any modern pop artist has come to playing the part of Jacques-Louis David, who developed the official Empire style of Napoleon’s First French Empire. It was no surprise, then, when Variety announced that Williams was to direct the “urban drama” Belly, the first feature film greenlit by Live Entertainment “since its buyout by a Bain Capital–led consortium last year.” This was January of 1998.

Undoubtedly because of the demands of preparing and shooting a feature, Williams’s music video output slackened somewhat that year. His principal persona-building project was for none other than DMX: Née Earl Simmons of Yonkers, X had been kicking around for the better part of a decade—here he is on Mic Geronimo’s “Time to Build” in 1995—when he was finally signed to Def Jam. Williams directed the black-and-white video for X’s major-label debut single “Get at Me Dog,” which was released in February 1998. On-screen text reads “SUNDAY NIGHT / AT THE TUNNEL / NEW YORK CITY / PERFORMING LIVE / DMX,” then DMX growls “Let’s take it back to the streets, motherfucker,” and what follows is three minutes of X threatening to climb out of his drooping overalls while prowling the stage, all gleaming and panther-sleek. (The Tunnel, a legendary NYC nightclub which closed in 2001, is also the scene of the opening heist in Belly. For all I know, film and video might’ve been shot at the same time.) When the accompanying album, It’s Dark and Hell Is Hot, came out in May, it hit #1 on an unbelievable groundswell of hype, and DMX’s follow-up, Flesh of My Flesh, Blood of My Blood, repeated the feat in December of the same year. While most people under 22 know X in the role of gruff, weird uncle who’s usually in trouble with the law, it is impossible to overstate how huge he was for a minute, sold as the outlaw second coming of Tupac.

…and then there was Belly. Between these two albums, on November 4, 1998, DMX’s screen debut opened. And while it has since attained hood classic cachet on home video, Belly wasn’t a money maker on initial release. It was an ill-starred project from the get-go. Williams argued with execs at Shooting Gallery. Used to run-and-gun improv on video sets, he chafed at the restrictions of a unionized shoot. As the budget was exceeded, script pages went out the window.

The final product, forged in the fires of conflict, is a bit of a mess if judged according to the standards of the well-made film—but of how many fascinating features could this be said? Williams is almost preternaturally good with establishing shots, defamiliarizing urban spaces with wide-angle set-ups whose barrel distortion gives the streets the dimensions of a coliseum, but he fudges the most basic of shot-reverse shots. In a scene where Tommy is getting blunted and talking over a deal with Jamaican drug lord, Lennox (dancehall reggae musician Louie Rankin), there are crucial moments in which we find ourselves looking at Rankin’s ear and an out-of-focus DMX—the coverage, clearly, just wasn’t there.

Not that a better take would necessarily do much to clarify matters. Rankin speaks in a heavy Yardie patois which only becomes clearly decipherable in a few sobering moments. (“I run shit. I kill for nuttin’.”) At times Rankin’s cadence seems to interest Williams more than what he’s saying, as the cutting seems to ride on the beat of his delivery. The exposition is both unclear and overabundant, but the film’s images have a stunning hyperlucidity throughout, and it’s full of vignettes that stick to your brain pan, like Black (Jay Black) rocking back and forth and blubbering on the sofa—“You gonna get yours, B. You gonna get yours, man”—after Tommy has forced him to strip naked for reasons that are as obscure to me as the meaning of the film’s title. Williams also has a Midas touch with action scenes—they aren’t marvels of clarity, but of imagistic indelibility. There’s the Feds’ raid on an Omaha stash house, with Mark (Hassan Johnson) scrambling out the window and running for it soundtracked by the opening of BraveHearts and Nas’s “I Wanna Live” (“We can’t be stopped by the bitch-ass cops…”) Or, later: Method Man, pumped full of buckshot, stumbling into an intersection out of a Nebraska strip club (“The Gilz Nilz”), trading shots with the arriving police—head-to-toe in orange-and-black camo, he’s an easy target—before stumbling into a waiting getaway car and, in a piece of dream-logic, apparently getting away clean. And of course that opening, with an a cappella rendition of Soul II Soul’s “Back to Life” kicking in as DMX steps out of a silver Benz and stomps out a blunt on the sidewalk.

That insert detail is shot from the perspective of the pavement, because Williams loves putting the camera in unlikely places. Not once but twice are gun-battle scenes viewed through the POV of a drugged shooter, the target out-of-focus, indistinct. It’s often difficult to tell what’s going on in Belly, for the film is, literally, gritty and dark. Having just rewatched it on a 35mm print, I can confirm that the “high definition” transfer that has been repackaged every few years on DVD significantly lightens the image. It was shot by cinematographer Malik Hassan Sayeed, whose most prominent films up to that point (Clockers, He Got Game) had been for Spike Lee. When Williams doesn’t have Sayeed dollying towards a cloud of chronic smoke billowing from a pair of lips in slo-mo, he’s using every gel and filter commercially available in 1998, like a rap game Mario Bava. (DPs usually escape the blame heaped on directors when a movie tanks, but Belly is to date Sayeed’s last fiction feature.)

Is this mere flash and swag, signifying nothing, or is Williams up to something more? I am not alone in believing the latter. In a 2003 piece called “Believe the Hype: Hype Williams and Afrofuturist Filmmaking,” which appeared in the online Australian film journal Refractory: A Journal of Entertainment Media, Thomas F. Defrantz has it that Williams is meeting the call for a “black visual intonation” (BVI) which black film theorist and cinematographer Arthur Jafa made in a 1992 essay of the same title, suggesting the use of “irregular, nontempered (nonmetronomic) camera rates and frame replication to prompt filmic movement to function in a manner that approximates Black vocal intonation.” With Belly, Defrantz writes, Williams “offers an extended meditation on how movement, musicality, and outrageous style can create a visual experience that extends possibilities for the medium of filmmaking toward the evocation of black visual intonation.” The matching of visual and verbal rhythms is made explicit in the film’s opening, which layers superimpositions in time to the cadence of DMX’s voiceover flow: “I sold my soul to the devil / Price was cheap / It was cold on this level / Twice as deep…” Detractors will point out Williams’s pilfering from Scorsese, but as Scorsese freely confesses that his use of rock ’n’ roll was influenced by Kenneth Anger’s use of Sixties pop in Scorpio Rising, so Williams is building on the methods of both filmmakers in finding a cinematic form for the black vernacular styles of R B and hip-hop. Belly doesn’t succeed on anything like the level of, say, Scorpio Rising or Mean Streets, but the scope of its ambition is what we should demand and applaud of a first-time filmmaker.

Of course, trying to convince the world at large to pay attention to aesthetics is a losing game, especially in these here United States. Magic Johnson, citing Belly’s “overwhelmingly negative and violent depictions of African-Americans,” refused to book the film in his chain of multiplexes in predominantly black neighborhoods, though this hint of controversy failed to generate concurrent box office. Even if we limit our discussion to content, it should be noted that the film’s narrative arc is a kind of Gangsta’s Progress. (Hilarious IMDb plot description: “A pair of vicious black gangsters have spiritual awakenings.”) Following the pattern established in the early cross-cutting between Tommy and Sincere’s domestic lives, the film contrasts the personal journeys of the two men, who switch off carrying voiceover duties, as they drift apart before arriving at the same final destination—raised consciousness. Sincere is the more pensive of the two; driving around Omaha on an out-of-town dope-dealing run with Tommy, he discusses a book on Self-Improvement that he’s been reading by a spiritual leader called the Minister, a book which has him “thinking about a whole new other format,” and wondering about the purpose of life. This prompts the following exchange:

Tommy: “Ain’t no purpose, dog. It’s money. We born to fuckin’ die, man. In the meantime, get money. Fuck a book, man . . . Shit is lovely for me, man. I’m gonna stop when I’m dead, end of story, man. You gots to be a leader, dog. That book is fuckin’ your head up.”

Sincere: “Yo, when’s the last time you read anything, man?”

Tommy: “Never, motherfucker! What you need to start thinking about is your seed, man. ’Cause shorty can’t eat no books, dog.”

DMX hits his lines with the force of a junkyard dog against a chain-link fence, while Nas remains unfazed, slightly catatonic. Even Belly’s admirers tend to take issue with his performance—the man who once said “I never sleep ’cause sleep is the cousin of death” looks dangerously close to nodding off here. That said, playing straight man to an unchecked Id—Charlie to Johnny Boy, to extend the Scorsese comparison—is a thankless job, and some of the taxonomic personality recaps he gives in voiceover are at least pretty funny. (Watkins, for what it’s worth, is always engaging when she’s on-screen—she has an unexpected authority in her lone girl-to-girl dialogue with Hicks, and what she calls her “Valley girl” delivery of the peevish line “Africa’s far!” is a knee-slapper.)

DMX is the more engaging performer, and fittingly he gets the juicier scenes and the more iconic images—for example, the trip to Jamaica where he’s photographed from ankle level while, in the foreground, an anonymous dancer shakes her ass faster than a hummingbird’s flutter. He also shoulders the burden of the most baffling plot development in a film that is full of them. Fresh out of prison, Tommy is recruited by a government operative to infiltrate the Minister’s organization and assassinate him before an important speech scheduled on the eve of the new millennium. (The undercover creep is played by Frank Vincent, who’d appeared in the video for Nas’s “Street Dreams,” a Williams-directed riff on Scorsese’s Casino, in 1996.) Per on-screen text, Tommy is contacted for the job in October of 1999, meaning he has less than three months to penetrate the Minister’s inner sanctum. He not only manages to do this, but in the course of playing his part he accidentally elevates his consciousness, a fact signified by his acquisition of some studious little wire-frame glasses. Tommy still goes to carry out his mission, beholden to the dirty deal he’s made. He gets the jump on his target, but then the Minister delivers an impromptu sermon on “lifestyles” and respecting women and youth drug use to his would-be assassin, who suddenly finds that he can’t pull the trigger—possibly because he has been lulled into a deep slumber.

I kid, I kid. I’m tempted to say that Belly is an altogether more satisfying and successful movie before it starts addressing itself in earnest to The Struggle after a Cecil B. DeMille sin-and-redemption bait-and-switch—but that is one hell of a white-boy thing to say. For example: “I’ve never been a fan of lyrical or socially conscious rap music,” Korine told a Pitchfork interviewer in 2013, after the release of Spring Breakers. “I just like the bass—the thud, the groove, the grimiest shit.” If social consciousness isn’t actually a necessity for your day-to-day survival, it can for sure be a bit of a drag—but for those who don’t have a family safety net and agnès b. to help them get past crack addiction, it’s not so easy to be flippant about it.   

If the last act of Belly does falter—and in my wildest flights of apologia, I don’t think I’ll ever be able to convince myself that it doesn’t—it’s because it shows Williams reflecting his critics’ prejudices: the belief that style and substance are separate matters, and that you have to set aside one to get to the other. The Minister’s speech—the scene was allegedly influenced by Williams’s meeting with Louis Farrakhan—dies on the screen not necessarily because the sentiments being expressed are sententious, or because the actor playing the Minister, Ben Chavis, is inadequate, but because for once Williams has failed to find a stylistic analogue for what he wants to express. Perhaps if the budget had held out long enough for Williams to follow Sincere and Tionne to Africa, as had originally been planned, the motherland would’ve provided him with visuals that could make holistic happiness seem like a viable alternative to law-of-the-jungle competitive contempt. As it is, we’re left with a stern finger-wagging.

Williams remained in demand as a video-maker after his Belly ache. His association with the Bad Boy family seemed to go on hiatus after a much-publicized incident surrounding the video for Nas and Puff Daddy’s 1999 “Hate Me Now,” but their Golden Age was already past, and Williams had new top-dollar clientele knocking at his door, reaching some kind of apotheosis with Jay-Z and UGK’s 2000 video for “Big Pimpin’,” a hedonistic, white-letterboxed trip to the Carnival in Trinidad. By then, Williams’s style had already reached the level of ubiquity that leant itself to parody—as early as 1998, it was sent up in the New Jersey scum-metal band Monster Magnet’s video for their song “Space Lord.” The shock of the new has faded, but in recent years Williams has notably collaborated with both West and Nicki Minaj, his video for Jennifer Lopez’s “Booty” coming like a reproof to youngblood Colin Tilley’s for “Anaconda.” As Alex Pappademas notes in a fine 2012 overview of Williams’s career for Grantland, he has established a niche as “the go-to director for rappers and R&B singers looking to, um, pay homage to a major motion picture in a video.”

What has been lacking are further major motion pictures for Williams, though plenty have been threatened. Though an adept live-action cartoonist—see Missy Elliott and Da Brat’s “Sock it To Me”—he lost the Fat Albert movie, as well as Speed Racer. There were rumors of Thrilla, a 3-D zombie film that would’ve returned him to Jamaica, and a sci-fi epic called MotherShip (the implicit P-Funk reference supporting the notion of his Afrofuturist connection). In 2011, Variety reported that Williams was going to direct a $28 million erotic thriller titled Lust, with a screenplay by “Sloppy” Joe Eszterhas—something to do with revenge porn and Miami real estate. It hasn’t been heard from since. Williams has collaborated on a number of videos with Kanye, including the short film “Runaway,” which Williams wrote and directed. In late February of this year, West premiered a trailer for a forthcoming feature tied to his album Yeezus on his website, which ended with the promise of a “Yeezus film directed by Hype Williams coming to theaters.” To date, no film has appeared.

Let us assume for the moment that Williams is a “difficult,” even insubordinate personality. It would still be an unassailable fact that he is possessed of an extraordinary visual imagination, and it’s a crime that such a talent should see so many projects left in preproduction limbo while a pasty nothing like McG, who has never shown even a daub of talent and whose movies have consistently underperformed since 2009, still has (for the time being) a career as a feature filmmaker. Of course, if Williams was dying to make movies, he could—like Tarsem, who pumps his commercial and video profits back into his consistently unprofitable productions—and it may be that he could take or leave the long-form. But oh, the difference to us!

Although he made one movie about mad love—The Curious Case of Benjamin Button—David Fincher never seemed a director deeply concerned with intimate relationships between women and men. His primary subject has been masculinity as a struggle within the male psyche (Fight Club, The Social Network) or against a savage doppelgänger (Seven, Zodiac). What links these films to his wildly anticipated Gone Girl is his tragi-comic sense of the absurd, as it applies to the extreme actions human beings take to protect and project an image of self largely based in what old-fashioned existentialists termed false consciousness.

Adapted for the screen by Gillian Flynn from her 2012 best-seller, Gone Girl has engendered much speculation, especially among the novel’s six-million-plus readers. Indeed, no major film since Hitchcock’s Psycho has been such a minefield of spoilers, and for viewers who haven’t read the novel, that minefield begins less than halfway into the narrative. We have tried not to give any of the film’s surprises away. Gone Girl is about Amy and Nick Dunn, two not particularly distinguished journalists who met and married in New York just before the crash of 2008 cost them their jobs. They move to the Missouri small town where Nick grew up and which Amy, a New Yorker born and bred, finds intolerable. When Amy goes missing, Nick becomes the prime suspect in the investigation of her possible murder.

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How did you go about adapting Gone Girl?

The book is many things. You have to choose which aspect you want to make a movie from. Most interesting to me was the idea of our collective narcissism as it relates to coupling, or who we show to our would-be mates and who they show to us.

The most dire part of the book then?

Well, maybe. It also is the most absurdly honest part, the part that touches us the most. And the newest thing in terms of what it illuminates about marriage and what may or not be going on behind closed doors.

Let’s talk then about the casting. Rosamund Pike is fabulous and she is exactly on the nose in terms of who I think Amy is. But the casting of Ben Affleck is a bit more surprising. Usually you work with actors who have great technical flexibility—the kind of actor who can speak a line 10 different ways and time his or her gestures and moves in relation to the words. It never struck me that Affleck is skilled in that way. But when I read about the casting, I thought that in another way he was right for Nick because he can be a blank slate on whom you can project just about anything.

He’s probably a lot craftier than you give him credit for. He’s wise as an individual, extremely bright, and he’s very attuned to story and where one is in the narrative. I think when any actor is miscast, it’s easy to blame them for trying to stretch. It’s difficult to be in the position where people are giving you a lot of choices. You have to be most thoughtful when everyone wants you. I enjoyed working with him immensely. The baggage he comes with is most useful to this movie. I was interested in him primarily because I needed someone with wit and someone who understood the stakes of the kind of public scrutiny that Nick is subjected to and the absurdity of trying to resist public opinion. Ben knows that, not conceptually, but by experience. Ben has all of that.

When I first met with him, I said this is about a guy who gets his nuts in a vise in reel one and then the movie continues to tighten that vise for the next eight reels. And he was ready to play. He was completely subservient to that notion. It’s an easy thing for someone to say, “Yeah, yeah, I’d love to be a part of that,” and then, of course, on a daily basis, to ask: “Really? Do I have to be that foolish? Do I really have to step in it up to my knees?” Actors don’t like to be made the brunt of the joke. They go into acting to avoid that. Unlike comics, who are used to going face first into the ground. They know what open mic is like. But actors, they want, when someone else is writing the lines, to be made to look good.

But we got the truth out in advance. When I first met with him, we didn’t have the script yet, but he had read the book. And I said, I’m going after something that walks a fine line between satiric and stupid. There was a National Lampoon record in the mid-Seventies called That’s Not Funny, That’s Sick. That’s kind of the tone of the movie. If we play it too earnest and sincere, then it’s tragedy, but if we go with the absurdity of it, I think it can walk a satirical line. The beginning of the movie purports to be the Scott Peterson case. Stripped from the headlines. And you say, I know what this is and I know where I am in the investigations. But then, by the time Desi [Neil Patrick Harris] comes into it, it becomes not about you at all. It takes off into this semi-absurd world. And then by the time we get to the fight in the dressing room, you kind of go, oops, we as an audience are not absolved. We’re complicit.

The movie keeps changing on you as you watch it.

Isn’t that what’s fun about it.

If Hitchcock’s Psycho had come out in the era of social media, Hitchcock could not have organized the publicity the way he did. He couldn’t have kept audiences from tweeting about the shower scene when the movie was only a third over. So this film is going to run into the problem that no one keeps quiet about anything. In a way, the film itself is about that problem. I can’t wait to see what’s going to be said about the movie.

I can’t wait to see what will go on between couples at dinner after they see it. There are so many interesting tectonic shifts in the movie. There’s the moment where Andie [Emily Ratajkowski] comes into it, and you watch the sexual dividing line in the audience. I’ve shown this movie to people and when they come out of it, they are either Team Amy or Team Nick. Team Amy doesn’t have a single quibble about her behavior, and Team Nick doesn’t have any problems with his. Especially the uninitiated. They are the most honest in their response. Then there are people who primarily measure the movie against the book and how they felt about the characters in the book. And the narrative of the movie is vastly denuded from the way it’s allowed to grow and bloom in the novel. It wasn’t a defoliation as much as a deforestation. Once you got it back to the branches and the trunk, it was pretty easy to see that this movie was going to be about who we are versus who we present to those we are endeavoring to seduce. And once we got there, it was easy to see that the absurdity needed to be part of the two-hour-and-half-hour fabric in a much bigger way than in the novel. For me, the 30 percent of the novel that’s about who we present—our narcissistic façades—becomes the entire foundation of the movie. Where the book had room for four endings, we only had room for one. You begin to prune back.

When we started working together, the biggest concern was how we would represent the two voices. And what was interesting was Gillian [Flynn] adapted so quickly to the structure that the “she said” is in flashback and the “he said” is being lived out in front of you. And you question which one is reliable or if either of them are. It wasn’t a question of there are 500 pages and which 300 were we going to lose. But all of a sudden, it was, if we prune back, it’s not so much a question of “he said, she said,” but that the “cool girl” speech becomes central to the exploration of “we’ve been married five years now and I can’t get it up anymore to be that person you were initially attracted to and I’m exhausted by it and I’m resentful that you still expect this. And you throw in a little homicidal rage and it’s a fairly combustible idea. Does that make sense? [Fincher has been laughing all the way through this passage.] I’m so sorry I made this movie: it’s just not marketable.

I’ll loop back: when you tested this movie, were there people who were actually on Amy’s side?  

I think, oddly, that it’s equally balanced. I don’t think Gillian is a misogynist. She’s taking everybody to task in a very subtle way. I think she is really gifted. I think she has a very interesting Midwestern pop sensibility. That is, she understands the salacious interest of “What’s going on in that house at the end of the cul-de-sac? It can’t be all that it appears to be.” She has a sort of Rear Window prurient interest that we all have to a degree. She probably has a higher percentage than most. But she also writes very much from the point of view of an audience member. She’s not above her material. She’s not making fun of these people, even the nosy neighbor. She’s not making fun of even those archetypes. And she’s interesting in that way. I kind of held my breath and waited to read her first draft and I was so emboldened by it. She was not only capable of slaughtering the darling, she took a peculiar pleasure in offing those extensions of her own imagination. And how she got to the things that interested me most: Who Are We? That great moment in The Stepfather, where he says: “Who am I here?”

I think everyone has those moments in relationships, especially extremely intimate relationships where you’ve spent years with someone and you find yourself standing in front of the mirror, and going “What!” Part of it is that I don’t want to let the other person down in their idea of me. When I hear my mate talking about me in the best possible terms, I absolutely want to be that person. Not at any cost, of course. But there are also times when you’d be shocked to hear your mate talk about you in not such glowing terms, and you can’t see yourself in that way. I think she was able to take the kind of headline-news angle—“What Was Going On in This Marriage”—and use that to create real traction with the question of who are any of us in these relationships. And she has a lot of fun with it.

But, look, it’s not healthy to have an idea in your head of who your mate should be. Who your mate is should be revealed to you through interaction, the quality of the person’s character, the behavior they exhibit. But I certainly know that early on in my life, I had ideas that I could fix someone. But then the thing you realize, if you’re remotely sane, is that I can’t fix anything about anybody else, and I need to look at that part of myself that thinks this is who I need to see myself with, and also, what length did I go to, how much did I betray who I really am in order to seduce that person and lead them to believe that I was a suitable mate for them. Forget how much I was lying to you, how much was I lying to me? There are all kinds of narcissism that a modern cultural intersection needs to address, but this book was on a frequency or a channel that I hadn’t seen before.

Are you describing the Hitchcock model? Sean Connery thinks he can save Tippi Hedren in Marnie, but that belief proves that he’s crazier or more damaged than she is. In Vertigo, Scottie thinks he can transform Judy into Madeleine, but he’s so crazy he doesn’t see that they are the same woman.

I don’t remember Marnie very well, but I know Vertigo really well, and I think Jimmy Stewart in Vertigo is so much crazier than any of villains in Hitchcock. I mean the so-called hero of that film is wandering up to women on the street and saying, would you wear a gray suit and change your hair for me? But I think this movie is different. Maybe it travels in those regions, but it didn’t occur to me, maybe because in some weird way Scottie never worries about the impression he makes. “No, that gray suit’s not the right one. Try this.” [Lots of laughter]

This is off the main subject, but did you ever read the piece Chris Marker wrote in which he theorizes that the second half of Vertigo is the fantasy that Scottie tells himself when he’s in the psychiatric hospital because he can’t admit his guilt for having not protected that nice woman, Madeleine, as he was hired to do, but instead allowed her to commit suicide by jumping off the tower. The only way he can handle his guilt is to turn her into an accessory to murder, who duped him, so the whole second half of the movie is a kind of wish-fulfillment dream—see, she’s really guilty, she deserved to die.

