Alejandro G. Iñárritu is never one to pull punches, in his films or in conversation. From the horrific dogfight scenes of his 2000 feature debut, Amores Perros, to his recent characterization of superhero movies as “cultural genocide” in an interview, the Mexican-born director’s brutal candor provokes strong responses, not always positive. But his body of work makes apparent that his convictions run deep, and his commitment to the ideas in his films is total, whether it’s structure (Babel’s time- and continent-shifting mosaic of communication failure in a post-9/11 world), metaphor (the title 21 Grams indicates the weight lost at the moment of death, supposedly representing the soul exiting the body), or tone (Biutiful, as befits a tale of a cancer-stricken single father, is unremittingly bleak).

Birdman is both a departure and a renewal for Iñárritu. Markedly lighter than his past efforts—star Michael Keaton just earned a Golden Globe for Best Actor in a Musical or Comedy (and Iñárritu shared the prize for Best Screenplay)—the film nonetheless makes fervent, contradictory, and topical points about the lives of artists today—the drive to create meaningful work, the compulsion to stay “relevant” while retaining integrity. FILM COMMENT spoke with Iñárritu recently about the beauty of imperfection, the plight of the critic, and the hilarity of the fragile ego.

This is a film about the insecurities that plague artists. The voice of Birdman articulates the anxieties of Michael Keaton’s character. Do you have a Birdman of your own?

Yeah, absolutely. A vulture, I would say! [Laughs]

Has he ever talked you out of anything you wanted to do?

Yeah. You know, in the creative process I think every human being is confronted with doubts and contradictions and flaws . . . and that’s part of it. That’s the deal of it. That’s the complexity of it. Because it’s very contradictory and that’s the way it should be, I guess—to move two steps forward and one back. And so it’s a torturous process, sometimes more for some than others, but no matter who you are you have to have that.

The film, as I was watching it, reminded me of Godard’s Contempt, in that everyone involved in this meta-production is somehow implicated. Actors who take themselves too seriously, actors who should take themselves more seriously, backers, critics—everyone has blood on their hands, in a way. I wonder if you were trying to make a statement on how art is born not just of noble intent but of ego, narcissism, and dysfunction?

Yeah, I think the film dealt with that a lot—what is art and what is commerciality, and when you’re an artist and when you’re a whore. All the time, artists are dealing with that question, especially in film, when there’s money involved in the process. That’s the tragedy of film, which is an industry and an art and a tool of personal expression, and at the same time a way to entertain the masses. That’s a very difficult kind of balance to navigate, especially today, with the rules of the game… Contempt is one of my favorite films, and I was always asking myself how Billy Wilder or how Max Ophüls or how Godard would do it. Those three guys were always in my mind, and also Brecht’s idea to be breaking the wall between the [actors] and the audience, and the shifting points of view, you know?

I want to ask about the critic character played by Lindsay Duncan. She seemed to be less like an actual journalist than an embodiment of this idea of critics who enjoy unchecked power. Is that a fair assessment?

For me I think she represents everything that Keaton’s character has feared all his life. In the universe of the film, I tried to have her express her frustrations that theater is being taken over by bullshit and propaganda and commerciality, and diminishing and not validating this guy that represents all that she hates. Which I think is valid, and sometimes I empathize with that—me, personally. And for him, she represents that—the possibility of being rejected, of not being validated, which is what he fears more than anything. And I found that the best antagonist for him would be that, because she represents the judge, she represents the priest, the mother, everything that he has feared all his life. So I think it was a perfect antagonist.

What do you think is the role of the critic today?

Honestly, personally, I feel mercy for them. I mean, if I had to see, what, 700 films a year, where I’m sure that 95% are really bad, because that’s the reality of the world? Well, I feel mercy for you guys. I see films, but only the ones that I know would interest me. But I’ve been a jury member in some festivals, and out of 20 films, you see two that are good, one that is so-so, and one extraordinary. And then the 16 others are unbearable! And 20 films have a very deep effect on me, you know what I mean? It poisoned me in a way. You have to eat poison or shit in order to taste good things, but then your tongue gets fucking burnt, and that’s why I feel badly for critics now, because they have a very difficult role, to judge 700 films, and you can get lost very easily. So that’s why I have respect, I have mercy, and I have doubts about how well you can really evaluate something after tasting so much shit. Do you agree with me?

Yes, especially about the 95%.

[Laughter]

Not long ago you spoke very frankly about superhero movies—you called them poisonous and inherently right-wing.

For me superheroes represent that vision of humans as flawless and certain, and all those things that are a delusional projection of how human beings should be. It’s almost fascist—there’s something very scary about that, the vanity. And for me, humans are exactly contrary to all that. I’ve never met a human like that. And I’m much more interested in humans, which I find much more dimensional and contradictory and flawed and driven by fears and anxiety, but at the same time, beautiful, pathetic, lovable creatures that I find fascinating. I think the values of the superheroes are in a way affecting the way the military mind works. So I have a conflict, philosophically, with the generations today not being fascinated by our human flaws and possibilities, and everything that’s human seems to be boring now. It’s scary for me. That’s my conflict—that humans seem to be now no longer subject to analysis and observation, and we cannot see ourselves in films because we feel so bad about ourselves. We have been acting so bad in the last years, the world is in such bad shape, that probably the reason [for the superhero craze]—I’m being outspoken here—is there’s a shame about seeing humans on the screen. And that’s sad.

Godard said the best way to criticize a movie is to make another movie, so is Birdman your critique of a society that’s saturated with fascist values on screen?

All the themes that the film navigates are themes that are really close to me, personally. I feel affected by or curious about them, and I’m part of it. It’s nothing I observe intellectually or detached from—I’m part of that discussion. I’m part of the problem, maybe. But I think that’s why it’s such an important and incredible journey for me, to be able to exorcise many of those thoughts that I have, through this story and these characters, because I empathize with all of them! I have been all of them, and I feel that sometimes I can really empathize with each point of view at the same time, so I don’t have a point of view. I’m not certain—I don’t know who’s right. I don’t know if Emma Stone’s right in what she says to her father. Sometimes I can empathize with her, and sometimes I can empathize with him. So that’s who I am, I guess.

The film isn’t overtly political, but you say that superhero movies are reactionary, and you have a critic who’s resolved to uphold the status quo, and the Birdman voice is constantly cautioning Keaton against being too ambitious. It seems like you’re saying that conservatism is anathema to art.

Yes, I think so. I don’t know if you know that the score of the film was rejected by the music branch of the Academy, because they considered that the classical music [drawn from preexisting music] was taking over the emotion of the film, and I disagree, because the [original] score of the drums was two times more in the film than the classical music. They [the music committee] attach emotion to strings but they cannot attach emotion to drums. For them, drums are not an instrument that’s as good or as emotional or as harmonic as guitars or piano. So yeah, I think the conventions don’t allow expression to be evolving in different ways. And yes, the form of this film—the fact that it was shot as perceived in one single shot—was a way to explore possibilities of experience or extend the emotional state of characters to another grammatical language.

As I’m sure a lot of people have noted, this film is lighter in tone than your other works. Does that grow out of the material or is it a change in your outlook?

I don’t think I’ve changed the subjects of my films—I’ve changed the approach. And, honestly, sometimes when you see how some people in this industry complain about how difficult it is to make a film, I feel like, oh my God, they haven’t been in Third World countries where people work in really shitty places with horrible fucking conditions. I’m not diminishing the pain of the creative process, and the need to be loved and express yourself and be naked and all those things. But what I’m saying is that I knew if I took the suffering of these existential things seriously, I would be betraying the real nature of the pathetic side of it. There’s a very pathetic side of the ego needing to be recognized, and applauded and validated. There’s something that, if you detach yourself a little bit, is more funny than tragic. It’s both at the same time, but I knew that if I took this so seriously, it would be as pathetic as everything [else]. So I prefer to take it from the hilarious vision of the tragic reality of the complex mind of artists. It’s more truthful that way.

Blackhat, a suspense spectacle about the hunt for a hacker who sabotaged a Chinese nuclear plant and manipulated soy futures on Chicago’s Mercantile Trade Exchange, should be a prize Michael Mann movie. Full of journalistic energy and aesthetic ambition, its argot, attitudes, and real and virtual textures emerge from Mann’s relentless quest to uncover dynamic worlds beyond and beneath tomorrow’s trending topics.

Blackhat is also a woeful letdown, with soporific stretches and thin or lumpy characters who come to life just seconds before they die. But it’s an artistic failure, not a crass, commercial misfire. Mann presents an onslaught of computer jargon and a parade of undeveloped personalities because he never finds an ideal way to dramatize his vision of cybercrime and cyber-punishment, not because of box-office calculation. It’s difficult to stay even semi-conscious during the dry, data-heavy setup (Morgan Davis Foehl wrote the script). Several setpieces, no matter how virtuosic, lack the action-painting poetry to keep from being bludgeoning.

Via the character of Nick Hathaway (Chris Hemsworth), a working-class computer whiz built like a white John Henry, Mann hoped to get at the essential traits of hackers—their intellectual hubris, their can-you-top-this? gamesmanship, their need to find an external, tangible measure of code-cracking prowess. Hathaway, an imprisoned cyber-criminal, becomes the key member of a joint Chinese-American investigation, spearheaded by his best friend and former MIT roommate, Chen Dawai (Wang Leehom), a People’s Liberation Army captain. Hathaway has a clear way to measure his success: if he gets the bad guy, it will lop off 11 years from his prison term—and allow him to continue the romance that sparks between him and his friend’s sister, network engineer Chen Lien (Tang Wei), who’s also an essential part of the team. What turns Hathaway into a promising movie fantasy figure is that he’s acquired close-combat skills during four years behind bars. He can shank thugs and assassins as easily as he slices through code.

In the past, even Mann’s “procedurals” have depicted instinct meshing with process, whether in his anatomy of a home invader Thief (81), or in the peerless profiling sections of his Red Dragon adaptation Manhunter (86). Part of the problem in Blackhat is that no matter how hard Hemsworth tries to capture the focus and alacrity of a master hacker, his ability to second-guess the enemy’s moves too often comes off as if achieved by rote. He’s 99 percent sure that the other hacker would do exactly what he himself did, especially since he and Chen Dawai actually co-wrote the RAT (or Remote Access Tool) that allowed the villain to invade computer systems and implant his own malware.

Hathaway is far more entertaining when he comes up with an offhand piece of ingenuity to pull off a seemingly momentous deed, like, say, breaching the National Security Agency. Stunts like that express a 21st-century brand of can-do irreverence. I think Mann wants to startle and engage us with the matter-of-fact flexibility of these youngish characters, whether it’s Chen Dawai revealing that he speaks perfect English as well as Mandarin, or Chen Lien falling hard for Hathaway without worrying about his future. At its most intuitive, this over-intellectualized movie suggests that people who’ve grown up with a digital sensibility have elastic boundaries, quicksilver emotions, and a hard time setting adult priorities. If only the writing made them fresh or expressive!

The film’s biggest laugh would fit right in a teen comedy: Chen Dawai racing into Hathaway’s bedroom to announce an emergency and not even registering a double take when he sees his sister in bed with his pal. Hemsworth and Tang Wei are lovely to look at, but their romance lacks punch. When Hathaway seems to seal their intimacy by confessing his hard-luck family history, Mann drowns it out with soundtrack music, as if the banal words are embarrassing. And once they get past their first big hug, Hemsworth and Wang Leehom—and Mann—underplay Hathaway and Dawai’s buddyhood until you wonder if they bonded over anything besides computer skills. These youthful, glamorized geeks don’t cast much of a shadow until their team takes a devastating hit.

Hathaway finally connects with his too-long-anonymous prey, the elusive Sadak (Yorick van Wageningen), by phone. This blackhat admits that he often can’t tell where he is or even who he is. It’s a signature line for this film’s take on the perils of cyber-consciousness. This confession also explains why the action seems to drift even when it finally gains momentum. The movie tries to gain existential ballast from characters who lack individuality and a strong sense of self—which should be essential starting points for any existential quest. Hathaway and Chen Lien firm up as hero and heroine only after they take risks to avenge fallen friends. A few gifted character actors bring the force of actual experience to each gesture, especially Viola Davis as FBI agent Carol Barrett, who combines acute psychological awareness with implacable command, and Ritchie Coster, as Sadak’s middleman and muscle, Kassar, who embodies the ruthless discipline of a battle-scarred merc. They anchor the film emotionally without weighing it down.

As all the deductions and adventures funnel into an extended global manhunt, with stops in Hong Kong, Perak (Malaysia), and Jakarta, Mann and cinematographer Stuart Dryburgh (who previously collaborated on Mann’s pilot for the HBO series Luck) put on a mercurial visual display. The film is full of imagistic marvels. You probably have never seen a homicidal restaurant brawl shot quite this close to each combatant. It’s a tribute to Mann’s visual imagination and kinetic sensibility that he can rejuvenate the cliché of a hero leveling a gang of brutish troublemakers with anything at hand, from a broken bottle to a tabletop. But the thrills are fleeting, because Mann basically puts us in Hathaway’s mindset, and that’s a barren place to be.

Hathaway catalyzes the inevitable messy, gaudy showdown when he arranges to meet Sadak during a polychromatic public event at Jakarta’s Papua Square, jammed with thousands of celebrants in traditional costume. We get the irony of a keyboard clash being settled mano a mano. How could we not? The movie has already overdosed on the contrasts between bloodless computer duels and gory shootouts—and between the microcosmic focus of hackers and their macrocosmic powers of real-world destruction. Humanity, though, washes away in the bombast, including the fate of countless Indonesian bystanders that Hathaway puts in harm’s way.

Throughout the final sequence, I thought of the climax to Brian De Palma’s 1981 masterpiece, Blow Out. During its splashy “Liberty Day” sequence in Philadelphia, literal and operatic fireworks capture the tragedy of a man who loses his love because he puts too much faith in technology, just as the denouement catches the creeping horror of a world in which sound and image can drastically manipulate “the truth.” Michael Mann—the artist who can make period films that are visceral and immediate (The Last of the Mohicans, 92; Public Enemies, 09) and journalistic films that are lucid and artistic (The Insider, 99; Ali, 01), and the entertainer who can make solid moral fables like Collateral (04) and pop-elegant extensions of the Zeitgeist like Miami Vice (06)—could have updated and intensified that story for the digital world. Blackhat is a visual blowout, but it’s no Blow Out.

Late in the five-hour-and-20-minute Indian crime epic Gangs of Wasseypur, the elderly politician and crime lord Ramadhir Singh (Tigmanshu Dhulia) asks his minions why they think he is still alive when so many of his contemporaries and their would-be successors have wound up dead. The reason, he explains: “Because I don’t watch Bollywood movies.” All his friends, he says, wanted to be the veteran screen actor Dilip Kumar, while later generations of men fancied themselves as stars Amitabh Bachchan, Salman Khan, or Sanjay Dutt, and it led them to ruin. “Every fucker,” says Ramadhir—the film’s subtitles consistently provide gritty translations—“is trying to become the hero of his imaginary film . . . As long as there are movies in this country, people will continue to be fooled.”

It’s a well-known irony of crime cinema that its fictional gangsters often model themselves on other big-screen bad guys: take Jamaican rude boy Ivan in The Harder They Come, with his spaghetti Western idols; or the Neapolitan hoods in Matteo Garrone’s Gomorrah, who dream of living like Tony Montana in Scarface. It’s plausible to imagine contemporary Indian criminals emulating the characters in Anurag Kashyap’s relentlessly punchy, unashamedly glamorous Gangs of Wasseypur—and it’s a sweet irony that one of the film’s co-writers, Zeishan Quadri, who also plays the streetwise young tough Definite, modeled his performance on one of the actors on Ramadhir’s list, Salman Khan.

Kashyap’s two-part film caused a stir when shown in Cannes in Directors’ Fortnight in 2012, although not quite the stir it might have done, given that films this long are often overlooked in the festival, and Indian cinema—especially commercial titles—do not currently have priority must-see status for the Croisette curious. Still, Gangs of Wasseypur now belatedly arrives at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, and it’s undoubtedly a force to be reckoned with.

Gangs comes on like… well, you’d want to say, like gangbusters, but there are no gangbusters here. The law-and-order presence in this story is ineffectual, corrupt, or in the final stretch, simply shows up too late to make any difference to the battles between rival crime dynasties. The film’s premise is summed up with ruthless neatness over the opening credits—after a bullet-laden setup sequence—by Nasir (Piyush Mishra), an uncle/consigliere figure who’s one of the few characters to make it alive to the coda. According to his juicy intro, there are “two kinds of people. Bastards. And dumb fucks. And they control the entire game . . . the twisted tale of Wasseypur. A seemingly innocent town full of insidious, rotten bastards . . . a dark and bloody jungle, where everyone thought he was the Lion King.”

Based on an actual history of rivalries in northeastern India, the film is set around the mining town of Wasseypur and follows the jockeying for dominance between three clans of Sunni Muslims. The story’s “heroes”—they’re as vicious as anyone else, but they’re more charismatic and we get to spend the most time with them—are the Khans. The film opens in 2004 with the enemies of local don Faizal Khan (Nawazuddin Siddiqui) launching a gun assault on his palace—an extended Steadicam sequence that begins by pulling out from a TV screen and the breezy opening of a popular show, before the camera swerves away to follow a cadre of gunmen down the street. After the credits, the action jumps back to 1940s Bengal (regional and national boundary lines shift throughout the film) and shows the roots of a three-way battle between the Khans; the clan later spearheaded by hard man Sultan Qureishi (Pankaj Tripathy); and the Singhs, who have always maneuvered themselves into positions of political respectability.

The background is coal, with corrupt union activities and seven decades of industrial changes playing their part. But the real-world underpinning is confusing: one minute characters are involved in coal, the next shifting operations to scrap metal, or buying lakes to corner local fishing rights, and you’re lucky if you can keep up with the numerous left turns in Nasir’s intermittent voiceover exposition.

But the background matters less than a propulsively moving vendetta saga spiked with constant reversals of fortune, abrupt forgings and breakings of allegiance, and bursts of often startling violence. The characters are, almost without exception, the “dirty rotten bastards” that Nasir advertises, and even when there’s a classic melodrama motivation for their acts—someone seeks to avenge a slain father, or must take one last stand before going straight—they’re all so ruthless that bloodshed itself becomes above all a mode of self-expression. As in all classic gunfighter cinema, the style with which someone kills an enemy is the measure of their character.

The most stylish characters here are the Khans. Shahid’s son Sardar (Manoj Bajpayee) the son of Shahid, shaves his head and vows never to grow his hair until he has avenged his father. Needless to say, he dies bald. Sardar is an unashamed womanizer, and the resentment of his second wife, Durga (Reema Sen), is one of the few narrative elements to pay off in delayed-effect fashion. Sardar’s downfall, which ends Part 1, is one of the moments where Kashyap lets it all rip: ambushed in his car while stopping for gas (the moment at which Gangs most echoes The Godfather), Sardar takes a rain of bullets, then staggers forth in slo-mo and fills the screen, blood-soaked in front of a blazing sun. It’s a great Götterdämmerung moment, echoing the earlier images of Shahid as a titan figure identified with fire and earth.

Later generations of Khans aren’t quite so mythical, but beset by human imperfection. The last of the Khan boys, and the meanest of the lot—if we’re to believe Nasir, who’s somewhat prone to hyperbole—is Definite, a strutting cool cat and one of several characters with bizarre English names (there’s also a Perpendicular and a Tangent).

The nearest the film gets to a fully rounded character with believable human nuances is Faizal. He starts off as an ineffectual nice guy, with an accompanying line in demure Seventies shirts and knitwear; becomes a lazy doper and a pariah within his family; then becomes a feared don, still with a penchant for getting high but now also sharing a hearty sex life, and taste in Ray-Bans, with his movie-loving spouse Mohsina (the sparkily charismatic Huma Qureshi).

The one moment at which the film really touches on emotional or moral contradictions is somewhat generic but effective: Faizal, à la Michael Corleone, ruefully tells Mohsina that he wishes he hadn’t gone into Dad’s business, and that the whole bloody saga had ended generations ago. It’s one of the few moments at which Gangs takes a breather to allow for a swell of emotion, and it works so beautifully because Faizal and Mohsina are shot in mustard-yellow light against a royal blue night sky (throughout, DP Rajeev Ravi artfully alternates the muted hues of urban realism with the hotter tones of Bollywood artifice). But all this is just by way of setting us up for the apocalyptic bloodbath in which Faizal finally emerges as a stone cold, icy-eyed killer.

The violence is at times so flamboyant that you gasp: when Faizal dispatches a betrayer, the killing is seen in silhouette from behind, amid sprays of gore, accompanied by a soundtrack of hacking, slicing, and a final heart-stopping thunk, before Faizal lifts a severed head aloft. This is where gangster cinema shades into the amplified register of gods-and-demons myth, or Jacobean tragedy.

But there’s little psychological or emotional finesse, or narrative modulation. Characters, even those we come to know well, are essentially expendable: when they are suddenly dispatched, there’s no time for grieving, either by the viewer or their families, each death simply a spur to further action. And Nasir is constantly narrating new shifts of direction, new terms of criminal engagement (“a new era of change,” as he puts it, seems to come along every five minutes). And there’s not really a well-shaped story—the action just barrels on unstoppably, from episode to (often very short) episode, with Kashyap throwing away setups and locations with magnificent profligacy, despite the reportedly modest budget (he’ll lay on a crowded party, or a street parade, for the merest handful of shots). You often feel lost and buffeted about on this river of incident, but the thrill holds; the effect is like speed-reading a 19th-century serial.

Kashyap also ingeniously addresses the Bollywood convention of inserting musical numbers even in dramas where they might seem utterly incongruous. There are a lot of songs in Sneha Khanwalkar’s buoyant soundtrack, offering wry commentary on the action and characters, often to salty effect. The subtitles to one strutting number of gangster self-praise read, “All hail my Assholiness…”; elsewhere, women sing to a girl of the perils of flirting: “Don’t let him play with your buttons, it’s a trick / This innocent game will end on his prick.” Other songs are performed on camera, whether bizarrely (quasi-hippies on a train launch into a grating cod-reggae number) or poignantly, as in Mohsin’s a capella serenade to her husband through prison bars.

For viewers not familiar with Bollywood convention, or with the actors glimpsed in film clips, it’s hard to know exactly how Gangs fits the bigger picture of Indian cinema now—although Kashyap, who had a success with 2004’s Black Friday about the 1993 Mumbai bombings, has something of a maverick reputation. It’s also hard to know exactly what to make of all the characters being Muslim (presumably their real-life originals were), but there has been some debate in the Asian press about whether or not this is an anti-Muslim film (see this comment in Pakistan’s Express Tribune).

But what makes Gangs one of the rare recent Indian mainstream movies to achieve crossover exposure is the way that it intersects with and echoes other international variants on gangster themes. Apart from its American flavors, there are echoes of Brazilian favela drama City of Men (without quite the virtuoso flash), the Japanese yakuza genre (without the quasi-corporate protocol), and, in the unremitting glamorization of thoroughly irredeemable characters, Mexican narco movies. I’m not conversant enough in contemporary Indian cinema to know what Gangs of Wasseypur tells us about current changes in Bollywood, but I’m sure that it’s already a prime exhibit in film studies debates on guns, gangs, and globalization. That Gangs is also a blast—if ultimately a somewhat exhausting one—goes without saying.

How much can you alter a time-honored story before it becomes something else entirely and loses its distinctive power? The irksome answer to this question lurks behind the haunting, frequently stunning compositions of Andrea Pallaoro’s Medeas, a reimagining of the myth of Medea in the American West.

Though classical variations of this tale usually center upon Medea’s otherworldly powers and/or the final body count, Pallaoro and co-writer Orlando Tirado’s changes lie in the tragedy’s setup. The betrayed partner is now the husband (Brían F. O'Byrne); the wife (Catalina Sandino Moreno) is a deaf-mute; and their cattle farm is beset by a drought. Like a Terrence Malick film stripped of its daydreamy philosophical voiceover—or like Stop the Pounding Heart, another Italian-born director’s taciturn take on rural, Christian America—the couple and their large brood wordlessly kill time and annoy each other in and around their large, isolated farmhouse.

But their cloistered existence is at odds with one of the fundamental elements of the myth. In the original story, Jason’s betrayal of Medea is as devastating to her social standing as it is to her heart; they are royals, so his decision to enter an arranged marriage with someone else in order to please a neighboring king has resounding consequences. In Pallaoro and Tirado’s telling, though, there isn’t much of a community to serve as a backdrop to the events. The murder of the children (committed by the husband in this version) becomes solely a primal reflex—you hurt me, so I hurt you more—and an expression of absolute and total loss. Both options are fairly realistic motivations for a massacre, but they’re substantially less interesting dramatically or psychologically.

Of course, Pallaoro and Tirado’s decision to switch genders diminishes another key aspect of what is so captivating and horrifying about the myth: Medea’s choice to kill her children, along with her witchlike powers, makes her a profoundly subversive figure, which in turn provides the catharsis with its power. (Unfit mothers, or those even momentarily displaying unbecoming behavior, have continuously roused the passions of otherwise uninvolved people throughout history—look no further than Casey Anthony.) By contrast, the father in Medeas is a strong silent type who only speaks with his fists, most frequently taking his financial and marital frustrations out on his children. His sadism is timeless too, but his character comes across like a newspaper crime headline rather than an in-depth feature—large print splashed across a page without nuance or depth, solely existing to relay information. Pallaoro’s decides to end the film abruptly with the children sitting motionless in the family’s pickup, and the ambiguity of the final shot elides any hesitancy or glee on the father’s part, making him a dull stereotype. (In fiction, how you murder is more important than if you murder.)

But then, he’s not the only one who’s a tired cliché: the couple’s children are virtually indistinguishable, save for the pre-teen daughter, who’s experimenting with makeup and Italian pop music. (The film appears to be set in the Eighties, but where exactly she bought these cassette tapes is a mystery; the fact that she knows all the lyrics makes sense given that the family doesn’t even own a TV until three-quarters of the way into the film.) While the detail about the daughter’s musical interest lies somewhere between self-indulgence and a failed attempt to show that “this isn’t the real world,” Pallaoro and DP Chayse Irvin’s cinematography is consistently exquisite. Their ability to render already majestic landscapes and austere interiors sensitively is a rare gift, and one that impassionedly makes a case for theatrical exhibition.

Even if there are problems with the re-telling, the image of the father sullenly walking home from a trip to a bar at dusk remains haunting. Though it’s tempting to dismiss the film’s strong visuals as rejected footage from a Nineties cologne commercial, there are a million other ways to be bored or underwhelmed at the cinema. This one at least creates a little space to dream. 

Peter Strickland knows how to create self-contained miniaturist dreamscapes (real or not) in which submissive types can luxuriate in masochistic misery. As the oppressed, manipulated sound recordist Gilderoy (Toby Jones) is to the world of fetishized analog equipment in Strickland’s Berberian Sound Studio, so the little maid Evelyn (Chiara D’Anna) is to the world of fetishized dead butterflies, uncleaned boots, and unwashed panties (in myriad colors) in The Duke of Burgundy. Unlike Gilderoy, she is not under the thrall of xenophobic Italian giallo moviemakers, but a stern, posh mistress, Cynthia (Sidse Babett Knudsen), who, when she misbehaves, takes her into a backroom (and offscreen) rains something on her that isn’t Cabernet Sauvignon.

Which is Strickland’s way of setting up an S&M dynamic that isn’t what it seems—and the demands and pressures of which cause a universally relatable rift in boss and drudge’s codependent relationship. Likely to be the year’s most significant antidote to the airbrushed (by Hallmark) perversity promised by Fifty Shades of Gray, Strickland’s third feature is another instant classic written and directed by the Budapest-based English filmmaker.

FILM COMMENT spoke to Strickland this week in Manhattan, where he will introduce the magazine’s double-feature sneak-preview of The Duke of Burgundy with the 1986 movie Mano Destra at the Film Society of Lincoln Center.

Is The Duke of Burgundy’s relationship to Seventies European erotica—the films of Jess Franco especially—the same as Berberian Sound Studio’s relationship to giallos? There’s clearly something more personal going on—Evelyn being a director surrogate who creates these perfectible rituals with role-playing, scripts, costumes, décor, and performance demands?

Absolutely, yeah. That was one of the great joys of doing it. The beauty of sadomasochism is that it provides this theatrical arena, not only to explore power dynamics in any relationship, but also power dynamics between directors and actors. I liked the parallel between Evelyn’s script and my script, the marking tape she puts on the floor, and Cynthia’s fear of getting her performance wrong—not just through forgetting a line but if the nuance is not there, if her conviction is not enough. There was a scene, which was cut out for other reasons, where Evelyn said: “What’s your problem? Most people would be happy to be spoiled and have their feet rubbed?” But what she doesn’t see is the psychological pressure she puts on Cynthia to perform and be something she’s not by dressing up and so on. What if she’s no good at tying knots?

I’ve noticed in Berberian and this film how interested I am in artifice: the process of writing and using dialogue, the process of acting. I try to find ways to not make it cold and film school-y, to weld these things into the narrative so there’s an emotional reason for the self-reflexive elements. Cynthia and Evelyn don’t change much in those scenes where the dialogue is repeated and you know what they’re going to say each time, but it gives me great satisfaction knowing how the changes allow you to understand the shifting dynamics between them. Why it give me great satisfaction, I have no idea.

It’s disconcerting witnessing Cynthia’s increasing discomfort in the dominant role.

For me there was something touching about someone delivering that commanding dialogue with such weakness and vulnerability. I love that dichotomy. It’s the paradox of controlling how much you are controlled by someone else. I’m not criticizing Evelyn, but the back rubs and foot rubs she’s made to give Cynthia are all given on Evelyn’s terms. When Cynthia needs a back rub for medical reasons, OK, Evelyn does it, but she’s looking at her watch. When Evelyn is truly punished, it’s pretty unpleasant for her.

Yes, the sexual thrill is absent. These rituals are only exciting to her when she’s controlling the artifice. One wonders if she’s really a masochist.

Someone else asked me that. There are so many different layers of masochism. There are arguably elements of masochism and sadism in all of us. A film such as Fassbinder’s Martha shows a very different kind of masochism. Margit Carstensen’s character is completely terrorized by her husband, played by Carl Boehm. He goes away for the weekend and forces her to revise all these chapters on engineering so he can have a conversation with her, which is hilarious but as disturbing as hell. It’s masochism that’s not so much sexual as emotional.

I’m not a psychologist and I haven’t seen it covered much in film, but I assume Evelyn’s brand of masochism, where she’s the one calling the shots, does exist. I wanted something that started off like a lot of those Franco films did, where a fantasy is embodied. I’m not trying to put those films down because they have some remarkable moments, but what I wanted to do was puncture the fantasy and show the dominant woman in her pajamas. She’s not someone who goes to bed in her stilettos. You see her miss her cues and you see her out of character. It’s something you would never see in the average sexploitation film. Franco was inventive, but some of the more traditional sexploitation directors would have to obey the producer’s commands to get the audience off.  I’m hoping this film does the opposite. I’m not saying it’s anti-erotic and I don’t want to say “How dare you get off on this film!” but I’m trying to unpeel different layers, hopefully without passing any kind of judgment.

BDSM has become mainstreamed to some extent. Something like Fifty Shades of Grey shows the acceptance of it in a cosmeticized form…

[Sighs] Yeah, anything consensual’s fine. If it’s spoken about, it’s good, no matter what one thinks of the films or books that are getting it out there.

When Evelyn’s script is burned at the end of the film, however, I did get the sense that you’re suggesting that overindulging fetishises within an intimate relationship can be alienating without the safety net of love and affection.

It was more that one of them was not into it. Had they both been into it, it would have been like a Richard Curtis film for me. There would have been too much harmony. Cynthia would have had no interest in tying Evelyn up, or whatever, had it not been requested. Had they both been into it, there would have been no need to burn the script. But it wouldn’t have been an interesting film for me to make, because my interest is in discord and having the characters misbehave. Evelyn doesn’t misbehave because she’s a masochist—she just misbehaves. I wanted to imply that everyone plays these games—therefore it’s not this unusual thing that needs some kind of judgment cast on it.

It’s tricky. You always want to push this kind of subject—you don’t want to be politically correct—but at the same time, you want to give the characters some dignity; you don’t want to laugh at them. There is scope, with any activity, of things going wrong. I’m not making a realistic film, but I’m making something that’s exploring the pragmatics of enacting role-play, such as missing a cue or being bitten by a mosquito when you’re tied up in a trunk at night.

I do think that people might think, what is this director saying? It’s important to note that you can see Cynthia’s character is not getting indulged when she wants to go for an ice cream or do something else regular like that. She’s ignored. She gets a lot of vicarious joy in doing what she does for Evelyn, knowing she’s desired when she’s paranoid about getting older—it gives anyone satisfaction to know they can physically arouse someone—but it has limited mileage. Clearly the dynamic is slightly lopsided. At the end [where Cynthia has dressed up again and is awaiting Evelyn’s arrival at their house], we don’t know if it’s a flashback to the beginning of the film or if they’ve reverted to their old habits—maybe Cynthia won’t answer the door and will escape out the back.

Did you read Freud on feminine masochism?

No. My research was fairly artificial.

What prompted you to make a film about sadomasochism in the first place?

I had some experience working with Cinema of Transgression filmmakers like Nick Zedd. I worked on a Bruce LaBruce film called Skin Flick, which was in that zone. It was never my intention back then to do something like that, but things bubble up again. Buñuel’s Belle de Jour bubbled up. The actual spark was Andy Starke, the producer, saying, “I want to remake The Exorcist,” which got me thinking about some of the tropes in a Franco film. I’m not trying to be elevated—it just organically ended up somewhere else.

In terms of the characters, I tried to use my “what if?” head. If you lock someone in a trunk, the first question in your mind is, can they breathe? But that’s the last thing you want to hear if you want to be locked in a trunk. You want the person who’s locked you in to be stern. Writing it was about playing ping-pong in my head as I tried to live out these characters. Two people could be used to most regular sexual act—but what if one of them goes along with it even though they find it a bit distasteful? I can’t give an answer to this, but what do you do? Do you keep sexually engaging with someone who is compromising himself or herself by doing something they don’t really like doing to please you? But if they don’t do it, are you compromising yourself by repressing profound desires you have to live out? These are all ideas I’m hoping the audience will argue about among themselves.

Ultimately, I see this as a kind of domestic drama, something very quotidian, a story about everyday bickering. It doesn’t matter what the activities surrounding it are. Really, this film is exploring the idea of consent veering into compromise veering into coercion, and seeing how that works for people who have different needs. It doesn’t have to be sexual. It could be anything—different career needs, for example.

I was struck by the film’s morbid Victorian atmosphere: the pinned butterflies with their splayed wings, the shots of fallen leaves in the autumn, the skeleton in the trunk that Cynthia imagines or dreams about. I wondered if you were equating Cynthia’s masochism with the death instinct.

It didn’t occur to me. The skeleton came quite late. Initially, the film was going to be set in the spring. Partly because of the money coming together a bit later than we thought it would, we shifted toward the autumn. That worked in my favor because it gave me an autumnal sense of “this cycle is over”—not so much a death instinct—with the insects emigrating to warmer climes. I wouldn’t call it a metaphor but there’s a strong connection between the idea of the mole cricket lying dormant [in winter, as discussed in an entomology lecture] and Evelyn is in her little “tomb.” In fact, there’s an Italian film called The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave. The autumnal feeling enhanced the idea that this love affair is perhaps reaching its natural end, or going into dormancy. Or maybe Evelyn’s desires will go into dormancy while Cynthia goes for her ice creams.

Why did you make Cynthia a lepidopterist?

Again, there’s no metaphor there. I think there’s something about butterflies—Surrealists use them, they just have a certain texture, the texture of the underwear. There’s an atmosphere there that I really like. I wasn’t so concerned about the idea of metamorphosis or why the butterflies are pinned. It just worked—it’s hard to say why. For the scene in which Evelyn is going through this extreme anxiety, the strongest image I could find was moths invading the screen. OK, part of it was a reference to Stan Brakhage’s Mothlight, but I didn’t want to just shoehorn it in as if to say: “Look at what I’m into.” It simply had a power to it. Sometimes it’s hard to say why images have this power. Certainly, though, I think the film could have survived without butterflies.

Several times, at emotionally heightened moments, the film drifts off into abstraction. That happens, for example, when the camera dollies between Cynthia’s parted legs toward her vagina. It’s literally a penetrative shot. It feels like you were imposing masculinity, consciously or unconsciously, on the femme world of the film, as naming it The Duke of Burgundy [a species of European butterfly] also does. Did you have to think about restraining your male perspective?

Yeah, it was very difficult, because it would’ve been incredibly arrogant to pretend I could adopt a female gaze. All I could do was be aware of the pitfalls of having a male gaze in this context, and to not make the camera so directional or mechanical, with a few exceptions, such as the one you mentioned. So it was more about softening my maleness. In hindsight, I can see, yeah, it has that feel of penetration, though when I wrote it and when we shot it, it didn’t feel that way. For me, it was more about the power of that intimate part of the body for the person who desires it and how you get sucked into it. Evelyn, we see, clearly enjoys going down on Cynthia, but the shot occurs at that point in the film when it is denied to Evelyn. I was interested in the idea of traveling into a forbidden zone—though I don’t want to get too silly about it. As for “The Duke of Burgundy” as a title, I think it was a purposeful reference to masculinity, though I’m not saying I am “the Duke.”

To be honest, I’m amazed I haven’t had more criticism for making a film about two women; I’m sure I’ll get some. It would have been more logical to make a film about two men. I do that have in mind for a project, and it’ll be very interesting to see how quickly I can get that funded, though being a man myself it might actually be weird having a man dominant over a man because it’d involve a very specific, physical kind of power—if a woman directed that story, fine. I’m not saying that other men wouldn’t tackle it, but I’d feel a bit strange doing it. There was an advantage in making a film about two women.

Cynthia and Evelyn occupy a very hermetic female enclave, sealed off from any particular time, apparently sealed off from men. Because Cynthia uses a typewriter working, one assumes that it’s not the present.

 It could be set in the future…

And it could be anywhere in Europe. It’s a kind of dream world isolated from the problems of work and survival.

Yeah. They did have jobs in the first draft—Cynthia was a hairdresser—but somehow that made the class system creep into it. I guess that doesn’t mean much, because class always creeps into everything. I thought, why don’t we make it like a fable, like a fairy tale? It’s preposterous: how the hell can they afford that place if they don’t have jobs? The entomology is just a hobby—they might be on welfare! By eliminating that social aspect, by eliminating the homosexuality of it all—because there’s no counterpoint, no issue of acceptance or rejection—hopefully you focus on the dynamic of the relationship. That was my intention. I also didn’t want to explore the background of why Evelyn is the way she is. I don’t want to psychoanalyze someone. It’s more about how you navigate around these different desires.

In the future, do you think you might go further in stripping away social context?

At the moment I’m doing the opposite. I wouldn’t dream of calling it social realism and I’m not trying to go in the Ken Loach or Mike Leigh or Dardennes Brother direction, but I’m writing something for my friends—the actors from my first film, Katalin Varga—that’s set now, in the real world, just to try it. Basically, it’s about Romanians working in the U.K. But I don’t want to turn it into a message film or anything like that. I just want to just have fun with it. At the moment, there’s no plan of going further in that oneiric direction. But who knows? I might go back to it in the future.

Twenty-first-century Bad Girls come in two basic kinds: the evil beauties of noir who get away with it, and the hags who scorn the niceties of grooming and sex appeal and let themselves go. Rosamund Pike in Gone Girl is an example of the transgressive beauty, easier on the eyes, but not likely to win an Academy Award. Charlize Theron in Monster, Frances McDormand in Olive Kitteridge, and now Jennifer Aniston in Cake are deglamorized harridans who earn kudos for acting, but may forfeit audience sympathy. Movies in the post–Production  Code era may be more open than in the past to oddball women, but the double standard of sympathy still prevails: male protagonists can get away with every kind of vile behavior whereas a female nasty will elicit cries of “Kill the Bitch!”

In this context of proliferating bitches, Aniston’s embrace in Cake of a woman who radiates pain and ill will is perhaps not earth-shattering but it’s still pretty damn gutsy. It’s a risky career move—if not exactly the radical departure heralded by feature writers announcing that Aniston is “finally” escaping her America’s Sweetheart, cheerleader-wholesome image from Friends. Some of us said this way back in 2002, when Rachel traded her smile, her high-gloss hair, and her pom-poms for the surly personality of a supermarket checkout girl in The Good Girl. That didn’t change Aniston’s career or we wouldn’t be having the same conversation now. It did tell us she could do something different and more interesting, and the opportunities have apparently been few.

In Cake, she plays Claire, a woman living in Los Angeles who has been scarred, both deeply and superficially by a tragic car accident, the extent of which we learn only later and incrementally. We first meet her in a support group for people with chronic pain, where the discussion revolves around the suicide of a fellow sufferer (Anna Kendrick, who will reappear as a tempter from the beyond). The session is tense with dark humor as various scenarios for the suicide are imagined, and a cringe-making Aniston violates every rule of groupthink by refusing to “share” in the bromides uttered by her cohorts. Ultimately her refusal to talk the talk of closure gets her thrown out.

The scene is splendid . . . and shocking. The bitterness of her condition is nowhere more evident than in her dirty lanky hair. She looks years older in the way that pain ages, her scar-covered skin is pasty, her shapeless body slumped over in despair, her eyes as lifeless as her hair. There is no sense of artifice, of prosthetics; she inhabits her pain.

Her days are marked and divided by outings for drugs and the taking of drugs, and the sense of isolation is reinforced by the landscape of impersonal highways and byways of Los Angeles. We wince at Claire’s walking-on-eggshells gait. The pain is her identity, her defense, her way of keeping the world at bay—a world that must inevitably include the audience, since the self-absorption of pain can only repel.

The exception is Claire’s Mexican housekeeper Silvana, played wondrously by Adriana Barraza (Thor, Amores Perros), whose devotion to Claire, even at the expense of her own children, is both mysterious and utterly compelling. The movie is astutely aware of class, of racial divisions and resentments, but it understands the way feeling can cross lines. In a way, Silvana’s relationship with Claire is similar to that of Mammy’s with Scarlett: the belle is a bitch, but because someone we love and admire loves her, we come to love her, too—or at least make allowances. We are implicated in the emotional transaction: the caretaker has somehow touched the vulnerability at the core of this woman and the bond is reciprocal.

Pain is Claire’s way of somatizing her grief, freezing it into a monolithic block of forgetfulness. But the audience is shut out as well, prevented from revisiting the accident, learning what part guilt plays in Claire’s elaborate defense. Details emerge by dribs and drabs, too little too late, and the elephant in the room (spoiler alert: dead child) is avoided like the too-easy bid for sympathy it is.

For all the virtuosity of Aniston’s threnody of pain, director Daniel Barnz and screenwriter Patrick Tobin haven’t found a way to maintain the initial level of anguish—and humor!—and go deeper and more penetratingly into character or imagine a richer sense of context. An attempt to “work through” Claire’s suicidal feelings with Sam Worthington as Anna Kendrick’s widower is the closest we come to illuminating the shadings of Claire’s urges.

The supporting cast is fine but function more as cameos. Felicity Huffman is especially sharp as the group leader with her own psych-speak agenda, but William H. Macy is ineffectual in a now-you-see-him, now-you-don’t walk-on. None of these expand our sense of the Claire who preceded the pain and will emerge from it—and of how she will emerge, how changed and unchanged. What about her husband, briefly seen? Did she drive him away? What was their marriage like? Mightn’t details of her life before the accident tell us something about the specific contours of her agony, even its extremity?

Pain in itself isn’t drama, and a poor scaffolding to build a film on. Like addiction, pain is a condition, moreover a condition of passivity—you’re in the grip of something monotonous with a life (or lifelessness) all its own. Cake doesn’t find a way of turning pain into something more than an issue, a problem that must have its solution. A similar problem afflicts Still Alice, the Alzheimer’s drama in which Julianne Moore, excellent as she is, is defined by how she deals with the onset of dementia. Such ordeals, whether doomed or ending in triumph, are better served in a TV Movie of the Week format.

Still, it will be a pity if viewers are too put off by the subject to see Aniston’s bravura turn, a tour de force that also tells us something about what we can and can’t accept in women’s performances, our threshold for unlikability and unprettiness. I for one hope we won’t have to wait another 12 years for this talented actress to have another “breakout” role.

Directed by Israeli brother-and-sister team Schlomi and Ronit Elkabetz, Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem zeroes in on one woman’s attempt to obtain a divorce from her husband in a rabbinical court. Screening tonight in the New York Jewish Film Festival at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, the film had its world premiere last May at Cannes, where it was a standout in Directors’ Fortnight.