I’ve always thought that anyone who directs a movie in which a character sits down in the second half of the movie for half a reel to write a letter explaining what happened in the first half of the movie should turn in his DGA card. That aside, I’ve always felt the more compelling version of Vertigo is her point of view, which is so much weirder and more freakish even than his. And his is really sick. I don’t know how you can make that movie and not expect people to go “Dude, you’re so sick.” But I always felt the movie was inverted and the most interesting version would be following this woman who meets this man [Gavin Elster], falls in love, and then he says to her, “Hey, would you dress up like my wife, wander around a few museums, maybe toss yourself in the bay, let a stranger disrobe you and keep you in his apartment all afternoon, and drive with him down to Santa Cruz or wherever they go, and meet me on the roof.” So she climbs up to this rooftop knowing that the guy she drove down with can’t follow her up the stairs, only to find her lover tossing his dead wife of the roof and saying to her, “Shhh, now you’re in it deep, up to your neck. Keep your mouth shut, and here’s some jewelry.” That seems like a way more compelling movie—you are in it deep.

I’ve always thought that Vertigo is about a police detective who falls in love with a transvestite, not knowing that she is a transvestite.

Especially the way she looks in that gray suit [laughter]. Reminds me of Rigby Reardon [Steve Martin] in Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid when he’s imitating Barbara Stanwyck and he goes: “I’m only half the woman you think I am.”

[Author’s note. In fact, as critic Rob Nelson pointed out to me, Flynn makes a strong reference to Vertigo in the novel. I had forgotten it when I interviewed Fincher, and maybe Fincher was being polite in not pointing out what a careless reader I was or maybe he had forgotten it as well.]

You’ve made two films in a row that are adaptations of best-selling novels. Is that the only thing that there is financing for, besides comic books?

Neither Girl with the Dragon Tattoo nor Gone Girl was a struggle to set up. But neither was The Social Network. That was a “go” movie. The Social Network came to me at a point in my life when I said, “Wow, just because it’s a really good piece of material doesn’t mean we shouldn’t make it.” [Laughs] I wasn’t offered any Marvel movies nor expect to be, and I don’t know why anyone thought of me for this, but I’m glad I got a chance to read it, and I’m extremely happy to have had a chance to work with Gillian and come up with something that I thought would make an interesting movie. My criteria isn’t to make something that’s been on the Times best-seller list and has a built-in audience of at least five million. I just thought when I read it that I haven’t seen this movie before. Dragon Tattoo was a story I was interested in, kind of in spite of itself. I was interested in the story of him and her. I liked that relationship. I thought it was spectacularly modern and beyond sexual.

That was great.

I hadn’t seen that. Yes, they partake of each other’s flesh, but that wasn’t the primary reason for them to have met. And it not codependent love, which I really like about it.

Novels are hard. They have incredible expectations around them.

There are not a lot of applicable comparative relationships. There aren’t a lot of people taking a symphony and whittling it down into a pop song. I always want to please the writer, not only the writer of the source material, but of the adaptation. I really wanted Chuck Palahniuk to be proud of the movie of Fight Club. And I felt the same way about Aaron Sorkin on The Social Network and Andy Walker on Se7en. I want the person who dreamed it up to walk away thinking that’s an effective distillation. I’m looking for the most salient storyline. There was a lot of good stuff in Gone Girl that maybe didn’t distract from the narcissistic facet of it but maybe was just too fine a marbling. Film narratives just move so much quicker. And have to be able to be seen, which usually means they have to be a little bit broader.

I’m happy that Gillian thinks it’s a good adaptation of her book. She did most of the heavy lifting. And I feel a responsibility to the audience, but no one feels more of a responsibility to the audience than Gillian. She’s ruthless. There was a moment when we were working on the end of the movie and we had these competing elements and we realized that the last 33 pages of the script didn’t help us. So she went away and came back the next morning and those 33 pages had become 31, but the two versions had maybe six lines in common. The rest of it she just chucked. She has an amazing work ethic. And she is completely at home with slaughtering anything that isn’t progress for our new collective narrative. Because it’s one thing when you ask who is Amy and who is Nick, but then, when Amy is Rosamund and Nick is Ben, you have to tailor everything to those personalities and what they are giving you.

I think when you are working with a novel that sold six million copies there’s a tendency to work backwards from the book, but the best adaptations work forward through the characters. And to have the novelist/screenwriter sit there and make eye contact with everybody and understand that implicitly. On some level she just took to it and realized that there is no point in fighting what these two people give us. You have to go through it with these people and allow them to shape it. We had these bookended shots that were going to launch and close the film, and these bookended sentiments, but the question was what was going to happen in that house with those characters after the shower. And she was just able say, okay, here we go.

So could you outline the process step by step?

I was sent the book. I said it’s interesting. Obviously we have to cut 300 pages but I don’t know yet which ones. They said the novelist is working on a draft of a screenplay but if it doesn’t pan out… I said, no, let’s let her get to the end of what she’s doing. And Gillian’s first draft was, albeit long, incredibly streamlined in terms of what my expectations were of what she would do. So I met with her and said, unabashedly, that I was impressed, “I’m betting on you.” But here’s what I think is extraneous and what I think is improbable. And we rolled up our sleeves and went at it for a month or so. Then we started talking about cast and availabilities, and we got to a draft that we thought could be sent out. In the meantime, I talked to Ben about the idea of it. And I sent him a script. And then we began to look for an Amy. And after those two, the most linchpin character was Desi, because he’s sort of like Clare Quilty, he sort of doesn’t exist in reality. And so we just took a left. We spun the wheel and it wasn’t your father’s Oldsmobile. And once we did that, the tone of the Scott Peterson inquiry, which is what you might think the opening is, was out the window, and we had to run off the end of the pier, and you’re in all the way up to your eyeballs. That’s what Neil Patrick Harris as Desi allowed us to do. And then Tyler Perry [who plays the lawyer, Tanner Bolt] because we wanted a calming influence, not a huckster. And once we had the widest ends of the spectrum in place we started filling in everyone else. And then we got everybody on Skype and had a read-through. It was interesting, all the little squares, but we could see who the actors were and how they felt about each other and where they each were in their careers. And we recorded the whole thing. All those little Hollywood Squares.

Had you ever done that before?

No. But we learned a lot so we were able to make more revisions. And then we rehearsed about three or four weeks and cut about 10 or 15 pages. And toward the end of that, we focused on the third act and what the summation of our thesis was going to look like. And then we went to Missouri and shot for about six weeks and came back to Los Angeles and shot another 10.

So when you talk about the book having four different endings, do you mean the book has four different rationales for the ending?

The book has a more elaborate wind-down, and the movie couldn’t have it. The end of the movie that we have now is the denouement of the novel, but the emotional catharsis is happening four minutes before that as opposed to 12 pages, which it initially was. For everybody, it felt that we were overstaying out welcome. And we needed to say, this is not something abstract. This is not beyond the experience of most of the people in the theater—what people tell themselves to make it all okay.

I read that Trent Reznor [who wrote the score] said this is a really, really dark movie. Do you think it is?

I think there are certain conceits in the kind of story and the storytelling… Well, let’s put it this way, I think he read the book or part of the book and he felt kind of the way you do. This is not me, it’s about Midwesterners or this writer who returns to this small town. And then when it got to the third act, as absurd as some of it is, it began to resonate with him. That was shocking to him because he thought at first that Fincher’s doing a popcorn movie. He hadn’t read the script so he hadn’t realized that once we had pruned back, we didn’t have Desi’s mother and we didn’t have more than an impression of Amy’s parents—they are much more caustic in the movie because they have only two or three scenes. Their suffocating presence in her life becomes more crystalline. And I think he was expecting to see something that was more polite.

Or more National Lampoon?

You don’t get much from Trent when you show him stuff. He’s cagey that way. But when he came out of the screening, he was laughing, almost giddily. And he said: “That’s so sinister in what it’s talking about. It makes me feel bad about myself.” I don’t really want to speak for Trent because he’s wildly articulate.

But I’m not sure yet what you think the tone of this movie has.

I think there were people on the crew who thought we were making Fatal Attraction. One of those Paramount thrillers of the late Eighties or early Nineties.

It’s definitely not that.

But there are these TV spots that all dance the same gig. Have you seen the trailer? Does it seem as if it’s selling the proper aspect of the movie that could possibly hook people without giving anything away? One of the things it took six months to negotiate in my deal was that they couldn’t use anything in the trailers of Amy past reel four. Because if you do, you ruin the movie. People go to the movies to discover things. They want to see actors as they’ve never seen them before and to see them in situations you never imagined them in because hopefully you never imagined seeing yourself in that situation. I need that sense of discovery when I look at movies.

I just want to correct something. I think Ben Affleck is wonderful casting. I would have done something stupid and obvious. I would have cast someone who is obviously ambiguous, like the Jude Law of Side Effects.

Interesting. But there needs to be a frat-boy component to Nick. You needed someone for Nick who could have opened their mouth and inserted both feet. And certainly Jude Law knows what that shit-storm is like. But Nick also has to be someone who has skated by on charm and has that as a deflection mechanism. And that’s what crucifies him. It’s the stuff that he didn’t do that makes him come on their radar. And once he comes on their radar, it’s the stuff he does do that seals his fate. And he needs to have wit; Ben has great wit. I think Jude Law does too. But I can’t see Jude Law getting in that kind of trouble.

Ben seems like the guy who wants to be everybody’s friend.

Yes, and that’s what Nick does too. And that’s what gets him in trouble—that “Hey, can’t we just all get along” attitude. That’s what I love about Carrie Coon [who plays Go, Nick’s sister]. You get the idea that she just loves him even though she’s going to develop calluses on her forehead from slapping him.

She’s great. She’s the reality principle. I love that character.

She’s part of the trification of how we see Nick. There’s Amy’s view of him, there’s Boney’s [Detective Boney, played by Kim Dickens ], and there’s Go’s. And she really, really knows him. So she’s the most necessary of the secondary characters.

I think all the women are very good in the movie. We haven’t talked enough about Rosamund Pike, but it’s hard to do that without giving too much away. I think this will be a much-talked-about movie, and it is also a very serious movie. But I really want to know what you think the tone of the movie is.

I think it is high seriousness in little dishes of candy.

Repetition has always been a key structural device in the work of the young, prodigiously gifted Argentine filmmaker Matías Piñeiro, and The Princess of France, the third of the director’s beguiling, waltz-like romances to take its inspiration from a Shakespeare play, is no exception. Piñeiro has a habit of staging certain moments, scenes, and snatches of dialogue in multiple variations, but the duplicate passages that result from this practice are never exact copies. Instead, the logic of Piñeiro’s movies can be closer to that of a theatrical rehearsal—his previous feature, Viola (12), was peppered with scenes of young actors practicing scenes from Twelfth Night—or, in the case of The Princess of France, a recording session for radio. In each case, the film becomes an environment fitted out for envisioning alternate possibilities, a space in which alternate routes can be tested out, then followed back to their source for other routes to be tried in turn.

Midway through the new film, which revolves around a radio production of Love’s Labour’s Lost, a key male character recites a handful of lines from the play into a studio mic. (In one of Piñeiro’s characteristic gender reversals, he’s playing the play’s heroine, the princess of the movie’s title.) He runs through the passage about half a dozen times, and while his delivery never strays far from the quicksilver, highly enunciated rhythm with which all of the film’s characters speak, each recurrence brings with it small shifts in inflection and variations in tone. The lines in question come from a speech late in the play’s fifth act. What they give is a promise—“[I will] shut / my woeful self up in a mourning house / raining the tears of lamentation / for the remembrance of my father’s death”—that turns out to be one component of a conditional. “If this thou do deny,” the speech concludes, “let our hands part, neither entitled to the other’s heart.”

The command to which that ambiguous “this” refers is, as it happens, for the princess’s suitor to shut himself up as well. Piñeiro never films the first three-quarters of her speech, in which she commands the man to “go with speed to some forlorn and naked hermitage / remote from all the pleasures of the world,” and “there stay” as proof that “this austere insociable life / [will] change not your offer made in heat of blood.” It’s clear from what we do hear, however, that what’s being demanded of the listener is proof of his fidelity—proof that his devotion will outlast the “heat of blood”—and that the need for such proof is present for both the princess and her addressee (though only she, it seems, is wise to the need to admit it).

The need for proof of commitment, and the importance of acknowledging that need, is also what’s at stake throughout Piñeiro’s deft, mischievous film, often in the form of its inverse: the fear of receiving proof of a partner’s infidelity, or having proof of one’s own exposed. It’s by glimpsing a suspicious inscription in her copy of Love’s Labour’s Lost that Victor (Julián Larquier Tellarini)—the actor we see reciting the Princess’s lines—discovers that his girlfriend Paula (Agustina Muñoz) took up with another man during his year abroad. As payback, he plans to give her proof of his own infidelity in the form of an incriminating note addressed to him from Ana (María Villar), an on-again, off-again lover with whom he’s recently had a one-night stand. Complicating the situation further are Carla (Elisa Carricajo), a friend of a friend whom he casually, almost incidentally plans to seduce, and Natalia (Romina Paula), an ex of Victor’s who re-enters his life asking for a role in the play. (In a representative move on Piñeiro’s part, the scene of her petition is played out three times in a row, each variation leading to a radically different outcome.)

If Victor stands at the center of the movie—the first male character in any Piñeiro film to do so—it’s as a somewhat vaguely defined sexual presence, extending amoeboid gestures of desire wherever he detects the slightest glimmer of interest. Compared to the movie’s prodigious women, he has few clearly defined commitments, fewer moral standards, and extremely little self-discipline; much of the movie’s pleasure is in watching the way the women dance carefully into and away from his advances, protecting themselves, pursuing their projects, watching their steps. Piñeiro’s graceful, mobile visual style, developed in close collaboration with his longtime cinematographer Fernando Lockett, has always come off, to my eyes, as a kind of analogue for the way his characters circle around one another, but his camera has never been so active a dance partner with its subjects as it is in The Princess of France, dipping, weaving, and maneuvering between them in breathtakingly choreographed extended takes.

For any two characters caught up in this roundelay, committing exclusively to each other would mean quitting the dance. Many of Shakespeare’s romantic comedies suggest the difficulty of carrying out and sustaining such a withdrawal; if the lovers do, in the end, make promises of lasting fidelity, it is often only under heavy coercion (All’s Well That Ends Well) or within the context of a serious doubt over the reliability of their own faculties (A Midsummer Night’s Dream). When we suspect that they might have a chance of success together, it’s often because they have learned to turn cohabitation into its own kind of game, accompanied by its own risks, deceptions, sidesteps, victories, and defeats. To some extent, they succeed by telling themselves that a relationship isn’t the sort of thing that allows for surefire proof of fidelity—only proof of betrayal. Each partner in a stable partnership, they decide, always has the option of rejoining the dance, an option both parties have to deny, or at least defer, day by day.

It might be objected that these sorts of questions are outside the purview of a movie like The Princess of France, if only because Piñeiro’s willingness to double back and restage key scenes deprives the film of a sense of risk—of things being irreparably, decisively lost. The movie ends with a breakup recounted in voiceover after the fact. At the end of the story, Victor, our narrator, pauses. “I’d have preferred [that day] went differently,” he confesses. “Like this.” In one last redoubling, the scene begins again; this time, it ends with a gesture of tender reconciliation.

It wouldn’t be quite right, however, to call this another rehearsal. If The Princess of France begins on the model of a tryout or a recording session, it gradually develops a sense of loss, and even, in its own delicate, exquisite way, a feeling for tragedy. If anything, the implication of the movie’s ending is that Victor is not, no matter what he might think, justified in conducting himself as if life were the rehearsal of a play. Without knowing it, he is making choices that cannot be undone; if his life is a play, he’s already an act or two into its only performance, and the people with whom he’s performing can’t be expected to give him the same freedom of revision that he wants, or needs, to enjoy.

Indeed, some of the movie’s most thrilling moments—the extended, single-take reading from Love’s Labour’s Lost that ushers in the film’s third act; the rapid-fire montage of Victor and Ana’s many make-out sessions that introduces their relationship; the bravura opening shot of a Buenos Aires soccer match from which players of one team keep darting out of the frame, only to reappear dressed in the colors of the other side—have the pulse of a high-wire live performance, incapable of revision or doubling back. That The Princess of France manages to balance this sense of risk with a genuine openness to alternate possibilities and a serene lightness of tough is perhaps another way of saying that a high-stakes, one-shot game is, in the end, still a game—or, alternatively, that much can be accomplished during a single live performance, and a lot of ground covered during a single dance.

The Princess of France screens October 5 and 6 in the New York Film Festival.

These days, Mathieu Amalric plays adults with a bit of life experience behind them—a weary married man in Sophie Fillières’s recent If You Don’t, I Will, an émigré psychoanalyst in Arnaud Desplechin’s Jimmy P., a burlesque impresario in his own On Tour (10). But Amalric still, as often as not, has the look of a frightened, small boy. That look worked superbly in his role as a theater director, and Polanski surrogate, terrorized by a femme fatale in Venus in Fur; and in Amalric’s own film The Blue Room, if he keeps that evident anguish more tightly under wraps, it still shows through as his character is outflanked by a sexually dominant mistress in this teasing jigsaw of a thriller, adapted from a Georges Simenon novel.

As a director, Amalric has been unpredictable if sometimes a little studious; till now, the film of his that most impressed me was L’Illusion comique (awkwardly translated as The Screen Illusion, 10), a brisk, elegant adaptation of a Corneille production by the Comédie-Française, staged in a Paris hotel with inescapable echoes of Godard’s Détective. But The Blue Room is by far his most adventurous film—tantalizing, fractured, and, at 76 minutes, beautifully concise. While it pushes the boat out stylistically, it’s also very faithful to the formal nature of Simenon’s book, which shows a certain laudable modesty on Amalric’s part. He wants to honor the original, and perhaps to remind us that a novelist still sometimes thought of as an indefatigable pulp factory was in fact an acute psychologist, a pitiless social critic, and a formal adventurer whose strategies (certainly in this 1964 novel) could hold their own against more exalted literary names.

The story is simple, and essentially mundane: a small-town affair between two people, Julien (Amalric) and Esther (Stéphanie Cléau, who co-scripted with Amalric), both of them married. Named Tony and Andrée in the novel, they were once schoolmates, and when they run into each other again after several years, Esther promptly tells Julien that she always had a thing for him. They make love on the spot, in the woods by a roadside, then embark on an affair, a series of passionate encounters in the hotel room of the title. One day, Julien spots her husband approaching the hotel; he runs, the spell is abruptly broken, he backs away from the affair… and that’s when things get complicated. Neither Simenon nor Amalric tells us for a long time what the upshot of all this is going to be, and neither will I, but we know from the start of both book and film that a criminal investigation is involved, with Julien facing a series of grillings from police (led here by director Serge Bozon), an examining magistrate (Laurent Poitrenaux, an actor with a look of wonderfully searching directness), and a prison psychiatrist (Blutch; yes, just “Blutch”).

Like the book, the film starts by throwing jumbled cards on the table and leaving us to get to work finding the order in them. The opening sequence is a bracing fugue of fragmentation: we hear Esther’s orgasmic cry, but what we see is the empty blue room, after (or before) the love-making. Disconnected shots show keys, crumpled linen, a relaxed post-coital hand or leg, a drop of blood on a sheet (echoed later by another shot, more Chabrolian in its ambiguity, of blood or possibly jam on a white laptop). We hear off-screen voices, hard at first to attach to sources or contexts: Esther’s opening words, “Did I hurt you?” (the story plays on her aggression, Julien’s feminization), presenting an enigma partly answered by one of Julien’s inquisitors, also off-screen: “Did she bite you often?” Glimpses of the couple’s trysts have an astonishing carnality, not because they’re graphic, but because Amalric and Cléau, partners in real life, have an easy complicity about shedding modesty in their nude scenes. The couple’s flesh is sweaty, a close-up kiss is laced with saliva, there’s a terrific shot of a fly on Esther’s naked belly.

The film establishes the blue room as a temporary heaven of sensuality (Simenon calls it “an over-heated room that smelled of sex”). The book is forthright, confrontationally so: the very first page features an image of Andrée’s parted thighs, with Tony’s sperm dripping out of her vagina. The film doesn’t go this far, but a brief image evokes it, with echoes of French painting’s most celebrated crotch shot, Courbet’s L’Origine du Monde. Simenon was writing this in 1964, note, and you wonder whether he was responding to (and outdoing) a new matter-of-factness about sex in French cinema, in the Nouvelle Vague, in Vadim, in Clouzot’s 1960 The Truth (in which the fearless sexuality of the Bardot character is still cause for social and legal outrage). You wonder also whether the book’s formal brilliance resulted from Simenon’s response to the by-then-well-established nouveau roman: it’s as laced with gaps and indeterminacies as any anti-narrative by Robbe-Grillet or Michel Butor.

Later in the story, Julien is amazed to realize that his affair with Esther is public knowledge, although they apparently haven’t been discreet: he’s standing naked in the hotel window when he spots her husband. At one point, the couple is seen fucking upright in the same window at night, on full view to the street; or are they? Perhaps this image is Julien’s imagination or distorted reminiscence, or a projection of the story as reconstructed by his inquisitors. All we know for sure about this image is that it is part of the way that the film imagines the affair, which has a tang of heightened irreality from the start: when the couple make love in the woods, their encounter is accompanied by an unexpected surge of romantic strings in Grégoire Hetzel’s score. It all suggests that while Julien, a tractor salesman by trade, is living an unexceptional bourgeois life, with Esther he’s living a movie. The blue room is a hot heaven somewhere apart: his and Esther’s own personal adults-only cinema.

The film plays down Simenon’s emphasis, very much of its time and inescapably misogynistic, on the oppressive dullness of bourgeois life and the emasculating nature of marriage: Tony’s bloodless, joyless wife is replaced by Delphine, played by Léa Drucker as a tender, sympathetic, and seductive woman with whom you imagine Julien having a very different sex life, but a sex life nonetheless. Here, when she tenderly says good-night to him in bed, he nervously turns away and you sense that he’s as frightened of her as he is of Esther.

All these elements fall into place—but not entirely into place—in a narrative that, despite my earlier reference to flashbacks, could really be considered a single, frenzied present tense. That present is the retrieving and sorting of memories in Julien’s mind, during various interrogations that are all collapsed together into one continuous process.

Christophe Beaucarne’s photography is in 1:33, heightening the claustrophobia and emphasizing the dislocation of François Gédigier’s editing, as if we’re being presented with a series of flash cards: the briefest vignettes of action or information. Sometimes parallelisms jump out at us: a discarded red towel on a beach chiming with the red towel on a balcony, Esther’s signal that she’s up for an assignation. Sometimes the cutting messes with our sense of continuity: Gédigier cuts from a view of a beach hotel bedroom to what seems to be a reverse of someone walking in, but it turns out to be another room entirely. The effect is partly to place us in Julien’s head, but it’s not just a matter of psychological realism. The approach infuses The Blue Room with the heady spirit of a certain editing style that’s contemporaneous with Simenon’s book. One of most exciting things about The Blue Room is that it celebrates the radical fragmentation of Alain Resnais’s 1963 film Muriel—a nostalgic blast for modernists, reminding us that, by and large, they don’t cut them like they used to.