“Completing a trilogy that they began with To Take a Wife (04) and 7 Days (08), the Elkabetzes set themselves certain formal limitations to unearth profound drama and mystery from the dry-sounding scenario . . . According to accepted archaic law, Viviane (Ronit Elkabetz) can only legally finalize her divorce with the complete consent of her husband, Elisha (Simon Abkarian). Supported by her lawyer (Menashe Noy), she returns again and again to court, with friends and family called as witnesses, but the man to whom she is unluckily bound holds firm, for increasingly opaque reasons in which anger, love, and pure male prerogative are merged together. As the months go by, time itself seems suspended, while the couple’s connection (or lack thereof) is increasingly suggested by what isn’t explained rather than what is . . . Part of the appeal of this twistily written film—which effortlessly shifts from courtroom drama to feminist commentary to intense melodrama to black farce to some combination of existential conundrum and folk tale—lies in the way it maintains the impossibility of truly characterizing a relationship to outsiders” (FC July/August 2014).

At Cannes, FILM COMMENT spoke with Shlomi Elkabetz about planning out the rigorous camerawork, the secrecy of the rabbinical court, and why he considers Gett to be their most American film.

How extreme is Viviane’s case? It seems as if it could be one of the worst ones out there.

No, the worst one we know is a woman who is still waiting over 23 years for a divorce. Many wait for 15 years. And when I was researching the subject matter, I wanted to see what was going on. I know the laws and I have a fairly good grip on biblical Hebrew. And for my imagination it’s enough for me to know that she wants the divorce, and he doesn’t want to give her the divorce—I can write 20 scripts, I don’t need to sit in on the trial. But I was afraid that I wouldn’t be precise. I gave the script to different rabbinical judges and lawyers, and everybody read the script and marked and helped me to make it realistic.

Did you observe an actual court?

I went to a divorce ceremony. I was still really afraid because I didn’t have the image—I needed the image, I’m a film director. I just need one picture and from there I can fly. There are open-door trials, but you cannot go into the marital court. It’s a secret. And I went to the court somehow. I said, I am writing an article about marriage and divorce, I’ve never seen a gett. There was a really nice rabbi there who told me, come, stand on the side, if the couple agrees, you can see the gett. I go to court, I wait, the couple comes, and the lawyer says “No problem.” In the court they were afraid the husband was going to say no [to the divorce]. The husband got a little crazy over the years, he was not 100 percent well, but still he has to say yes—you cannot force him to say yes. And at a certain point, she closed her eyes and waited, and the room was still. When she got the divorce... I don’t know if any of us can imagine what it means to do anything for so many years for something everybody knows you deserve—your freedom.

When we had this image in our head, it was like, OK, this is it, we have everything. We have the protocol, we have the script, we have the characters, we have the image, we know what we want to say, what we want to tell. What we do with this film is open the door for people to see what’s happening in the rabbinical court. Now, the rabbinical court is an open-door court because of the film.

Did the laws change after the movie came out?

No, no, it didn’t happen yet. With the film, effectively we could see what’s happening in the rabbinical court. I think the film will create great dialogue. It will create a movement in a way, but I don’t know if it will change the law—the law hasn’t changed for the last 4,000 years. In Israel, the civil law and the religious law are one. We are caught in between history and present day. It’s very difficult.

The film has a feminist strain in that we strongly feel the divorce should be the woman’s right, but you can get caught up in the family drama and forget about rights for a while. Yet you’re able to return to the idea without making it the driving issue. It’s more about her as an individual.

The film is not a [newspaper] article. I hope the film is an act—a demonstration—but it has to be a film as well. And it’s important that people understand how absurd it is. We thought about the audience throughout the shoot—we never took an objective shot in the film.

Yes, it’s all point-of-view shots.

It’s all point-of-view shots. We don’t believe it’s objective—so let’s shoot the film the way the court actually is. And it was amazing to discover in the first days of the shoot, even though we changed the point of view every few seconds, the truth does not change. The truth of the moment doesn’t change. As in, for example, Rashomon where when you change the POV of the story, things change. From any angle you look at it, you agree that Viviane deserves to be a free woman.

The looks between the participants in the court are so important. And there is something subtle going on with the gazes from Viviane’s lawyer especially.

Viviane’s waiting to get a divorce, she’s beautiful, and her lawyer’s looking at her from time to time. The film opens with this shot—we see his face gazing. We don’t know it’s at her, but he is gazing down at the place where she’s sitting, with a very tender look. But even if he feels something towards Viviane, he would never risk anything, because then he would risk the whole trial. Maybe he doesn’t even know he feels something for this woman.

How did you choose your cinematographer? Looking at the small courtroom where it all takes place, it seems you would want someone who knows how to work with that kind of space, almost like studio television.

It was a very interesting DP, Jeanne Lapoirie. She doesn’t shoot TV at all, she shoots a lot of documentaries, and feature films as well. It was very challenging to shoot it this way for both of us. For me and Ronit and for Jeanne, it was tough to create and re-create the space again everyday. The lighting is the key for every film, and here we don’t have exterior shots, but we understood that if we manage to bring the outside inside through the light, we can have something very interesting. Every day we asked what kind of day is it today outside: is it winter? Is it summer? Is it early morning? Is it cloudy? Is it a grey day? Is it hot? How do we re-create the light? We put cold neons to wash the room,  and then we try to create a conflict between the cold neon light, the blues inside, and the light that we bring from outside. We shot this film for eight weeks.

The sound design is also done with great care, both the courtroom dialogue and the scenes in the waiting room.

Yes, the sounds that you hear of the people, the women shouting, were recorded secretly in the rabbinical court. There’s an Israeli documentary film that was made with a secret camera and microphones in the court. I know the director, and I asked her to share some sounds from her documentary—her characters are real. So it’s even more authentic in a sense. The story seems so far-fetched—you don’t believe it’s true, you know? But it’s so realistic, it’s so true. And this trial is not just a trial of Viviane Amsalem, it’s a trial of society.

There seems to be a spectrum of religious beliefs among the people who come to the court. The requirement of wearing a yarmulke in the court becomes another point of tension in a way.

Elisha got further away from the religious life, but he knows the language very well, he knows his people, he knows how to talk to them. Viviane comes from a traditional family. As for the protocol, when you go to religious court, you are obliged to put a yarmulke on and women have to cover their heads. Some of the rabbis will not let you in if you don’t wear your yarmulke, and some are more progressive because people’s eyes are on them now with the press—they don’t want to lose the power that they have, so they start to let people come without the yarmulke. But some would say: “Put on your yarmulke, cover your hair! Wear something more modest!” They would shout at you. They can be very rude.

There’s that wonderful scene when Viviane decides to wear a red dress.

She’s so tired—she woke up this morning, she wants to be alive, she wears something red, for once. And she makes a mistake. She won’t wear red again.

I’m guessing there wasn’t much improvisation during filming, since the energy of the exchanges seems so deftly choreographed.

There’s not even one inch of improvisation. That’s because of the language—it’s very complex, a different type of Hebrew. You can improvise Shakespearean language, improvise Chekhovian, but it’s very difficult to improvise this language. So we had everything prepared: I just wanted the actors to know the text by heart. Before the shoot, I gave them a lot of images and I asked them to say the text. The images would be completely disconnected from the film. We did not analyze the text—we would try to work with simple images, with sensations, and slowly we started to advance. We shot everything so many times because of the point-of-views, and at a certain point it was there, you know?

You collaborate closely with your sister, Ronit. How do you divide the work of writing and directing?

We have worked for 10 years together now. We love each other very much, we are really connected, we are infatuated with each other. When we write a script, we go away for one month somewhere, maybe in Paris—the first time we went to New York and we closed ourselves in the apartment. We lived together for one month, we write sometimes, and then we rehearse together.

So you each play the parts?

We each play the parts—I play Viviane, she plays Viviane, I play Elisha—we play all the parts for these three months. And we rehearse and rehearse, and while we rehearse, we talk about how we would like to do it. And we argue a lot. This time we argued a lot about the light—we had very interesting arguments, I wish I had recorded them. Making a film is something very internal, but the film itself is extrovert work; and for the viewer it’s very internal. After we finish our arguments and debates, we do the shoot and we hardly talk. We don’t even talk by the end of the shooting day—maybe every other day we have a conversation about what happened and what we planned, and we just look at each other, and we know. Because we spoke so much before—for two years we talked before the film! When the shoot comes, it’s our time to look, to look at each other, to look at the picture, to listen, to very attentive, to be sensitive. We never do playbacks, we hardly stand by the monitor. I see, I know if I like it. Then we edit together, we go through the whole process. It’s a total collaboration. For this film and the last one, I also produced.

Did you have any touchstones in film, dramas or documentaries?

One of my favorite films of all times is A Woman Under the Influence.

I love that movie.

I love everything about it. I love every inch, every frame, every sound—it’s a film I know, I remember. I can talk with this film, I can have a conversation with it—it’s not just a story for me. And when making Gett, we also talked a lot about Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc, Bresson’s Trial of Joan of Arc, all the different Joan of Arc trials.

What about literature, or theater? The movie is almost like being inside a play.

I love Chekhov, I love Tennessee Williams. I love still photography, I love all the American film noir that was made in the Forties. I lived in New York, and I did some theater myself as an actor. I never went to film school, but I took some classes at the Strasberg Studio. Everything is there for me—all the plays I love, all the photos that I saw, all the experience that I’ve had. It’s funny to say this, but for me this is the most American story I could ever write.

American in what sense?

Just because of the simplicity of the story. “You say yes and I say no”—the essence of the drama of the film, not the film as a whole. It’s something that I usually see in American scriptwriting, something very defined. It’s very much like when you go to drama school and you learn what’s the simplest conflict. And that’s what sometimes makes American cinema so great. When we finished writing the script, I told Ronit I never thought we could write like this. Even though my biggest influences in dramaturgy are American, still I never thought I would be able to have something so simple.

What was the original inspiration for the story? Did you know people who had gone through this?

First, the film is a part of a trilogy that we directed over the last 10 years and the inspiration for the character Viviane. We wanted to make the three films about the journey of a person who tries to be free. The first one we made, To Take a Wife [04], is more personal, drawn more from our own lives and our point of view on our mother’s life. Then the second one, 7 Days [08], moves further from this. Viviane is inspired by our mother, but our mother never went for a gett, divorce. I know many, many women who did go for a divorce, and hundreds of women who wait for many years, and thousands of women who wait under three years, under two years. It’s very tricky when you go and collect this information in Israel. But imagine that you have to wait two years for something that we all agree is a lawful right. It’s the right of one person to live with whom he wishes.

Did you have the idea of making three movies from the beginning?

We had an idea to write the three films 10 years ago. But it is a bit pretentious to say, as a beginner filmmaker, that I knew I wanted to make a trilogy. We did know the character very, very well, but we were very open because we watched it progress with Viviane. Sometimes it’s just the audience, sometimes it’s the critics, the scholars who write articles—Viviane talks back to you through these people. And she progresses, and then the story that we want to tell progresses over the years, and of course as filmmakers we grew and became a little older, and this film’s a little more mature than the first one. Viviane talks to us, and the women that we know talk to us, and we talk back. And the story evolves.

Barry Levinson’s The Humbling is frisky and buoyant, with laughs that bubble up unpredictably, often when you least expect them. It’s also improbably moving, especially considering how irreverent it is toward its source book—Philip Roth’s unfairly maligned 2009 novel—and its protagonist, Simon Axler (Al Pacino), a great American actor whose creative well has suddenly gone dry. Levinson’s triumph is to bring the grotesque and satiric humor of Roth’s early books to the somber insights of this late one. By letting in an antic air, Levinson expands the story and connects it to an intense, volatile world. This director creates vibrant moments with the tiniest characters, including the fantasy stagehand and usher who prevent Axler from entering a theater where he’s due onstage, and the (real) nurse at his asylum who promises to give him a pill that will definitely put him to sleep. Everyone the novel relegated to phone calls or secondhand conversation springs to immediate visual life, including the asylum’s top shrink, Dr. Farr (Dylan Baker), who conducts follow-up sessions via Skype.

The most important figure next to Axler is Pegeen Mike Stapleford (Greta Gerwig) the thirtysomething lesbian daughter of actor friends, who shows up at his Connecticut country house determined to make good on a childhood crush. In riotous addition to her just-dumped lover (Kyra Sedgwick), who pops up in a nifty replay of the book’s sharpest scene, Pegeen’s outraged parents (Dan Hedaya and Dianne Wiest) and her first lover—a lesbian who alienated her by deciding she was a man, and now is a man who goes by the name Prince (Billy Porter)—become delicious face-to-face antagonists for Axler. He hopes that Pegeen will replenish him, heart, body, and soul. Instead she expands the demented human carnival that invades his pastoral, anonymous Connecticut estate. Axler’s mistake—a common one, especially for artists and entertainers—is to imagine that there is such a thing as a simpler life. Having lived solely for the stage, he has no talent for everyday existence, and no defense against his own or other people’s lunacy.

In Roth’s novel, Axler’s downfall is instant and complete, more like a monumental writer’s block than a performer’s gradual humbling before an audience. (That’s one reason the novel is a second-tier work in Roth’s marvelous oeuvre.) In Levinson’s movie, everything is more elastic and more rooted in theatrical experience. Roth’s Axler figuratively takes “a tumble” from his usual artistic heights, in the words of his agent, Jerry (Charles Grodin). Levinson and Pacino’s Axler literally nose-dives off a stage and crumples face-first on the orchestra pit floor. In the emergency room he is still trying to grasp his effect on an audience, even if it’s just the nurse who wheels him down the corridor. Does she believe his moans? Should he take them down a bit? Did she notice the fluttering gesture he made with his hand?

Pacino is perfectly cast as a legend who loses his sense of craft and his grip on emotions because he can no longer distinguish between onstage and offstage behavior. That rare big-screen giant who maintains a steady connection to the stage, the post-Seventies Pacino has often proved to be too much in movies (even in his Oscar-winning, over-the-top turn as the blind retired lieutenant colonel in Scent of a Woman). But in fallow periods he has confounded expectations with superb restrained performances, especially when working with smart, talented directors like Brian De Palma in Carlito’s Way (93), Michael Mann in The Insider (00), and lately, Barry Levinson.

Pacino and Levinson have been superb collaborators. In Levinson’s HBO movie You Don’t Know Jack, about right-to-die advocate Jack Kevorkian, Pacino created a multifaceted protagonist—a man whose stubborn integrity transcends his sometimes crude and overbearing manner. In The Humbling he lets audiences glimpse the imaginative power that’s the source of his bravura and his acting genius.

Apart from Brando in Last Tango in Paris (a performance that endures partly because of its oddball humor), few iconic actors have dared to be as self-revealing as Pacino is in this movie. I’m not talking about spilling primal autobiographical secrets. The Humbling is about an actor struggling to use his observations and intuition to make sense of his most important character—himself—and to discover whether he still has a normal range of feeling. It’s about the actor who plays that actor, too. When Axler tries to regain the human reactions he had before his acting reflexes devoured them, you feel as if Pacino is tuning his own instrument.

Seeking relief from his suicidal mindset in a private “treatment community” (after attempting self-destruction with a shotgun), Axler pauses in group therapy before continuing to ramble on about his craft. As Axler tries to gauge the interest of the group, Pacino summons a furtive, pleading expression that’s eloquent, touching, and funny. It’s a small tour de force, but where did Pacino get it? From perception, inspiration, or both? It’s a face I’ve seen on widowers who fear they’ve talked too much about late wives, but Pacino makes it work for a man who’s mourning his late art. As Simon Axler, Pacino gives an exploratory performance. But it’s also sharp and controlled, even when Axler zones out—something that happens with increasing frequency when he contemplates whether Gerwig’s playful, childish Pegeen, who teaches theater arts at a nearby women’s college, could be a dream come true.

The charged yet indefinite connection he forges with Pegeen—an inspiration and opportunist, simultaneously—makes more sense than it did in the book. Screenwriters Buck Henry, Michal Zebede, and Levinson (who did the final rewrite) remove the novel’s backstory about Simon’s failed marriage to a former Balanchine ballerina. This Axler could never be married. He’s not just lost his moorings—he never had any outside his art. Levinson and Pacino’s Axler can’t even pretend to be paternal or avuncular. He doesn’t know how. As a weary, good-humored man of the world, he lends a sympathetic ear to any problems Pegeen had with her parents over her lesbianism. So he’s startled just a bit later when she flings herself at him, and he succumbs.

In Roth’s novel, Axler’s breakdown kicks in after he performs Prospero and Macbeth in repertory at the Kennedy Center. The phrase that haunts him is Prospero’s statement that “our actors . . . were all spirits” and “are melted into air, into thin air.” In Levinson’s movie, Axler’s pre-breakdown role is Jaques in As You Like It. The speech that sends him spinning into the abyss is “All the world's a stage, / And all the men and women merely players: / They have their exits and their entrances, / And one man in his time plays many parts.” It’s a much better umbrella for Axler’s tale, and also for Pegeen’s. She’s an academic gold-digger who slept with the dean to get her college job, an ardent lover to Axler who later declares that he “hasn’t fucked the lesbian out of her yet,” and a narcissist who nearly makes Axler late for his comeback in King Lear because she must purchase the perfect outfit for opening night.

In the opening scene, Pacino puts the masks of comedy and tragedy on top of each other—signaling the film’s seriocomic intent—and savors Jaques’ delineation of the “seven ages” of man that define the “many parts” a man plays “in his time.” Axler will epitomize them in the movie. He’s an “infant mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms” (Age One), a “schoolboy” at his mental institution (Age Two), a “lover, sighing like furnace” (Age Three). He’s a burlesque “soldier” brandishing his shotgun at Pegeen’s lesbian lover (Age Four) and a renegade “justice” full of “wise saws” (Age 5), vainly arguing to an asylum friend (Nina Arianda) that she should hire a professional, not him, to murder the husband who abused her daughter. Even before Pegeen takes home a casual lesbian pick-up, Axler becomes the commedia dell’ arte “pantaloon” (Age Six), a ridiculous, hunched old man who can’t comprehend that his wealth alone earns him attention, and when a veterinarian shoots him up with an animal tranquilizer to quiet his aching back, he uproariously enters “second childishness and mere oblivion” (Age Seven). This master of articulation loses the gift of intelligible speech, disarming Pegeen’s aghast dad (Hedaya) and delighting her hostile mom (Wiest).

All these actors—and Grodin, Baker, Porter, and the rest—act with inside-out originality. The way Levinson conducts “their exits and their entrances,” they interact like a jazz ensemble that can play equally well “hot” or “cool.” Gerwig matches her typical fluent intelligence with quicksilver emotions, so you understand why Axler can pin her down only in his daydreams. Grodin creates an indelible portrait of an agent as a fan whose love for his artist translates into a pathetic eagerness to please. (When Axler says he’d rather do a hair restoration commercial than King Lear on Broadway, Grodin’s Jerry responds: “That’s a good choice, too!”) Baker squeezes laughs from psychiatric skepticism; he provides a farcical catharsis by noticing how many remarkable figures in Axler’s life appear to be converging in rural Connecticut. Perhaps freshest of all is Arianda, as a woman so desperate for revenge on her monstrous, child-abusing husband that she becomes Axler’s stalker, convinced that he can be exactly what she needs: a contract killer. Arianda compels you to watch her with nervous anticipation; her fixed smile can be scary, amusing and affecting.

From Pacino on down, they do the thespian equivalent of bungee jumping. Levinson makes it look both natural and unpredictable—the signature of his work in multiple media and genres over his three-decade-plus career. The filmmaker started out 33 years ago with an autobiographical masterpiece—the hugely influential Diner—and pursued his Baltimore memories with Tin Men (87), Avalon (90), and Liberty Heights (99). He swiftly notched “official” classics like Good Morning, Vietnam (87) and Rain Man (88), then proved to be a master of many forms, from big-star art and entertainment like the glamorous, black-comic gangster picture Bugsy (91) and Bandits (01), the best road comedy since the Seventies, to lived-in, small-scale fables like An Everlasting Piece (00) and piercing, poignant documentaries like The Band That Wouldn’t Die (09), a tip-top entry in ESPN’s 30 for 30 series. In Wag the Dog (97) he really did what other Oscar-winning directors usually only say they’ll do: he made a groundbreaking, superbly iconoclastic independent movie that also happened to be the first political satire since Dr. Strangelove to introduce a phrase into our political vocabulary.

Over the years, Levinson has developed an ever-swifter, ever-suppler style. Though it was largely misunderstood as an "inside Hollywood satire," What Just Happened (08), starring Robert De Niro at his understated comic peak, remains one of the few crack adult comedies about the fractured way we live now, with a fluid, not frantic, mode of shooting and editing. You Don’t Know Jack (10) was audacious and formally inventive. The direct-cinema-like scenes in which Kevorkian interviews his prospective patients are as extraordinary as the death scenes: they’re triumphs of the director’s extreme tact and sensitivity, bearing witness to the bravery of these pain-stricken people as well as to the zealotry of Kevorkian. His “found footage” eco-horror film The Bay (12) was both a cautionary tale about pollution and a prescient illustration of the dangers and beauties of "new media" when it comes to reporting an untold story.

In The Humbling, filmed on a pittance in and around Levinson’s own Connecticut home, he’s like a one-man American New Wave. As Axler and Pegeen start playing house by laying out a serpentine path for his old model train (steadied by stacks of old Playbills), his fearless cinematographer, Adam Jandrup, shoots at shoe-level and knee-level, and his crafty editor, Aaron Yanes, zigs and zags to Marcela Zarvos’s infectious, unconventional score, which combines finger-snapping pop, ooo-ooo choruses, tribal beats, melancholy jazz, and Bolero. It all feels organic, including the train set—just the right toy to convey a fragile, peculiar man trying to get his life on track. Throughout the film, Levinson pulls off matter-of-fact leaps between realism and fantasy, reverie and dialogue, and juggles time frames like a rock-’n’-rolling Chronos.

Yet Levinson also knows when and how to be simple, so we can appreciate, for example, how Pacino and Mary Louise Wilson, as Axler’s housekeeper, develop an entire Abbott and Costello routine out of her attempt to understand Pegeen’s place in the home. A static, prolonged shot of the sedated Axler in the veterinarian’s waiting room, struggling to communicate with Pegeen’s parents as they sit under kitschy pictures of owners cuddling pets, becomes funnier the longer Levinson holds it. Hedaya’s ragged patience heightens the scene’s drollery as he waits between the dazed, incomprehensible Pacino and the shrieking Wiest, who turns mother-love into a lethal weapon. She says she knows how vulnerable her daughter is to Axler’s reputation and celebrity “because I’m her mother—that’s how I know, that’s how I know, that’s how I know!” Then she turns the rest of Axler’s life into a death sentence: “You’re getting older by the day. Sixty-five now, and soon you’ll be 66, and then 67, and so on—it never stops.” I’d happily listen to Wiest recite the multiplication table. All three actors brilliantly boil down a family feud into a single, blissfully hilarious setup.

At its core, The Humbling is a tragicomedy about an actor who feels empty when he separates from his roles, and a woman who’s so good at “acting out” that she hasn’t bothered to find a firm identity. You don’t have to be a performer to love it. You could be a Facebook user overtaken by your colorful persona. The deepest meaning of The Humbling is its insistence that authenticity—in life and in art—is a matter of life and death.

OK, so it’s a little more complicated, but in effect, the pitch for The Duke of Burgundy could be the old joke about the sadist and the masochist. The sadist stands toying with a whip, while the masochist trembles with anticipation. “Hurt me, hurt me!” pleads the masochist. After a tantalizing pause, the sadist just smiles and says: “No.”

Peter Strickland’s elegantly stylized film is an extended game with the expectations that surround domination-and-submission role-play, and with expectations in general—not least the moviegoer’s. The Duke of Burgundy certainly confounds standard assumptions about British cinema. Writer-director Strickland is a relishable anomaly on the current U.K. scene—an eccentric, a dreamer and an aesthete within a national cinema that normally disregards or discourages such filmmakers (among the executive producers of The Duke is another misfit Brit dreamer, Ben Wheatley).

But Strickland has achieved prominence as an auteur-in-exile, almost as if he were a foreign infiltrator into the predominantly realist world of British film. Resident in Hungary, he made his debut with the Hungarian-language revenge story Katalin Varga in 2009, then followed up with the very different Berberian Sound Studio (12), which was as much a conceptual art piece as it was a movie, conventionally speaking. A paranoid drama about an English sound editor and Foley artist out of his depth on an Italian horror production, this was at once a fractured narrative of mental breakdown, a treatise on screen sound’s address to the psyche, an inquiry into extreme violence and its effects on the viewer/listener, and a fanboy tribute to the thematic and stylistic excess of the Seventies giallo school.

Strickland the conceptual pasticheur is at work again in The Duke of Burgundy, essentially a claustrophobic two-hander about love, obsession, performance, and lepidoptery (yes, lepidoptery), as well as a lesbian love story that pays homage to Sixties/Seventies Euro-erotica—specifically Jess Franco, with perhaps a dash of Just Jaeckin. We know we’re in an exotic, otherworldly universe from the start, as we see a cloaked woman sitting by a woodland stream. As the woman, Evelyn (Chiara d’Anna), cycles through the woods, the light through the leaves is… well, the word that comes to mind is “dappled,” and it’s accompanied by retro-rustic psychedelic-folk music by the duo Cat’s Eyes, with trilling guitar, female vocals with a nursery-song lilt, and later, a nicely creaking oboe that enhances the film’s very woody, organic tone. Then come the gorgeous retro credits, with textured washes of color over freeze frames, as much a stylistic tour de force as those in Berberian—and with prominent upfront credits not just for the lingerie (Andrea Flesch) but also for perfume (Je Suis Gizella). We’re not just in movieland here, but in a strange private area of it: altogether another part of the woods, you might say.

Evelyn, we learn, is the cleaner and servant to the stately, imperious Cynthia (Sidse Babett Knudsen), who lives in a beautiful, eerie ivy-colored mansion, and is the sternest of mistresses. Her opening words to Evelyn are a chilly “You’re late,” followed shortly by a peremptory command to massage her feet, which Evelyn does with respectful relish. Later, Cynthia tells Evelyn off for not washing her lingerie properly, and leads her behind a glass-paneled door to take her punishment, which is left to our imagination. Eventually, we see the two women caressing in bed; the mistress-servant routine is a ritual between two lovers, after which they can drop the masks and be tender.

All this might seem a sleekly packaged commonplace, but the twist comes some 25 minutes in: Cynthia is not strictly the stern chatelaine, Evelyn not strictly her slave. Evelyn is making the rules, and apparently footing the bill; she has paid for Cynthia’s sumptuous and complicated wardrobe, some items requiring an instruction manual to put on, the latter complains. The long-suffering Cynthia is playing the mistress according to strict rules that Evelyn has scripted: we see Cynthia reading through handwritten instructions specifying not only her dialogue, but precisely how long she should keep Evelyn waiting at the door when she rings. As perfectionist writer-directors go, Evelyn is as exacting as they come.

But the couple’s relationship is not the oddest part of The Duke of Burgundy. Stranger yet is the fact that the film’s world—a small rural community, apparently in Central Europe in the 1960s or ’70s—is wholly populated by women, males apparently not existing outside the title, which refers to a particular species of butterfly. Moreover, nearly all the women in the film devote their lives to the study of moths and butterflies. The couple’s house is filled with illustrations of them, and display cases full of the captured creatures, which the camera scans in obsessive close-up. Moths flutter in the window frames as the couple make love, and insect lore even inflects their love life: Cynthia tells Evelyn that she intends to use her body as a chair, adding, “I can read about cave crickets while you are helpless underneath me.”

At a local Institute, an all-female audience (including, bizarrely, two or three obvious mannequins, whether to make up numbers or to highlight the artifice) listens to various women, including Cynthia, giving learned presentations on the wing markings of, and the sounds made by, certain moths. Strickland’s own enduring obsession is with non-musical sound, and the film’s end credits list in detail the insect field recordings used in the film—not just the names of the recordists and the insects (in English and Latin), but also the relevant microphones, times of day and years of recording, and even the temperatures at which the tapes were made.

Such pedantry is these days generally labeled geekery or nerdism, but in fact derives from a centuries-old tradition of mock-scholarship, going back at least to writers such as Rabelais and Sir Thomas Browne. Its most celebrated cinematic flagbearer is Peter Greenaway, whose films have tirelessly pursued an obsession with taxonomy and classification. Like Greenaway’s dramas, The Duke of Burgundy is staged in a hermetically enclosed, manifestly invented universe in which contingency is stripped out so that everything is dominated by a limited number of recurring rules and themes. Thus, not only is everyone mad about bugs, but everyone seems to be into S&M: when a vampish woman known as the Carpenter (Fatma Mohamed) arrives to take measurements for a special kind of constricting bed, Evelyn is dismayed to learn that local demand for the item is so intense that she won’t get hers in time for her birthday.

The theme of restraint, or constraint, has its literal part to play in Strickland’s story. Instead of this bespoke bed, Evelyn tries sleeping locked in a wooden chest, and chooses a safe word to signal to Cynthia when she wants to be released. That word, of course, is itself lepidopterous—pinastri, from the name of the pine hawk-moth. There are only so many possibilities in this enclosed, expressly limited fictional world. Restriction is also a key principle in the couple’s sexual routine—a defined set of elements to be repeated over and over in specific codified ways.

But similar restriction applies in certain types of experimental or anti-realist fiction: in Greenaway’s films, or in the kind of literary composition associated with the OuLiPo group, and notably Georges Perec, whose novel La Disparition wholly dispenses with the letter “e.” The novelist and filmmaker Alain Robbe-Grillet composed many of his fictions, literary, and cinematic, through the Rubik’s Cube recombination of a limited number of repeated elements within an enclosed fictional world. Strickland certainly sails near to Robbe-Grillet territory in The Duke of Burgundy, both in the fetishistic but tongue-in-cheek use of softcore lesbianism, and in nods to the writer’s most famous script: he has the camera glide along a chandeliered ceiling, echoing Last Year in Marienbad, and decks the Carpenter with black feathers like Delphine Seyrig’s in that film.

The Duke of Burgundy might easily have come across as an airless exercise, or a hyper-rarefied amusement for a particular kind of niche fetishist. Strickland’s peculiar interests are, apparently, writ large on screen: here’s a man, one assumes, who likes moths, natural sound, avant-garde narrative strategies, a somewhat disreputable field of Seventies retro-cult cinema, and the private activities and underwear choices of mature European ladies. If the success of The Duke depended on finding a viewer whose own interests fitted that same profile, it would have a very limited public indeed. (After a press screening, a colleague said to me: “Very nice—but who exactly is the audience for this film?” “Why,” I said, “lesbians and lepidopterists, and the men who love them.”)

But what brings the film to life is the elegance of the execution, beginning with the silkiness of the performances. Sidse Babett Knudsen is best known as the lead in Scandinavian political TV drama Borgen, and that gives a perverse frisson to her decorously steamy scenes: my God, you think, that’s the Prime Minister of Denmark whose crotch the camera is slowly zooming in on. Knudsen has a very soft, detached delivery, and a fake English accent that’s manifestly artificial enough to be unsettling, while d’Anna’s slightly stilted Italian-accented readings as the faux-demure Evelyn sound almost like dubbing—which adds another layer of detached irreality. Their interplay achieves a piquant absurdity, and the decorous scenes of sexual intimacy—no nudity, always deluxe lingerie—display a languid tenderness, showing the two lovers taking real pleasure in each others’ bodies, and presences.

Of course, this is wholly a male fantasy about women in love, and the voyeurism is accentuated by DP Nic Knowland’s camerawork, eroticizing the women’s bodies by showing them refracted and reflected in windows, or as if through various shimmering filters. But the objectification of the two women is also defused by a comic emphasis on the mundanity that must affect all long-term relationships, however passionate. Cynthia keeps Evelyn awake at night with her snoring, prefers baggy pajamas to basques, and can’t hide her weariness when Evelyn demands that she invent new dialogue to thrill her (the fundamental problem of art: how to innovate and renew while still observing the imperative to repeat, recycle, provide the same tried and tested thrills?).

The Duke of Burgundy is a deeply eccentric filigree of a film, as aesthetically refined a piece of cinematic artifice as I’ve seen in ages. Taking their cue perhaps as much from Sixties/Seventies record sleeves as from any films of the period, the images often shimmer mysteriously or fragment kaleidoscopically—Knowland played similar tricks with light, as an object in its own right, in his features for the Brothers Quay, Institute Benjamenta and The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes. For much of the film, Strickland follows chains of images, treating them as purely imagistic or quasi-musical motifs, rather than for narrative effect. There’s an astonishing crescendo moment in the film, in which the screen is suddenly filled with an explosive irruption of moths. You can’t quite say what it means, but you know how it feels.

This mini-apocalypse, in fact, may be a sort of Strickland trademark: there was one in Berberian Sound Studio, a similarly unnerving climactic moment at which the film’s narrative logic simply imploded. After that moment, Strickland didn’t quite seem sure where to go, and it rather feels as if in The Duke, too, what follows the climax is a sort of dying fall, even an anticlimax. I suspect, though, that one of these days, Strickland will make a film that manages its dynamics with perfect efficiency, and tells a conventionally satisfying, rounded story, and then we may all be lamenting that some of the ineffable strangeness has been lost. For now, Strickland is making films that are frustrating, tantalizing, and unsettling for all kinds of interesting reasons. Hugely entertaining into the bargain, The Duke of Burgundy is about as close to an impossible object as cinema—especially British cinema—gets these days.

“There’s the story of the old Irish biddy, to whom the neighbors came for a coffee klatch and said, ‘Is this story true about the young widow up the street?’ She said, ‘It’s not true, but it’s true enough.’ I used this in my classes and told them that the historian has to proceed with the reverse of this. There are a lot of things in history that are true, but they are not true enough.” 

—John Lukacs, Winston Churchill’s Evolving Views of Russia, 1917-1953, Reconsidered

The Grand Budapest Hotel

We are midway through that Bataan death march known as “awards season,” which begins with a disproportionate number of prestige pictures flooding the market at the end of year. Because most of these will be period pieces, many based on True Stories, a disproportionate amount of movie chat in turn has lately been devoted to the ethics of representing history on screen. Of the current Best Picture crop, we have films set during the prewar, wartime, and postwar of an invented Mitteleuropean nation (The Grand Budapest Hotel), in England during and after World War Two (The Imitation Game), in Cambridge and its environs in the Sixties (The Theory of Everything), segregated Alabama in 1965 (Selma), and at home and on battlefields during the recent Iraq-Afghanistan Wars (American Sniper). (This is not to speak of the various un-nominated period pieces that were clearly made with some idea of being awards contenders, like Angelina Jolie’s Unbroken and Tim Burton’s Big Eyes.)

Of the above nominees, only Budapest doesn’t use the figures of real men and women who lived through the events depicted, setting its scene in the Republic of Zubrowka, a stand-in for any of the eminently civilized Central European nations that would descend into the twin barbarisms of fascism and communism during the 20th century—like the real Budapest from which John Lukacs fled in 1946. As such, it escapes certain of the criticisms that the other films have been subjected to—such as the “expert” op-ed, in which the facts as given (or elided) by the movie are scrupulously compared to the known historical facts, and as often as not found wanting. This is, of course, because most filmmaking is, to borrow from Lukacs, closer to the providence of the Irish biddy—it deals in the true enough, not the strictly true. At the same time that Anderson, by putting his film at a slight remove from the actual World War II, avoids one point of vulnerability to criticism—one can’t very well recruit a Ph.D. who wrote his dissertation on the Republic of Zubrowka to fact-check The Grand Budapest Hotel—he opens himself to another front of attack. Namely: he’s set himself up at a comfortable remove! He’s made a movie about the idea of World War II, as learned from The World of Yesterday and Ernst Lubitsch films, all while keeping himself immaculate and aloof, as not to get any blood splatter on his crushed-velvet blazer.

Nevertheless one has a feeling that Anderson, by leaving no room to doubt that he’s employing fictional license, has taken the path of less resistance. Fact-checking as a dedicated occupation has almost entirely disappeared from journalism, instead added to the responsibilities of overworked writers who are expected to do their own Googling on their own time, but the Fifth Estate has, at no extra charge, offered its services in this capacity to the entertainment industry. As I have not seen either The Imitation Game or The Theory of Everything, and have no intention to do so, I won’t comment on their individual cases, though a few keystrokes pulls up items like a Slate piece asking “How Accurate Is The Imitation Game?” and an ongoing Entertainment Weekly column called “Fact-Checking the Film.” The New York Times is also on the case, having run a piece on the subject this week (“When Films and Facts Collide in Questions”) which contains a juicy quote from Jeanine Basinger: “It makes you crazy when you confront, year after year, the fact that no one understands either the movies or history. We’re trying to hold movies to a truth we can’t hold history to. History is always someone’s opinion.” Basinger is the former chair of the film studies program at Wesleyan University, and author of a fine volume on Anthony Mann, whose 1949 pulp history of the French Revolution, Reign of Terror (aka The Black Book), if released today, just might not pass muster with eggheads.

The Imitation Game

Whatever their relative fidelity or lack thereof to the True Stories they purport to tell, The Imitation Game and The Theory of Everything are marketed with their take on subject matters not likely to be controversial with the genteel, soft art-house audiences to whom they are addressed—the treatment of homosexuals in Fifties Britain and something to do with the intellect and ineradicable dignity of Stephen Hawking, from what I can gather. This leaves us with the two movies stalking bigger game, both cited in a piece by Jake Coyle for the Associated Press: “From Selma to American Sniper, artistic license gets an audit in Hollywood's awards season.”

The first sets its scene during one of the most important actions of the American civil-rights movement; the second during post–September 11 military operations in the Middle East, depicted not infrequently in American pictures, though rarely with the sort of box-office success that has thus far been enjoyed by Clint Eastwood’s film. (Pundits seem to have forgotten the impressive January take of Peter Berg’s Lone Survivor last year, which is understandable, as said movie is shoddily made, risible trash.) Both have been accused of playing fast and loose with history by a media which has gotten very Joe Friday in its demands of filmmakers, asking “Just the facts.” The likes of former Johnson presidential aide Joseph A. Califano Jr. and Maureen Dowd have tut-tutted Selma director Ava DuVernay for her film’s “distortion” of LBJ’s record on race. American Sniper and Eastwood went undetected while this was going on, but a breakout wide-release opening weekend and a slew of nominations announced the film’s presence, and it has since taken flak for whitewashing its subject, Chris Kyle, the Navy SEAL believed to be the most lethal sniper in U.S. military history.

The movie is based on Kyle’s 2012 autobiography of the same title, written with Jim DeFelice and Scott McEwen, which was optioned months after its publication by Bradley Cooper, who would eventually star as Kyle. In the interim before American Sniper arrived on screens, Steven Spielberg would be attached as director, then withdraw, and Kyle would be killed by a fellow veteran and PTSD sufferer whom he was taking out on a shooting trip, part of volunteer work that he began after the end of his service. In his brief period of celebrity between the best-seller list and the grave, Kyle was also revealed to be something of a serial fabulist: he claimed to have knocked down former Minnesota governor Jesse Ventura while defending the honor of the SEALs in a Colorado bar brawl (he did not), to have picked off 30 or more armed looters from atop the New Orleans Superdome in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina (he almost certainly did not), and to have killed two carjackers outside of Dallas (ditto).

Eastwood’s American Sniper makes no mention of Kyle’s Munchausen-esque postwar embellishments of his supersoldier legacy, braggadocio which would run counter to the film’s depiction of Kyle as a modest, tight-lipped protector of the vulnerable. Nevertheless, we may suppose that the real Kyle’s foot-in-mouth loquaciousness (often, it seems, accompanied by binge drinking) and the screen Kyle’s noble taciturnity had the same source—a profound psychic damage—and the fact of this damage is more important to Eastwood’s American Sniper than what Werner Herzog once called “superficial truth, the truth of accountants.” Eastwood shows men in war and their actions, and contrasts these images with Kyle’s insistence of his own clear conscience. Eastwood’s mistake is to trust a viewer to sort through contradictory evidence on their own—for some people, a movie cannot be sufficiently antiwar unless it ends with a fatigue-wearing, tear-streaked Matt Damon wailing “Why did Bush do 9/11?”*

American Sniper

It is discomfiting and a little embarrassing to have to actually examine one’s feelings about the martial tradition and the warrior caste, and so many responses to American Sniper have broken down along knee-jerk political lines. On one side there is “America, Fuck Yeah” boosterism occasionally shading into outright racism, as in a much-circulated screenshot of four tweets offering what re-posters apparently believe to be damning evidence that, yes, four of the film’s millions of viewers were xenophobic trash. On the other, there’s a curious focus on the handful of shots in the movie in which Cooper is seen dandling a newborn baby that is, upon closer scrutiny, actually a rubber doll. You can either take the rubber baby, apparently brought in after two real infants had failed to work out, as Eastwood’s reasonable and efficient no-BS response to on-set exigency, or take it as a “tell” that reveals his directorial indifference and the fallacy of the entire project. Similarly, you can either admire Eastwood’s ingenuity in taking the director’s chair on American Sniper, which was going to be made one way or another and might easily have been made very badly, and crafting a film which encourages a viewer to think deeply about the cultural roots and inculcation of gun love in America via a property that does not necessarily speak to these matters; or you can deride him for making the movie at all. Generally speaking, I prefer to limit myself to discussing the films that have been made rather than discussing the ones that haven’t.

Through no fault of either American Sniper or Selma, there is a developing sense of these movies as “counterprogrammed” works—Sniper for the Red States and Selma for the Blue—facing off in a clickbait Battle Royale. (“American Sniper vs. Selma: Hollywood Takes Sides, Aim” squawks a Thompson on Hollywood headline, obligingly.) Both films world-premiered back-to-back at AFI Fest, had limited-release award-qualifying runs starting on Christmas Day, and opened wide in January. This month, the perception of a face-off ramped up when DuVernay wasn’t nominated for a DGA award while Eastwood was (as were Wes Anderson and someone called—I’m not kidding—Morten Tyldum), while Bradley Cooper edged out David Oyelowo, DuVernay’s Martin Luther King Jr., in the all-white acting categories.

The irony here is that American Sniper and Selma have more than a little in common, and not only the fact that their real-life subjects were both victims of gun violence. (One, it should be emphasized, dealt out more than his fair share.) Both films, for example, end with the integration of stock footage into their fictional narratives: American Sniper with Chris Kyle’s 200-mile funeral procession from Midlothian to Austin and the laying-in-state of his catafalque on the 50-yard line of Cowboys Stadium; Selma with Dr. King leading a procession across the Edmund Pettus Bridge to begin their march to the state capitol at Montgomery. These shouldn’t be taken as instances of filmmakers trying to slyly conflate their fictions with fact, but rather as deliberate confrontations between myth and documentary record. Both films examine the cost of inhabiting a legend—incidentally, “Legend” was Kyle’s battlefield nickname—and the private toll incurred by public men. Selma takes place largely in the realm of political negotiation made urgent by the threat of violence, while American Sniper takes place amidst what Carl von Clausewitz called “the continuation of politics by other means,” but Eastwood’s and DuVernay’s films are both acutely aware of the part that storytelling plays in real life, so-called. In depicting the civil-rights movement, Selma devotes a great deal of screen time to scenes of stage management, from the vital function of Dr. King’s narrative-shaping oratory to the manner in which he and his cohort address themselves to broadcasting a compelling image of the oppression of the black Southerner to the wider world. Eastwood and DuVernay have even shared a “character,” that of J. Edgar Hoover, played by Dylan Baker in Selma, and by Leonardo DiCaprio in Eastwood’s 2011 J. Edgar, which begins with the FBI Director preparing to wiretap Martin Luther King Jr.’s hotel room while confronting a challenge from his new supervisor, Attorney General Robert Kennedy.

Selma

Selma and J. Edgar are both films which deal in the manufacture of images for the public eye, which is another way of saying that they are interested in the basic currency of political power. In the case of DuVernay’s Martin Luther King Jr., the cause is a just one pursued by a flawed man, while Eastwood’s Hoover is a character whose early idealism is poisoned by a distrust of self which, through the years, he increasingly externalizes into a universal paranoia. (In Selma, Hoover is employed to create a counter-image of Dr. King that will undermine his appearance of righteousness by accruing evidence of his infidelities—this is the point at which J. Edgar begins.) The responsibilities and snares that come with the spotlight are among Eastwood’s abiding interests through his 40-plus-year career as a director, and the theme carries through films concerning a smoothie DJ’s seductive on-air persona blowing up in his face (1971’s Play Misty for Me), a paean to fake-it-so-real cowboys-and-Indians play acting (1980’s Bronco Billy), two stories detailing the perils of living one’s music (1982’s Honkytonk Man and 1988’s Bird), a backstage/safari drama following John Huston into the bush (1990’s White Hunter Black Heart), a Bostonian scribbler’s skimming the Wild West for larger-than-life subjects (1992’s Unforgiven), the demythification of national propaganda on both sides of WWII’s Pacific Theater (2006’s Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima), nation-building through spectatorship sports (2009’s Invictus), and the “just too good to be true” business of pop treacle (2014’s Jersey Boys).