What’s also daring about the film is that, by the end, we’re none the wiser about exactly what has taken place. Neither, it seems, is the hapless Julien—although there’s an extraordinary reaction from Amalric in the film’s concluding courtroom sequence, in which he gazes at a witness, and his wide eyes suggest that he has suddenly realized what’s at stake in his predicament. But, as in the book, nothing is certain: Julien is steeped in guilt, but is it for a crime he has committed, a crime he has been party to, or for having committed adultery, or for failing to see his adulterous passion all the way through? Julien’s face is at times electrified with shock, at times impassive, and Amalric’s finely judged reticence means that it’s never transparently readable; and the less demonstratively Julien responds to certain things, the more it’s held by observers as a sign of his guilt (echoes of Camus’s Meursault) and added to the stack of circumstantial evidence against him.

So, what’s actually happening here? (I’ve been careful to hold back on spoilers.) Only one person, apparently, knows for sure, and that’s Esther; she’s not saying, but her complicit smiles at a cornered Julien speak volumes. Stéphanie Cléau appears only briefly and intermittently, but she’s a revelation: when Esther is quizzed together with Julien, her proud, complicit smile at him, together with her plucked and penciled eyebrows, suggests the unbowed ferocity of an old-school femme fatale. A contemporary neo-modernist reworking of a 1964 story, with a vamp worthy of Forties film noir—that’s a whole history of crime-of-passion stories compressed into one tight, intense frame.

Several minutes before its protagonist first appears on screen, Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s rich, elusive 1951 fable People Will Talk confesses that he might be too good to be real. “There may be some,” reads one of the movie’s opening title cards, “who will reject the possibility that such a doctor lives, or could have lived. And there may be some who hope that if he hasn’t, or doesn’t, he most certainly should.” As the wise Dr. Noah Praetorius—could he have been given a more venerable name?—Cary Grant does indeed give off an almost supernatural presence. His practice is a fairy-tale vision of medicine as a holistic treatment of the soul, his clinic sparklingly clean, and his bedside check-ins closer in spirit to Socratic debates. Occasionally, he’s capable of bouts of Hamlet-like melancholy—“just my usual twilight sadness,” he replies when a nurse finds him staring broodingly into the night from his office window—and moments of well-intentioned deception. But the inquisition launched against him by his sniffy, jealous colleague Prof. Elwell (Hume Cronyn)—though it’s presented as the main fulcrum of the movie’s narrative—is nonetheless, we’re meant to feel, doomed from the start.

The movie surely isn’t about Elwell, nor, properly speaking, is it about the treatment of actual physical ailments, to which it pays almost no attention. In fact, one of the great pleasures of People Will Talk—showing as part of a complete Mankiewicz retrospective during and after the New York Film Festival—is that it often doesn’t seem to be about any one thing. It’s a digressive, gleefully eccentric film spattered with left-field discourses on, among other subjects, model-train driving, symphony conducting, and farm management, spaced out to make room for solos from a terrific lineup of character actors: Walter Slezak as the dotty Austrian chemist who plays upright bass in the medical school faculty orchestra Noah conducts; Sidney Blackmer as the sheepish, penniless father of the doctor’s young patient-turned-wife Deborah (Jeanne Crain); Will Wright in a cantankerous one-scene turn as Blackmer’s brother, a farmer for whom life’s chief pleasure is the adding up of tax deductions; and, in what might be the film’s strangest element, Finlay Currie as the broad-statured, slow-witted shuffling “friend” of Noah’s who inexplicably clings to the younger man like a shadow.

Grant was entering the last great decade of his career when he starred in People Will Talk, and Praetorius was, one senses, a part he could only have played after having perfected the immature young idealist (Holiday) and the swaggering cynic (His Girl Friday). There are elements of both in the doctor’s lucid, serene, unflappably assured manner, as well as a streak of chilly, disconcerting detachment unglimpsed in Grant’s earlier screwball heroes. “You’re quite a noble character,” his new wife tells him bitterly after he informs her that she’s still carrying the baby over which she tried to kill herself—and which, in a tactful breach of medical ethics, he’d told her had been the result of a false positive on a pregnancy test. “I’ve heard of doctors who were unsatisfying and unselfish,” she continues, “but were you that afraid I’d kill myself?” 

Noah: How afraid is “that afraid”?
Deborah: Enough to marry me to keep me from it.

In the long exchange that follows, Grant locks his face, with its naturally rigid, chiseled features, into a tight-set mask. Praetorius’ answers are considerate, witty, eminently logical, and at the same time disconcertingly formal; he’s still playing the part of the doctor-as-Socratic questioner, drawing out his patient’s inconsistencies and slips of reason.

Mankiewicz is often either vaunted or criticized (depending on who you listen to) for the writerly refinement of his dialogue, and there is, it should be admitted, something about this passage that comes off as stiff, belabored, overly theatrical. One gets the sense that Noah, for all his benevolence and all his declarations of love, is thinking through the situation without giving full attention to the visibly distressed flesh-and-blood woman in front of him. He has become one of those people for whom, as the ethicist Peter Railton has suggested, morality has an alienating effect, reducing the world to “a fabric of obligations and permissions in which personal considerations deserve recognition only to the extent that, and in the way that, [they] find a place” in the whole. It’s hard to imagine how he would respond to her last line, not a question but an order: “love me.” Something, we expect, has to intervene—and something, in the form of a resounding burst of music from outside the door, does.

There is, the movie suggests, an implicit link between the practice of medicine and the conduct of morality, not only because both have a kind of restorative mission—“there is a world of difference,” Praetorius insists, “between curing a disease and making a sick person well”—but also because both involve the cultivation of a perspective over and above personal interests and special preferences. It’s unclear, however, how long such a perspective can be developed or sustained. Early in the film, the doctor forces a roomful of mildly shocked medical students to recognize that the pallid, beautiful young woman stretched out on a slab in front of him is “a cadaver, not a dead human being,” and there’s a current of queasy humor in the way he absent-mindedly plays with the woman’s long black hair before the lecture begins. (The scene, like the rest of the film, has a shade of autobiography; Mankiewicz graduated from Columbia’s med school at 19.)

At the same time, the movie keeps leaving itself open to cases in which the question of life’s presence, or its absence, remains suggestively open: the baby whose existence is repeatedly concealed and revealed; the ailing old woman who praises Praetorius for making “dying seem like a pleasure”; Currie’s Shunderson, who comes off throughout the film—even when he is not being trailed by a dog named “Beelzebub”—as a kind of resurrected corpse. It isn’t until the movie’s last act that this last character, in a monologue of deadpan, macabre, and utterly weird Midwestern humor unlike anything else in the film, reveals the mystery of his past—and his speech does, in fact, suggest that not all cadavers stay dead.  

In a magisterial chapter late in his autobiography, William Carlos Williams—a working doctor who received patients steadily for four decades—wrote of “the humdrum, day-in, day-out, everyday work that is the real satisfaction of the practice of medicine”: 

The actual calling on people, at all times and under all conditions, the coming to grips with the intimate conditions of their lives, when they were being born, when they were dying, watching them die, watching them get well when they were ill, has always absorbed me . . . We begin to see that the underlying meaning of all they want to tell us and have always failed to communicate is the poem, the poem which their lives are being lived to realize . . . It is actually there, in the life before us, every minute that we are listening, a rarest element—not in our imaginations but there, in fact.

Praetorius’ skill consists more in talking his patients out of what they have said than in listening for what they haven’t, and it’s perhaps this—the difference between his drive to “make sick people well” and Williams’s to “see the meaning of all they want to tell us but have always failed to communicate”—that results in the gap between his brilliant bedside manner and his somewhat chilly inability to take his loved ones into full account.

Mankiewicz, too, is arguably more at home with the spoken than with the unexpressed and inexpressible. (“Let’s not mess with the unconscious right now,” Crain’s character tells Grant’s during their climactic quarrel. “We've got enough conscious trouble to worry about.”) As much in its lighting and staging as in its subject and theme, the movie is his riff on “The Anatomy Lesson,” a copy of which appears in the background during a key scene. Praetorius—a Dr. Tulp presiding over a crowd of onlookers enraptured, curious, jealous and unmoved—is a great man, we’re told in the film’s last minutes. But his climactic triumph—in the film’s last scene, he conducts the faculty orchestra in a rousing performance of a Brahms overture—is, to my eyes, exclusively that of a public hero: poised, elevated, brilliant, and not yet reconciled to the poem of his life.

People Will Talk screens October 2 as part of the New York Film Festival retrospective Joseph L. Mankiewicz: The Essential Iconoclast.

With Stray Dog, a kind of documentary follow-up to the award-winning Winter’s Bone (10), Debra Granik returns to the Ozarks of southern Missouri to profile Vietnam veteran Ron “Stray Dog” Hill. An imposing figure, Granik’s burly tattooed subject guzzles moonshine, likes his firearms, and rides around on a Harley with his gang of war buddies. But there’s also a softer side to Ron. He’s touchingly tender toward Alicia, his new wife, who is Mexican, and gives heartfelt guidance to his wayward granddaughter from a previous marriage. He also visits the grieving parents of fallen soldiers, and offers free repairs on their houses.

What emerges is not only a character study of a quintessentially American type, but also a portrait of an American heartland in transition, where economic opportunity is drying up, social values are in flux, and technology is reconfiguring the way of life. (Stray Dog is often docked at his computer, using video chat, sharing photos with friends or practicing his Spanish on language software.) Stray Dog complicates a certain derogatory one-dimensional image of the South that often circulates, instead offering a richly detailed direct look at the people and their daily struggles.

Granik got her start making industrial videos for trade unions in the Boston area, studying people in their workplaces and then filming them going about their jobs. This early experience informs her close observational approach, which she describes as “visual anthropology." Applying this ethnographic lens to Stray Dog, Granik skirts the common documentary reliance on direct interviews and voiceovers, and avoids a pedantic style. This allows her to craft an often lighthearted film that trusts viewers to develop their own responses to the issues it presents.

FILM COMMENT spoke to Debra Granik by phone as she rode a train from Poughkeepsie back to New York City. Stray Dog screens October 2 and 3 in the New York Film Festival.

With Stray Dog, you return to the Ozarks, where you filmed Winter’s Bone. What did you gain from your previous experience filming there?

I was in a slightly less rural area. Ron lives within 25 minutes of Branson, Missouri. So it wasn’t as rural as the county on the other side of Lake Taneycomo where we filmed Winter’s Bone. But phrases that I learned when I was there, when they’re said to me, I understand them. And issues that were front and center in people’s lives about scraping by, about having heat or no heat, issues that were unavoidable to learn about through the filming of Winter’s Bone. So I was able to pick up and start recording without needing to ask people for lots of explanations about things in their lives.

Stray Dog documents a world that is unfamiliar to many audiences, and you capture its minutiae, its uniforms, its symbols, and its rituals. Were you trying to preserve a part of heartland America that is at risk or in transition?

I think you’re never that conscious. Maybe in my ego, in my fantasy of how conscious I can be, maybe I like to think I went in having that awareness in me. But I think going in you’re more interested in what you don’t know. I am interested in rituals that structure and affect other people’s lives that I don’t know about. I am intrinsically curious about how people scrape out meaning in their lives, and so when I’m witness to something and it moves me, it piques my wonderment in that sense. And then it’s only in retrospect, when you get to watch it, that you might see some photographic beauty or framing beauty or cinematic beauty.

Absurd or foreign elements keep appearing in Stray Dog. Literally, there are foreigners who have come to live here, but it’s also a look at parts of America which seem exotic to many audiences and at the same time are experiencing unusual social developments.

I think that’s what kept me coming back. It was getting under my skin. By being there and recording and looking through the viewfinder, I’m seeing these moments that I could have never predicted. For a filmmaker, an observer, a sociologist, or an anthropologist, what defies your expectations ends up delighting you. As a filmmaker, if you had to order up a scenario, who wouldn’t want twin sons, like Alicia has? Twins who move on some level with synchronicity and who are very physically bonded and have their four eyes looking at the new spot, the new location.

Even their names have a special ring, Angel and Jesus.

I know! We were so smitten with their names. The working title at one point [was] Ron’s toast at the barbecue: “Jesus and Angel, welcome to America.” It was kind of close to Tony Kushner...

Am I an American who loves to see things be touching and tolerant? Yes. Was that eye candy for me on some level? Yes. I was trying to treat the exotic or the outside with a certain tenderness or affection, not trying to highlight or throw a spotlight on exoticness. I think they were doing the assimilation. They were doing the absorption and the integration. And I guess the most faithful recording of that is to show that it was happening in a gentle kind of way.

It’s easy to show that type of thing with a mocking tone, or just for a laugh, for the titillation of the viewer, but I think you don’t do that.

Well, there is some of that in there. I mean, with the twins looking up the word “pussy.” That’s been in and out of the film. I was very receptive to the fact, and persuaded by the fact, that it did get a laugh, and it is played for a laugh. So when you say that, I have to come clean. And yet, it was interesting that they (Angel and Jesus) were trying to observe him (Ron) so closely, and the fact that that word does crop up and it wasn’t going to be a satisfactory result from looking that word up in the dictionary. And on some level, once they saw Ron squirming through it, they were in on the humor too.

Stray Dog offers up a portrait but at times it also seems to resemble direct-cinema films of the civil rights era, in which social issues are presented by documenting disenfranchised groups. Here, for example, it’s immigrants, the indigent, and veterans. Is this how you were trying to make the film?

What was so strangely organic is that that’s just in one family. Everyone’s been in a Q&A where someone says that the specific yields to the universal. But in trying to take an ordinary American family, you’ve got the granddaughter and the daughter with a minimum wage and that’s not working. You’ve got the strand of what it’s like for Jesus and Angel to come to an area that is not thriving economically. And then you’ve got a man who, very late in his life, found a way to look at the lifelong effect of where he came of age and how, as a soldier that participated in combat in Southeast Asia. You’ve got these themes that are embedded in their lives.

But going into that, you don’t know that. When I first met Rob, I didn’t know Alicia was going to become part of his life. So that’s that weird thing that happens sometimes when you’re doing a documentary, where the subject defies the narrative, that there was going to be a little love story. You touch certain loaded subject matters, and the themes are numerous. It’s like a hook effect, where one theme will hook to the next, and you’re kind of pulled. Sometimes you feel like you’re being pulled too fast, like the subject gets way too complicated.

Did you feel that with Stray Dog?

Oh, at times, yes. A lot of material had to go by the wayside. In the editing—unless we were going to a [TV] series, with an hour about the Mexicans, an hour with Robin. We cut it down so much: the chili supper, the business meeting of the bike group—things that take time, but that aren’t necessarily high-stakes. I have a lot of patience for anthropology, I can sit and watch guys in southern Missouri figure out who’s gonna bring the onions, who’s gonna bring the whatnot to the potluck. I loved seeing men organize a potluck. Men are such an enigma to me often, that I almost like watching anything they do, except hurt each other. I’m sitting there going, “Oh my God, this is what happens when I’m not around.” Some stuff was just super-photogenic. There’s a lot of charity action there on the holidays, and one of the biggest bikers in their group, in a Santa suit, led to an interesting scene.

There was stuff with sexual identity. How is it addressed when the topic of gayness comes up, what does that look like in a community such as an enclave of southern Missouri? Firearms was a big theme, and the film doesn’t even go there. There was a fascinating scene in a bank, about finances, Ron trying to borrow some money. You could bring guns into the bank. The sign on the wall, in the same place where the signs normally say “No firearms beyond this point,” this sign said “Bring it in.” I was scared shitless of how in-depth anything to do with the Second Amendment is taken there. Ron has his own very deep views on that. I felt grateful just to be able to have a dialogue with someone who has views very different from my own.

How else were you affected by the time you spent there?

The heartland does render up a lot of its young blood. We are maybe in a place that we don’t want to see how close it is to other times in history where certain families are expected to give up their first-born. It feels biblical, sometimes, in the heartland. Some people want to serve, want to be in a tradition that’s been in their families for three, four generations. It’s a form of almost warrior nobility, it’s warrior culture. That’s very ancient. There’s sort of no culture, and no time in history, that doesn’t have that. I think what I did learn is the huge loss of that route of exit and opportunity when there’s not a wartime military. And that re-stratifies our class system more. Your class awareness, if it’s not already smashed open in New York City, is doubly so there. There’s no way out of it. It’s 24/7 contemplation of that, it’s in your face. The idea of food deserts, minimum wage, and being a starving obese person or a person whose body is being changed by the diet of poverty and living in poverty. That part you really, really feel.

Stray Dog is not one of those single-issue documentaries dealing with a big public social issue, but many of these issues come up naturally, and the film presents them in a way that leaves it up to the viewers to come to their own positions.

Some people feel it is hard to glean that or get that without voiceover or narration, or without on-camera interviews. Some people have felt uncomfortable about that with the film. And we did all that. We did many hours of interviews, direct to camera, with different people. We had translated interviews in Spanish, with English subtitles. But we ended up not using those structural elements that do more directly announce the themes.

I like doing films about ordinary people. And some people have said to me, Don’t be coy, Ron’s not ordinary. But Ron views himself as a salt-of-the-earth working-class man who has had military experience, who finds it easier to be heterosexual by being with people of a different culture. I get scared, because when you make a film about an individual, and you put them on a pedestal somehow, even though that wasn’t the intention—you know, “Oh this magnificent warm-hearted, burly teddy-bear with two immigrant stepsons”—sometimes I start to say: “What have I done to Ron?” He has a lot to him. And he is a deep-thinking individual. And he is also an ordinary American, in the sense that he’s lived a life that a lot of us live, or a lot of the people who live near him live. So that’s a challenge.

But at the same time, I’m still excited. I’d love to go back and make a narrative fiction and cast Ron and his neighbors, and make it about the dilemmas and quandaries and stakes that do exist in daily life. The issues of where you get your money, what happens when you don’t have it, what happens with foreclosure. What happens with wanting a hobby really bad and having bike payments that cause you to make bad choices. Picking out the issues that really are embedded in daily life, but showing that those too have stakes. How you solve them. How you navigate. How you have an American life that you can also not get weary of, not get beaten down by, and enjoy sometimes.

Few films in the main slate of this year’s New York Film Festival match the sheer rigor of the fourth feature by the Safdie Brothers, Heaven Knows What. Singularly committed to plumbing the depths of its subject, the semi-biographical film chronicles the life of Harley (Arielle Holmes, in her first screen performance), a street kid adrift in New York, madly in love with black metal misanthrope Ilya (Caleb Landry Jones), addicted to heroin and entangled in a volatile milieu of fellow itinerants. The Safdies have taken a decisive step with Heaven Knows What, radicalizing their best qualities (like their nose for melodrama and humor on the street) and yielding a work that is at times frightening and always wrought with emotion.

For FILM COMMENT Dan Sullivan interviewed the Safdies a few days before the U.S. premiere of Heaven Knows What at the New York Film Festival, where it screens on October 2 and 5.

At this point, the story of this film’s origins is…

Josh Safdie: I don’t want to talk about that anymore!

But there’s one aspect of it that I’m still interested in, which is the research that you two did. How did you familiarize yourself with this milieu?

JS: Well, it’s simple. We use the excuse of research to experience life outside of our own houses, so to speak. I personally have always been attracted to the milieu of people that hang out on the streets. I was initially attracted to Arielle, but I didn’t know she was a street kid. Once I found out a little bit more about her, I thought she was an interesting person and I wanted to be her friend. And I just hung out with her and kind of wanted to see the room behind the room behind the room. I needed to see it firsthand. I would tell Arielle, “I need you to show me this. I need you to take me to these people. I need you to introduce me to this person.”

Benny Safdie: At the same time that she was writing, we would meet these people and ask her to write more about certain people, to understand their pasts. So it was like Josh was kind of…

JS: I was directing the writing through the research in a weird way.

In shooting, did you often feel that you had touched a nerve with Arielle or that she felt uncomfortable?

JS: No, not once. She’s a really strong person and she’s also kind of sadistic. So she would always look for us to push it farther and farther and farther. The hardest part emotionally, I figured, would be the wrist-slitting scene, because we had a certain attachment to the way the action unfolded and there were four different versions of the story I’d heard. And the only one I was interested in was hers. Caleb did extensive research to figure out where his take was and we ended up editing it to fit her account. But she always wanted things to be darker than they were.

BS: She was attracted to it.

JS: The farther away we removed the scenarios from her actual experience, the better performer she became. When we would do a straight re-creation, she had a much more difficult time accessing it.

How did you guys come to meet and cast Caleb Landry Jones? Did he meet the real Ilya?

JS: We had exhausted all these different routes of talking with other young actors. Jennifer Venditti, who’s a casting director, suggested him to us.

BS: She sent us this audition that he did for The Last Exorcism. It was a very strange audition tape where they’re filming him and he’s getting very annoyed and aware of the camera.

JS: Caleb can do naturalism easier than most people could play themselves, but he’s also extremely interested in insanity and melodrama. So when he met the real Ilya, which was the second day he was in New York, he knew a lot about Ilya through Arielle’s perspective, and as a result, he was very nervous. Ilya was basically a celebrity to him, and he didn’t know how to handle that. But they immediately became friends and are still very close. Ilya’s idol is Diogenes. He is a very well-read, smart, dark, misanthropic nihilist—except that he cares a lot about black metal, and love. So he’s not exactly a nihilist, although he claims he is. If you get close to Ilya, if he likes you, it’s a really amazing experience. He is a pretty wild guy, and he has substance problems, and it’s tough. It’s tough how drunk he gets. But, Caleb got very close to him, very quickly.

BS: If Ilya had sensed from Caleb that Caleb was really only trying to get pieces of his personality and then be done with it, he wouldn’t have given him anything.

JS: Caleb basically spent the first week with Ilya demonizing Arielle, and they wouldn’t even talk to her. Caleb became worried that if he got close to Arielle, Ilya would be upset. But they needed to have a relationship before we started filming. Caleb finally told Ilya that he needed to step away and spend time with Arielle. And then we spent the first three days of shooting with them at the tail end of their getting to know each other.

Did Ilya visit the set?

JS: He did, a lot. I don’t even know how he found us. All of a sudden he would just show up, and literally we would have to stop filming because he said he’d just beat the shit out of somebody. He was like a tornado.

But your relationship was complicated by the fact that you two were fictionalizing him?

BS: It actually wasn’t. He loved it. In fact, he was our first choice. We weren’t going to cast an actor.

JS: He’s a very melodramatic person. He’s unbelievably charismatic in a very strange way. So I asked him over and over again to play the role. But he didn’t want to be on camera. Yet he was very attracted to this idea that he was a character. He was never uncooperative.

BS: Ilya knew that Caleb was going to add parts of himself to the role so it wasn’t exactly him.

I found the film to be incredibly stressful from beginning to end. How were you two able to access and maintain that intensity throughout?

BS: It’s funny, I don’t consider the movie dark or intense. I know that we cut out all of the dead spots. We definitely wanted it to feel like condensed time, just because that’s how their lives are.

The big cliché is that the life of a junkie is incredibly boring. But regardless of how much is happening on a narrative level, the film is so dense with psychology and affects.

JS: From the get-go, Ronnie [Bronstein, the film’s co-writer and co-editor], me, and Benny talked about Sturm und Drang, and emotions, and, you know, Beethoven, Bach…

BS: And there’s little plot stuff that should be in the movie—it doesn’t need to be, because if its only job is to move the plot forward, it’s pointless, you know? We tried not to contextualize things, because if you run into somebody in the street, you don’t know everything about them.