It is not so easy to contextualize Selma in DuVernay’s career, for she has much less career to look at. She is now 42 and on her third film—exactly Eastwood’s age when he made his #3, 1973’s rather lovely Breezy. Even if the picture industry didn’t not-so-secretly scorn blacks, woman, and especially black women—and of course it totally does—it would be difficult to imagine her or anyone starting out today matching Eastwood’s longevity and prolificacy, though I’d be fascinated to see what she’d do given the chance to take as many shots as he has. As it stands, Selma strikes me as a work of considerable aesthetic and moral force, though hamstrung by glaring flaws in casting. In fact, it does have an LBJ problem, and that problem’s name is Tom Wilkinson, who plays the 36th President of the United States. I never thought I’d be nostalgic for Liev Schreiber’s President Johnson, seen playing statesman from the toilet in 2013’s The Butler (a scene which the fact-checking Daily Beast determined “COULD BE TRUE”), but Wilkinson’s jowl-shaking very nearly did it. It is one thing to finesse the official records on Johnson’s attitudes in the months leading up to his signing of the Voting Rights Act in service of a larger truth—that black self-determination was achieved by independent black organization, in large part through black and (some) white church groups, and outside the official avenues of foot-dragging politics-as-usual. It is another thing to render the man who was known to casually refer to his “bunghole” while ordering slacks so unforgivably colorless.

Handling a Texas accent like a slippery brown trout, Wilkinson is one of a plethora of U.K. actors in a film which speaks to the best and worst in American history, including Oyelowo—judging from such fare as Jack Reacher and A Most Violent Year, I’d dismissed Oyelowo as a vocationally bad actor, though he is unaccountably fine here—Carmen Ejogo as Coretta Scott King, and Tim Roth as Governor George Wallace, giving a career-worst performance. Across racial lines, Selma’s Anglicization of the South is indicative of a current tendency to overvalue Commonwealth-bred thespians, but while a few anecdotal examples might make for a snappy trend piece (Buzzfeed’s “The Rise of the Black British Actor in America”), it’s probably far too early to discuss the endangerment of the black American actor when Kevin Hart’s The Wedding Ringer is handily dusting Selma at the multiplexes. Whatever the case, I’m sure there will be roles enough for diaspora actors the world over whenever the studios should choose to bankroll an Africa-set historical epic.

Exodus: Gods and Kings

* This is how Green Zone ends, right?

In the West, Timbuktu has historically been a synonym for a far-flung or mythical locale. Yet the real Malian city is about as far from an Orientalist Vegas as one could get: a trading post that eventually grew into a city housing a university and library with thousands of priceless Islamic texts, the UNESCO World Heritage site is today deeply impoverished largely due to environmental factors (namely, desertification). In 2012, Islamist militants, some of them Tuaregs from Libya, captured the city with the aim of creating an independent state, and imposed strict sharia law upon its inhabitants.

Though much of coverage of this event focused on the militants’ destruction of those ancient texts, Abderrahmane Sissako (who was born in Mali, grew up in Mauritania, and currently resides in France) began creating his story based on a news report of a couple’s death by stoning during the city’s occupation. Like his previous features Bamako (06) and Waiting for Happiness (02), Sissako’s emphasis on the quotidian unsettles preconceived notions of the weighty reality of radical fundamentalists: cultural contradictions and language barriers abound among the jihadists, while the townspeople are resilient but not irreproachable.

FILM COMMENT spoke with Sissako about the art of filmmaking, and destroying beauty, last October during the New York Film Festival.

Your films seem made to express an African point of view to Western audiences. How do you go about engineering that?

I don’t think I go about it with that specific objective, because rather than emphasizing a difference, I think people are the same no matter where they are. And the problem is that they’re not portrayed as being the same. Yes, it’s true that every culture is going to have their own set of issues, but it’s the way in which they’re shown that makes it seem like they’re different. Africans are very often portrayed in a way that makes their issues seem mysterious, when in fact they’re really in many ways no different from Europeans. With Timbuktu, in the relationship between the couple, Kidane and Satima, when they’re talking about family issues, it’s really a conversation that could take place here as well. The father/daughter relationship is the same. But it’s true, if you do have a specific geographic location and maybe a specific event like this conflict that’s going on there right now, that does give it more of a specificity.

In the topics you’ve chosen to make films about—if it’s the World Bank (Bamako), if it’s terrorism (Timbuktu), if it’s what it means to be in an interracial relationship in Russia (October)—there is an attempt to convey viewpoints that haven’t been well represented in cinema. Africa hosts the third-largest film industry in the world thanks to Nollywood, and that’s helped close the gap just by numbers alone, but it’s a mixed bag.

It’s true that Nigeria has a huge film industry right now. They’re films that are made for local consumption. But it’s important to remember that Nigeria is also a country where they make lots of lots of tires, and lots and lots of counterfeit pharmaceuticals. It’s a country where productivity is what’s placed in the fore, and not necessarily quality. They make auto parts that aren’t any good—you can use them in your car, but they don’t last very long. So I don’t really think it’s as wide-reaching. But what I find interesting about their cinema is that the people who are watching it, they see themselves, their daily lives reflected on the screen.

What attracts you to the medium?

It’s very complicated, because it’s true I’m not constantly seeing films. I love making films, but I don’t at all like the process of making films. Maybe one explanation is that I came to cinema accidentally, not out of passion and the desire to watch films. But when I went to formally study cinema I was overwhelmed. And I’m still overwhelmed by it.

Are there any other sources or media that you draw from?

I think the main source of my inspiration is human beings: my neighbor, my neighbor’s neighbor, the person I buy milk from—all of those people. These people who we call “anonymous,” people who we never really see doing anything. If I’m out and I see a statue of someone, and I look up at the statue, I never bother to look on the bottom to see who he was. I could be on the metro one day and cross paths with a woman who gave birth to 10 children, and nobody knows her. That’s an achievement too.

There are many different strands of story in Timbuktu, some of which intersect and others that exist entirely independently. How did you approach the editing process?

It’s true that the film doesn’t have a classic, linear narration. If you look at the different stories, there are different blocks, you can move them around, put them in different places. And for me, that’s what cinema is. In an hour and a half, you create a kind of harmony of communication. But I really enjoy the editing process. There are a lot of things that are involved in creation that I feel at that moment, in that editing moment. And film itself is a very fragile thing.

Do you plan it out before, or is it that as you see the images on a screen, you come to an understanding of how they fit together as a whole?

I plan a lot in advance. I work a lot in my head, which is why I have a lot of trouble working with a continuity person—their logic is totally different from mine.

What makes a compelling frame?

That’s a really good question, because I know the answer! For me, the framing of the shot is an invitation. What I’m doing in the frame is inviting the viewer to enter into it. So I don’t impose the scene on them by saying: “Here, look at this. You’re gonna look at this.” And that’s why there are very few wide shots.

You once said something to the effect that you would never apply the aesthetics of the city to the desert. How do you conceive of different spaces as you’re creating the film?

It’s funny, what I really try to do is destroy the beauty of a location. That’s why I don’t have lingering shots on the beauty of the countryside. It stays beautiful because it is beautiful—that’s just how it is. But I always come back to the person.

Six films by Nils Malmros will screen—with Malmros appearing in person—February 27 through March 1 as part of Film Comment Selects at the Film Society of Lincoln Center.

1.

Pain of Love

It’s surprising, given Nils Malmros’s deep, abiding interest in youthful rites of passage, that it took the Danish filmmaker until 1992 to structure a movie around an exam. “All right, Kirsten,” a high-school psychology teacher prompts his flighty, beautiful student during a pivotal examination scene in Pain of Love, the director’s sixth film: “Piaget’s theory of development. It has to do with some stages and phases.” She rattles off the stages in question, direct from her notes. “Tell us more,” he presses her, “about the second stage.” She can’t. “It’s all in the book,” she answers over-confidently. “The important thing is that we know where to find it.”

That young people often lack a vocabulary with which to talk about childhood and youth is one of the key assumptions behind Malmros’s early films, all of which deal with adolescent life in the bustling, affluent coastal city of Aarhus, Denmark. To be young, in these movies, is to be a mystery to others and a source of nearly equal bafflement to oneself. Growth spurts, tongue-tied early attempts at self-expression, random social demotions and promotions, acts of cruelty dealt out and received, unexpected surges of lust, pangs of unreciprocated romantic feeling and nervous abdications of romantic commitment: the experiences with which Malmros deals are, most often, the sorts of milestones a psychologist would assign to an early “stage or phase” in a theory of development.

Indeed, one of the most attractive—and, ultimately, deceptive—aspects of Malmros’s films is their apparent neutrality, their surgical steadiness of hand. Watching them can feel like recalling a particularly turbulent passage in your life from the lucid and serene remove of a later, mellower stage. By Malmros’s fifth feature Beauty and the Beast (83), however, a second, half-hidden voice was starting to speak up from under that paternal tone. This voice, more anxious and less assured than the one under which it’s been hiding, seethes quietly through Malmros’s films about adolescence. Cool-tempered, exquisite reminiscences of youth and its discontents, these movies are also, you start to feel, unsettlingly pained dispatches from middle age.

Beauty and the Beast

Beauty and the Beast is an atypical Malmros film: the only one of his first four mature features to take on the perspective of a grown man rather than that of one or more children. It’s a discomfiting, awkwardly revealing movie, its structure having seemingly been dictated by Malmros’s intense need to relieve himself of a psychological load. The “beauty” of the movie’s title is a 16-year-old woman living alone with her father, a writer. (Her mother, pregnant with the writer’s second child, is confined to a remote hospital bed for reasons never made clear.) There’s a strong, at times tense intimacy between Mette and her father: each comments frankly on the other’s physical appearance; he engages in casual relationship talk with her best friend; she walks around the house half-naked. When he looks at her, it’s with a mixture of fatherly protectiveness and visible, if unacknowledged, desire. Soon, she starts going out with a cocky, smooth-talking male model, and the father becomes obsessed—to the point of intruding on her rendezvous and eavesdropping on her calls—with preserving her virginity.

Much of Beauty and the Beast takes place in the father-daughter’s two-story house in suburban Aarhus, where the action plays out like a cramped, fitful dance: the two characters move up and down the stairs, sidle past each other in the hall, open doors on one another, listen in on one another’s speech through the walls. In what had already by then become one of his trademark devices, Malmros arranges his characters’ expressions of psychological unrest into compositions of impeccable order and eerie calm, like a personal essayist confessing some lurid youthful transgression in incongruously stately, measured prose.

That comparison is not accidental. Nearly all of Malmros’s films are derived from events in the director’s own life or the lives of people close to him. In many cases, including that of Beauty and the Beast, the forms of his finished films give the impression that the process of making them was something like therapy, a pretext for Malmros to confront some unacknowledged demon—in this case, his confused feelings for Line Arlien-Søborg, the young girl for whom he wrote the part of Mette after she appeared in his previous film, Tree of Knowledge (81)—or purge himself of a corrosive memory. It’s curious how Malmros’s intense confessional bent co-exists with his particular type of universalism: his way of treating Life in general as a more or less fixed series of stages and developments, each with its own attendant pleasures, dangers and fears.

2.

Aarhus at Night

Malmros was born in Aarhus on October 5, 1944, when Denmark was under Nazi occupation. His father was a famous neurosurgeon, and Malmros grew up intending to practice the family trade. At 17, when he was still living at home in Aarhus and studying medicine, he saw François Truffaut’s Jules and Jim and decided, with sudden resolve, to take up filmmaking. His first feature, A Strange Love (68), was shot on a 16mm camera borrowed from his father’s neurosurgical ward; what reviews it received were harsh dismissals. Malmros, who never attended film school (he funded his first two features by serving as a security guard on the hospital’s night ward), taught himself movie grammar in the field, and in A Strange Love, he later confessed, he’d failed to find a tone. “I felt I had to make a film that was deep and poetical,” he suggested in a recent interview. “I was not deep and I was not poetical, so the result was fake.”

In the three great features Malmros made between 1973 and 1981, you can see the director steeling himself against reaching for any grand poetic effects or falling into any self-conscious affectations of style. These are movies in which each scene moves at its own pace and within its own custom-set limits, sometimes blossoming into an epiphany or erupting into a crisis, but more often shuffling along inconclusively right up to an

arbitrary end. (The cuts in Malmros’s early movies are often jarringly curt, as if to suggest that the scene could have gone on for much longer, but had to end somewhere.) The films Malmros made at this stage in his career are marked by a steady input of humdrum details: the distinctions in size and opulence between different children’s houses; the personality of a stuffy (but essentially benign) composition teacher in contrast to that of a wizened, half-deaf exam administrator; the awkward, stop-start rhythm of an elementary-school waltz class or a middle-school dance; the way the windows of a young boy’s childhood home glow at him invitingly; the way that those of a campground social center glow threateningly at a put-upon teenage girl.

Lars Ole, 5C

The title character of Lars Ole, 5C (73) recurs under an altered name in the central role of Boys (77), and under a third variation in an important corner of the magisterial Tree of Knowledge (81), in which there’s no obvious central character. The first of those three movies is a ragged, black-and-white love story with a familiar setup: Lars pines for the adorable brunette Inger; his best friend John pines for the timid, freckled Hanse; Hanse pines over Lars. What’s immediately striking about Lars Ole, 5C is the total lack of condescension with which Malmros, who was 29 at the time of the movie’s release, films the nonprofessional middle-schoolers that comprise nearly all of the cast. When Lars gets to dance for a fleeting second with Inger during a polka in the movie’s waning minutes, the film lights up with him. It’s a genuine, if pointedly foreshortened, moment of triumph.

These early Malmros’s films are so casually—one might say invisibly—structured that they can seem as if they’re being made up as they go. Boys, with its clear three-age, three-act plot, is the most schematic of the three. In a cut 30 minutes into the film, young Ole—the movie’s hero—transforms from a timid 8-year-old into a handsome, immaculately groomed teen. Thirty minutes and one dashed relationship later, we find him again, this time as a cockily confident, sexually hungry young man pursuing a forbidden liaison at a girl’s nursing school dormitory.

It’s in his slightly overzealous drawing of links between these episodes that Malmros risks letting the movie devolve into a developmental study. The youth at the center of Boys discovers sex textbook-style, stage by stage: witness the marked correspondence between how 8-year-old Ole lingers outside his family’s house on a warm summer night, how his teenage self hovers below his ex-girlfriend’s window, and how, a few years later, we see him unsteadily climb past the lit windows of a nurses’ dormitory. When it arrives, the movie’s epilogue—a scene of Ole getting foiled from engaging in some pre-pubescent erotic horseplay with a boy his age—feels a little too emphatic, a punch line that draws attention to itself.

Boys

Where Boys improves thrillingly on Lars Ole, 5C is in the presence it gives its female characters. The women Ole pursues arguably make more of an impression than he does: Marianne, his first love, with her precociously wise, reflective temper and her air of shuffling between conflicting romantic desires; then Marethe, the nurse who directs him playfully through their curtailed one-night stand. Malmros’s style is, on the whole, too decorous and modest to handle any full-blooded sex (the love in his early movies is always unrequited), but he’s an expert at staging the shifty, dancelike navigations that lead up to a sexual encounter. The question Marethe asks Ole after he’s persuaded her to lay down next to him on her bed—“what now?”—is Malmros’s cue to disrupt the couple’s privacy; it’s as if she’s beckoning the movie down a path it’s not equipped to follow.

And it’s the women who take pride of place in Malmros’s masterpiece, Tree of Knowledge: a series of exquisitely staged, expansive vignettes that accumulate with quietly shattering force. (The movie, which takes place between 1953 and 1955, was shot over two years, during which time most of its cast either entered puberty or left it.) If there’s a figure around whom the movie revolves, it’s Elin (Eva Gram Schjoldager), a shy Jewish girl whose friends reject her after she grows visibly close to, then rebuffs the advances of, the handsome Helge (Marin Lysholm Jepsen). The film, however, often re-centers around the friends themselves—the group’s pretty, secretly insecure ringleader Anne-Mette (Line Arlien-Søborg) and her quieter, more pensive best friend Elsebeth (Marian Wendelbo)—or the boys in their orbit. Niels Ole (Jan Johansen) is in this second camp, pining familiarly over an older girl who returned his affections for a short, unsatisfying spell. It’s mesmerizing to watch Malmros guide some of the boys slowly out of the character types into which he’s written them: Willy (Brian Theibel), the class clown who, over the course of the film, takes on his own sort of poignant loneliness; or Gert (Anders Ørgaard), the heavyset boy who hovers longingly at the edges of the action and evolves into one of its few sources of reliable wisdom.

Such sympathy for the ways people navigate puberty is rare. There’s a surreal tinge to the dance scenes in Tree of Knowledge, with their frequent shots of tall, physically developed young women swaying to the beat of Fifties rock ’n’ roll with diminutive, prepubescent boys. But the way the characters on the edges of the action in these scenes engage with those in the center—glancing at them longingly, evasively, timidly—isn’t far from the way, say, the lonely, stoic heroes of many John Ford films shuffle around on the thresholds of those movies’ saloons or dancehalls, or the way the disappointed, middle-aged ex-lovers in Claire Denis’s 35 Shots of Rum gaze furtively back and forth at one another across the unbridgeable space of a bar’s makeshift dance floor. Standing in the glare of an atrium during their school’s Christmas party and watching their friends and rivals drift in pairs around the darkened, curtained-off private room one door away, these kids are, the movie suggests, getting a taste of adulthood.

Tree of Knowledge

The film’s title suggests that they’re getting a taste of something else: the “knowledge of good and evil” that will replace—or is taking—their innocence. But the process of acquiring experience, in the movie’s final picture, is more benign than that: a stream of practical challenges, unforeseen frustrations and new social demands. What do middle-schoolers talk about? How do they register the maturing of their friends’ bodies, and adapt to the changes in their own? How do they navigate space? How do they express or repress their desires? Here, as in the rest of his best early work, Malmros isn't so much describing adolescence as channeling its particular confusions through a cooler, decidedly adult voice.

3.

Sorrow and Joy

Near the end of Sorrow and Joy (13), Malmros’s painfully intimate, emotionally forthcoming latest film, Signe, asks her husband, middle-aged filmmaker Johannes, why he’s never made a movie about “learning to love”: “You made films about being hopelessly in love in intermediate school, and about hopeless love in high school—and a film about starting to make films and being hopelessly in love.” (She’s referring, in the last instance, to Aarhus at Night, Malmros’s 1989 comedy set during the shooting of a movie that bears a striking resemblance to Boys.) “You need to make the film about reaching adulthood,” Signe tells him. They’re just starting the day, she perched on the side of their bed in a robe, he still ensconced under the covers: a moment touched by a kind of gentle, serene eroticism rare in Malmros’s early movies. “I can’t make that film,” Johannes replies. “You know that.”

“That film” would, Johannes knows, have to tell the story of a tragedy with which, after 26 years, he’s still struggling to come to terms. Around the time of the release of Tree of Knowledge, Malmros and Marianne Tromholt, his girlfriend of several years, got married. The early months of the couple’s marriage were strained. Decades earlier, after suffering a mental breakdown in her teens, Marianne had been diagnosed as manic-depressive, and now, with a change of medication, she had started to relapse. (It must be said that a contributing factor was jealousy: at the time, Malmros was filming Beauty and the Beast, and Marianne quickly picked up on its thinly veiled suggestions of Malmros’s attraction to his beautiful teenage star.) In January 1984, Marianne was briefly hospitalized for mental illness. The next month, during an afternoon at home, she suffered a severe psychotic episode and killed the couple’s 9-month-old daughter.

After the tragedy, Malmros’s output slowed down markedly. His next film after Aarhus by Night was Pain of Love, a fiction inspired by his wife’s early life—specifically, the initial struggle with suicidal depression that led to her first institutionalization as a college-aged young woman. It took a full decade for Malmros to make another indirect reflection on his recent, traumatic past. Facing the Truth (02), which revolves around a character named and modeled after Malmros’s neurosurgeon father, proceeds mostly in flashback after the elderly man is embroiled in a medical ethics scandal over his choice 40 years ago to use a toxic X-ray substance on patients in life-or-death need. Both movies centrally involve male characters who fail to take care of the lives with which they’ve been entrusted, partly out of pride and partly out of sheer helplessness; their hands, in both cases, are eventually tied. (Kirsten’s partner in Pain of Love, her former high-school composition teacher, intellectually condescends to her in much the same way that Johannes condescends to Signe in Sorrow and Joy.)

Facing the Truth

The dramatic structures of Pain of Love and Facing the Truth are less thrillingly porous and open than those of Malmros’s early films. Where Boys and Tree of Knowledge luxuriated in individual scenes well past the point of dramatic necessity, these later works are briskly paced character studies with well-defined narrative arcs. Pain of Love proceeds in chronological sequence and ends, like Beauty and the Beast, with a moment that’s both decisive and inconclusive. Facing the Truth, like Sorrow and Joy, is a kind of emotional whodunit, each flashback giving a new or further clue to the source of the aging doctor’s guilt.

In their own way, these later films of Malmros manage to generate more tension than any of his previous movies (the extended surgery setpieces in Facing the Truth, the twinned exam scenes in Pain of Love). They both lavish space on their protagonists’ childhoods, but there was clearly something liberating for Malmros about working with mostly adult performers. In Pain of Love especially, he’s enraptured by the dramatic potential of grown-up conversation, its casually dropped digs, dancelike maneuverings, and veiled affronts.

The films’ shared visual style is another matter. Malmros briefly practiced as a surgeon during the period from which these films date, and it’s at this point in his career that his formal precision and simplicity risked turning into clinical blandness. There’s an almost stuffy professionalism to Pain of Love and Facing the Truth wholly absent from the self-taught director’s earlier films—a feature of these movies that’s oddly out of step with their strain of personal urgency, even desperation. (The character meant to stand in for Malmros in Facing The Truth is almost completely unindividuated, and the scenes that have him listening to his father’s story make dramatic sense only if you take them for what they are: conversations in which the filmmaker himself takes the listening role.) It’s precisely because these movies include many of Malmros’s most acute treatments of male-female relationships (in the case of Pain of Love) and some of his most bracing straight doses of procedural detail (in Facing the Truth) that their limitations—their stodgier mise en scène, their intrusive musical scores, and thir somewhat diminished sense of place—frustrate as much as they do.

Sorrow and Joy

Midway through Sorrow and Joy, Johannes warns his wife Signe not to take his films too literally; if they represent his own feelings, he tells her a bit condescendingly, it’s only in a “sublimated” form. But what makes Sorrow and Joy such a riveting, difficult film is precisely how little sublimation seems to have taken place in its making. The film Johannes is shooting is unambiguously Beauty and the Beast, just as the character’s previous film was clearly Tree of Knowledge. (Reviving a device he’d used decades before in Aarhus by Night, Malmros shows his alter-ego filming shot-for-shot recreations of both those movies, with look-alike actors chosen to replace the films’ original casts.)

Indeed, the events recounted in Sorrow and Joy follow the course of Malmros’s life in nearly every particular: his wife’s medical history; her mother’s absent-minded failure to keep an eye on her the day of the tragedy; her generous sentence to recuperative psychiatric care; the striking choice of the parents of her elementary-school pupils to invite her back to teach after her release; his ill-timed trip to Berlin shortly after the incident to promote Beauty and the Beast with that film’s young star. Like most savvy memoirists, Malmros takes great pains in Sorrow and Joy to turn himself into a character. And like many memoirists, he attacks that character’s weaknesses with ferocious precision: sometimes caring and sensitive, Johannes is also, at various points, tactless, proud, chiding, paternalistic, superior, domineering, and cruel. (Witness his derogatory remarks on seeing Signe’s apartment for the first time, or the way he quizzes her professorially on the book she brings to one of their first dates.)

There’s perhaps too little in Sorrow and Joy of the recklessness that enlivens many such memoirs—if only because Malmros is deeply concerned here with proving that the story he’s telling is one he has a right to tell. Marianne, as he has maintained in several interviews, sat him down in 2012 and gave him permission to film their story, but there’s something disconcerting about the way Malmros writes that speech conscientiously into the film, like a protective clause in a contract. The essential indiscretion of the memoir enterprise, one senses, doesn’t sit well with him; watching the film, you sometimes wish he wasn’t at such pains to tell his own story with such impeccable decorum and tact.

Pain of Love

For all the clarity of its emotional observations and all the luminous poise with which it’s shot, Sorrow and Joy is at its most effective whenever Malmros sets forces moving inside the film that risk shattering its composure. There are moments in the movie—indiscreet confessions or chilling outbursts of grief—that seem to erupt irrepressibly out of it: Signe’s almost unbearably precise account of what took place during her psychosis; a queasy moment on the set of Beauty and the Beast during which Johannes pressures his reluctant teenage actress Iben (Maja Dybboe) to disrobe for a key scene; a heartbreaking image late in the film of Johannes watching his daughter play for the last time. The film’s decorum, in moments like these, transforms into a kind of steely, iron resolve.

To Signe, “a film about reaching adulthood” would be, almost by definition, a film “about learning to love.” As they age, the heroes of Malmros’s later movies nearly always find that they have to divest themselves of the romantic appeal of unrequited love. Johannes’s attempts to suppress his evident attraction to Iben, Kirsten’s choice in Pain of Love to keep the baby with which she has been left after a painfully unsatisfying one-night stand, Rodger Malmros’s halfhearted concession to marry the levelheaded, easygoing girlfriend he doesn’t love in Facing the Truth—it’s a fundamental assumption of these movies that growing up means lowering one’s romantic expectations, or (in the case of Sorrow and Joy) coping with the need to share someone else’s pain.

If Malmros’s later movies sometimes feel excessively careful and restrained, it’s because they match their characters’ romantic compromises with formal compromises of their own: their stately, slightly stiff compositions; their focused, single-protagonist narratives; their hand-me-down flashback structures. There’s a sense in which Malmros’s earlier movies spoke in wiser, more developed voices than his films about adulthood. Less attuned to the difficulties and rewards of cohabitation, they were more attentive to the way a single action can branch out along unexpected trajectories and into unforeseen effects, more sensitive to the psychological motives of even their most distasteful characters, and more interested, oddly, in the dynamics of sexual power between people. One of the constants in Malmros’s body of work has been his view of life as a series of stages, and taken together, his movies come off as proof that, in the movement from one stage to the next, there’s a loss for every gain. 

Read a transcript here.

The late Russian director Aleksei German once declared: “I am not interested in anything but the possibility of building a world, an entire civilization from scratch.” He achieved his ambition in his final film, albeit posthumously. German had dreamed of adapting the Strugatsky Brothers’ novel Hard to Be a God since its publication in 1964, at the very start of his directing career; he finally embarked on a six-year shoot in 2000, but died in February 2013 before his film was completed. The project was brought to term by his wife and co-writer Svetlana Karmalita and their son Aleksei German Jr., himself a director of note. But Hard to Be a God was already nearly finished when German died and is, by all accounts, substantially as he intended it. If you’ve seen any of his small but extraordinary oeuvre, which includes My Friend Ivan Lapshin (84) and Khrustalyov, My Car! (98), you’ll immediately recognize in Hard to Be a God the signature of one of cinema’s great stylists and visionaries. I use the latter word without exaggeration: although Hard to Be a God is itself a case of cinematic exaggeration, an extreme case of visionary film, and as much a delirium as a movie in any customary sense.

Based on the book by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, whose Roadside Picnic was the basis for Tarkovsky’s Stalker, Hard to Be a God is a bleak medieval fantasia, although ostensibly it’s science fiction, since it takes place on another planet. Here’s a sketch of the plot, which you may find useful, as you’ll be hard pressed to gather this much from watching the film (I had to look to the novel for clarification, and well worth reading it is too). The setting is the city of Arkanar, on a humanoid-inhabited planet where life resembles Europe’s Middle Ages. Existence there is brutal, messy, and grim: the rain-battered streets are covered in mud, as is just about every available surface, including many inhabitants’ faces; the place is governed by a brutal slob named Don Reba (Aleksandr Chutko); and the streets are thronged with soldiers, thugs, peasantry, and assorted grimacing idiots in various stages of disfigurement and/or derangement. Arkanar is currently in the grip of a campaign to suppress art, culture, and knowledge of any kind, and is patrolled by militia known as the Greys—about to be succeeded by an even more brutal monastic warrior order, the Blacks.

At the center of this world is an outsider: an observer from Earth (Leonid Yarmolnik), operating in the guise of Don Rumata, an aristocratic swordfighter. His mission, supposedly, is to help this benighted planet develop a humane civilization, but he is sworn to a policy of non-intervention. To this end (as far as I could gather from the book), he hopes to rescue an imprisoned physician, Dr. Budakh (Evgeny Gerchakov). Rumata is seen by some around him—and, to a large degree, by himself—as a quasi-god. He tries to adhere to Earth principles and to maintain the rudiments of civilization: in this world of endemic slobbery, he prides himself on washing and on wearing clean, white linen. But he’s being transformed by the inhumanity that surrounds him. He’s never killed a man, not in 186 duels—but he has cut off 372 ears.

In the Strugatskys’ book, Rumata is a dandyish thinker, an idealist lapsing into cynicism but always ready for a Dostoevskian debate on human values and the futility or otherwise of combating evil. In the film, the notion that he is a paragon of sophistication is undermined from the start when he wakes and peers over a table cluttered with the debris of the previous night’s banquet: framed from the neck up, he looks about as urbane as a suckling pig.

Whatever narrative there is in German’s film has been engulfed by the density of the macabre, bustling pageant fills the screen. German has indeed created a whole world—along with DPs Vladimir Ilyin and Yuri Klimenko, and production designers Sergei Kolovkin, Giorgy Kropachev and Elena Zhukova—and it’s an altogether grotesque, unholy one. One of the first things we see in the film is a bare arse framed in the window of a latrine; later, a joker frames his face with a soiled toilet seat and declares it a painting. That’s the kind of scatological painting we’re dealing with overall in this film, although on a more spectacular scale. The film is in black and white—mercifully, as it’s awash with bodily fluids of every sort—and the absence of color means that whenever we see sludge of a certain consistency, we don’t know whether it’s mud, feces, food, or a mixture of the lot. The hordes of actors are forever trudging over, or slipping face first onto, surfaces coated with mud; it’s a safe bet that German briskly dispensed with all but the most basic health and safety measures on set.

In exteriors and interiors alike, the frame is always crammed—with people, detail, sometimes impenetrable chiaroscuro. The people—thousands, it seems—are straight out of Bruegel and Bosch; the grotesques of the latter’s Christ Carrying the Cross were surely the prime reference for the film’s casting, although German has arguably gone further still in seeking out extremes of physiognomy. German rarely deigns to clear a space to make the action more transparent, or just let us breathe: the action is a constant parade of militia toting halberds and spears, of passersby stopping to gaze quizzically at the camera, of gaping toothless mouths. At the start, a translucent circle on screen seems to denote Rumata’s POV: although the film never states this directly, the crystal he wears on his forehead is a camera, beaming what he sees to Earth. But later, when people gawk at the camera or confide the odd aside to it, it’s apparently just to break the fourth wall. Incidentally, German loves breaking walls of all kinds: at one point, a pile of wood crashes to reveal a whole landscape behind it, with the mandatory simpleton squinting straight at us.

The film’s world is familiar, up to a point, resembling certain instances of screen medievalism, but bleaker and crazier: from Russian cinema, echoes of Andrei Rublev and the Elsinore of Kozintsev’s Hamlet, while the muckiness and Grand Guignol knockabout put you in mind of Terry Gilliam’s Jabberwocky. Shot both in Lenfilm’s studios, and on location in the Czech Republic, the film is a marvel of production design, from the opening shot of a castle under snow—a truly Bruegel-esque winterscape, and one of the rare moments that could be described as beautiful in the proper sense. With its galleries and walkways, and labyrinthine interior and exterior architecture, the design is on a level of Gothic monumentalism right out of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy. There are exterior scenes of arresting grandeur—the camera passes through a window to reveal a vast army of helmeted soldiers stationed in the night—and interiors of terrifying enclosure, endless prison corridors, cluttered castle chambers that seem to shift and fold in on themselves before we can get any purchase on their topography.

The camera is forever negotiating crowded rooms as if desperately looking for a space to breath, or moving unpredictably, without obvious regard for the action: in one shot, a horse gallops away dragging a man behind it, before the camera suddenly veers off and up to the side, as if in search of something more interesting to look at. There are mad shifts of perspective: an extended shot exploring Arkanar’s streets starts from a close-up of a donkey’s penis. Another shot scans the faces of corpses on a gibbet, then shifts to reveal a rural landscape stretching into the distance. We’re just taking stock of this newly revealed space when an off-screen hand starts pouring some kind of liquid right in the foreground: the use of deep focus in such shots is almost parodically extreme. An additional disorientation comes from the eerie use of post-synched dialogue, that makes it seem as if we’re watching not a new film but one at least decades old: Yarmolnik’s sardonic basso dryly, imperturbably comments on events as if from a great distance, even from another planet.

We get to explore an entire world here, down to every dark corner—and it’s a remarkably claustrophobic one. In Khrustalyov, My Car!, set in Stalin’s USSR, the corridors of crowded communal apartments became barely navigable labyrinths in which the camera’s movement and our line of sight were constantly impeded by people dashing into view, or thrusting kettles, brooms and other objects into the lens. That same principle applies here: geese, tortoises, goats, ducks, a monkey, a hedgehog, a swarm of flies all add to the already formidable human confusion. Throughout, things dangle into every available space: hanging ropes, chains, foliage, a dead fox, even a bull, or just unidentifiable fluid dripping into shot. Everything hangs down, in what is perhaps a very concrete illustration of the theme of the Fall. Few films—certainly none set in space—ever made such a prominent structuring principle out of gravity.

Then there’s the bloodletting, culminating in universal carnage. It’s hard to say exactly why this or that character gets killed, but many do, abruptly and horrifically: a colonel gets whacked in the head with some sort of spike; Rumata stabs someone with the horns on his samurai-style helmet, and blood gushes fountainously into his face; elsewhere, German makes extravagant use of cascading entrails and freshly gouged eyeballs. Yet there’s a strangely detached, cavalier aspect to the film’s violence: a key character gallops off screen, and in the next shot, he’s lying dead on a heap of festering rubbish, body spiked with arrows (to add to the exquisite bleakness, the film’s intermittent voiceover notes matter-of-factly that rotten turnips would later be dumped on him).

In many ways, the film defiantly refuses to make sense, outside a certain language of flamboyant gesturality and mood-swing volatility: here characters are forever slapping themselves on the head, stopping to smear gunk on each other’s faces, or pulling hideous grimaces and putting on strange voices, for no apparent reason other than that such are the uncontainable energies of the world they inhabit.

Hard to Be a God does aspire, in its way, to be a divine venture: German has taken on the task, like a mad deity, of creating an autonomous universe of uncontainable energy and extremity. This is truly Promethean filmmaking of a kind that seems of late to have become a peculiarly Russian phenomenon. Much rumor, for example, surrounds another vast long-gestating project which may one day conceivably be completed, Ilya Khrzhanovsky’s Dau, for which the director created not so much a set as an entire citadel.

Then there’s Alexander Zeldovich’s regrettably overlooked Target (11), a dystopian imagining of a near-future oligarchs’ Russia. This may all be coincidence rather than an actual trend, and there may not be much specifically Russian about this attraction to visionary gigantism. Then again, look at the heft of the nation’s novels in the last two centuries—and if German’s new film echoes any pre-20th-century novel, it’s surely Dead Souls, Gogol’s abortive panorama of the human condition, with its mix of cartoonish farce, metaphysics and grubby realism.

I’m reluctant to speculate on Hard to Be a God referring to any contemporary real-world subject, or indeed to anything other than German’s general view of the human condition. Then again, his previous films depict very specific moments in Russia’s 20th century. In a contemporary Russian context, the film could well be read as a cry of despair, lamenting the impossibility of ever rising out of a centuries-old state of brutality and confusion. That would make it a reversal of the Strugatsky novel’s belief in the drive towards enlightenment, born out of a Khrushchev-era desire to rise above the depredations of the Stalin years. There’s little left of divinity or super-humanity in German’s film: “It’s hard to be a god,” sighs Rumata, to which another character reacts by ramming a finger up the speaker’s nostril. But the film does end, as it began, on a note of melancholy beauty, as Rumata makes his escape from Arkanar’s carnage, riding across a snowy landscape and blowing a distinctly jazzy melody on his horn (with a nice anachronistic tone of Albert Ayler). But the beauty is undercut too: “Do you like this music?” comments a passing girl. “It makes my tummy hurt.”

Hard to Be a God is such a singular anomaly that it’s tempting to suspend any value judgment. I felt as much overwhelmed, oppressed, exhausted by it as bewitched, and I wonder how many viewers its genuinely hermetic brilliance will connect with. But to consider it a failed experiment, or a quixotic folly, would be meaningless because the film works on terms that are entirely its own: if it resembles anything at all, it’s the uncategorizable, uncanny extraterrestrial artifacts left behind on Earth by the alien visitors in the Strugatskys’ Roadside Picnic. Or I’d compare it to the later “novels” (if such they are) of Céline, unstemmable cascades of malediction and polemic that set their own terms of engagement with such belligerent force that it makes no sense at all to compare them to the novel in any of its known incarnations. As much as any film can just be, German’s film just is, and has to be marveled at—or rejected—on its own terms. Boil it down, though, and it can be seen to carry one simple message: it may be hard to be a god, but it’s hell to be human.

Abderrahmane Sissako’s Timbuktu is bracingly original and unexpected—a welcome shock to the system for American moviegoers who’ve grown used to seeing prosaic melodrama in topical or torn-from-the-headline movies. This fearless poetic response to the jihadist occupation of the title city and its imposition of Sharia law unfolds in charged tableaux and conveys the wreckage of a civilization lyrically and potently, in 95 spare, suggestive minutes. What a relief to see a fact-inspired, imaginative work that doesn’t start with the words “Based on a true story.” Still, it might help situate viewers to know that the militant Islamist group Ansar Dine dominated Timbuktu and other towns in northern Mali (in West Africa) for most of 2012, before French and Malian forces drove them out.

Sissako, who was raised in Mauritania and Mali and co-wrote the film with Kessen Tall, sets a unique tone of otherworldly dread in the opening shot of a gazelle racing away from a pickup truck filled with rifle-toting extremists. In Sissako’s vision, the jihadists’ attempt to lay down the (Sharia) law is more successful at annihilating everything organic than it is at re-establishing an antique and absolute morality.

Part of Sissako’s strategy is to thrust viewers into a roiling yet slow-moving and mysterious maelstrom. In the first few minutes, jihadist bullets tear up tribal masks and West African statues that could be pagan gods or outlawed art. Sissako proves his visual mastery immediately: one sculpture falls backward as if executed, while another issues gun-smoke from its mouth, as if taking a hellish last gasp.

Then we see jihadists hand a pale, bespectacled man to another group of armed guards, taking care to get his medications just right because one has been refilled with a generic drug. Is the man a hostage, or, perhaps, a rival group’s negotiator? We never find out. But the scene is oddly indelible because of its casualness: the guards remove his blindfold, inspect his meds, hand him a drink (with a low-key “cheers”), then restore his blindfold and seat him in another Toyota pickup. It’s a gently ominous introduction to this film’s vision of jihadist hegemony.

Rather than tell a story, Sissako maps out an oppressed region with a disturbing emotional topography. The ancient city, with its narrow sand streets and modest sandstone or adobe-brick buildings, is a physical and political maze. Jihadists harass anyone outside by day, ordering women to wear socks and gloves and men to roll up their pants (presumably to pay homage to the Prophet Mohammed). They forbid citizens to hang out or “do just about anything,” as one bored town crier puts it. They argue fervidly about their favorite soccer teams while forbidding soccer. In one chilling moment, a soccer ball bumps down a set of stairs, and the young man who follows seconds later is immediately accused of the lash-worthy sin of illegal play. In its own matter-of-fact way, it’s as powerful as the murdered girl’s bouncing ball in Fritz Lang’s M.

In brilliant moments of mute protest and irony, an old man strips to his shorts after vainly trying to get his loose, flowing pants to stay put, and an old woman gingerly walks barefoot, without gloves or veil, in an empty street, in glorious cerulean finery. In the nighttime, patrols armed with guns and flashlights spy on rooftops and alleyways, tuning their ears to pick up any sound of music. They report by cell phone to the town’s Jihadist Central—three dour, sleepy-looking men in a Spartan room, armed with weapons and a Koran—when they overhear one household singing songs of praise to the Prophet.

What keeps the movie from becoming static is Sissako’s modulation of the atmosphere, from volatile and anarchic to monolithically intense and bleak. Early on, a brave female fishmonger who says she can’t wear gloves and sell fish dares the morality cops to cut off her hands. They back away. The city’s resident loon imperiously parades around with her beribboned hair exposed. Wearing a multicolored gown complete with a crazy-long flowing train, she casually calls jihadists “assholes” and stops one of their transports simply by holding her arms aloft. Later, a gorgeous young woman croons a pulsating song, supported by a roomful of friends and musicians. She, though, doesn’t escape punishment. In one of the movie’s many exalting leaps into transcendent feeling, she suddenly elevates her cries of agony under the lash into a lacerating aria. She sings to bear the pain and to prove she’s still alive.

In a printed director’s statement, Sissako has said that what triggered this movie was an incident that took place in Aguelhok, another northern Mali town that fell into the hands of Ansar Dine: “It was the 2012 death by stoning . . . of a man and a woman who had loved each other and had children, and whose only crime was that they had never been married in the eyes of God.” His deliberately abrupt insertion of a similar scene into Timbuktu focuses on a man and a woman responding with stoic resignation to being planted in the sandy execution grounds up to their necks. This premature burial is the obscene prelude to lethal stones raining down on their heads.

Timbuktu makes you understand how clashes that fizzle out in normal times turn calamitous under an inhumane regime. In the desert not far from the city, a goat and cattle herder named Kidane (Ibhrahim Ahmed dit Pino), his wife, Satima (Toulou Kiki), his daughter, Toya (Laula Walet Mohamed) and an orphan boy, Issan (Mehdi Ag Mohamed), who tends their cattle, live a traditional pastoral life, though most of their neighbors have fled. Apart from Satima, who misses her female friends, they go on as before. Kidane even plays his guitar, since there’s no one around to report him.

Sissako basks in the family’s warmth, without romanticizing their patriarchal unit. Kidane exudes domestic love and masculine complacency. He’s a touching protagonist, with emotions close to the surface; Satima seems more distant and impassive. But she’s the one who understands the dangers surrounding them. A rangy, fidgety jihadist named Abdelkrim (Abel Jafri) has his eye on her. Abdelkrim provides the movie’s fullest portrait of jihadist arrogance and hypocrisy. He orders Satima to veil her head while looking at her lasciviously. He smokes, he thinks, in secret, and is amazed that his driver says everybody knows about it. Just to blow off steam, he picks up his automatic rifle and shoots the top off a fragile mound of desert greenery.

The family’s downfall comes from a longstanding feud with a nearby fisherman. This man carries himself like a knife-blade and gleams with hatred whenever Issan allows Kidane’s cattle to veer too close to his precious nets. When Kidane prepares to confront him over the meandering of a favorite, pregnant cow into his nets, Satima urges her husband—in vain—to leave his gun in the tent. When Kidane says that “the humiliation must stop,” you know that he’s responding to pressures that go beyond water rights or the fate of a beloved animal. Kidane’s reactive anger and aggrieved honor, which put at risk his beloved wife and the daughter who’s the apple of his eye, anchor the film emotionally. He grows in stature as he clings to his love for them. Sissako views Kidane’s tragedy as one of many. Multiple anecdotes about town-dwellers prove just as desolating, like a forced marriage between a modest, beautiful Timbuktu girl and a haughty radical invader.

It’s Sissako’s collaboration with cinematographer Sofian El Fani (Blue Is the Warmest Color) that lifts and shrivels your heart at the same time. Fierce, poignant imagery abounds. In a panoramic wide shot, the moviemakers depict the aftermath of a murder in a shallow river, the killer splashing back in a straight line to the far shore, aghast at his own action, and the victim lying still before making one last, desperate stab at life. The filmmakers shoot with intimate closeups a man breaking into an impromptu, tai chi­–like ballet of longing and, perhaps, expiation (he bows his head and plunges his fingers into sand). And in one of the most astonishing sequences of this century, the camera elegantly partners teams of football players who play a soccer match without the ball. It’s a defiant dance of life performed with surpassing grace in a violated desert landscape, as jihadists on motorbikes buzz the playing field like Death’s emissaries in Cocteau’s Orpheus. The scene is a triumph of imagination for these characters and for the filmmakers. It makes you both impossibly happy and devastatingly sad.