JS: We just kind of were running with Arielle’s friends. They’re the busiest people I’ve ever met. But what do they do? I mean, they don’t have jobs, they have no obligations.

BS: Their obligation is to the drug.

JS: But they decide not to sign the social contract. I don’t want a job, I don’t want to pay taxes, I don’t want to pay rent, I want to do whatever I want to do. But it’s strange because they end up succumbing to it, due the bedbugs of that culture: drugs.

Ronnie was involved in your last fiction feature, Daddy Longlegs [09], in a radically different capacity. What was it like working on this longer, more ambitious project with him as a co-writer and a co-editor rather than as an actor?

JS: I don’t know which film was more ambitious, Daddy Longlegs or Heaven Knows What. With Heaven Knows What, there was much more at risk, just because of the nature of the film and the performers we were working with. With Ronnie, in Daddy Longlegs, he’s such a great actor, and he’s such a radical thinker, that it was very helpful. It was comfortable for us to have someone we were so close with to be this soldier in the field, if you will. Not having that in Heaven Knows What was challenging. It was very new. But Ronnie was involved in a different way in the writing process with Daddy Longlegs.

BS: Also, because the kids in Daddy Longlegs were not actors and were completely combustible, Ronnie had to be on his feet all the time. He had to have the freedom to be able to do and say whatever he felt was necessary to get the kids to do something.

JS: He would read something and be like, “I can’t do that. I can do this, I can do this better so we should go farther with this idea here.” And that’s where his writing came in. And he helped out a lot in the editing. Here, it’s all about his intellectual and personal interests. The melodrama of the mind, the psychodrama—he was interested in that, and he really liked Arielle as well, so our collaboration was based on figuring out what makes her tick.

BS: I would say he was a bit freer on this film. He was under the hood. He didn’t want to meet anybody. It allowed him to have a certain amount of freedom of thought. Later on, during the editing, we just needed to make sure we were speaking the same language.

The film has an incredibly unique look, especially in the context of NYFF, where we’re seeing it alongside films shot on 35mm and 16mm—including one film that was shot by your cinematographer, Sean Price Williams (Listen Up Philip). Josh, you’ve talked to me about the hazy image of this film, which could perhaps be opposed to the grainy 16mm image of Listen Up Philip. How did you and Sean achieve this look?

JS: Our collaboration with Sean is unique, but we also had a second cameraman a lot of the time, Chris Messina. He just shot something that was at BAMcinemaFest this year…

Bingham Bryant and Kyle Molzan’s For the Plasma.

JS: Yes, which was actually supposed to be shot by Sean, but Sean couldn’t shoot it so he suggested Chris. Without Chris, this film wouldn’t have existed. He was our anchor. With Sean, I would let him have a lot of freedom. We knew from the beginning we were talking about making an “opera of long lens.” We wanted there to be so much glass in front of the lens that you don’t even know what you’re looking at times.

BS: We experimented with that in The Black Balloon. We were testing the waters, but it’s not quite the same.

JS: At one point we were going to shoot on MiniDV, but then that was too lo-fi, and we wanted to have a clean HD quality to it.

BS: It was also the decision to shoot on tripods. The world we were filming would lend itself to this gritty, handheld, lo-fi quality, but we wanted to go against that.

JS: I really, really pushed Sean sometimes. Asking him to shoot a close-up a block and a half away on a crowded city street is not an easy task, and although we had an insanely complicated communication system via walkie-talkies, it was very difficult. The actual look of the film is a byproduct of the filtration that we did, that we committed to on set. There are certain times when the light flashes the glass, it creates a haze when our actors were outside, which shouldn’t necessarily have the same effect as when they’re inside. If it’s nighttime, if it’s daytime, it feels different. If it’s freezing outside, you really feel that.

Do you have any interest in making a film outside of New York?

JS: We’ve been thinking about that a lot. The short answer is yes. The larger question is, are we interested in working outside of an urban environment? We were thinking about doing a film in the Everglades, and I was very interested in that. But right now on our horizon are a lot more urban movies.

BS: It’s difficult for me to even think about because I get so much just by riding the bus or taking the train. You see people, you hear conversations. Just by walking for five minutes, there’s such a density to that experience.

JS: The short answer is that we’d love to make a movie outside of New York, but I’m petrified of leaving New York City.

The experience of watching Takashi Makino’s work is perhaps best expressed by the title of one of his films: still in cosmos. On the one hand, the filmmaker attempts to create a pure frenzy through the use of multiple exposure and superimposition, but there always remains a notion that abstract chaos exists within some sort of greater order. This paradoxical tension has persisted in all aspects of his filmmaking. At times his films confront you with the visual equivalent of a shriek; in other moments, they feel completely tranquil.

Makino’s work is steeped in the avant-garde traditions of abstract animation and artisanal practice represented by the likes of Jordan Belson and Stan Brakhage, but the techniques that he employs involving digital transfers, increased frame rates, and multiple layering also push digital technology forward to the edge of its current abilities. While his films may appear transcendent and otherworldly, they are entirely composed of images from this world, such as the shimmers of light against leaves in Inter View (10), clouds dispersing in In your star (12), and a bird’s-eye view of the Tokyo cityscape in Generator (12). These moments illuminate with blinding intensity but are always full of shadows. Such tensions are the foundation of his practice.

Although Makino’s work continues to eschew story, character, and dialogue, his recent films have marked several turning points that have taken his artistic practice in a new direction. In 2012, Makino shoots with a digital camera and employs the Pulfrich 3-D effect to portray images of ripples spreading on a river surface; Phantom Nebula (14) is his first foray into found-footage filmmaking where human shadows emerge from the dust and scratches accumulated on the filmstrip; and with Space Noise (13-14), in addition to performing haunting ambient noise himself, he has turned it into an amorphous multi-projection work that changes with every presentation.

Makino’s first North American tour of screenings and performances includes a screening of 2012 on October 5 in Projections within the New York Film Festival. For FILM COMMENT, Julian Ross spoke with Takashi Makino via Skype.

2012

In the past you’ve shot on film and digitally superimposed the material to create immersive and layered images. Your film 2012, in a sense, marks a departure as it includes a section that is digitally shot. Can you elaborate on your stance concerning the gap between analog and digital filmmaking?

At first, I considered only shooting on film and projecting the finished work on film for an audience, but I ended up facing many issues, such as the costs involved in making prints. From 2004 onwards, I stopped making works entirely on film, and decided around 2006 to shoot on film but edit and project digitally. That was a big decision for me. At first, it didn’t feel like my own work when it was digitally projected. I was using a Telecine machine at work, transferring film material to video, and came to realize that the technology had arrived at a point where the qualities of film can be preserved after a digital transfer. It had previously taken me two to three years to make one film, and when I made the shift I was suddenly able to make four or five a year. Around the same time, digital projectors became much better, and I realized that the time has come for me to accept it.

Still, I wanted to keep shooting on film. The reason was because the contrast resolution is different, which is important because I create my images using the technique of multiple exposure. Layering film has a different effect to layering digitally, as physical photosensitive particles get mixed together, which doesn’t happen as smoothly with pixels. Between 2011 and 2012, when film seemed to be facing a crisis of extinction, I felt I might no longer be able to shoot on film. Laboratories were shutting down in Japan and abroad. I had to ask myself whether I could work completely digitally or whether I’d have to quit making the style of films I make. When I started making 2012, I thought film might no longer exist by the end of the year. I told myself I would only make one film during the year, in which the first section would be shot on film and the latter would be shot digitally, to mark this transition. This was decided from the outset.

2012 Act 5

You presented the film 2012 in different versions throughout the year 2012, before settling on a final version in 2013. What was the thinking behind this?

Again, it had to do with the difference between analog and digital film. One thing that sets digital apart from analog is that you can screen exactly the same film as many times as you want because it doesn’t deteriorate. Film, on the other hand, is susceptible to changes every time it is projected. Strictly speaking, it is never exactly the same. I wanted to challenge the notion of showing the exact same film to an audience, which had become a possibility with digital projection. I wanted to make a work that could only be seen once every time it was projected. Every time it was shown, I added new sounds and changed the images. By performing the music live, I also wanted to add an element of physicality to the screening. I made it so it was required that I would be present at the screening. I put together these rules and I wanted to abide by them for this film. I wouldn’t be able to do this forever, so I only did it during the year 2012 and completed the film at the end of the year. 

Did you encounter any surprises shooting on a digital camera?

As expected, there was quite a difference in contrast resolution between analog and digital film. At first I worried, because multiple exposure on digital material doesn’t have the same depth as something shot on film. I was working as a colorist at the time, where I adjusted the color and image contrasts when digitizing film prints. I tried applying the same techniques that I used for my job with what I had shot on video, which unexpectedly worked out.

Nevertheless, I think most people can tell when the film switches to digitally shot material. Even when you digitally scan film using 4K resolution, you can tell the difference in quality. For example, a hand would appear a little fuzzy on its contours when shot on film, as if there was no clearly demarcated border between the hand and its surroundings. When you layer such images, they bleed into each other nicely. When the image is shot on a digital camera, the pixels create clear borders, no matter how high the definition. It’s actually not suited to my style of production.

You sometimes screen a 3-D version of 2012. Can you explain why?

It’s connected with the physicality that I wanted this film to have. While considering the physicality of analog and digital film, I thought of the screening as an experience. I wanted the audience to be able to decide how to perceive the film. I hand out glasses so that the images can appear to rotate outwards to the left when you hide your left eye, and vice versa, due to the Pulfrich effect that gives an illusion of depth. The film will appear to be different when you use the glasses but you’re also welcome to watch it without them. In Hollywood films, it is already pre-determined how to look at a 3-D image, and the area of the image that will poke out at you has already been decided for you. There is no variety of experience among the individual spectators.

Space Noise (screening at Issue Project Room, Brooklyn, on October 8)

I consider Space Noise to be a continuation of this approach to filmmaking. Space Noise doesn’t seem to have a complete version, as it changes every time it is presented to an audience. Will Space Noise ever arrive at a final version?

The idea behind Space Noise is to project film and video onto the screen at the same time and have that as the foundation of its development. Rather than changing it every time, I add more images every time it is projected. In a sense, Space Noise is a flexible project and has a looser concept than 2012. I’ve performed live music for Space Noise separately with Manuel Knapp, Jim O’Rourke, and Floris Vanhoof. Space Noise can become an installation or a performance, but it will never be completed as a film. The aim of the project is to attempt to reach the limits of abstraction, which is naturally an endless endeavor.

Could you talk about your collaborations with other filmmakers? For Deorbit [13], you collaborated with Telcosystems from the Netherlands. They’re digital artists but you work with analog film.

Telcosystems don’t shoot images. They don’t even edit. All their images are produced from a system they have devised on a computer. Yet, sometimes our films that are made in such different ways appear to have similarities. Over the years, we’d been discussing how strange but exciting this is. Telcosystems, who are also members of the organization Sonic Acts, invited me to collaborate on Vertical Cinema, their newest project where artists were commissioned to make site-specific works for a custom-built projector that projected 35mm celluloid in vertical cinemascope.

We edited analog film material I shot together with the digital noise Telcosystems created. We added the images of scratches on the film material into the digital system that Telcosystems created, and experimented with new ways of creating digital noise in real-time, which was captured and then used as raw material for the edit. Telcosystems also downloaded lots of satellite images of earth from the NASA website, which was also used as raw material.

Deorbit (screening as part of Vertical Cinema at Leeds International Film Festival on November 7)

Watching your other films, I feel the abstractions often use a horizontal motion. And lateral motion is actually essential for 2012, because it allows for the Pulfrich effect to work. But, of course, Deorbit operates vertically.

I shot lots of raw material on cinemascope but it just looked imbalanced when I shifted the image vertically. When I adjusted my mind to the vertical format, I noticed that I began to select images with downward and falling motion, such as a waterfall and rain. I suppose it’s a bit like a hanging scroll painting. Telcosystems and I were editing while shooting, and discussing the images, so I stopped recording horizontal movements, which had become a habit when I made films on the 16x9 format. The falling motion is also connected to the title Deorbit, which was conceived from the idea of something in space falling out of orbit.

Phantom Nebula (screening at the Center for New Music, San Francisco, on October 26)

You just completed your newest film, Phantom Nebula, which, at 60 minutes, is also your longest. Judging by Ghosts of OT 301 (14), which you describe as something of a preview, you seem to be departing from total abstraction with the presence of human figures.

For the first time, I decided not only to use images that I shot myself, but also found footage. Actually, I was thinking about not making abstract films altogether after 2012, as my intentions were to bring together all the technical skills that I had learned for the film in order to reconsider what I want to do from now. It was a turning point for me. I had always made abstract films in order to trigger images in the audience’s mind. Whenever I brought concrete images into the mix, your eyes couldn’t help but be drawn towards them, which is why I never used them. I came up with the idea to use concrete images but reduce their concreteness in order for them to remain abstract. This is what motivated me to make Phantom Nebula. I wanted to go beyond abstraction and arrive at a concrete abstraction.

I did something similar with the sound. Although the first half includes music that I made myself, I gradually incorporate sounds from older narrative films. I wanted to rethink the relationship between sound and image, and try producing new relationships in collage format. The film is divided in three parts according to the primary colors of red, blue and green, with 20 minutes each. The third section in the film includes a lot of play on symmetry, using the shapes of eyes, bodies, and symbols that almost look ritualistic. When Telcosystems were making digital noise, there were moments where the image got stuck and became bilaterally symmetrical.  We considered it a malfunction and didn’t use it for Deorbit, but I experienced seeing images differently when this suddenly happened.

When I thought about it, I realized many things in our universe are constructed symmetrically, including our bodies and, to an extent, how trees grow. This approach of bringing symmetry into the equation provided me with new forms of abstraction. These images started to look like a nebula, which is why I gave the film its title.

El Futuro starts off with a black screen. It’s 1982. The voice of Felipe Gonzalez, head of the socialist party, is announcing with studied optimism his acceptance of the newly created prime ministership, and his commitment to Spanish democracy, blossoming forth after decades of Francoist repression. You’re suddenly thrust into an apartment where a party is in full swing. The soundtrack of obscure Spanish punk and new wave songs provide a constant noise that often makes it difficult to hear the conversations going on. Some partygoers flirt while others chitchat about drugs and politics. You’re witnessing a watershed moment in history flitting by, its meaning obscured by small talk and having fun. “A 68-minute Warhol-esque microbudget portrait film, defiantly shot in 16mm, that bowls me over,” wrote Gavin Smith in his FC Rotterdam journal (March/April 2014). “Set in an apartment on the eve of the 1982 Spanish election that would bring the Socialists to power, it takes in an assortment of twentysomething partygoers, studied in singles, pairs, and groups, in a series of prolonged, attentive, but loose and informal medium shots.”

Luis López Carrasco cut his teeth working with the audiovisual collective Los hijos. With a firm foundation in experimental filmmaking, his first solo feature film shows Carrasco pushing formal boundaries, challenging himself, and asking questions about the source of Spain’s current political, economic, and cultural malaise. El Futuro takes on these issues, not with any overt commentary, but with more oblique avant-garde strategies. It has the look of a home movie—it could be found footage—but it’s carefully staged. A sequence of still photographs of happy Franco-era families appears, hinting at possible narratives. And then there are the mysterious black holes that appear at the end of the film, obscuring faces, as if freeze-framing the characters within the meta-confines of the film’s surface itself.

El Futuro screens October 5 as part of Projections in the New York Film Festival, after premiering in Berlin last January and making the festival rounds. FILM COMMENT caught up with López Carrasco back in May.

Let’s start off with the title of the film, El Futuro. The film takes place in 1982, yet as it progresses, the film is very much in the present tense. It exists as a sort of a counterpoint to the contemporary present. The “future” that the film refers to—is it the present, a possible future or an idea, in 1982, of the future?

I decided to look back to 1982 because of the way that Spanish society has behaved since 1982. The socialist party’s victory speech is when historians and the media claim that democracy began. So, it's important to me to say, that even in this party full of young people, you can see the seeds of the institutional and social collapse that we’re going to live 30 years later. The future that all these people have in their hands is… I don't know. It's a future that's going to land us in the final moments of the movie, to this moment of economic oppression that we're living in now. I always say that I made this film about a recent moment in Spanish history, when society thought that the future was going to be better, and it was made in a time in recent history when I have the opposite feeling.

When Spaniards watch the movie, they have the feeling that the party could have happened in ’82, but it could also have happened in 1992, or 2002. The film is a portrait of youth celebrating. The way they behave, the topics they speak about, are very, very familiar. It's like this new way, these new values, this idea that Spanish society had about being modern, has shaped the framework of how to behave.

There’s a general feeling that Spaniards turned their backs on politics in the Eighties. They decided to live in a free country, but only in a leisurely way. I mean, a lot of new values appeared in Spanish society, but all the strong commitments to leftist movements or engagement disappeared very, very, very quickly. And speaking about 1982 is speaking about how Spanish society in the Eighties, the Nineties, and the Aughts decided not to be involved in politics. And this is related to the moment we are living now where political parties are approving laws merely to maintain the power of the media, banks and financial institutions. The film starts in 1982 and the party goes on too long—just like the “party” of Spanish society, thinking that they’re rich and modern. So, when the sun rises in the movie, 30 years have passed. This crazy night has lasted 30 years and now you have this feeling of a huge hangover. It's a film about the impossibility of the Spanish society building any common future nowadays.

Still, when one thinks of the transition that Spain made from the Franco dictatorship to the young democracy of the late Seventies and early Eighties, there were things like La Movida Madrileña. It was a very creative time. Do you think there were some positive things that came out of this transition? Or do you think that it also had no future?

I think the transition was positive, because after the transition we had a democracy. There was a real danger when we had the coup d’état in 1981. There could’ve been an involution and we’d have had a military dictatorship, like in Argentina or Chile. So for 20 years there was an idea that transition was exemplary. The idea that every political party, the king, and even the ministers from the Franco era—all of them—made a huge commitment, and that was a very, very important moment. Spain was suddenly a mature and democratic nation. But it wasn’t real, because the transition was made in a very improvisational way, and the democracy that appeared after the transition was a limited democracy. We have to understand that we can improve institutions. We can improve the political parties. We can improve the constitution and we can improve the model of country we want. Let me be clear: it’s not a clean and perfect process. 

There’s a general feeling now that that it’s going to stay the way it is now forever. For example, there are a lot of problems with Catalonia and in the Basque country. But the central government always says that the constitution is perfect, because transition was perfect. To them, there’s nothing more to say about it. There were a lot of problems and conflicts that were buried in that moment, and they have to be solved. And of course, after 40 years of dictatorship a society isn’t able to be democratic just in one minute. And my film speaks about that there was this illusion; an illusion in an optimistic, exciting way... an illusion in a way that you’re lying to yourself, like a mirage.  I did some interviews with people that were 20 years old at that time and they all told me that there was a general feeling that everything was done; we were living in a modern democracy.

About a creative cultural movement like La Movida Madrileña, I think that there was a moment in the late Seventies that was about being cynical about politics—to just dedicate yourself to having fun and enjoying the present moment and living freely in a very joyful and hedonistic way, and laughing about all those very serious older brothers and sisters that were fighting against Franco. Because in the late Seventies there was a feeling of disappointment called el desencanto. The people wanted to have a revolution, to build a country, a socialist country, a country that wasn’t related to Europe or the United States. There were a lot of idealistic and utopian ideas about how Spain should be. And when most of these people who fought against Franco saw that the leaders of the political parties were making agreements with the king and the same Francoist ministers, and that the power was held by the same big enterprises, so there was huge sense of disappointment from 1976 to 1978.

So it was transgressive and subversive just to say that you only want to have fun and that you didn’t believe in politics. It was also related to the punk movement.  So, I thought La Movida Madrileña from ’78 to ’82 was a very, very powerful and interesting and subversive cultural movement. I mean, Spaniards broke with Catholicism. It was a very, very huge movement: gay rights, women’s rights. It was linked to the underground, this cultural scene. And that’s very, very interesting. The point is that from 1982, the Socialist party used this cultural scene to build a kind of superficial culture. They institutionalized the punk movement.

The Basque punk scene seems to be completely different than La Movida Madrileña in that the music was entirely political and that was part of their protest against what was going on.

Of course, of course, I'm speaking of generally.

In the film, your characters talk about all sorts of things. They're talking about politics. They're talking about the economy. They're talking about the changes. They're making small talk. They're talking about drugs. But they're always being overpowered by the soundtrack of the times. And you seem to have chosen a lot of music from that scene that is actually fairly obscure, at least to me. I'm left with not so much the politics or the economics, but this kind of soundtrack for people’s lives in the Eighties. Could you comment on that? And why you chose these songs in particular.

I wanted to make the music very, very loud because we were trying to give you the atmosphere and the feeling of an amateur home movie. It was interesting for us just to use the aesthetics of home movies. But of course there’s a kind of metaphorical idea that in the Eighties, this party, this music, this way of living avoids the possibility of speaking or having any serious conversation or discourse about anything. That was the motive for using music so loud that it doesn't allow you to hear the dialogue in a proper way. It also allows you to be inside the party constantly. I wanted to use a soundtrack that isn’t well known as a way of telling viewers that there were a lot of things happening in the early Eighties, beyond the stereotypes. It was important to communicate that Spanish music was richer and more interesting and as pluralistic as the young society. I didn’t want to do a nostalgic or retro or melancholy movie.

Film-wise, I see several influences, but it seems with El Futuro there are probably two main stylistic tendencies going on. One is a sort of Cassavetes-style narrative, and then there's kind of a more experimental avant guard thing going on with black holes, the way the film is cut with jarring rhythms, and black film leader. Can you tell me about some of your influences for this film in particular?

I’ve had a strong interest in Cassavetes’s films since I was a film student—his way of approaching characters, his way of building atmosphere. The improvisations from Faces. . . they’re very present. And also I was very interested in Andy Warhol’s Portraits, even his Screen Tests, and of course films like Chelsea Girls, where you only have the fiction of a group of people on the screen and there’s not any real interest in any narrative from the filmmaker. So those movies were very, very important to me. I’m also interested in Spanish documentaries from the Seventies—independent, underground documentaries and experimental works from Ivan Zulueta. And also direct cinema—the Maysles brothers and Fred Wiseman. That, and in a more experimental and material way I was thinking of Michael Snow’s Wavelength. I don't know if it's exactly in the movie but I was thinking of Wavelength—the way the film itself shows time, using it in an expressive way. I also watched Jean Eustache’s The Mother and the Whore as a way of thinking of young people and their behavior and of the atmosphere of disappointment after the utopian movement of ’68.

I was thinking particularly with the black holes. They reminded me very much of the structuralist films of the Seventies. And speaking of black holes, by the end the different characters disappear behind these circles of blackness. My impression is that the legacy and the faces of the generation of ’82 have disappeared. They're almost edited out. Do have any other sort of explanation for your use of that effect in the film?

Well, firstly, this is not exactly an effect. It’s the burn-out of the image. These black holes are made in the film laboratory. They make these holes in the film to mark the start and the end of the reel. We didn't use postproduction or any effects. We used things that there were in the film, in the negative. I knew that there was going to be a lot of information and marks and blurrings and burnouts and these holes in the image because of the 16mm camera. I've done other 16mm works with my director of photography, Ion De Sosa, and I knew this kind of artifact, by chance, could appear. I decided to use it.