My major quibble with the movie pales before its poetry. But I wish Sissako had found some artful way of incorporating more history into his visual mosaic. Only by reading Yaroslav Trofimov’s Faith at War: A Journey on the Frontlines of Islam, from Baghdad to Timbuktu, did I learn that a 2004 Freedom House report ranked Mali as one of two totally “free” countries out of 47 Muslim-majority states. According to Trofimov, Mali in general and Timbuktu in particular nurtured religious tolerance and secular democracy. When Trofimov visited Timbuktu a decade ago, during statewide elections, the city even had a feminist candidate for mayor. Mali’s president, Amadou Toumani Touré, told him: “The state never enmeshed itself with the affairs of religion, and that’s what allowed us to have a stable and peaceful country. We see nothing in our religion that’s against democracy. It wouldn’t even come to a Malian’s mind to think that there is a contradiction.”

In this context, Timbuktu takes on an apocalyptic impact. It chronicles a kind of barbarism that rends the very fabric of historical reality.

I’m not late; everyone else was early. And what’s a “year,” anyhow? As we deal with it in end-of-year list-making, it’s the domestic release calendar, a construct imposed by distributors and exhibitors, a business/PR cycle (awards-season boom, January bust, endless summer) that runs through the same annual revolutions. What if, instead of trying to rank the best movies released from January 1 to December 31, we stood in unified dissent against the tyranny of the cycle, and made up our own year instead, looking at the movies released between June 1 of the current year and June 1 of the previous year, for example? Or if we just took advantage of the start of a New Year to talk about what happened in 1928 instead?

Fall of the House of Usher

At the very least, I’m going to take my sweet time, and while the cream of criticism have been in Park City, Utah, marveling at the veritable Ali Baba’s Cave of indie gems which we’ll see through 2015, I’ve been scraping up the lees of the year that was. Looking at a list of every feature film which had a weeklong theatrical run in New York City in 2014, I find that I have seen approximately 100 of the titles listed, the total number of which must run in excess of 2,000. Adding to this films seen at festivals, both those which have since had or will have a theatrical run and those which are doomed never to find a distributor, the number of 2014 titles that I saw climbs to something like 175. I will also admit to having taken thin-slice samples of several well-loved movies, which will remain nameless, before giving them up as lost causes. As Ernest Hemingway once wrote: “I do not have to eat an entire bowl of scabs to know they are scabs.”

Based on these numbers, the men and women who manage “the biz” would find me a model citizen, if I were a civilian, but I write about film vocationally, and among my professional brethren, my numbers are probably pretty lousy. (This goes doubly for what I earned in 2014.) In my defense I will say that the 175 movies, give or take, constitute around one quarter of my overall viewing. And given that the movies theatrically distributed in 2014 make up a tiny fraction of those that have been distributed in the century previous, new movies are still disproportionately well-represented in my viewing habits. 

What follows is a list of movies that played commercially in 2014 which I saw and, at this late date, feel have contributed something to my life, either moments of pleasure (expected, unexpected) or things that are interesting or troubling to think about. I prefer this criterion to filling an arbitrary number of slots—a Top 5 or Top 10 or Top 20, say—which can either force the elevation of undeserving material or, conversely, be limiting. Look at 1946, for God’s sake! There were, that I know of, not 10 wholly good films released in 1946. Look at 1971! Every single movie released in 1971 is a masterpiece, or near-masterpiece.* I’ve arranged my list alphabetically rather than trying to qualitatively rank the movies on it. This is because ranking (or being given a numerical limit) tends to activate certain prejudices with regards to what constitutes importance, resulting in low movies (comedy, genre fare) being bumped in deference to movies whose seriousness—in subject matter and in approach—is more self-evident. Given that these middle-range movies, as much as the visionary or sui generis films, are essential to the continuing enjoyment that I take in the medium, I’d prefer not to make it a matter of either/or. There are many different categories of value in movies, and where possible, I prefer not to rate one over another. I suppose I could develop a bracket system, like Richard Brody, or something like Dan Sallitt’s elaborate color-coding system, whose mysteries scholars have struggled to unravel for years, but simplicity seems to me best, and so Dumb and Dumber To will stand on equal footing with Stray Dogs, which is as it ought to be. So after all of that ado, let there be no further ado:

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Abuse of Weakness (Catherine Breillat)

Actress (Robert Greene)

Alan Partridge (Declan Lowney)

American Sniper (Clint Eastwood)

Art and Craft (Sam Cullman, Jennifer Grausman, and Mark Becker)

Boyhood (Richard Linklater)

Dumb and Dumber To (Bobby and Peter Farrelly)

The Expendables 3 (Patrick Hughes)

Fury (David Ayer)

The Grand Budapest Hotel (Wes Anderson)

The Guest (Adam Wingard)

Hellaware (Michael Bilandic)

The Homesman (Tommy Lee Jones)

The Immigrant (James Gray)

It Felt Like Love (Eliza Hittman)

Level Five (Chris Marker, 1997)

Listen Up Philip (Alex Ross Perry)

Manakamana (Stephanie Spray and Pacho Velez)

Muppets Most Wanted (James Bobin)

National Gallery (Frederick Wiseman)

Non-Stop (Jaume Collet-Serra)

Only Lovers Left Alive (Jim Jarmusch)

The Overnighters (Jesse Moss)

Pompeii (Paul W.S. Anderson)

Soft in the Head (Nathan Silver)

Stations of the Elevated (Manfred Kirchheimer, 1981)

Step Up: All In (Trish Sie)

Stray Dogs (Tsai Ming-Liang)

Venus in Fur (Roman Polanski)

Winter Sleep (Nuri Bilge Ceylan)

There are a handful of outliers here, which is to say movies that I have not seen appear with much frequency on other lists. Alan Partridge is here because, ever since a friend in Oakland played me a bootleg VHS of Knowing Me Knowing You with Alan Partridge in 2001, Steve Coogan’s chat show host turned Norwich DJ has given me more consistent horse-laughs than any other single character in whatever medium. I held no such fondness for Expendables franchise, the first two films of which ranged from mediocre to god-awful, though the third (and presumably final) movie has a humdinger of a grand finale, and comeback parts for both the immortal Wesley Snipes and Racist Ass Mellie Gibson. It, along with Fury, Non-Stop, Pompeii, Step Up: All In, and The Guest, make up my “underrated genre exercise” column. I would not describe any of them as “batshit,” believe all of them are good and true movies, and am aggressively humorless on this point. The last-named might make a helluva double-bill with American Sniper, while Abuse of Weakness and Venus in Fur also pair nicely, two brash and unapologetic studies in power dynamics for a duet, the latter of which, with its audition premise, outstrips Alain Resnais’s final meditation on life and theater, and is altogether a more authoritative artistic statement than the other movie made this year by a surviving New Waver. And since we’re talking about power dynamics: I beg the observer to note that I have, according to my custom, overrated movies by New York City­­–based independent filmmakers who I know personally, and who have at one point or another flattered my boundless ego.

I’ll supplement the above list with features of merit that I saw on the festival circuit in 2014 which, as of the year’s end, hadn’t been theatrically released, because they were an essential part—maybe the essential part—of how I experienced the year in movies. These include: The Airstrip—Decampment of Modernism, Part III (Heinz Emigholz), Amour Fou (Jessica Hausner), Buzzard (Joel Potrykus), The Clouds of Sils Maria (Olivier Assayas), Eden (Mia Hansen-Løve), Hard to Be a God (Aleksei German), Heaven Knows What (Josh and Benny Safdie), Horse Money (Pedro Costa), Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter (David and Nathan Zellner), Letters to Max (Eric Baudelaire), Living Stars (Gastón Duprat and Mariano Cohn), The Mend (John Magary), Ne me quitte pas (Sabine Lubbe Bakker and Niels van Koevorden), Our Terrible Country (Mohammad Ali Atassi), Pasolini (Abel Ferrara), La Sapienza (Eugène Green), Timbuktu (Abderrahmane Sissako), Welcome to New York (Abel Ferrara), and Wild Canaries (“Lawrence” Michael Levine).

In particular, certain moments of Timbuktu, released in New York this week, have been ricocheting around my mind since I saw it last fall—and not only “in light of recent events,” to use perhaps my least-favorite arts journo cliché this side of “as relevant now as ever,” as though eternals such as, in this instance, human brutality and stupidity, had some sell-by date. (A line from Horse Money which has also been echoing in my headspace—“We’ll keep falling from the third floor”—explicitly addresses the matter of fucked-ness as a perennial.) Similarly “timely” is Our Terrible Country, which follows dissident writer Yassin al-Haj Saleh fleeing his native Syria’s frying-pan-to-fire situation, as the despotic reign of President Bashar al-Assad gradually gives way to new bosses in the Islamic State—rarely have I seen a movie better capture the poignant stench of curdled political hope. This is not to say that proximity to outrage is any kind of criterion for inclusion on this annex list. The nearest claim that Wild Canaries has to relevance is as a blackly comic commentary on the New York City real-estate market, though really it’s all a pretext for zippy, irascible line readings and some good bits involving a neck brace. Along with Buzzard, which does nice work with Cheetos and a treadmill, it gave me hope that the art of the sight gag is not entirely extinct. (Wild Canaries opens in New York at the end of February, Buzzard in early March.)

Last and certainly not least: short subjects, too little acknowledged in this sort of reckoning. I find that a good short can provide me every bit as much intellectual and aesthetic stimuli as a feature, with the added advantage of not wasting nearly so much of my time, which there are so many other ways to squander.** Given that there isn’t really such a thing as a proper “release date” for shorts, I’ve included works dated to 2013 and ’14, using the criterion of “it’s new if it was new to me.”

brouillard - passage #14 (Alexandre Larose)

Buffalo Juggalos (Scott Cummings)

Cool as Ice 2 (Mayer\Leyva)

Crème 21 (Eve Heller)

Cutaway (Kazik Radwanski)

Ennui, Ennui and Taprobana [above] (Gabriel Abrantes)

Hector.LA (Nick Corirossi)

Modlitwa (A Prayer) [above], Wieczór (An Evening) and Dalsza Modlitwa (Another Prayer) (Sofia Bohdanowicz)

The New-Ark (Amiri Baraka, 1968)

Off-White Tulips (Aykan Safoğlu)

Panchromes I, II, III (T. Marie)

Person to Person (Dustin Guy Defa)

Relief (Calum Walter)

Silk Tatters (Gina Telaroli)

Swimming in Your Skin Again (Terence Nance)

Two Museums (Heinz Emigholz)  

The titles I’ve listed aren’t necessarily those of films that I embrace unconditionally, but whatever issues I do have with them are ones that I care to tangle with, because my basic response to these movies was strong enough to make the effort seem worthwhile. (There are also among them maybe a half dozen titles that flat-out touch the superlative which I throw my hands up before. I am of course referring to Muppets Most Wanted.) Broadly speaking, the films that I’ve named here are those which set out to do a thing, succeed for the most part in doing either that thing or something else, and—here the illusion of objectivity falls away, as it necessarily must—elect to do something that I happen to believe is worth doing in the first place. In the case of, say, Stray Dogs, American Sniper, Horse Money, or Hard to Be a God, to cite four movies being grouped for the first and probably last time, the achievement feels epochal, vast, at times even oppressive, like a summation of the work that came before. In the case of the shorts, the achievement might be that of the feuilletonist, the ambition anecdotal, but the satisfaction of seeing the right material matched to the right vessel is in both cases the same. (I have not seen Ignatiy Vishnevetsky’s Ellie Lumme, but have nothing but #respect for its spectacularly awkward 42-minute runtime.) The 25-minute Cool as Ice 2 has Vanilla Ice narrating his experience as the last survivor of an exploded earth (“there was no warmth but the stale light of the stars”); Person to Person is 18 minutes of a dude telling some other dudes about trying to shoo away a hungover girl who passed out at a party at his apartment. These are works that precisely establish their parameters, and work beautifully within them.

Missing are the films that I failed entirely to see (the vast majority of them)*** because of apathy, indifference, or some degree of inborn antipathy, or those films which I did see and, while watching them, experienced apathy, indifference, or some degree of active antipathy. There are also a handful of movies which, however much I may have admired some individual component parts, looked just plain wrong when I tried to wedge them into a Best of the Year list. I am as strident a Clint Eastwood apologist as anyone living today, but even I have to cop to the detractor’s claim that it’s glaringly obvious when Clintus is disinterested in some part of the property he’s handling—and when, as in Four Seasons musical Jersey Boys, that “part” is the group’s front man, Frankie Valli, mounting a full-throated defense becomes a tricky proposition. (I gave it a shot anyways.) Selma certainly would’ve been a contender without dreadful, derailing work by Tom Wilkinson and Tim Roth, though I don’t think even editing Joanna Newsom out of Inherent Vice (or giving her narration to, say, Barbara Luddy or Bea Benaderet, both late of Los Angeles) would be enough to help me surmount my basic antipathy to Paul Thomas Anderson’s ongoing history of Southern California through juxtaposed comic-book iconography. (Albert Serra, winner of the Festival Circuit Manqué of the Year Award, takes a similar face-off approach to Romanticism and Rationalism in his Story of My Death, overlong yet decidedly puny next to Jessica Hausner’s Amour Fou or Eugène Green’s La Sapienza, which explore some of the same philosophical-historical territory through radically different means.) In other comic-book news, I unreservedly adored the first hour-and-a-half of Captain America: The Winter Soldier, though I cannot at this late date distinguish its last act from that of Guardians of the Galaxy in my mind—something to do with planetoid-sized airships exploding, I think?

The words of the Louvin Brothers—“Others find pleasure in things I despise”—proved as true as ever in 2014. The burgeoning cult of John Wick is clearly an attempt to gaslight me by critical culture at large, and I will not succumb to madness. The likes of Wick, Snowpiercer, and neo-erotic thriller Gone Girl constitute a mini-revival of attitudes and aesthetics that belong in a time capsule marked “1997” and I must stoically endure them as I now endure hearing Blues Traveler’s “Run-Around” and tracks from Offspring’s Americana album in public spaces. One generation’s FM radio traumas are another’s no-strings-attached pleasure, a fact of which I was rudely reminded upon seeing a band I admire covering Sugar Ray’s “When It’s Over.”

The band in question are the Tweens, and their self-titled album is one of a handful that I listened to multiple times in 2014. Also on this list: Freddie Gibbs + Madlib, Piñata; Pure X, Angel; Migos, No Label II and Rich Nigga Timeline; Afghan Whigs, Do to the Beast; Run the Jewels, Run the Jewels 2; Iceage, Plowing Into the Field of Love; Chief Keef Back from the Dead 2; Jerome LOL, Deleted/Fool EP. Honors for the most meaningless thing that I saw in 2014 go to Meredith Graves of the zero-zilch-nada band Perfect Pussy performing a “timely” cover of The Strokes’ “New York City Cops” at the VICE Media 20th anniversary party shortly after a grand jury decided not to indict officer Daniel Pantaleo in the death of Eric Garner, the identifiable low-point of a year in “brave status update” culture. It was totally as relevant now as ever.

To round things out, the best television of 2014 was seasons 1 to 5 of Cheers, which I watched on Netflix. The more flapdoodle that I hear about TV’s Golden Age, the more convinced I am that the sitcom is the medium’s highest attainment, playing to its strengths (long-term character development, conveyance of shtick unreliant on visual grace), and conveying a humane, relatably Sisyphean view of the world, rather than cliffhanger teases and dreamlife fantasies of power. (The even plane of the sitcom makes its moments of drama stand out in high relief: the Sam and Diane breakup at the end of Season 2 is practically Strindberg.) Otherwise, television continued in its role as kindling to fuel “the conversation,” an idiotic babel inimical in every possible way to art. “Everything’s a stupid social issue,” as Mathieu Amalric’s director character raves in Venus in Fur not long before receiving his well-deserved comeuppance—a fate which I dearly hope is due to me as 2015 rolls along.

* Only very slight exaggeration.

** I have, by way of Netflix, recently discovered the worst program of all time—the 2012 History Channel miniseries The Men Who Built America, a work of shameless oligarch worship in which present-day titans of industry appear as talking heads to vindicate and valorize the robber barons who emerged in the United States in the years after the Civil War. The series’ identifiable high/low point comes when Carnegie strongman Henry Clay Frick, having survived an assassination attempt by Alexander Berkman, turns the tables and pulls a UFC-style ground-and-pound on his assailant. Fuck yeah dogg whoop his ass!

*** At the date of this writing, the list includes Belle, The Blue Room, CITIZENFOUR, Dear White People, The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby, Dormant Beauty, Exhibition, A Field in England, Foxcatcher, Get On Up, Jealousy, Jimmy P., The Last of the Unjust, Leviathan, Li’l Quinquin, Love Is Strange, Miss Julie, Night Moves, Norte, the End of History, Le Paradis, Starred Up, Stranger by the Lake, The Tale of the Princess Kaguya, Tip Top, Two Days, One Night, Under the Skin, Vic + Flo Saw a Bear, A Walk Among the Tombstones, Whiplash, and Why Don’t You Play in Hell?

“I don’t have an anger problem,” Elle Reed, played by Lily Tomlin, assures her granddaughter after berating an uppity barista in Grandma. “I have a problem with assholes.” Infusing a naturalistic performance with impeccable comic timing, the actress who got her screen break on Laugh-In and created indelible lived-in characters in Nashville (75) and Nine to Five (80), among other films, is in top form here as a cantankerous lesbian poetess suddenly called upon for help.

If last year’s Obvious Child was tagged as an abortion comedy, Grandma might be simplistically summarized as an abortion road movie. Pregnant and too afraid to go to her own mother, Sage (Julia Garner) shows up on her grandmother’s doorstep in Los Angeles needing $600 for the procedure she’s already scheduled. But Elle is flat broke: she’s drained her savings paying off hospital bills (her partner of 38 years has recently passed away due to illness) and chopped up her credit cards to make the decorative mobile that hangs on her front porch. With nothing but a half-baked idea as to how to come up with the dough, the two women take to the road in Elle’s beat-up Dodge Ford.

The familiar setup of an odd-couple family journey might suggest a broader characterization than the emotional nuance Tomlin and director Paul Weitz manage to achieve. Though Elle can certainly dish out the caustic insults (and assaults) when need be, this is not just some Bad Grandma. Each pit stop along the way peels back another layer of her hard-edged exterior, and the film traces the challenges of moving forward amidst the omnipresence of the past with sensitivity. Tomlin’s Elle has the vulnerability of Linnea in Nashville (75), the kooky matter-of-factness of Vivian, the existential detective of I Heart Huckabees (04), and the feminist prerogative that Violet was just beginning to claim in Nine to Five (80).

At Sundance, where Grandma had its world premiere, FILM COMMENT chatted briefly with Tomlin, who had that ever-present mischievous twinkle in her eye. (“You don’t know when you’ve messed with a young person’s psyche!” she laughed when quoted back a line from Huckabees.) Smile wide and Midwestern lilt still intact, she discussed the new film and how she got her start in showbiz.

Grandma

This role seems tailor-made for you. Did you have a hand in creating the character at the script level?

I’d done Admission [13] with Paul Weitz, where I played Tina Fey’s mother, and that was a feminist character. He got the idea to write Grandma when we were working together, but I didn’t know at the time. About a month after the premiere, he and I were having a cup of coffee and he told me about it. We read and talked—and talked and talked—and tried to solve issues that might come up, like the cost of an abortion and that kind of thing, but it’s his script.

Grandma has almost an entirely female cast, and is arguably the most female-centered film you’ve done since Nine to Five [80], but it couldn’t be more different. Both are speaking to such different times.

Everyone that came on board came because of Paul. He’s made a lot of movies and he’s a very sweet guy and has all these relationships [with actors]. He’d come tell me, “I think Marcia Gay Harden is going to do it,” and I’d think, wow, are you serious? And John Cho and Nat Wolff are so good, Sam Elliott is just great.

I appreciated how this film addresses motherhood so honestly. It’s not just an “instinct,” it’s a hard job. I love the line where your character tells Sage she’s been afraid of her own daughter since she was 5 years old.

[Laughs] Well, that’s Paul. I think motherhood is daunting. That’s why so many of us are screwed up. The script is very rich in a small, subtle, incremental way.

Tea with Mussolini

This is the first time you’ve played a gay character on screen in a number of years.

I played Georgie in Tea with Mussolini [99]—she was gay, an archaeologist. I’ve done it on the stage. But it’s not so different. I could be talking about the man in my life instead of the woman. I guess it is informed by my life somewhat—but it depends what kind of lesbian it is. To me, people are so much more alike than they are different; it’s all kind of just how it goes through the system.

Originally, you started in stand-up, and you’ve had such an immense and varied career, from movies to TV to voicing cartoons.

Oh, my cartoon! My Edith Ann cartoon! We won a Peabody for one of our shows. I never was a traditional stand-up comedian, it was more sketch. When I first got famous enough to get jobs headlining at small clubs because I was on Laugh-In, I played to silence. I’d do a little Ernestine and then maybe two minutes of Edith Ann, and then I’d do things they’d never seen that they weren’t used to, and they’d just stare at me in silence.

That sounds absolutely terrifying.

After five or six nights of it, it wears you down a little bit. Jan Sterling came to a club in Denver one night I was playing, Marvelous Marv’s—it was in a big high-rise and the club was on the ground floor. She gave me a big pep talk she said: “Don’t stop doing what you’re doing”—as if I would’ve, I wouldn’t have known what to do otherwise!—“the audience just isn’t with you yet.” They’d never seen sketches like this, and certainly not in a club. So I’d go back all renewed and buoyed, and then I’d play another five or six nights and move onto the next town and think: “Well, the next town will pay off.” It just takes time.

Edith Ann: A Few Pieces of the Puzzle

People are always lamenting the limited availability of smart female roles. Did your collaboration with your partner, Jane Wagner, who’s written for and with you since the very beginning, come from an absence of material?

I always had to pursue my own devices. I came about in the late Fifties, early Sixties, and was just getting my footing. In ’62 I got into a college show. I was sort of in pre-med in college. Not that I ever would have been a doctor—you would have been killed by the medicine I computed for you. I used to fill these little bottles with Xylene, which we used to use to clean oil-immersion slides, which I was just mad for. I’d sprinkle it on my books and just sit there inhaling it.