Most of the songs in the film speak about the void and emptiness and. . . I don’t know, exactly. They could be a lot of things. People born in the Sixties, who were in their twenties in the Eighties, left a generational gap because many creative and working class young people died from the twin epidemics of heroin and AIDS. Another way to see it is this idea that the future of Spanish society is going to end in a kind of black hole—that the society and the democracy that is being built in that moment is not going to end in a good way. There’s also the idea that because of these black holes, the image is not complete: that we don't have a proper storytelling or a proper image of that decade, that the image of transition and the early Eighties isn’t complete. There are some critics that have connected these black holes with the idea of time tunnels. I didn’t think of it, but it’s interesting too. Could the black holes be like a time tunnel that links 1982 with 2014?  I don't know. I'm not sure. 

Pier Paolo Pasolini, the subject of Abel Ferrara’s latest film, had a great love for hustlers—and Ferrara is nothing if not that. He has been at least a half-dozen different kinds of filmmaker, having worked in porno, transgressive exploitation, Miami Vice–chic crime-thrillers, lacerating psychodramas, science fiction, Rabelaisian documentaries, and now in the biopic. Throughout, he has remained fundamentally himself, and though dogged by rumors of an unruly personal life that he has done his part to cultivate, he has never stopped working while many a sober and industrious professional has stalled or flaked out. He also has a reputation as the terror of interviewers but, disconcertingly, was the soul of courtesy when I spoke with him about Pasolini and sundry related matters. (He did take a moment to slag the reporter who proceeded me as he was on his way out the door, and I’d feel a little blue to think I didn’t get a little of the same business after I’d left.)

Born in the Bronx but removed to placid rural Peekskill by his father—all for naught—Ferrara came of age commuting into New York City for cinema and countercultural immersion. It’s with this that our interview began. Pasolini screens October 2 and 3 in the New York Film Festival.

When did you first discover Pasolini?

I saw Decameron as a young filmmaker, and that was a pretty good beginning. All these films played big-time then. They were major releases—in all these beautiful theaters, the Paris, theaters in the Upper East Side, and you could go and check out Satyricon. Y’know, these guys were making a lot of money from American distribution. You could see these movies in a beautiful setting, and people went to them.

Was the impact of Decameron instantaneous?

Yeah, y’know, when you see something at that age, you’re so impressionable, and being Italian, Catholic, and watching that, seeing the players, how he shot it, everything about it. I saw the film again not long ago, I hadn’t seen it in probably 40 years. And it had the same heavy impact, only this time I could understand a little better why. The idea of the director as liberated artist: working, not having a crew and a cast and a budget, and all this on his back, like a cross. The guy is using his tools, pursuing a vision, and pursuing in search of a vision. He’s learning about the movie that you’re gonna see while he’s making it. He’s up there on a tightrope without a net, but he’s not worried. It’s a sense of freedom, and it’s a sense of passion. I saw it on a double bill with Peckinpah’s Wild Bunch, and both of these films really slammed home the idea of what it is to be an independent, having your vision and pursuing that vision, bringing the crew and the actors to it, and making everyone find the movie that the audience is gonna end up seeing, so the film is being made right before your eyes.

How far back does the idea of translating this interest in Pasolini into a film about the man go?

I guess it’s always been there, it might’ve began when we found out he was killed. Maybe, I dunno. In the Nineties we were thinking of doing it with Zoe [Tamerlis Lund, star of Ms. 45 (81) and screenwriter of Bad Lieutenant (92)]. She was gonna play Pasolini in New York, and we would’ve flipped the gender, just kept the Alfa Romeo. We didn’t do it that way, so we went in another direction. The films, they come together when they’re meant to come together. I think we needed to do the documentaries [Chelsea on the Rocks (08); Napoli, Napoli, Napoli (09); Mulberry St. (10)], I think we needed to live in Rome and really get it going…

There’s an incredible parade of logos at the beginning of the movie. It seems like you got a little bit of money from a lot of places.

Well, that’s film financing in 2014, you gotta get money from—from the government, actually. Not corporate, but government—something that doesn’t exist in the United States. For me to go to my government and think that I’m gonna get money to make a film is absolutely the most avant-garde, outrageous concept. I wouldn’t dream of it in a million years. Call up Obama and say we’re making a movie? But in Europe they do, they support the arts. The city itself, the country, the campagna, the county, the state, the whatever. And we did it with three countries. France was a big supporter of the film, Belgium, and Italy is his home. I know, it looks a little funky at the beginning, but hey, whatever it is. Sometimes you get one guy to put up all the money, you got one name, sometimes you got 10 different people put up one-tenth of the money, you got ten names. But, hey, we got a movie, I ain’t bitchin’.

Are you looking to continue working in Europe for the foreseeable future?

I’m gonna go wherever we find the money, we find the culture, we find the people who understand that these films count, they’re important. The tradition is alive and kicking. Unfortunately, I don’t see it so alive in my own country, and it’s a sin.

Did you ever get any flak, not being Italian-born, but being in Italy doing a film on a subject who’s a cultural icon there?

Yeah, but I mean, he belongs to the world, and he belongs to me as much as anybody. And the writer is Italian, the editor is Italian, the cinematographer is Italian. The creative team was me, Willem, and three guys who were born there. I’m not gonna let it stop me that I wasn’t born there. I mean, I read Dostoevsky, I don’t speak Russian, know what I mean? These guys are mine.

How did the international nature of the production influence what language was being spoken on screen?

Well, me and Willem and the Americans—our native tongue is English, we read Pasolini in English. Willem speaks better Italian than me, but even he’s not gonna attempt to relate certain ideas—you’re talking philosophy, you’re talking poetry… And we’ve barely got it together in the language that we have. So we’re not gonna do those scenes—the Furio Colombo interview, the other interview—we’re gonna do those in English, man. But when he’s with the kid [Pino “The Frog” Pelosi, played by Damiano Tamilia], and the kid is speaking Italian, that language that that kid is speaking, you’re not gonna get that speaking English. You can’t translate that. You can’t drop that into American. What’d he be, a rapper or something? I don’t know what the fuck he’d be speaking. He’s a street kid, y’know? Thank God Willem speaks enough Italian, and can speak Italian well enough, that he can get that kid’s talking back, which to me is more important at that moment. It’s a stretch, but the audience has to stretch to the imagination of the filmmakers. I’m not gonna reduce our imagination, you gotta come up to the plate when you wanna watch a movie.

There’s a real emphasis on the quiet, domestic moments in Pasolini’s last hours—the flight from Stockholm, the after-hours dinner with Pino in a suburban restaurant. I thought about the domestic scenes with the director played by Harvey Keitel in Dangerous Game [93], a film that’s also interested in the counterpoising of an artist’s domestic existence with their riskier activities.

This was the life the guy led, it was basically that. He lived with his mother! What more can you say? He was a 53-year-old guy who lived with—and loved, and adored, and spent a lot of time with—his mother. He spent time with his friends. He went to certain restaurants. And then he had that other side of his life. And he was an artist. At the time of his death he had two beautiful screenplays and a 1,700-page novel… so he better spend time fuckin’ writing that shit. That stuff don’t write itself. You have to dedicate this time. And that was what was so beautiful about him. He was a man of action. His ideas, he put ’em on paper, they’re living there for everybody, they’re done. But he’s able to balance his life in that certain way, and one night it went a little bit off-kilter on him.

You brought up the Colombo interview, which Pasolini suggested the title for: “We Are All in Danger.” His thinking at this point is very apocalyptic, which put me in mind of one of your more recent films, 4:44: Last Day on Earth [11]. Is this idea of impending doomsday something you’re particularly aware of?

From Pasolini’s point of view—and everything he says, I would buy into—he was saying: “Don’t think that you’re gonna be immune.” If you’re on earth, and this is what’s happening to the world, don’t think that somehow you’re gonna save yourself because you’re living in a gated community, or you have something that’s supposed to protect you. You’re not gonna avoid it. We’re all in this together. What he was talking about specifically—to him, the worst tragedy that hit mankind was consumerism. So he’s out there doing it, he’s out there living a life among kids who he thinks have changed and not for the better, that won’t stop short of murder. He’s been there with them.

But that danger that he’s in, everyone is facing: the tragedy of wanting and needing things without even knowing why. It’s one thing to need to eat, it’s another thing to need a certain brand of wristwatch, a Rolex, to need a certain brand or you actually feel bad. That’s a new kind of thing that was being put into people, before they even know enough to make that choice. When you’re going to the shopping mall on Sunday instead of going to church, you know you’ve got a problem with the spirituality of the community. You could argue about forced Catholicism but…

He was very concerned about the snuffing out of proletarian energy, and in some of your recent work—Go Go Tales (07), the New York documentaries—you seem to have similar worries. You’re looking at New York City being denuded of the people that make it a vital place, as Pasolini was looking at the process in Rome.

But he thought Rome was over. Manhattan’s been bought and sold so many times. They stole it from the Indians, now they stole it from the artists. That’s just the way it is. You wanna see the Manhattan that everyone so cherished? Go to Flatbush. Or Bushwick, rather. Maybe Flatbush too. It’s there. Go to Istanbul.

In filming scenes from Pasolini’s novel, Oil (Petrolio), or his screenplay for Porno-Teo-Kolossal, you didn’t seem to try to make these things look like a Pasolini movie.

It’s not gonna happen, even if you try. I mean, we’re students of the director, my crew are students of [Tonino] Delli Colli, his DP. My DP [Stefano Falivene] worked with him. The bottom line is, that work is so clear and so concise and so precise and so inspiring that to shoot those sequences is everything you want from a screenplay. It’s beautiful and it’s clear, it makes you want to do it.

The narrative arc of the movie conforms to a pattern that’s interested you in the past—it’s there in 4:44, but also in Bad Lieutenant and ’R Xmas [01]. These are countdown movies.

Right, right, right. It’s interesting you mention that. Go Go Tales is also real-time, and the place is gonna close down. This one, you kinda know where it’s going. If you know his life, you know what’s gonna happen; even if you don’t, I think you feel it for some reason, I don’t know what. The guy was full of life. The last shot of the movie, that’s his daybook, that’s his actual daybook. When you see the appointments he was making that day for the next day, and the way he wrote—this guy, he was not expecting to die.

Even though you know it’s coming, the scene on the beach in Ostia is very difficult to watch.

He was killed by the car, you know? If that car didn’t roll over him, he would’ve lived. And so, whoever’s driving that car, whether they were gunning for him or it was just dark and they couldn’t control that Alfa and it was muddy and all that bullshit and it was an accident… That’s a big accident, ’cause you took out a big player.

How have people who knew Pasolini who’ve seen the movie been responding to it?

Everybody responds with their own eyes, you know what I mean? It’s different with everybody. Everybody sees the movie, everybody reacts different, some can communicate it to you, some can’t. But I mean: they get it. We came at this from love and respect, we came at it with open eyes and we were gonna let it take us wherever it took us.

You mentioned the daybook was his, were there other artifacts of his that you used?

We got it all. I mean, Graziella [Chiarcossi] the cousin, [Pasolini actor Ninetto] Davoli… We were embraced there by them, that’s what gives the film its soul, y’know? The medal he was wearing, his clothes—Willem was wearing his clothes. We shot in all the same places. That’ll only take you so far, but—it can take you so far. We had Ninetto, and Arianna Asti who was his… forget it, they were good fuckin’ friends. That’s what was great about being in Rome, 45 years ago is not that long ago. And that’s the tragedy too. We went and shot at those restaurants, those guys were there the night he was there. Those guys were alive, and kicking, and talking, those guys were there. He could’ve still been alive, and he could’ve still been working. That’s what’s lost, that’s what’s gone when shit like that happens, and that you cannot get back. You can find the missing this and you can find a Van Gogh painting in a garage but you’re not gonna… The stuff that’s not done is not done.

In discussing his novel Oil, Pasolini says of the protagonist, Carlo: “Aside from the similarities of his story to mine, he is repugnant to me.” This made me think right away of Devereaux, the venal politician that Gérard Depardieu plays in Welcome to New York [14].

He’s writing about a guy, he might despise him, but he knows him, and he gets him. It’s a complicated issue. It’s the same thing with Gérard. At the beginning of the movie, Gérard talks about playing DSK, Dominique Strauss-Kahn. He might say there at the beginning of the movie “That’s it,” but he gets him, he knows him, and he plays him by not playing him. That’s an actor going through his beats. Pasolini could despise that character, but he wrote a 1,700-page novel about him.

You could say that both of the movies are about men undone by desire, though in one case you’re sympathetic…

In one case you love the guy, and in one case you don’t, okay, I know. But in the end, with Pier Paolo, he was living a life that he felt he had balanced, he thought he had it together, you know. It’s a tough call. I’m not gonna pass judgment on either of these guys. It’s a tough call with Dominique. What happened in that hotel room—who knows what happened? Really. But, you know, you live that life, it’s not gonna come out all good. It’s just not. These are two examples of it. Again, you don’t wanna pass judgment on either one of them, and in both cases, as a filmmaker, I have to empathize, I have to get there with them, that film has to make sense for me. I have to understand where he’s going and why he was doing it. I have to find those guys in me, you dig? I gotta feel it, I gotta feel like, “Okay, I get it, that’s what happened.” Because that’s what makes sense to me. Whether that’s what happened, didn’t happen—really I could care less in the end. As long as I can understand why they got to where they got to. And at that point you’re talking about your own... you’re talking about yourself.

You say you’re not going to pass judgment—I think of Pasolini during his own interview in the movie: “I’m not a moralist.” Does this hold true for you?

Judging on these two films, we’re definitely not moralists. But that’s because he said it. Because we’re students of his, we’re not gonna be moralists.

Is Welcome to New York going to see the light of day in the U.S.?

In the U.S.? Right now it’s a war with these people, these guys think they can just cavalierly take our film and do what they want with it just because they bought it. Just because you buy the Mona Lisa doesn’t mean you can put a moustache on it. It’s my job to protect that film, so we’ll see what’s gonna happen. But it’s out, it’s on the Internet, steal it, man.

I already did.

Good, good, congratulations. It’s out there, use it, take it. It doesn’t belong to Showtime. That film does not belong to IFC, whatever they might think or whatever price they put on it, they don’t have the right to change that film. “What’s the fine print in the contract, what’s the deal with Showtime” and all that, that’s really bogus.

You have several movies that exist in longer versions, like Dangerous Game and Cat Chaser [89]—

Cat Chaser was a disaster. We gave up final cut and we paid for it. It was a total disaster. It could’ve been a very cool film—it was a cool film at one point—and it was totally butchered and destroyed by a couple of drunken bums. And what am I gonna do? I mean the guy’s dead now, I don’t want to badmouth him. But it’s a sin. Thank God for Anthology Film Archives, they’ve got a funky rough cut of Tony [Redman]’s, the editor’s, that does some service to the actors, to the great Elmore Leonard, to the dude who wrote it, to the people that made the film. That taught me the last lesson: it’s my job to protect the fucking film, period. That’s the director’s gig. It’s not the director’s job to make the film—he’s got a lot of help making the film—but to defend it. And when it gets fucking butchered, when it gets changed, there’s no one to blame but the director.

Eight years ago last month Tetsuro Tamba went to the After Life World, leaving behind a cloud of contradictions that linger in the air long after his departure, like a zesty aftershave made of man-sweat and punches to the jaw. Simultaneously the best actor in Japan and the worst, a man of refined taste and of no taste at all, a rich kid whose career was either shotgunned from the hip with no planning whatsoever or a carefully wrought piece of performance art, one thing is for certain: Tetsuro Tamba is probably the only man to direct a movie that ends with a dead poodle turning to the screen and saying “Sayonara.”

Appearing in either 268, or 301, or 350 movies, depending on who you ask, Tamba was born rich, descended from Japanese aristocracy, and he lived his life according to the rule he laid out for Sean Connery when he appeared opposite him as Tiger Tanaka in You Only Live Twice (67), “Rule number one—never do anything for yourself when someone else can do it for you.”

The Five Man Army

For Tamba, that meant: never watch your own movies, never turn down a role, and never memorize a line. Whether he was on the stage in Takashi Miike’s Demon Pond or a scientist trying to save the world in The Last Days of Planet Earth (74), Tamba gave his super-serious performances from inside a vortex of notecards and script pages taped up all over the set. Watch him move around his office in The Last Days of Planet Earth delivering a speech about the coming apocalypse and you’ll see him reading his first few lines from a file folder he’s holding, looking inside a desk drawer for the next few, and delivering the clincher from off the back of a lampshade.

That didn’t mean he was a bad actor, but he wasn’t exactly a good actor either. Tamba transcended acting and simply existed, generating a force field made of machismo that fermented into gravitas with age. Whether he was the President of the Earth Federation in Kinji Fukasaku’s Message From Space (78), or a po-faced grandpa killing a bird with a thrown log in Happiness of the Katakuris (01), Tamba was the Troy McClure of Japanese cinema, a man as stiff and reassuring as Charlton Heston, and as rugged and out-of-date as John Wayne.

Happiness of the Katakuris

His father was physician to the Meiji Emperor, and Tamba himself was a pampered aristocrat who lied his way into a job as a translator for Occupation forces after WW II, making up for his total lack of English by taking GIs to all the best whorehouses. In 1951 he won a “New Face” competition at Shintoho studios, and his movie career began. Shintoho had been launched in a burst of optimism four years previously, a splinter group of artists who left Toho over a labor dispute, who cared deeply about cinema, and who vowed to build a brighter future.

Full of potential, Shintoho attracted directors from Ozu to Kurosawa but the one thing it couldn’t attract were audiences. By 1956, it had been taken over by Mitsugu Okura, a circus ringmaster turned theater owner, and he unleashed a tidal wave of sex, horror, and mutilation under its logo. Before Okura, Shintoho released Mizoguchi’s classic Life of Oharu (52); under Okura, it released Nude Actress Murder Case: Five Criminals (57). See what he did there? Tamba clashed with the studio constantly, believing that he came from just as good a family as they did, and therefore they were his equals, not his bosses. Three years after Okura took over, Tamba squirmed out of his contract and went rogue. He took part in high-class pictures like Kobayashi’s Harakiri (62) but his most important role came when he conned his way onto British film, The 7th Dawn (64), again using his nonexistent English. (According to legend he just answered “yes” to every question at the audition). 7th Dawn was directed by Lewis Gilbert, whose next movie, Alfie (66), won a special jury prize at Cannes. Next up for Tamba was Gilbert’s You Only Live Twice.

You Only Live Twice

Set in Japan, Gilbert turned immediately to the one Japanese actor he knew for the role of Tiger Tanaka: Tetsuro Tamba. Putting his machismo into overdrive, Tiger Tanaka’s office is only accessible via a chrome laundry chute, he has a school of ninjas, a bikini beauty bathing squad who wash him, and he gets to admire Sean Connery’s chest hair and utter such immortal lines as, “In Japan, men come first, women come second.”

With a Bond film in his back pocket, Tamba had a license to appear in any movie he wanted and the movie he picked was…all of them. He appeared in Italian spaghetti westerns (Five Man Army, 69), he appeared in the Shaw Brothers' wu xia (The Water Margin, 77), big-budget disaster flicks (Sinking of Japan, 73), Teruo Ishii softcore samurai pictures (Bohachi Bushido, 73), science fiction films (Message from Space, 78), and Buddhist biopics alongside Tatsuya Nakadai (The Human Revolution, 73). He had his own late night talk show, Tamba Club, he was in the movies, he was on TV, he was everywhere, reading his lines off cue cards and tightening his jaw on cue.

The Water Margin

He was also in the afterlife.

In the Seventies, Tanba got interested in the possibility of life after death, and decided to do research, which meant reading a bunch of books. This led him to become leader of the Dai Reikai (Great Spirit World) movement, a new age, afterlife-focused group that appeared in Japan in the Eighties promising to scientifically investigate the afterlife, which apparently involves flying around on a trumpet. Tamba wrote dozens of books on the Great Spirit World, worked on opening a Great Spirit World theme park, gave lectures about spirituality, and made three feature films on the subject, the most infamous of which, Tetsuro Tamba’s Great Spirit World—What Happens After Death (89) features a dead dog who gives the aforementioned “Sayonara” sign-off at the end of the film.

But an interest in life after death didn’t stop Tamba from appearing in plenty of other movies, including Hong Kong’s Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky (91) and Takashi Miike’s Happiness of the Katakuris (01), Deadly Outlaw: Rekka (02), and Gozu (03). In 2006, he passed away at the age of 84, and by all accounts his death was a quiet affair, which seems tremendously out of character. Terrible, amazing, awesome, and awful, Tetsuro Tamba was the very definition of a cinematic icon. Hell, he even gets his own hip-hop track. If that doesn’t guarantee immortality, I don’t know what will.

Deadly Outlaw

Patrick Macias remembers Tamba


Tom Mes remembers Tamba

LINKS! LINKS! LINKS!

…Clips are showing up online from Shinya Tsukamoto’s Fires on the Plain, his remake of Kon Ichikawa’s 1959 classic of the same name. Still one of the most singular directors in the world, Tsukamoto’s new movie is excerpted here and here.

…That took its own sweet time. 14 years after rocking the Korean box office, Korea’s My Sassy Girl (01) is getting a remake. The male lead, Cha Tae-Hyun, is returning but no one else from the original is on board. Telling the tale of his marriage to his childhood sweetheart, it’s a China-Korea co-production that’s set to debut in May of next year.

…With the sound of a dozen pampered executives plugging up their ears and denying the future, AMC, Regal, Cinemark, and Carmike are refusing to screen Yuen Wo-ping’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon sequel, which is slated to be released August 28, 2015. Partnering with Netflix, the Weinstein Company wanted to debut it day-and-date on Netflix and on IMAX screens, but the big chains say they’ll never cooperate with this kind of release. Then like a bunch of small children they passive-aggressively dismissed it as a made-for-video movie that might play “science centers and aquariums.” You never know what a movie’s going to be like until it’s released, but budgeted at over US$20 million, starring Donnie Yen, one of the biggest action stars in the world, co-starring Michelle Yeoh, and directed by the man who gave us some of the greatest action scenes ever shot, I think this sequel deserves the benefit of the doubt. But, let’s face it, movie theaters are not going to survive in their current incarnations for much longer, which is entirely the fault of the people who own them and who have chosen to treat their customers to expensive tickets, sub-standard projection, and unimaginative programming. I’d be happy to live in a world where AMC doesn’t exist. As much as I dislike them, I’m betting on the Weinsteins this time around.


…Speaking of people denying the future, the American exhibition chains can join China’s Communist Party in sticking their fingers in their ears and chanting “la, la, la, I can’t hear you.” In a spontaneous escalation of events, Hong Kongers from all walks of life have taken to the streets to demand free elections (a promise China made, then recently reneged on). At first, the police extended the standard tear gas/pepper spray greeting to the students who started the protests, but that BS got shut down quick when tens of thousands more people hit the streets, appalled that their law enforcement officers were acting like thugs. Since then, the cops have chilled out, and in some cases even helped the demonstrators. The crowds have refused to be provoked into anger, and instead are showing almost superhuman calm and dignity as they call for the immediate resignation of the Chief Executive and for Beijing to honor its promises. Solidarity demonstrations have broken out across the globe, and as of this writing, despite street attacks by pro-Beijing triad gangs, the people of Hong Kong are standing strong. Andy Lau has responded with a message that can definitely be read as a statement of support, and Patrick Tam (star of Rigor Mortis) said of the protesters, “They are braver than me.” Anthony Wong gave the best celebrity response, however, writing on Facebook after police launched 87 canisters of tear gas at protesters, “That's enough for a war, did the protesters have any weapon? Unless they are Wong Fei Hung, who can use umbrella as a weapon. 87 tear bombs against umbrellas. Hong Kong cops is [sic] truly amazing, amazing!”

…Two of the biggest statements of support for the Occupy Central movement have come from two of Hong Kong’s biggest stars. Chow Yun-fat told Apple Daily, “The students are reasonable. When the government uses violent measures on students, it’s a turn-off for the people of Hong Kong. I don’t wish to see anyone getting hurt… it was a peaceful demonstration and there was no need for any violence or tear gas.” Then jaws around the world dropped when the notoriously press-shy Tony Leung Chiu-wai went to the media and said, “I support all the people of Hong Kong who peacefully ask for what they want, and protest the government’s use of excessive force against people who have gathered peacefully.” Actor Chapman To followed up on Twitter, saying, “If even someone as silent as Tony Leung is saying something, then you’re truly screwed.” Yep.

Matias Piñeiro’s ongoing series of idiosyncratic Shakespeare adaptations continues with The Princess of France, one of the shortest yet most slippery and complex features in the main slate of this year’s New York Film Festival. No one working in cinema today makes films quite like Piñeiro’s, which, despite their compact run-times and modest production values, abound with social and sexual intrigues, formal gambits, narrative contortions, and spellbindingly interwoven dialogue. Following Viola (a New Directors/New Films 2013 selection and his first to be distributed in the U.S.), The Princess of France is both tantalizing evidence of Piñeiro’s development as a filmmaker and an engrossing example of the dramatic gamesmanship that has been manifest in each of his films to date.

For FILM COMMENT Dan Sullivan interviewed Matias Piñeiro a few weeks before the U.S. premiere of The Princess of France at the New York Film Festival on October 5 and 6.

How did you decide to place what is effectively the most elaborate shot in The Princess of France at the very beginning? Do you feel it presages events to come in the film’s plot?

I believe that one film helps the next one to be, not only economically but also compositionally. It is the idea of variations. So, I wanted to start differently, as I tend to start the action of my films rather too quickly. I decided to start this film in a more relaxed or slower way. Viola was based on certain ideas about the close-up, so I decided that I should try working in longer shot. I wanted to direct another sort of a scene. I also included a piece of music in a way I never did before. And I thought that the idea of including sports in the film would also make me think anew, to film an activity I’ve never filmed. Although I am not a football fan, I believe that everybody should be capable of seeing something of interest in what other people do, so I focused on the football game and found that there is an irregular geometry organizing it. But in order to appreciate this, you need to be far away enough, which was actually perfect for what I was looking for. Then came the idea of starting with a dream sequence, maybe a nightmare. I think this has to do with my relationship with this game. I remember the first time I got into a football field when I was 7. I had no idea how it was played, no clue about the rules. Being among all the other boys who knew exactly what they were doing while I was just standing there in the middle pretending I was “playing” with them was pretty nightmarish.

One thing that the first shot is very concerned with—as indeed all of your films seem to be—is group dynamics. You tend to render your groups with a certain opacity, and it can be a bit difficult to keep everyone straight (which I assume is deliberate). It almost feels like infiltrating a group of friends, in that you must work to figure out exactly who shares what kind of history with whom, and so on. What is it about this particular approach to portraying a group that appeals to you?

I try not to be bureaucratic when it comes to storytelling. I know there are things that it’s important to do in order to tell a story, but I can’t stop thinking about how things could be presented otherwise. When we go to a dinner, we meet many people and most of the times we don’t get everybody’s names, but that doesn’t prevent us from participating, from talking to each other or following conversations. By the end of the night, we may know some people’s names and even get some telephone numbers. If I were to try to explain everything, I would kill something more precious: the sense of rhythm, ambiguity, and confusion that I find in relationships. I trust that the spectator is more intelligent that me, and that by the end of the film the relationships are clear.

How much of the film’s expressivity do you think emerges from your script versus performance, your rehearsals, the shooting, etc.?

The expression comes from the confrontation between the script and the shooting. The script is written close to the shooting schedule. With the actors, we read the dialogues before shooting and I listen very closely. In order to make the film I want to make, it is a matter of knowing how to listen better and how to see better than what was written. The world knows better than the script. I try to surround myself with actors and crew members that I admire, because they are also composing the film and putting something of themselves into it. The script is there to evolve into a reality, a film-reality. It is a relationship of elasticity, where we play with what we think we can do and what the world reveals that we can achieve.

You’ve worked with many of the same people for many years across many films. Are you conscious of the documentary aspect that this lends to your films, like the feeling of surprise produced when a pregnant María Villar first appears in The Princess of France?

I didn’t realize this until I was to screen all my films together at CPH:PIX. I realized that my collaborators and I have been insisting so much on the films we want to make, on a continuous wave of production, that it only took a bit of time to go by to begin building a body of work we have made together. When we are making a film, we are only concerned with what we have to do at that moment. I don’t think that any of the people involved ever thought themselves historically. I don’t think so. It was just something that happened when you grow older and keep working year after year, one film at a time. And if María was pregnant when we had to shoot this film, it was purely due to life, and film can absorb that. Life won’t stop us from doing a film. I still think that we can do many new films with Romina [Paula], Fernando [Lockett, the film’s cinematographer], and María, even if (or maybe because) we have been working together since 2005.

Visually, The Princess of France is a quite a bit darker than, say, Viola [12] or They All Lie… [09]. Was this a conscious maneuver on your part?

I’m glad you mentioned this. That’s something I thought about with Fernando while preparing the film. In every film, I try to work on what I didn’t in the previous one, so as to see myself differently. The Shakespeare play in this case, Love’s Labour’s Lost, is a very bright play that gets dark in the end. I appreciate that tonal movement in the play and I thought that my film could take over from there, playing with the idea of the main character returning to the fields of love one year after the main action occurred. In the end of the play, the Princess says that the men should come back in a year’s time and Victor starts the film by coming back a year after his departure from Buenos Aires. The idea is that there should only be some resonances. The darkness of the image has to do with the tone from which the film departed.

Painting plays a large role in The Princess of France, especially Bouguereau, who is considered rather academic, almost corny. Did that somehow account for part of the appeal for you?

The inclusion of Bouguereau in the film has to do with an email that Fernando sent me after I told him the plot of the new film. We met in Buenos Aires the day before I left for New York, and the next day he sent me an email with Nymphs and Satyr as an attachment. I researched the painting online and discovered that it was at the Met, so I went to visit it the next day. I started to believe that the painting was the film’s script. It also became an inspiration for some formal devices in the film. I like the circular movement that the painting has, and I thought that it could also affect the structure of the film. Also, the idea of the nymphs bullying a satyr was an inversion of the usual gender roles, which I enjoyed and I tried to transfer to the film.

Then, I found out that in Buenos Aires there were some Bouguereaus at our National Museum. So I decided to include the museum as a location. As all of this came from “Nymphs and Satyr,” I thought I needed to somehow photograph the painting. So I came up with the idea of the postcard that would also be a good object to go from hand to hand, to circulate. In terms of what Bouguereau represents in art history, I found his fall in reputation interesting, his transition from being canonical in his time to a forgotten academicist now. As María says in the movie, we’ll always prefer the Impressionists, but there can still be plenty to appreciate in those others that may seem campy or ridiculous.

Your characters are constantly discussing cultural objects, generally from the 19th century if not even earlier. In reaching back to these artists and works, you effectively reach past cinema. Is part of the attraction to these things that they are pre-cinematic, or that they have nothing to do with cinema or cinephilia per se?

I think my attraction comes from the fact that these objects are considered generally non-cinematic and that I believe in quite the opposite, the impurity of cinema. That is to say, theater, literature, and painting can help me find to new ways of thinking about what cinema can be. They nurture me, but they also provide basic needs to shoot a film: objects and locations for mise en scène, dialogue, etc. There are of course many Shakespeare adaptations around… but I will never forget the faces on my friends and acquaintances when I told them I was working on Shakespeare!

Dialogue dominates your films. How do you think about filming speech as its own form of action?

Yes, words are like actions. But mainly, I think, as many do, that language is as much a part of the world as are streets, faces, and the wind. As cinema deals with all that is involved in the world, words have to do with cinema. The act of speaking produces a photogenia as well, which has to be taken into account. It’s much more a matter of thinking about how to deal with this game of sounds and images, and how we can use them to produce a new kind of fiction. Just think about the complexity of telling a lie, the density of a word and its ambiguity, the double- or triple-layers that have to develop in order to make the lie intelligible, and the effects that it has on the liar and the person being lied to alike.

One of the major formal ideas in The Princess of France (which you’ve explored in your work before) is repetition, as with the thrice-repeated scene with Natalia in the middle of the film, and the two versions of the ending. Do you conceive of these as alternate realities, or are they purely different iterations of the same scenario?

Again, I think it is a mixture of all of the above: it is for both narrative and abstract or metaphysical reasons. But I believe it first comes from my way of experiencing the world, in that I focus on ambiguities, on how contradictions are developed and the intermittencies of the heart can be explored. I think repetition helps me to compose a world that reveals itself to be complex and closer to the experience I have of it, where certainties are seldom acute, dreams can fuse with reality, and relativity is part of being.

Finally, why do you tend to favor such short run times? Could you see yourself making a two-hour film, perhaps as soon as with your forthcoming American film?

It’s not something that I think before shooting. Actually, it would be better for the sake of programming if I could control that better, but I still prefer not to restrain myself from cutting anything I didn’t like just in order to meet the standard length for a feature. I’d rather make a film that I like, and that I could defend. A film is an autonomous object and it must obey the laws that exist within itself, so I have to try to listen to it carefully. I must be very careful with the total length to achieve the rhythm I want. I can’t be distracted by external standards. Yet I do think that after making two films that are between 60 and 70 minutes long and one film that is about 40 minutes long, I could try to make a much longer film, just for variation’s sake. I would also like to do a much shorter film for the same reasons.

“History is not Chronology, for that is left to lawyers,—nor is it Remembrance, for Remembrance belongs to the People. History can as little pretend to the Veracity of the one, as claim the Power of the other,— her Practitioners, to survive, must soon learn the arts of the quidnunc, spy, and Taproom Wit,— that there may ever continue more than one life-line back into a Past we risk, each day, losing our forebears in forever,— not a Chain of single Links, for one broken Link could lose us All,— rather, a great disorderly Tangle of Lines, long and short, weak and strong, vanishing into the Mnemonick Deep, with only their Destination in common.”

—The Rev. Wicks Cherrycoke, Mason & Dixon

It’s easy to feel cowed into submission by the sheer bigness of Paul Thomas Anderson’s three most recent features: dense, crowded, immaculately shot and composed, incident-heavy movies in which setpieces often seem to be competing with one another for attention and space. All three, despite their vast differences in texture and tone, present double portraits of troubled men set during a particularly tumultuous time and place in American history. Their heroes, such as they are, end up locked in an ideological opposition that somehow echoes a deeper, more pervasive tension in American life: the parasitic rivalry between Daniel Day-Lewis’s monomaniacal capitalist and Paul Dano’s maliciously self-denying man of the cloth in the 19th-century California landscape of There Will Be Blood (07); the uneasy mentorship that Philip Seymour Hoffman’s charismatic cult leader develops with Joaquin Phoenix’s broken-down vet as they move through the strange, suspended vision of Fifties America in The Master (12); and now, in Anderson’s newest film Inherent Vice, the antagonistic buddy romance that emerges between a pothead PI and a shell-shocked, crew-cut detective as each navigates the splintered world of Los Angeles in the early, paranoid Seventies.  

Anderson’s 1971 California is a messy boiling pot of acid freaks, dope fiends, heroin addicts, fascistic cops, black nationalists, neo-Nazis, corrupt developers, coke-snorting millionaires, baseball-bat-wielding ex-Army enforcers, Red-hunting movie stars, runaway teenage daughters and their murderously vengeful right-wing dads. This is the burnt-out 1971 of Joni Mitchell’s “California,” in which hippiedom’s great quest for freedom was starting to bleed into a desire for an absent sense of comfort and home—or, alternatively, into the weed-soaked oblivion of Black Sabbath’s “Sweet Leaf” or the druidic mysticism of “Stairway to Heaven.” It is also a 1971 filtered through the peculiar obsessions of Thomas Pynchon, whose seventh novel Inherent Vice is here closely adapted. The movie’s epigraph might, for all intents and purposes, have been the opening couplet from “Going to California,” which appeared on Led Zeppelin’s fourth record like a tired sigh: Spent my days with a woman unkind / smoked all my stuff and drank all my wine.

Anderson’s movie is anything but a tired sigh; its rhythm is closer to the nervous, slinking beat of Can’s “Vitamin C,” which kicks in thrillingly during the film’s title sequence. But like those lines, and like Anderson’s two previous films, Inherent Vice begins already immersed in the fallout from a failed utopia. We are given no simple backstory to explain why “Doc” Sportello—so named because he runs his illicit private eye business out of the back room of a medical clinic, and played by Phoenix with a somewhat more subdued energy than the ferocious kind he brought to his character in The Master—comes off as so deeply dislocated from the main fabric of American life. There’s a sense in which Anderson’s recent movies all begin with their protagonists in flight from something we never see head-on: a war, an economic depression, a culture, a counterculture, the threat of conformity. It isn’t necessarily that these men refuse to conform to the demands of society; often, it’s that they simply can’t.

There can be something deeply poignant about this inability on the part of Anderson’s protagonists to stop running. (Near the end of Inherent Vice, Sportello, having arranged for the reunion of an estranged couple, watches the sweet domestic scene through the window of a parked car before driving back to his own, markedly less settled life.) At the same time, the imaginative fertility of Anderson’s latest movies—the way they conflate meticulously re-created historical details with wild confabulations and surreal touches of pure fantasy, always trying to top their own sweeping gestures with wider and weightier ones—is linked, in my mind, with the way they close off all possible routes of access to the respective cultural mainstreams of the eras they depict. To be an Anderson hero is to be stuck in an unsettled—and, for that reason, exhilaratingly colorful—world.

It’s often America itself from which Anderson’s characters are trying to escape. “We discovered,” a black nationalist (Michael K. Williams, stealing his only scene) tells Doc to explain his prison alliance with a white supremacist, “that we held similar opinions about the United States government.” But Anderson is never deaf to the fact that this very rootlessness—this need to escape—is also a fundamental part of his heroes’ American inheritance. In There Will Be Blood, he found this tendency in an archetypical Western hero: the traveling prospector bent on gaining dominion over the land. In Inherent Vice—a wily fifth-generation Los Angeles noir that riffs with equal dexterity on the genre’s classical high-points (The Big Sleep, Double Indemnity), its radical Fifties masterpieces (In a Lonely Place, Kiss Me Deadly), its New Hollywood re-stagings (Chinatown, The Long Goodbye), and its Nineties postmodern updates (L.A. Confidential, The Big Lebowski)—he finds it in another familiar character type: the reckless, sharp-witted professional snoop caught up in a case beyond his pay scale. 

Like the films just mentioned, Inherent Vice gets off on the generation of plot. Its hilariously knotty narrative involves the mysterious disappearance of Doc’s ex-lover Shasta Fay Hepworth (Katherine Waterson) and her current lover, a high-profile real estate developer (Eric Roberts). This last character—“technically Jewish but wants to be a Nazi,” as Jeannie Berlin, playing one of Doc’s gabby informers, puts it—is caught up in a shady land deal that turns out also to involve a sax player (Owen Wilson) forced by a powerful right-wing interest group into snitching against his underworld friends. At one point, both men end up living in a sinister mental hospital presided over by a Chinese heroin syndicate, whose payroll, in turn, also includes a flamboyant, coke-addled corporate executive (Martin Short) and—possibly—an LAPD-employed contract killer (Peter McRobbie) responsible for the death of, among others, the former partner of Doc’s main foil: one Detective Christian “Bigfoot” Bjornsen. (Pynchon has a gift, second only to Dickens, for the creation of goofily revealing character names.)

Bjornsen is one of the movie’s richest characters, in part because Josh Brolin, perfecting a comic register in which he rarely gets to work, always keeps him so narrowly poised on the edge of caricature. Other crucial characters—Benicio Del Toro slouching in and out of the movie as Doc’s “maritime lawyer”; Reese Witherspoon providing an occasional dose of normalcy as his straight-laced DA lady friend; Joanna Newsom presiding over the film as a benevolent sage and occasional narrator—fill in the picture, but Inherent Vice is closer in spirit to Anderson’s recent two-handers than it is to his earlier, broad-canvased ensemble works. It’s a movie in which plot twists occur with such frequency that, in the end, their content becomes almost completely irrelevant. What’s left is simply the scaffold of a plot: a web of intersections and convergences that do for the movie what the texture of a canvas might do for a painting.

The painting in question is, like all of Anderson’s recent movies, a large-scale portrait of an individual who, in his particular failures, losses, commitments and dislikes, embodies something fundamental about the time and place in which he lives. Regardless over how many days, weeks, or months they take place, these are films that move in historical time; their grand subject is the fading of epochs, the birth of nations, and the passage of entire generations from innocence to disillusionment. At their best, they achieve a dazzling synthesis of individual and collective experience, as in Inherent Vice’s most emotionally overwhelming scene: a brief flashback to a rain-soaked afternoon Doc and Shasta once spent looking, per a Oujia board’s instructions, for a nonexistent weed hookup in a vacant lot, scored to the cracked grace of Neil Young’s “Journey to the Past.” But it’s also this that accounts for the singularly exhausting quality of Anderson’s movies, which, once their virtuosic effects start to fade off, can leave one feeling depleted and mildly shell-shocked.

It’s hard to shake the feeling that the effects Anderson desires are sometimes irreconcilably at odds. He wants the God’s-eye scope of Stendhal without Stendhal’s cynical, Machiavellian streak; Melville’s deep, burrowing insight into the American consciousness without Melville’s willingness to speak in tones as earnest and grave as those of a sacred text. Pynchon, an author uniquely gifted at forcing ironic, self-consciously goofy elements to co-exist with sincere and unapologetically moving ones, might be the closest thing Anderson has to a literary model. (This is, after all, an author who, in his 1997 novel Mason and Dixon, managed to compose a genuinely profound hymn to the historical “arts of the quidnunc”—i.e., of the busybody—that doubled as an elaborate, ironic parody of a long-defunct literary style’s attempts at profundity.)

One of Inherent Vice’s greatest strengths is the seamless tonal synthesis it finds between the jocular casualness of a stoned-out shaggy dog story and the full tragic sense of a historical saga: in this case, an elegy for a generation’s burnt-out dreams. But for all its goofy asides and imaginative excesses, the movie never fully eases up; here, as in Anderson’s previous films, the dominant impression is of a swollen, tense, supremely effortful grasping on the director’s part for ever bigger and grander effects. The price of Anderson’s consistent, remarkable success at achieving such effects may be that, like many of his characters, he never finds it in himself to relax.

If you don’t like spoilers, or if you don’t find desolation a source of immense pleasure in films, you might want to skip this first paragraph. But it’s one of the subtle joys of Alex Ross Perry’s downbeat comedy Listen Up Philip that the film ends with its hero, Eric Bogosian’s voiceover tells us, about to become “an isolated and emotionless specter forever remaining a mystery, even to himself.” That there’s the faintest, barely detectable smirk on the face of anti-hero Philip (Jason Schwartzman) suggests, though, that this is a kind of happy ending—of sorts, at a pinch, in the most delicate minor key imaginable.

Another of the aces in Perry’s film is Jason Schwartzman’s presence in the lead. Now, many people don’t find Schwartzman a pleasure; in fact, the glory of this actor is that he has consistently managed to play unlikeable, self-centered, arrogant, often idiotic boy-men (sometimes, all the more idiotic the smarter they are) that you want to slap. And in this he’s gifted with having—is it libelous to say this?—a supremely slappable face. There’s something about the delicately carved fineness of his features, together with the seeming naturalness with which it falls into a look of supercilious contempt, together with those strange cartoon eyebrows that seem to have been dashed on with a thick felt pen, and to the hair, with its dandyish flop… It’s a physiognomy perfectly suited for playing poseurs, pedants, neurotics, and narcissists, and—from the career-making Rushmore onwards—Schwartzman has made these roles his specialty. It’s also a face you can imagine in just about any historical setting: I’ve yet to see him in a 19th-century den of Parisian poètes maudits, which seems an ideal fit, but he was perfect wigged and powdered as an infantile Louis XVI in Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette. Hell, who wouldn’t have revolted?

Often excelling as a supporting character actor of the old school, Schwartzman now gets another lead role cut to his cloth in Listen Up Philip, as Philip Lewis Friedman, an up-and-coming novelist (his second is about to published) with a wildly inflated view of his own genius, and an animus against all humanity. Schwartzman sets the key note in the opening sequence in which Philip meets an ex-girlfriend in a New York coffee shop and berates her in a sour carping monotone for a) being late and b) having failed him in every conceivable way. Having got into gear, Philip decides to give his friend Parker “an equally robust dressing-down.” Destroyed, Parker calls Philip a “fucking Jew bastard” and then—in one of the muted killer payoffs that punctuate the film—heads off forlornly in his wheelchair.

Listen Up Philip is inescapably not only a very New York film, but a rather New Yorker-ish one, reveling in its literariness. You’ll get a tang of The Squid and the Whale, and echoes of The Royal Tenenbaums: the latter because the film essentially “is” a novel, narrated by Bogosian’s off-screen omniscient storyteller (earnestly intoning what sounds like a very stodgy, old-fashioned slab of psychological realism), and because it too contains an array of apocryphal book jackets, brilliantly crafted by Teddy Blanks, who has also designed credits in perfect Seventies paperback cover typeface.

Perry’s film won’t strike you as something entirely, head-spinningly sui generis—but I like the way that it intersects with certain other things, in film and literature, in a very stylish and witty way. A key reference point is the work of Philip Roth, who has his surrogate here in the figure of Ike Zimmerman (Jonathan Pryce), an elderly, soured hermit of American letters, who after decades alienating everyone he knows, has headed to the country for a life of seclusion. He’s a little bit Roth himself, in a cruel way, and a great deal of Roth’s fictional alter ego Nathan Zuckerman, and of E.I. Lonoff, the literary mentor to young Zuckerman in Roth’s The Ghost Writer.

Much of the narrative revolves around Philip abandoning his girlfriend, photographer Ashley (Elisabeth Moss), to stay in the country with Zimmerman, whose justifiably embittered daughter Melanie (Krysten Ritter, terrifically hard-edged) is also in residence. Then the story takes a swerve as Zimmerman secures Philip a teaching post at a rural college, where he has a miserable time playing the mysterious loner, and tangles with a highbrow French faculty member (Joséphine de La Baume). This, in fact, is one of many swerves: Philip himself drops out of the action for long stretches, while the film accompanies Ashley as she gets used to living without him. In one very pithy scene, she encounters a bearded slob in a bar (the episode ends with wonderful bathos, with the two of them bemused astride their bicycles); in another, she gets herself a cat named Godzooky which, thanks to a fine stroke of editing by Robert Greene, hisses with perfect timing. Moss shows a superb command of urban neurosis, and has a lot of fun, but is far too tough and intelligent for Ashley to come across as just goofy (much as I admire Greta Gerwig, I was somewhat relieved that it wasn’t her in the role).

Then there’s the continuing meltdown taking place at the Zimmerman estate—a retreat to which the failing author long ago repaired, to escape city distractions, only to find it’s no place to write. Ever wondered what literary lions do for months on end in their Walden-esque isolation? Listen Up Philip offers one suggestion, as Zimmerman and another venerable scribbler, Norm (Yusef Bulos), try to spend a drunken evening with two younger women, excruciatingly: it ends with Philip wistfully invoking Zimmerman’s heyday, when “women were looser” and more likely to be impressed by writers. I can’t remember when Pryce had a truly juicy screen role like this one, but he lets rip here, his Zimmerman creating a new benchmark for self-pitying cantankerousness.

Above all, Listen Up Philip is an extremely strange film, in its downbeat way. It’s novelistic in its digressions, its waywardly unstitched time scheme, its killer one-liners that are all the more effective in that often you can’t always pin down just why they’re so funny; it’s to do with tone, with a poised, deliberate off-ness about them, as in Philip’s “I’m not successful, I’m notable. There’s a difference” or in his remark to Yvette about “My uncle. Mon oncle. Like the film.” But most of all, Listen Up Philip is as much jazzy as literary, with Keegan DeWitt’s elegant, distracted score (sublime trumpet by Rod McGaha) sometimes riding right over the dialogue with perfect insouciance. This is a film that hypnotically, perplexingly, just drifts. So for that matter does its handheld camera, with Sean Price Williams shooting entirely in Super 16mm—light blazing in from unexpected corners into the overall dark tones to evoke a very improvised feel, although this film could hardly be more knowingly contrived.  I haven’t seen Alex Ross Perry’s earlier films Impolex (09) and The Color Wheel (11), but this makes me feel like catching up; I’ll try and slip them in ahead of my Roth backlog.

Listen Up Philip screens October 9 and 10 in the New York Film Festival and opens October 17.

Crooked Candy

As anyone who has been trapped in an interminable conversation can attest, the ability to make a long story short is a rare gift. So why is it that the short film (unlike the short story) is more frequently regarded as a stepping-stone toward feature filmmaking than a valid mode of storytelling in its own right? The 52nd New York Film Festival went a long way towards recognizing the form’s intrinsic value with their annual dedicated shorts programs, which far from being a sideshow to the main slate, sold tickets handsomely. With 13 films spanning 12 different countries, the selection ranged in subject matter from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (Tal Zagreba’s Humor) to the illegal smuggling of Kinder-eggs (Andrew Rodgers’s Crooked Candy).

Chlorine

Both Marcelo Grabowsky’s Chlorine and Jesse Hasse’s In August explore the casualties of divorce—namely, children. A dark take on a sexual awakening, Chlorine witnesses a marriage’s end through the striking green eyes of a wealthy (and perpetually poolside) Brazilian teenager, while In August hones in on a father-daughter relationship on the morning the paterfamilias leaves home for good. Simple in conception and nuanced in execution, Hasse’s film is worth singling out. Its brief but fully realized glimpse into familial love and discord unfolds largely on a single car ride through the mountainous French countryside. The gorgeously shot sequence achieves its full narrative and visual potential, with the director coaxing seemingly effortless performances from two actors at opposite ends of the age spectrum.

The Return

The prevalence of coming of age tales in the program (including Chlorine) suggests a collective desire to distill the painfully prolonged experience of adolescence. Set within the Romany and African American communities of Italy and France, respectively, Jonas Carpignano’s The Lions of Gypsy and Yohann Kouam’s The Return probe the protean nature of fraternal relationships. In both cases, the younger brothers discover more than they care to know about their older, lionized counterparts. Carpignano’s film is the more striking of the two; noteworthy for its grainy, naturalistic cinematography in particular, the film bears witness to a young boy’s foray into manhood (complete with a visit to the town’s Fellini-esque prostitute) in a taut but moving 16 minutes.

The Girl and The Dogs

Co-directed by Selma Vilhunen and Guillaume Mainguet, The Girl and The Dogs also zeroes in on youth, this time in the Danish countryside. Melding fantasy and realism, this remarkably fluid film follows three pre-teen girls on their expedition on foot through a forest and across a beach, to a party where the presence of boys is guaranteed. The journey quickly takes narrative precedence over the destination, then takes a masterful detour into the realm of fable when the girls are deterred by a disturbing discovery on the windswept shore.

La Estancia

The shorts program took its darkest turn when it reached South America. Federico Adorno’s La Estancia and Jayisha Patel’s A Paradise provide equally stirring meditations on death and the process of grieving. Completely wordless but far from silent, La Estancia makes ample use of ambient sound to depict Paraguayan farmers emerging from the brush to collect and bury their dead after being forced off their land. In A Paradise, a Cuban family finds comfort in sharing their private tragedy with an all-too-empathetic community.  

Wu Gui

Jordan Schiele’s Wu Gui happens to be the only selection from Asia, though it stands out more for its setting than its origin: it unfolds predominantly in a stark white studio. While trying to sell his pet turtle on the street, a construction worker is convinced to pose for a portrait by the first woman who makes him an offer. With moments that recall Kiarostami’s Certified Copy, the simple setup is parlayed into an astute study on identity, class, and the potential for connection between strangers. Embedding a great deal of substance in his grey scale, minimalist aesthetic, Schiele is definitely a director worth keeping an eye on.

The Kármán Line

While the 2013 roster boasted a handful of recognizable names (Damien Chazelle, Michael Almereyda, FILM COMMENT mainstay Jonathan Romney, Nicolas Saada), this year’s line-up focuses on newcomers. Nevertheless, familiar faces can be spotted in the crowd—most notably that of Fassbinder’s longtime muse, Hanna Schygulla, who stars in Sergei Rostropovich’s Ophelia, and British actress Olivia Colman, who plays the lead in Oscar Sharp’s The Kármán Line. In Sharp’s absurdist take on the perils of moving upwards, Colman plays a housewife who one day finds herself locked in suspension hovering above ground. In spite of numerous visits from medical specialists, she continues to ascend unstoppably away from her husband and daughter towards the boundary that divides earth from space. Pairing deadpan tonality with the outlandish imagination of a Roald Dahl story, Sharp’s film also filled the void in a program otherwise noticeably lacking in humor. It’s not often that a movie so bizarre in conception succeeds so well in execution, and Sharp might very well be set to follow his protagonist’s skyward trajectory.

Ten years ago, Abhishek Bachchan leapt a speedboat over a highway while shooting out the windshield of an 18-wheeler driven by the leader of a gang of bank-robbing pizza deliverymen—and the Dhoom franchise was born. Now, with three films under its belt, Dhoom is Bollywood's all-time top-grossing franchise, having raked in $122 million at the global box office with a collective budget of about $27 million. It stormed Turkey and China, was so popular in Nepal that local producers kept their own movies out of theaters to avoid the competition, and inspired a real-life bank heist. 

The Dhoom movies are a lot like the Transformers films: big, dumb, crass, and capable of hoovering money from audiences' pockets into the producer’s coffers in a 500 mile-per-hour suck-stream. But whereas Michael Bay's babies will give you a headache, the Dhoom movies are actually fun if you approach them in the right frame of mind. Pretend that you’ve recently received a blow to the head, and you’re going to love Dhoom. This effect can also be achieved with large amounts of alcohol, doses of cannabis, or a deep self-awareness of your inner being. Let’s face it: you probably already know if you’re the type of person who can get behind a sequel whose theme song blares: “Dhoom again / We’ve gotta break the rules / And party all the time!” 

Yash Raj, the studio behind Dhoom, is Bollywood’s Walt Disney (and in fact Disney tried to take them over in 2009), a manufacturer of family-friendly entertainment that specializes in Day-Glo color schemes, flat lighting, broad performances, and squeaky-clean morality. They’re more accustomed to making movies like Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (95), a sweet romance that’s one of Bollywood’s all-time biggest hits, than an action flick about bad boys on motorcycles who deliver pizza and rob armored cars on their smoke breaks. But while the Dhoom movies are risky business for Yash Raj, for us they look like what would happen if Michael Bay directed Saved by the Bell on a budget. 

Each Dhoom is bigger than the Dhoom before. Dhoom (04) runs two hours, cost $1.8 million to make, and earned $12 million globally. Dhoom 2 (06) runs two-and-a-half hours, cost $5.7 million, and earned $24 million. Dhoom 3 (13) runs three hours, cost $20 million, and took in an astonishing $86 million at the box office, playing 4,500 screens in India and 750 worldwide, including IMAX. It’s also the only one you need to watch. Although they're essentially globe-trotting buddy-cop flicks with a motorcycle fetish, what distinguishes the Dhoom franchise is that they’re producer-, not director-, driven, and Yash Raj studios has a cutthroat awareness of what works and what doesn’t, ruthlessly refining their formula from picture to picture until they perfect it with Dhoom 3.

In a bit of mercenary casting, Abhishek Bachchan, son of India’s biggest screen icon, Amitabh Bachchan, stars as Jai Dixit a no-nonsense cop, who recruits a motor-mouthed bike thief named Ali to help him take down the motorcycle marauders of the first Dhoom. The next two movies see this odd couple go after a jewel thief in Brazil during Carnival, and an acrobat-turned-criminal out to take down a Chicago bank (“We’re bankers. Everyone hates us,” one board member explains). Ali is played by Uday Chopra, son of Yash Raj founder, Yash Chopra, and brother of the studio’s boss, Aditya Chopra. Together, they solve crimes, mostly by chasing people on motorcycles. Abhishek inherited his dad’s deep voice, but otherwise he appears to be dead, with someone off-screen pulling strings to make his limbs twitch in a vaguely lifelike manner. The only way he expresses emotion is by varying the length of the five o’clock shadow that clings to his face like moss on a boulder. Chopra, on the other hand, is all manic high energy, throwing himself into production numbers with an enthusiasm that becomes downright creepy, as he dances around a woman trapped inside her stalled car, leering through the window like a lunatic and humping his pelvis against her doors. 

A Dhoom movie lives or dies by its bad guys, and unfortunately in the first movie it’s John Abraham, whose chiseled abs are more expressive than his face. Also annoying is Abhishek’s wife, Sweety (Rimi Sen), whose midriff appears to be allergic to clothing and who gets the lascivious musical number, “Dilbar Shikdum,” during which the camera leers at her curves like a filthy old man, leaving drool puddles on her thighs. With an eye on the bottom line, Dhoom 2 jettisoned everything that didn’t work in the first movie, including Rimi. She appears briefly at the beginning, pregnant this time, but the producers simply cut her out of the film when the movie moves to Brazil and we never hear from her again. The same thing happens with the love story between Abhishek and an old flame turned police inspector, Bipasha Basu. The two have zero chemistry on screen, so when the movie decamps to Brazil, she’s transformed, with no explanation, into her free-wheeling twin sister (played by the same actress) who falls for Uday, with whom she’s able to actually generate some heat. 

The sequel's greatest (and most expensive) coup is Hrithik Roshan. One of the biggest stars in India, and certainly Bollywood’s strongest dancer, here he plays Mr. A “the smartest and coolest thief in the world.” Determined to pull off a pattern of jewel heists that spells out his initial across the face of the planet, he steals the crown jewels from Queen Elizabeth II who is, inexplicably, taking them across Namibia by train. We’re told he’s a master of disguise, which is good because it’s impossible to tell when he’s actually in disguise, since it often consists of a do-rag and a mullet. Cast opposite him is Aishwarya Rai, Abhishek’s real-life wife (with whom he also has zero on-screen chemistry), playing a cat burglar who constantly refers to herself in the third person. 

Within minutes of Aishwarya’s introduction, she’s playing a slow-motion game of basketball in the rain with Hrithik. From then on, Uday and Abhishek are relegated to the sidelines, and it’s The Aishwarya and Hrithik Show: the pair look directly into the camera, roll their eyes at the audience, disguise themselves as bearded midgets, and point guns at each other while molten tears erupt from their eyeholes, and their cars explode for no reason. They wear a delightful assortment of masks, skin-tight costumes, and compete to see who can expose the most cleavage. Gleefully self-aware, they strike every pose as if it’s the cover of a romance novel, and their every exit is a mic drop. There’s not a plot point that doesn’t get a musical sting or a sudden choral “Whoa!” When Aishwarya enters she gets a chorus singing “Sexy lady on the floor,” and right before the big final heist, the five stars unleash an exuberant all-hands-on-deck musical number. 

Aiming to out-Dhoom previous Dhooms, the producers replaced their director (Sanjay Gadhvi) with the screenwriter of part one and two (Vijay Krishna Acharya), and no Dhoom ascends into a higher realm of ridiculosity than Dhoom 3. Sharing many of the same locations and plot points of The Dark Knight and The Prestige, this is a movie directed by Christopher Nolan and Joel Schumacher’s love-child who just got high on nitrous oxide and watched 16 Cirque du Soleil shows back-to-back. People enter scenes by smashing through brick walls on rickshaws, and exit by smashing through entirely new walls on the same rickshaws. Motorcycles transform into jet skis in mid-air. It is paradise.

This time, Abhishek and Uday are practically guest stars in their own movie, ceding the spotlight almost entirely to the bad guy, Aamir Khan. As a boy, evil bankers drove his circus-owning daddy (played by Jackie Shroff) to kill himself. Now, he has vowed revenge on the Chicago Western Bank, and he’s decided to bring it to its knees by opening The Great Indian Circus and robbing the bank’s branches in a series of flamboyant crimes involving tightropes, sky hooks, bags of cash dumped off high rises, masks, doubles, mountain climbing, graffiti, and (of course) motorcycles. He’s like a high-school overachiever turned bank robber.

Female co-star Katrina Kaif (whose Amazonian physicality would have made her an amazing Wonder Woman) tries to hold her own, but Aamir Khan blows everyone off the screen. Almost 50 years old when he shot Dhoom 3, Khan looks like a jug-eared, tap dancing bulldog with bow legs, but as he power-stomps the stage he reminds you of Jimmy Cagney in Footlight Parade. One of the immutable laws of Bollywood physics is that the star giving the best performance earns the most screen time, and Aamir practically cuts his co-stars completely out of the script through sheer force of will. Imagine The Dark Knight if Nolan had jettisoned boring old Batman and instead just kept the camera on Heath Ledger’s Joker, and then threw in some flashy musical numbers. It might not have made a lick of sense, but it would have been one hell of a ride.

LINKS! LINKS! LINKS!

Breakup Buddies

…Ning Hao had nothing but bad luck trying to get his Mainland Chinese black comedy, No Man’s Land, past the censors, but his latest movie, Breakup Buddies, is changing his life. A romantic road comedy, it’s taken in almost US$100 million at the Chinese box office in just 10 days, making it a massive, career-changing hit. It also opened across North America where it earned almost a quarter of a million dollars.

…It looks like Hong Kong’s Occupy Central protests have ended after an exhilarating 10 days as students and government leaders reach an agreement for open talks. The Chief Executive is barred from the talks, at the request of the students, and now that his secret contract to take previously undisclosed payments from an Australian firm have been revealed he might even be removed from office. Emotions are still high in Hong Kong, however. When actor Chapman To was asked to remove his yellow ribbon of solidarity during a TVB interview, he erupted into profanity and refused to remove it. “Air it if you like,” he said afterwards in anger. “Don’t air it if you don’t.” 

…Ricky Wong’s upstart TV channel in Hong Kong, HKTV, was denied a free-to-air license in a closed government session earlier this year, and it looked like it was curtains for the self-made billionaire who wanted to revolutionize Hong Kong television. But now he’s announced that next month he’ll start broadcasting over the internet and anyone with a set-top box can tune in for free. Stocks in the company jumped 17 percent at the news that Wong finally found a loophole to begin his attack on Hong Kong’s entrenched, subpar TV channels, TVB and ATV.

…a Thai textbook publisher narrowly averted a crisis when they grabbed some art off the internet to appear on the cover of their latest math book. Turns out that the image they used is of Japanese porn actress, Mana Aoki. Unfortunately for students (but fortunately for the copyright owners) they caught the mistake before distributing their books after users discovered the image in their online catalogue.

…after 15 years of weekly installments in Shonen Jump, 600 anime episodes, and 10 theatrical films, Japan’s wildly popular Naruto series (about ninjas, naturally) is ending on November 14. Goodbye, Old Friend! I’ll Always Believe in You!

…Roaring Currents may be the number one movie of all time in Korea, but people with the surname Bae are very unhappy. One of their ancestors, Bae Seol, is shown betraying and trying to assassinate an admiral onscreen, and they’ve filed charges with the police, asking them to investigate whether this cinematic portrayal of fictionalized events from 1597 constitutes illegal defamation.

Gone Girl

A big part of the case for David Fincher, at least as I’ve heard it put forward by his more eloquent defenders, is that he’s a throwback—that is to say that, with his unfailing technical luster and easy traverse between genre subjects, he’s a holdover from the days of studio professionalism. Dave Kehr, for example, has compared him to Otto Preminger: “[D]istanced, cool, he’s not making too many judgments for you, he’s amassing data that you can then sift through, very similar camera style, these beautiful long takes.”

The preceding quote comes from 2011, shortly before The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, a film which seems almost universally to be regarded as among Fincher’s worst, arrived in theaters. Fincher was then 49 years old. Almost three full years have passed since. Preminger, in the same stretch of his life (1954-57), knocked out River of No Return, The Court-Martial of Billy Mitchell, The Man with the Golden Arm, and Saint Joan—not a bad haul, though nothing like his 1960-65 tear. Fincher has since directed the first two episodes of the Netflix original series House of Cards, continues to serve as the show’s executive producer, and fixed in place the overall “distanced, cool” visual template of the program, to which even the demonstrative Joel Schumacher has allowed himself to be tethered. And now we have Gone Girl.

Like Preminger, who established himself as a very successful independent producer-director with 1953’s The Moon is Blue, Fincher at this point in his career presumably has almost total control over his selection of material. Both directors allocate scriptwriting duty elsewhere—neither has a screenwriting credit on any of their feature films. Both have also evinced a partiality for fat tomes with great popular appeal, if only intermittently with egghead cachet. (On the highbrow end, Preminger did Wilde and G.B. Shaw; Fincher, Scott Fitzgerald.) Preminger adapted Book of the Month Club hardcover cinderblocks by Leon Uris, John D. Voelker, and James Bassett. Fincher has now followed Stieg Larsson with an adaptation of a 2012 bestseller written by Gillian Flynn. It’s astonishing that he let The Da Vinci Code slip through his fingers.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Finally, both Preminger and Fincher have a nose for material that will get the chattering classes chattering—or the Twittering classes Tweeting, as it were. The success of The Moon is Blue was attributable, at least in part, to a publicity putsch—it went to theaters without the Motion Picture Production Code’s seal of approval, and this fact promised untold titillation to ticket buyers. Fincher’s greatest box-office successes have come when he has dealt with hot-button issues or the multiplex audience’s idea of the transgressive, with films about serial killers (Seven), anti-consumerist sloganeering (Fight Club), The Way We Live Now (The Social Network), and inside-the-Beltway skullduggery (House of Cards). But where Preminger had the ability to chasten and elevate variously unpromising material, Fincher rarely seems to do the same. For this reason he’s always left me a little uncomfortable, his impeccable, unruffled style putting me in mind of the opening paragraph of Manny Farber’s “Hard-Sell Cinema” essay:

“The figure who is engineering this middle-class blitz has the drive, patience, conceit, and daring to become a successful nonconforming artist without having the talent or idealism for rebellious creation. The brains behind his creativity are those of a high-powered salesman using empty tricks to push an item for which he has no feeling or belief. Avant-gardism has fallen into the hands of the businessman-artist.”

This talk of “rebellious creation” against the “businessman-artist” may seem a little starry-eyed as Jeff Koons holds court at the Whitney, but the above excerpt gets at the absence of conviction that I have always felt in Fincher. Even the Fincher films that I’ve admired seem to have their sticking points: The pathos of Mark Zuckerberg F5ing updates on a Friend Request to an ex-girlfriend at the end of The Social Network (2010) is a piece of laborious symmetry only one-bettered by his latest. For many, Zodiac (2007) was the movie that announced Fincher’s emergence as a mature artist, the one where he put aside those gauche CG-generated traveling shots through wastepaper baskets and Mr. Coffee handles and assumed his present observational style. It is an undeniably audacious movie, a maze without a center—or a proper protagonist, shackled as it is with Jake Gyllenhaal, the performer who my colleague Nicolas Rapold memorably categorized as “wombat-eyed.” Of course, Preminger also had a habit of working more-or-less-successfully around casting—see the green Jean Seberg of Saint Joan (not the quantum leap Seberg of Bonjour Tristesse), or poor, poor Tom Tryon in The Cardinal.

Zodiac

Gone Girl is concerned with a missing woman, but the real structuring absence is Ben Affleck, playing Nick Dunne. With this film and Terrence Malick’s To the Wonder, Affleck may have perfected the role of following—as opposed to leading—man. (Since 2006’s Hollywoodland, his good roles have all played on the ridiculousness of his status as a star actor.) Nick runs a bar in “North Carthage, Missouri” (in fact Cape Girardeau, MO) and teaches English on the side, though it’s difficult to imagine this lug finishing a book, much less aspiring to write one. When we meet Nick, he is sullen, pouty, a little ex-jock paunchy. One afternoon, he returns home slightly day-drunk to find that his wife is missing, and that the glass coffee table in their living room has been shattered in what would appear to have been a struggle. From the moment that the police arrive, Nick fails entirely to respond to the absence of his wife with any of the acceptable indicators of grief, and his insufficiency in the role of distraught spouse is all the more glaring when the media spotlight alights on his case. His wrong-ness is quickly picked up on by the pundits of the 24-hour news cycle, particularly the hostess of Ellen Abbott Live, a blathering blonde modeled on Nancy Grace. 

It has been interesting to see a film which, in part at least, is about the process of media feeding-frenzy and reckless speculation, going through the mill itself—as its creators had every hope and confidence that it would—in the week preceding and following its release. (I know, I know, I’m not helping matters.) The touchy subject here, originated with Flynn (who wrote the screenplay) and hand-picked by Fincher, is woman hate—hatred of women, women’s hatred. These are also present to one degree or another in the director’s previous work: The boundlessly execrable Fight Club; Panic Room, previously the record-holder for recurrences of the word “bitch” in a Fincher film; and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, with its turnabout-is-fair-play strap-on rape. Gone Girl does all of the above one better, a Rorschach blot custom-made for this moment when quantifying works of art according to their relative perceived feminism-to-misogyny content is one of America’s favorite pastimes. So chum meets sharks, and Amanda Dobbins at Vulture confirms that yes, Virginia, “Gone Girl Has a Woman Problem,” while for Todd VanDerWerff at Vox it’s “the most feminist mainstream movie in years.” Among our friends in Canada, it has been received as a comedy, either intentional or otherwise. Just today I’ve caught wind of a rumor that the entire movie is taking place in Nick’s head, the new Gorfeins Theory of the too-much-time-on-their-hands set. And I’ve not even started in on the brouhaha surrounding the side-view of Affleck’s Hollywood loaf!

The dong cameo occurs in a shower scene which takes place after Nick’s reunion with his blood-spattered bride, Amy, played by Rosamund Pike, in actual fact no innocent victim but a Lady Macbeth whose conscience presents her no problem in washing herself clean of the taint of blood. Amy is introduced in close-up in the film’s opening shot, in which her husband is heard to fantasize about cracking open her skull in voice-over. Through the first half of the movie, during which we have no reason other than Nick’s limp protestations not to believe that he’s lived out his fantasy, Amy is present through flashbacks narrated by her journal entries, in which she recounts the two years of their courtship and the five years of their slowly unraveling marriage, writing with a girlish script and candy-colored ink entirely inappropriate to a woman over thirty. The visualized scenes from these diary entries play like fairy-tale romance familiar from post-Sex and the City pop, New York City media jobs and skyscraper backdrop and all. It’s saccharine to the point of parody from the moment that Nick takes Amy past an all-night bakery to walk her through a sugar storm, just as the dissolution of their loving foundation plays out as boilerplate domestic melodrama.

Gone Girl

There is a reason for this reliance on cliché, as it turns out: what’s being depicted is, in fact, largely the fabrication of a madwoman. (Where the real story of Nick and Amy ends and the fabrications begin is not and will never be explained.) Throughout the media firestorm surrounding her disappearance, Amy has been hunkered up in cabin in the Ozarks, hiding out behind a big-box store dye job and a southern accent. The incriminating journal that we’ve been hearing from was a clue that Amy left behind for the investigating detectives to find, the final piece in an elaborate mousetrap deigned to catch and frame Nick for her murder, as she deems nothing less than the death penalty a just punishment for his affair with a young student.

With this revelation, replete with “This is how it really happened” flashbacks a la The Usual Suspects/Fight Club/Memento, Amy temporarily takes over the narration, explaining how she used the same imagination that she’d once applied to crafting romantic scavenger hunts to trap Nick. Here Fincher is entirely in his element, offering the viewer the vicarious thrill of playing accomplice to a criminal genius—you almost expect Amy to tauntingly direct-address the viewer in the style of Spacey’s Frank Underwood in House of Cards, or his predecessor, Spacey’s John Doe in Seven, and she damn near does. From Doe to Mark Zuckerberg, Fincher’s filmography is littered with blandly brilliant micromanaging geniuses, but here he has one who exudes a bit of gelid glamor. Amy is “methodical, exacting, and worst of all patient,” to use a description applied to Doe, or if you prefer “a manipulative fucking control freak,” as Michael Douglas’s Nicholas Van Orton is described in 1997’s The Game, still by a considerable stretch Fincher’s most completely-realized movie, and the one where his comprehension of movie logic—as opposed to reasonable plausibility—reaches the giddiest heights of preposterousness, up to its final swan dive.

Gone Girl’s single most impressive set piece comes after Amy takes shelter in the security camera-wired lake house of Desi Collings (Neil Patrick Harris), an ex-boyfriend who’s held a torch for Amy since boarding school, who agrees to help her in her hour of need, though his assistance comes with an undercurrent of proprietary menace. This doesn’t sit so well with Amy, especially after Nick sends her a covert message signifying that he knows she’s alive, has decoded her scheme, and seems to want her back. So one morning, biding her time, Amy scrupulously builds a case to prove that Collings had kidnapped her, held her hostage, and repeatedly raped her, putting on a dumb-show for the camera, violating herself with a bottle, shredding her wrists with rope restraints and finally—the piece-de-resistance—slitting her “captor’s” throat with a box-cutter at the moment of his climax, showering herself with a gush of arterial blood with full assurance that she’ll get away clean. “There are parts of the movie where I go, oh yeah, ‘Go Amy,’” Fincher told a Los Angeles crowd at a recent post-screening Q&A, and why wouldn’t he—she knows how to stage a scene for her director.  

Gone Girl

The victim here, Collings, is a posh spazz who threatens to chain Amy to a future of “octopus and Scrabble” in the wine-dark Mediterranean, and so his passing is not to be grieved. The rich are detestable here, while the middle-class don’t come off a great deal better, represented by the bovine Midwesterners who herd together for a candlelight vigil for Amy—beautifully shot in dusk-light by DP Jeff Cronenweth, as if I needed to mention—and most prominently by a neighbor hausfrau, Noelle (Casey Wilson), covertly befriended by Amy to bolster her case against Nick. (An “idiot” in Amy’s words, but also as presented by Fincher.) As for the poor whom Amy descends among while on the run, they’re treated with the usual repulsed fascination that Fincher reserves for the sight of decay. We have the Morlock-like meth addicts who congregate in the abandoned mall in North Carthage, and the white trash grifters who sidle up to Amy while she’s laying low, Greta (Lola Kirke), a slattern with a cold sore visible from outer space, and Jeff (Boyd Holbrook), a lummox with his arm in a filthy cast. The pair catch sight of Amy’s fanny pack full of rainy day cash and shake her down for it, and as Jeff’s ransacking Amy’s cabin, it’s let slip that the whole thing was Greta’s idea, for the women wield the brains in this movie, against which male brawn is laughably ineffectual. (It’s one of the film’s better gags that when Nick finally puts hands to his wife, as she’d unfairly impugned him for doing before, she scarcely even notices the blow.)

Is Gone Girl misogynist, misandrist, elitist, or sans-culottes? Can I opt for all of the above? And who’s to blame? Once Amy has revealed herself as the film’s stealth narrator, and in the process ceded control, we must presume that the narrative is being overseen by none other than Gillian Flynn and David Fincher. (That is, of course, assuming that it isn’t all in Nick’s head.) It is telling that their storytelling in no significant way deviates from that of their heroine. The “distanced, cool” style tends to deflect claims of caricature, but all things considered, the New York City gay bar in Preminger’s Advise and Consent—made in 1962, mind you!—seems a more pleasant place to spend time than the small-town Missouri of Gone Girl.  

If the film has any sympathy or allegiance, it’s a respect for cleverness and ingenuity wherever they exist, most often as embodied in Amy. When she covertly hocks a loogie in Greta’s Mountain Dew, we’re invited to share in Amy’s enjoyment of the payoff. When Greta and Jeff catch her with her back turned, well, she has only herself to blame. It’s a movie that’s on the side of whoever’s conniving enough to get the upper hand, which is why the ostensible tragedy of the conclusion, with hapless Nick pinned in a loveless marriage with a potentially-homicidal monster, feels so wholly unconvincing. Any time someone gets caught out—or, quite literally, with their pants down—you can almost hear Fincher out-of-frame, whispering like John C. McGinley’s gloating SWAT agent to the bedsore-ridden “corpse” in Seven: “You got what you deserved.”

Gone Girl

Fincher is a throwback all right, but he doesn’t go much further back than the release of Pretty Hate Machine. For all of Fincher’s marvelous control, I can’t look past the accumulation of Nineties tropes that riddle his filmography, a particular form of PTSD that comes with having gone through adolescence in that era. It’s in his ex-music video director’s fetish for urban/industrial desolation. It’s in his serial killer chic. It’s in his marketable, unreflective conception of female agency—when Amy gives her “Cool Girl” speech, apparently lifted verbatim from Flynn’s book, I swear I heard Jagged Little Pill fading in on the soundtrack. It’s especially in his elevation of cleverness and snark, as epitomized in the zingy patter between Nick and his twin sister, Margo (Carrie Coon in the Janeane Garofalo part—and while we’re on the subject, does anyone buy this sibling relationship for even a second?)

Like Tyler Perry’s Gummi bear-throwing defense lawyer, Margo is there for comic relief, but as a friend noted, “a comic-relief scene isn’t the same as a film being a satire.” (Is John Ford’s entire filmography satire because of the occasional bouts of knockabout comedy?) Sometime around the point that the lead detective investigating Amy’s disappearance (Kim Dickens) complements the name of Nick and Margo’s bar (The Bar) as “very meta,” effectively directing our reception of the film, I decided I’d had just about enough of exemplification-as-exoneration. Gone Girl reconfirms Fincher as a mastermind, but I only see whey-faced John Doe playing with his “sick, ridiculous puppets.”  

At the Cannes press conference for The Wonders, the first thing director Alice Rohrwacher said was: “This is not an autobiographical film.” Certain elements are indeed drawn from her life—she grew up in the Italian countryside on a bee farm, and her father is German—but the story Rohrwacher tells is too complex and richly philosophical to be simply a confessional or a padded-out memoir. The eldest of four sisters, Gelsomina (Maria Alexandra Lungu) assists her father (Sam Louwyck) in the family’s apiary and keeps an eye on things whenever he’s away. Then she becomes fascinated by a televised regional contest that showcases artisanal foods—“The Countryside Wonders”—and enters their household in a competition to appear on the show, against her father’s wishes. Though his politics are never spelled out, it’s obvious that their rural bohemian lifestyle is a remnant of some ultra-leftwing, commune-like ethos. Gelsomina’s place in the family is also challenged by the arrival of a German juvenile delinquent, who’s ostensibly there to be fostered and “rehabilitated” but instead gets used for free labor.

FILM COMMENT digital editor Violet Lucca spoke to Rohrwacher shortly after the film screened in the New York Film Festival, where her last film, Corpo Celeste (2011), also has its U.S. premiere.

Television plays a big role in the film. Can you talk about your relationship to it?

On one hand, the thing about TV is its hypnotic power. I’m hypnotized by it. The same way that fairy tales have hypnotic power, because these magic elements hypnotize you. But in reality, these same elements can be quite dangerous and very negative. In Italian there’s a fairy tale called “Prezzemolina,” about a little girl who is given a series of tasks to save her mother from fairies, but all along her path are these little distractions, these little things that are trying to take her away from what she is trying to accomplish. I wanted to relieve myself of this—to say that TV is really inside a tomb, it’s already dead—and I wanted to look at it with a certain tenderness, as if it belonged to a kind of stone age.

But you didn’t grow up with TV?

No.

How did you go about imagining how it looks in the film? It has a very distinct look.

There are many things we can imagine that we didn’t grow up with. For example, I didn't grow up within the church or within organized religion, but that made me very free to look at it with fresh eyes in Corpo Celeste. I didn't grow up with TV but that allows me to look at with a sense of surprise. I’m looking at TV, not as something that is bad, although certainly in its history it been very bad, but as something that is here now, something that I looked at etymologically as captive animal.  

You have a background in theater. How do you approach directing actors in the theater versus for a film?

I was only ever an assistant in the theater—I was a girl that brought the coffee. But I tried to bring a lot of coffee during this movie and sing some songs.

I think theater is something that, when it’s good, restores your trust in human beings and your trust in what happens in life, because there’s a relationship between the person that is watching and the person that is acting. In cinema it is this relationship between human beings and then between cinema and these human beings on screen.

You said the idea for this film came from Saskia Sassen’s book about how every city is becoming like a theme park. What drew you to that material? Was it more of an idea or an image?

I can’t have an idea without an image. They so very deeply connected that I can’t say that I have an idea without there being an image connected to that idea.

And what was that image, or what sort of images did you get?

I realized that there is something that is happening to my country, with all of these attempts to preserve things that have survived. Preservation efforts are too focused on turning things into a museum—the idea of a monument as a symbolic concept, for the sake of attracting tourism. It is a shame, because, instead, what does have to be conserved, what has to be kept alive, is all of the life that is there, all of the things that are involved in that place, whether it is a public square or a movie theater or the theater itself. All of the things that surround that monument, rather than this sole focus on monuments themselves.

How involved are you in the editing process?

Well, I don’t really leave much choice [laughs]. In my case, I only shoot in one way. Other people get frustrated and say: “Try this other frame just for safety’s sake.” But I leave very little margin for the editing. And I always regret this. But while I’m shooting, I have this vision of the editing process with which I am involved with daily.

What is that image? Or what makes you see something through the viewfinder and say, “That’s what I want”?

It’s very simple. I just ask myself: “Where am I? What is happening in front of me?” I’m like this very privileged traveler on this trip, and I have to react. I’m alive, I’m there, and I have to ask what is happening. I ask myself “Where am I” and not where is the story going and what is the viewer going to see. If I absolve my responsibility in showing my point of view, others will take on their responsibility for their points of view.

In terms of how the film looks, like the costumes, how did you communicate that?

I’m very picky.

But this is different from Corpo Celeste, where people were wearing everyday clothes, whereas this included more fantastical costumed portions.

Well, I’m fussy, as I was saying before. The costumes give a certain sensibility to the story, a particular meaning. If you look at the way I’m dressed today, I bought these shoes five years ago, my pants are new, my sister gave this shirt to me. The way we live cuts across different eras of time. In most films they try to be so specific about an era, so they choose things that only belong to that era, and it has a flattening effect. So instead I choose—in translating, [the translator] been saying “I,” but I always say “we,” because I work with very weird people—we choose to focus on just a few elements that show you a lot about these people and how they passed clothes back and forth to each other: how the big sister gives something to the little sister, which then she gives to the mother, who then exchanges that to the father. You might see a shirt changing hands that way, and these portend the various ties that are behind these people. But there is also a very symbolic value in the way that I use color.

The symbolic aspect of the costumes is much more connected to fairy tales. For example, in scenes with the TV crew, the host [Monica Bellucci] is in white and all the men in black, which is a sort of childish element, but then we mix it up with a bit of realism. But these are magical elements.

So when you’re writing a film, how much is written and how much do you improvise or leave to chance?

Everything is written. Everything is deliberate and nothing is accidental. So even if something works it is also as a result of a choice.

There’s this saying in Hollywood, I think from W.C. Fields, that you should never work with children or animals, and in this film there are both. Did you experience any problems with that?

I think W.C. Fields must have had a very boring life. I had many problems, but I love problems. As soon as I see a problem, I go running towards it.

Look at the honey in the film. The honey is illegal in the film, but it is very good. The production of honey involves child labor, violation of health laws, but it is a very good honey. And that’s sort of like the way we worked. There are a lot of laws, and it wasn’t always possible to observe laws to the letter. You aren’t supposed to shoot with bees because then the insurance won’t cover you, because bees are considered a wild animal, and they cannot be put down right away, so they’re classified as dangerous. In Italy there is a day when no one works—including the police—which is August 15, so we shot all the scenes with the bees on August 15.

Why do you think that people so often confuse something that is personal with something that is autobiographical?

I think that we’re in pretty bad shape today, because people are no longer appreciating the complexity of words and of sentences. So you say “difficult” and everyone instantly thinks “hard,” and that’s a bad thing, difficulty. And we say “personal” and people identify that with “autobiographical,” and we lose a sense of nuance. It is very hard for people to believe that something can be personal without being a literal part of your personal history.

And do you think that problem is compounded because you’re one of the very few internationally known female directors?

What’s really laughable is that even if I were to make a film where people are mowing each other down left and right with machine guns, and I had one scene of a leaf falling from a tree, the critics would say it had a delicate feminine gaze and was a very sensitive picture. I think there is this desire to identify only one quality of womanhood and of being feminine as being feminine out of all the things that are being found. That is what’s happening with this film, this attempt to find this one female aspect to the film, when in fact everything is female. And since the traditional role of women is to be at home and to wash dishes and to talk about her family, then instantly the father is identified as my father, the mother as my mother—the type of questions you wouldn’t ask of a male director.

What are your plans after this?

Tonight? Let’s go to a place with music, please.

Whereas Mathieu Amalric’s previous film, On Tour (10), was an open-hearted and free-wheeling story about a troupe of American burlesque performers and their devoted manager (Amalric), his latest, an adaptation of Georges Simenon’s The Blue Room, is a terse, elemental thriller of pent-up longing, infidelity and murder. Julien’s (Amalric) affair with the enigmatic and rangy Esther (Stéphanie Cléau, the film’s co-writer and Amalric’s partner) is told in slow drips of narrative information that reconstruct the central crime after the fact, while past and present tense are mixed up, trading off from one to the other scene by scene. The ornate presentation of how the events unfold keeps character motivation in question, throwing causality into disarray. This is further complicated by Amalric’s insistence on gestures and body language over psychology, nowhere more apparent than in Cléau’s portrayal of Esther: at once a femme fatale, a “woman in love,” and a living embodiment of Julien’s desire.

I was reminded of the first feature you directed and starred in, On Tour, which is such a loose, chaotic film. Zand looks so uncomfortable when he’s in the supermarket, or in the lobby, when he’s not participating in the show-business world. And there’s something similar with your character in The Blue Room where he’s awakened by the passion of the affair.

Yes, but it’s so tragic. I saw it yesterday night for the first time since Cannes, and it was like, “Ah, this is so dark. How could I make a film like that?” So I spent the time after the Q&A making jokes, like I was apologizing to the audience: “I’m sorry, I’m a funny guy. I don’t know what happened.” But, that’s what it is. We made it so quickly, so it must be subconscious. I know that Simenon is an author that really strikes you. Especially that book: the opening of it is so raw and so real, about how this miracle of chemistry between two bodies can put you in danger.

It’s like Julien spends the entire film reeling from that. In Simenon there’s this terrified sexual instability, a terror at longing. It’s something that can consume you from the inside out; the entire film is haunted by those opening scenes. Because you think as you go through life that you want that kind of fulfillment but, when you come across it, it’s like you’ve met a kind of death.

Yes. There is something like that, and he doesn’t admit it. Julien always tries to protect himself. The mistress doesn’t seem to protect herself at all, as if she’s only an innocent woman in love. It is possible that she’s innocent. Simenon doesn’t say anything more; he says less even than the film about that. But—like many men, you could say—Julien prefers to forget that, hide it under the carpet, and continue his life, because he put so much energy into the construction of his paradise: a brand new house, a self-made man. It’s very important that you feel that they don’t come from the same social background. And the silence of his wife. Those are the sorts of things that really drew me to adapt this text. Of course, it was really a pleasure to play with the genre, and think about what I love in the commissions of Golden Age Hollywood, where personalities had to be woven in slyly, hidden behind the police thriller, with suspense and who killed who.

And Simenon’s a master at that, just considering his own life.

Simenon is an author who shows what is common to all human beings—not what is specifically extraordinary with one character, who happens to be the hero. No, no, no—we are all the same, we are all in danger, and that’s why there’s a man who has to use words to explain what the judge already knows, the shrink knows, the cops know.

Even if they find out the facts of the case, there’s still something missing. There’s still something that will never be revealed.

Yes, which is reinforced by how the story is told upside-down. There are those voices saying, “Don’t you think she did it on purpose, biting you?” So you think this man is arrested because in the heat of passion he killed his mistress. But oh, no, it’s not that. So who died? I loved that. Stephanie and I wrote the script in two columns: onscreen and the offscreen. There’s the life that you live and life that you peel away afterwards, fragments of memory. And that’s how we came upon the aesthetic of still shots—pieces rather than harmony. It’s the same crew from On Tour, a movie about a man who accepts being part of a group. So there was something that seems…it was to hide the work in On Tour. With Christophe [Beaucarne, the DP], it had to do with “Chu, chu, chu” [chopping gesture with hands]…

The experience fragments him.

Yes, yes.

So the film becomes fragmented: it’s sharp, it’s jagged, the cuts don’t mesh together—they clash against each other.

Yes, exactly.

And when you’re framing in the academy ratio, the viewer becomes very conscious of all of the negative space, because the body is very central.

I love the fact that you can have more of the body, and isolate things. Because when you shoot in 1:33, it’s much more…it’s far away. So, the actors are alone like that. Like on the beach, when his wife says, “What’s on your mind?”, they’re not in the same frame. It was an instinct, you know? You feel it and you try to read Simenon’s sentences again. Stephanie and I loved his sensual notation so much: about light, about smells, about sounds outside, the summer, the terrace with somebody who’s laughing, the bee on the belly. And then you try to invent other things with the bee that aren’t in the book. I mean, we didn’t invent this blue room with the bee…I would have never thought about that. But when I saw the location scouting photos, I said, “Where did you find that!?” Well, it does exist.

It’s like the room comes out of their imagination, out of their experience with one another.

Yeah. But I would have never thought to ask someone to repaint the courtroom in blue. In fact, it’s a Napoleon-troi paper that was green and became blue with time. And the bee is the symbol of Napoleon.

There’s a really striking shot of the two file cases on top of each other. One’s manila and one’s red. It’s like the facts of the crime are two different bodies.

Yes, and I put her on top of him.

And I also love the way the lettering is written: it’s kind of bloody, it seems scrawled, it’s messy.

Yes, because judges in France—and I think it’s the same here—hear hundreds of cases. They go by so quickly. That’s why you hear the judge on the phone, talking about another story. I love those things, you know? We have a hero, but in fact, a girl got raped somewhere? There are other stories.

It’s part of the core existential dilemma in the movie: there’s this one thing, and there’s so many other incidents that are ripping people apart just as much. And that really takes the air out of the room, when he takes that phone call. And there’s that half-beat, and then he says, “It’s all right.”

Yes, because that’s a moment where he feels that the guy is human. Simenon loved judges, he wrote a book that is very similar to The Blue Room 10 years before called Letter to My Judge. It’s incredible. But he hated defense lawyers, because he thought words were really bullshit for them. That’s why I invented this moment that’s not in the book where the judge takes his shirt off. And you can see this judge, with the clerk, and he puts on his shirt like Julien does after coming back home from being with his mistress. And those two scenes might unconsciously have a sort of resonance, without people thinking about it.

I’d be very interested to see a triple feature of Wild Grass [09], and Jimmy P. [13], and The Blue Room. I think they would play together nicely. 

In regard to Resnais, I know that Je t’aime, je t’aime [68] helped me a lot because of memory. And freedom. What’s great about Resnais is that when you’re stuck, and you think of what you’re not allowed in movies, it’s complicated. But you just go and see a Resnais film and you’re like, “Oh! You’re allowed to do what you want in movies.”

And Je t’aime, je t’aime is such a dark movie about being with another person.

Yes, absolutely. In the novel, Julien’s whipping himself a lot, saying, “Sexuality is bad, I shouldn’t have done it.” Like women are witches, in fact. It had to do with how sexuality is…So Truffaut’s The Woman Next Door helped us a lot, because it’s a story of passion where they go there together, and Je t’aime, je t’aime, and then…for production reasons, things like Jacques Tourneur’s Nightfall. I hadn’t seen that before and now I love it. The meeting in the café with Anne Bancroft: I love that scene. And then, the memories I have of Bresson. Those still shots of pieces of bodies, how they could be so sensual. That helped me sometimes.

There’s a capacity for expression that is more common for comedians that I think you bring to this film in your performance. Your performance and Stephanie Cléau’s performance are unlike anybody else’s in the movie. They’re unlike each other, too. But she’s like a sphinx: she’s unreadable.

She is unreadable. That was my attraction to her, the hot and the cold. You get crazy. You have two well-known actors in these roles. But the mistress is played with what I would call, “the threat of the unknown.” It could be Stephanie, because people will project their worst thoughts on her, like “Mmmm,” and at the same time, “Oh, too dangerous.” Of course it’s a game, because we have been together ten years and have a child together. I still don’t know who that woman is. And now I’m acting in her play—I’m touring as an actor in theater.

Did your experience directing her affect her experience directing you?

She went through this incredible thing while acting, especially naked. She’s so shy! She’s not at all like that. But then, those scenes…I know that gave her a lot of strength for the rehearsal of her play. How to speak with actors, she knows what it is now.