I was developing a character [the Grosse Pointe Matron] at the time, but I didn’t know it yet. In Detroit where I’m from, Grosse Pointe is a very rich suburb. This was 1962 and they had just blown the lid off the fact that Grosse Pointe was an overtly segregated community. My mother’s maiden name, just by coincidence, is Ford, and the Fords lived in Gross Pointe. Their daughter was my age and was making her debut at 18, and my mother said, “I’d love to go see her coming-out party.” I borrowed a car from a kid at school and went out there—everybody was out there, there was just a collection of cars circling the property.

When I got on the variety show I saw the material and I thought it was lame. It was so collegiate, like parodies of Gunsmoke and the Academy Awards. So I just sprang up full of aggression and said to the producer: “I think I have something you could use, and I did the Grosse Pointe Matron.” I was just ad-libbing it because I knew it so well: charity work, your daughter’s debut party. I was friendly with a guy on the show and I said: “Just interview me like I’m your distinguished guest.” I had on fox furs and a good suit that went just past the knees. She’d be talking and talking like a snake and then invite the audience to come to some function and then she gets up like this [gets up with her knees spread wide]. That got a big laugh in 1962, to break that social taboo. So then I said, I’m going to go to New York and become an actress, because I was such a hit on this show.

This year’s the 40th anniversary for Nashville, which was a big turning point in your career. What was it like working with Robert Altman and how did he cast you in the part?

I’d bought a book that my partner Jane had written the screenplay for Cynthia Buchanan’s novel Maiden, in the early Seventies. Bob Altman and I had the same agent, and he was looking for something for Joan Tewkesbury, who wrote Nashville, to direct. He was going to produce Maiden and Joan was going to direct it, but it never happened. So he said come down to Nashville and you’ll do this part and we’ll do Maiden in the fall. He was just amazing. And when I got to Nashville I read the script and I thought I could play a dozen of these characters. But then as more and more people came in I thought, he’s so on the money [casting me as Linnea] . . . I’m the right person to play Linnea.

Nashville

Though your role in Grandma is a dramatic one, there’s so much humor and reliance on comedic timing in the way you deliver the dialogue. Do you approach a role like this differently than you would a purely comedic part?

I don’t really work differently, depending on how broad it is. I’ve done things as broad as Beverly Hillbillies [93] and I enjoyed that immensely because I got to play that character knowing full well about Nancy Kulp, the actress who plays Miss Hathaway [in the original TV Show]. I didn’t want to tread on her territory because she was so revered by a certain segment of the population—kids who are 40 now, maybe 45, would run home from school everyday to see Beverly Hillbillies. I got to play that character really goofy and that was fun. I would pull my gun up with one hand [demonstrates animatedly]. You just let yourself go and do it, and you can play it a little bigger. But it’s really [about] believing it. If you believe it, you can play it any style that’s suitable for the vehicle. This is more naturalistic.

Between this and your upcoming Netflix original series Grace and Frankie with Jane Fonda, you must feel on top of your game right now.

Well, I probably should be. I’m enjoying it, it’s nice. I want to say things like, “This too will pass,” and it does. But it’s not gone yet.

William Greaves: “Now, a lot black people feel that our reactions to various events that go on here in America are totally reactive. We never seem to initiate things. Black power never seems to have a self-originating nature to it. Why is that, Professor Hamilton?”

Charles V. Hamilton [Professor of Political Science, Columbia University]: “It’s very difficult. The weaker you are in a society, the less resources you have to start anything . . . I know the argument you’re making, and I know that to a large extent it’s correct. But keep in mind that blacks are a minority: numerically, politically, economically. So it’s very difficult to initiate things from that position. So I don’t see that so much as a criticism. The problem is, do they fail to react properly when the occasion develops? It’s a conservative system, built on self-interest.”

—Black Power in America: Myth or Reality? (1986)

Within Our Gates

Unlike other movements of the 20th century such as Third Cinema or Cinema Novo that sought to reconfigure or subvert dominant cinematic forms and narratives, there is no single, easily identifiable moment that inaugurated or crystallized black independent filmmaking in the U.S. Though some argue that D.W. Griffith’s Civil War melodrama cum Ku Klux Klan recruitment film Birth of a Nation threw down the gauntlet, with the first and most notable response being filmmaker Oscar Micheaux’s 1920 refutation Within Our Gates, the Chicago-based Foster Photoplay Company had been producing shorts with all-black casts and crews since 1910. William Foster, the company’s founder and a journalist who wrote for many black newspapers across the country, argued passionately for the importance of film and its ability to uplift the community both inside and out.

Throughout its multiple “waves,” black filmmaking in the U.S. has been defined by that desire to refute and complicate portrayals of blackness in Hollywood films, but also by virtue of its independent production. The types of films made by the “L.A. Rebellion”—its most prominent members being Charles Burnett, Julie Dash, Larry Clark, Billy Woodberry, and Haile Gerima—are distinguished from those made by their contemporary counterparts in New York not merely by virtue of their shared experience of attending UCLA, but also because public television played a different role in the East for black independent filmmakers. The films featured in “Tell It Like It Is: Black Independents in New York, 1968–1986” at the Film Society of Lincoln Center showcase the work of black independent filmmakers based in New York, many of which are not available on DVD or have gone unseen since their original broadcasts.

Pearl Bowser, Bill Gunn, and Katherine Collins (photo courtesy of PJ Bowser Productions)

Of course, the vast majority of black filmmaking in the U.S. has necessarily been independent—there has yet to be an African American CEO of a Hollywood studio, and, save for a handful of outliers like Warner Brothers’ The Green Pastures (36), the majors didn’t produce films with entirely or predominantly black casts (or “race films”) until the Seventies. Most black filmmakers have historically been forced to serve as producer and distributor in addition to writing, directing, and editing duties. While this is increasingly true of contemporary filmmakers of varying distinction in the age of digital, combining these roles meant something very different back then: it effectively shut these films out of block-booked, studio-owned theaters as well as out of many film publications, whose editorial policies restricted their coverage only to films with distribution. (Films made for public television usually suffered a similar fate.) Many historians have argued that Micheaux’s distinctive, “imperfect” style—minimal editing, poor sound, fumbled lines, and overextended scenes in which the performers stare off into space—is equally understandable as a jazz-like reinterpretation of the rules of Classical Hollywood (much in the way African-American English reconfigures American English) and as a fiscally motivated strategy. Though Micheaux made 44 films that he exhibited across the chitlin circuit in impromptu screening venues like churches, schools, homes, and barbershops, he was constantly forced to borrow money and sell off assets to continue making them.

The ways in which the jack-of-all-trades demands of independent filmmaking shaped form and story are apparent in the careers of Jessie Maple, the first African-American woman to gain entry into the New York camera operators union, and William Greaves, whose importance in the New York scene was aptly described in former colleague St. Clair Bourne’s Chamba Notes: “If the black independent film movement of the 1960s-1970s were to be symbolized by a band, William Greaves would be the bass.” Greaves began his career as a successful actor on radio, television, film, and Broadway in the late Forties, and gained membership to the Actors Studio. However, Greaves grew increasingly frustrated by the “Uncle Tom” roles he was routinely offered, and by the industry’s treatment of black actors at large, so he refocused his efforts towards directing and producing films instead. After studying filmmaking at City College, Greaves moved to Canada to escape the dual oppression of racism and McCarthyism, and got a job making documentaries with the National Film Board. He filmed the landmark 1966 World Festival of Black Arts in Senegal for a U.N.-sponsored organization (they only wanted a five-minute clip; he eventually turned his footage into a feature), and then returned to New York, splitting his time between that position and work for National Educational Television (NET, later WNET-13). In 1968, the network developed a nationally syndicated monthly magazine show by and for African Americans called Black Journal, on which Greaves served as producer and co-host. Though the initial episodes were akin to 60 Minutes, concerns about representation in staff led to a strike and a white producer’s transition to being a “consultant”; subsequent episodes ended with the greeting and signoff addressed to “brothers and sisters,” and Greaves, along with being promoted to executive producer, traded in his suit for a dashiki. The year Black Journal began also marked the release of Greaves’s landmark hybrid documentary, Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One, in which a crew attempts to document a crew shooting two actors running through a facile break-up scene in Central Park. The film’s complicated structure reflects a keen familiarity with the different roles on a shoot, questioning the creative process at every level, from the crew (who revolt against their sexist, incompetent black director, played by Greaves) to the actors (who Greaves knew from the Actors Studio) during rehearsal and improvisation. The conflicts that sometimes bubble forth are born out of the actors’ actual frustrations, and in turn collapse traditional filmmaking roles as the cast take on responsibilities traditionally belonging to the screenwriter; likewise, Greaves’s fictional failings parody the bumbling roles typically given to black actors.

Black Journal

Black Journal was able to broach new subjects and themes as ambitious as those in Symbiopsychotaxiplasm, in part because of its “by us for us” commitment to staffing and WNET’s hands-off approach, which may have been influenced by the country’s tense racial climate amidst riots occurring across the country. These auspicious production conditions also allowed the show to serve as incubator for up-and-coming black talent: Madeline Anderson, initially an editor on the show, wrote, directed, and produced several documentaries for Black Journal that encompassed the breadth of the civil rights struggle, such as A Tribute to Malcolm X (67) and I Am Somebody (70). The powerful I Am Somebody, a tag-along look at striking hospital workers in Charleston, North Carolina, depicts the intersection of class, race, and gender in this primarily female-led triumph for labor rights, but also subtly questions conventional American historical narratives. The film’s voiceover narration, read by one the strike’s participants, begins with her discussing the Charleston’s typical springtime tourist attractions: Fort Sumter (where the first shots of the Civil War were fired), “our stately historic mansions,” the “lovely gardens.” While she identifies these places as being far away from “the real Charleston,” her use of “our” subtly evokes the crucial role black labor played (and continued to play) in the creation and upkeep of these picturesque attractions. The sense of this unevenly shared heritage is further underscored when Southern Christian Leadership Conference leader Reverend Abernathy comes to speak at one of the hospital union’s strikes and jokingly bemoans the fact that every time he’s visited Charleston, he’s been forced to visit those historic sites again and again. It’s a pleasantry with an edge—a plea for the black community to be successful and for them to make their own mark on history—as another leader states, “when hospital workers make a little more money, we all can make a little more.” Later, the strikers are shown strategically moving their marches to “The Battery,” a historic seaside promenade (so named for its role in the civil war), and being bolstered by the support of student walkouts; the film’s final (staged) image is of the narrator strolling along the same area alone in her 1199 union hat, proud of their collective achievement. Anderson’s layering of several time frames—the Antebellum past, the local history of labor actions, and the consequences today of the black community’s success—is quietly brilliant.

The focus on community, not just the individual, is also apparent in the work of Charles Hobson, a former WBAI radio producer who moved into directing and producing documentaries for television in 1968 with the weekly WNEW program Inside Bedford-Stuyvesant. Hosted by Jim Lowry and later Jeffersons actress Roxie Roker, the program—the first black-produced show in the country—was created to counter negative images of black neighborhoods on the nightly news, and functioned as a forum with representatives from across the spectrum of the Brooklyn community: local business owners, activists, kids, teachers, and celebrities local and otherwise. (One episode concludes with a breathtaking performance by Harry Belafonte.) The limitations of respectability politics—the dictum to “uplift the race” by adopting the values and manners of white society—were complicated early on in documentaries like Kent Garrett’s The Black Cop (69) and The Black GI (71), which deal with the “perpetual outsider status” of African Americans and pose questions about those who serve to protect rights historically denied to black communities. Later on, what comes after achieving respectability was explored within black middle-class families: Larry Bullard and Carolyn Johnson’s striking A Dream Is What You Wake Up From (78) employs vignettes and self-reflexive techniques to question the American dream and the accepted role of black women in families; and Camille Billops and James Hatch’s emotionally raw Suzanne, Suzanne (82) shows a California family torn apart from the inside by domestic violence, female body-image issues, and heroin abuse.

Suzanne, Suzanne

St. Clair Bourne, a Black Journal alum (who helped organize the staff strike that led to Greaves’s promotion), sought to broadcast the activities of black communities to audiences domestically and abroad using CHAMBA Notes, an internationally distributed newsletter of critical essays about films, news events, and social issues named after his production company, and with films like The Black and the Green (83), which explored the civil rights movement’s influence on Catholics in Northern Ireland fighting for independence. The resulting 40-minute documentary is both a startlingly frank account of Belfast’s tormented cityscape and an invaluable record of the remarkable conversations between five black American ministers and activists and various IRA organizers. While many criticized the film as pro-IRA, Bourne argued that it was part of his “Sixties humanist approach,” and that the film was better understood as “a step in my own development, and perhaps for documentaries in America, if a situation that is not clearly identifiable as ‘black-American’ can be looked at by black Americans.” In Motion: Amiri Baraka, a portrait of the iconic revolutionary and beat poet that, through a chance meeting at an anti-Apartheid demonstration, led Bourne to create The Black and the Green, was also considered highly controversial upon its release (though any documentary about Baraka that goes down easy is fundamentally misunderstanding its subject).

Bourne’s commitment to generating such dialogues, pushing form forward, and filling in gaps of representation in front of and behind the camera is evidenced by the quality and quantity of his output (he directed or produced over 40 films in his 36-year career). But his legacy is also apparent in the younger black filmmakers he mentored, and his 1988 documentary about the making of Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing, a recognition of that film’s historical importance. The success of Lee’s film—along with those working in Los Angeles—marked Hollywood’s renewed interest in black filmmakers, and inaugurated a cycle of films about black life such as House Party (90), Boyz N the Hood (91), and Juice (92). These studio attempts at cashing in mirrored the trend of Blaxploitation in the Seventies inaugurated by Mario Van Peebles’s pimp odyssey (per Toni Cade Bambara, “Stagolee meets [Frantz] Fanon”), Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (71), and Bill Gunn’s 1973 fusion of African spirituality, Black churches, and European vampire horror, Ganja and Hess. Like many of the black independent filmmakers working with fiction who were unable to rely on production support from public television, almost a decade would pass before Gunn’s second and final directed feature, Personal Problems (80), was completed. Like Greaves, Gunn had begun as actor in New York and switched to writing and directing; however, he was largely dissatisfied with how Columbia handled his screenplays for 1970’s The Angel Levine and The Landlord. (He channeled these experiences into a novel with the suitably Gunn-esque title Rhinestone Sharecropping.) Personal Problems was conceived with writer Ishmael Reed, and lives up to Reed’s description as “experimental soap opera.” Although the film’s form is fragmented, reflexive, and sometimes veers into abstraction, the black middle-class characters are painted in ironically broad strokes: Johnnie Mae (Vertamae Grosvenor), a nurse at Harlem Hosptial, wants to pursue poetry but feels fenced in by her tiny apartment, which houses her husband, father-in-law, half-brother, and sister-in-law. (She attempts escape by drinking with her girlfriends and an ultimately unsatisfying affair.)

On the set of Personal Problems

This variety of black, middle-class creative malaise spilling over into extramarital affairs also fuels Kathleen Collins’s superb, newly restored Losing Ground (82), which features Gunn as an actor. Philosophy professor Sara (Seret Scott) obligingly follows her painter husband Victor (Bill Gunn) to a small town in upstate New York for the summer, even though it complicates her attempts to finish her own academic work on the nature of ecstasy. Victor has recently abandoned abstract expressionism (the style of his longtime mentor) in favor of representational work, and feels connected to his new surroundings—and to the very attractive, young Puerto Rican women who have the run of the town. Feeling increasingly left out, Sara accepts a flamboyant student’s invitation to act in his thesis film (“a meditation on the tragic mulatto”—aka a filmed interpretation of the song “Frankie and Johnny”) alongside his wise, aging actor uncle Duke (Duane Jones, the protagonist of Night of the Living Dead). Collins’s depiction of academia is incredibly astute, particularly in the interactions with her students (the boys unapologetically hit on her; a type-A personality girl visits during office hours), and her depiction of a marriage slowly stagnating is understated and devastatingly real.

But perhaps most impressive is Collins’s explorations of black female sexuality. Sara’s mother is an actress who wishes she could play “a real 60-year-old negro lady, who thinks more about men than God,” and is dismissive of her daughter’s academic career because she doesn’t consider it to be creative in any respect. Sara meanwhile, with her oversized glasses and bun, at first comes across as nebbishy and nerdy, lamenting her inability to just let go or tell a pompous co-worker, “Ain’t that a blip?” This, of course, makes her analysis of ecstasy even more painful—she’s missing the point by turning it into a mental exercise rather than just going with it. But she comes close to having a breakthrough in her dance performances for her student’s film and her on-screen chats with Duke, who seems far more compatible with her than cranky, self-absorbed Victor. However, the alternatives to her current life never truly materialize for Sara. The enthusiastic director constantly barks orders at her during the film shoot, exerting control at every moment; so too does her husband run the show when posing his (always female) subjects for portraits. Under these traditional conditions of artistic production, creative control seems to be firmly rooted in the masculine: her mother describes how her longtime partner was turned off by her post-stage fugue state; at another moment, the camera looks through the student director’s framing monocle. At the end of the student’s film (and Collins’s), Sara’s character arrives with a gun and shoots Duke for dancing with another woman—a scene that mirrors her husband’s poolside betrayal with his favorite model earlier that day. Victor pulls up to the set (an empty stretch of the City College campus), and watches as she acts out this scene, tears streaming from her eyes.

Losing Ground

While it’s tempting to read this as a feminist moment, her very real tears aren’t only from heartbreak, but also from frustration: she has no other option except to shoot. This masterful finale, born of rage and realized with supreme control, is a fitting image for black independent filmmaking in the U.S., a work in progress, driven by passion and necessity.

Guy Maddin’s phantasmagoric opus, The Forbidden Room, comes packaged with a warning: “Stay safe, and have fun!” reads the filmmaker’s statement in the press notes. Working with co-director Evan Johnson, the enfant terrible of Canadian cinema has fashioned something like a series of cavernous, roiling story chambers in which viewers can safely enjoy an onslaught of deranged narrative excess without enduring any actual bodily harm. But it’s impossible to stay safe amidst the explosive color, hypnotic super impositions, and lurid intertitles, and while Maddin neophytes may find the experience of The Forbidden Room akin to a brain aneurysm (in a good way), movie lovers with any sense of humor will gleefully lap up the overflowing bounty of cinephilic pleasures and polymorphous perversities.

The Forbidden Room grew out of Maddin’s interactive Seances project, which resurrected lost films from the silent era by re-writing and shooting them live in Montreal’s Phi Center and The Pompidou Center in Paris, sometimes with nothing more to go on than a title. The new feature spits out serial-style adventures in spasmodic fragments: a stranded submarine crew must rely on air bubbles in their breakfast flapjacks for oxygen; a lumberjack goes on a quest to rescue a maiden from a pack of wild wolf men; a woman holds her own inner child at gunpoint; a man has a lobotomy in order to cure himself of a paralyzing obsession with bottoms; and a mustache induces melancholic memories. The directors’ imaginations prove bottomless: there’s also a skeleton orgy, a bone-breaking orgasm, and an absurd educational video on how to take a bath (narrated by a smarmy Louis Pregin clad in an all-too-revealing silk robe). As is the case with most of Maddin’s work, lust, shame, and fetishism abound as the film navigates the nether regions of the human body and psyche with playfully archaic euphemism.

The 58-year-old filmmaker has assembled his best cast in years to bring these ludicrous narrative nuggets to life. Fans will be equally pleased to find familiar stock players like Pregin and new-to-Maddin heavyweights like Mathieu Amalric, Charlotte Rampling, and Elina Löwensohn utterly at home in his singular world.

FILM COMMENT met with the self-deprecating director at Sundance, where The Forbidden Room premiered in the New Frontier section, to talk about everything from fetishism to color timing.

The director’s statement in the press notes for this film is phrased as a warning of sorts against the explosion of narrative and potentially of the viewers’ subconscious. Can you talk about your conception for the film in relation to your Seances project and how you managed to condense such a huge scope of material into a feature film?

The Seances project started first—that’s how Evan [Johnston] came on board [first] as a researcher. As we talked more about the interactive element, which was really pioneering stuff, he just had so many great ideas that he became co-creator of that project. We realized we wanted to make a feature because as we were re-writing our own adaptations of these lost films, along with Robert Kotyk, our third screenwriting colleague, a lot of our own personal concerns just kept reappearing in our melodramatic reductions.

The stories came to us as reviews or one-sentence plot synopses. There were some that just had such intriguing titles and that would inspire us to write something. It was almost like being a police dog, trying to track something big down based on a sniff of one small item and it became clear that we had a chance to make a very different kind of narrative…well, there are movies with [multiple] narratives in them and ironically, those are usually the narratives I don’t like. They bore me—they feel longer than they are. I’m slowly working towards making a lean, fast-paced movie that everyone can understand but that somehow has a Bressonian simplicity, too. But in the meantime, I’m just a hack so, that’s kind of hard to do.

That director’s statement is literal. We just had too much narrative and had to pare it down and make it all fit. I was inspired by the writings of Raymond Roussel, who wrote New Impressions of Africa [1910] and Locus Solus [1914]. The way he nests stories within stories within stories just delighted me.

In addition to Evan Johnson, you also collaborated with the poet John Ashbery on the film. What was his role?

I asked John to pick any title from this big list of lost movies we had to write and he chose How to Take a Bath [37], which is a lost Dwain Esper movie. He was an exploitation producer and director in the Thirties, Forties, and Fifties—I think he was the distributor of Freaks [32], and he directed How to Undress in Front of Your Husband [37]. After John wrote the monologue for it, we realized that it was the best framing device for the movie. From there, it was just a matter of going inside the bathtub to make the submarine movie and then finding an excuse, or a more far-fetched connector, from one story to another. Ashbery was channeling The Amazing Criswell. The closest thing I had to Criswell is Louis Pregin.

He’s great in this movie.

Yeah. It’s really hard to find Canadian actors that both look and sound great. He’s from Montreal so I was able to use him in the Montreal shoot. Due to how that portion of the film was financed, I wasn’t allowed to use anyone from outside of the province, so I used an all Quebecois cast, which I was thrilled to do because they’ve got a great star system of their own and I was completely new to it. I cast Clara Furey, who is Carole Laure’s daughter, as the female lead. She’s a dancer and she’s really wonderful.

Did you have an audition process? You’ve cast quite a few of your regulars here but also have some new faces.

No, I don’t like auditions. I don’t like the pressure, the fear you smell in the room. I had what looked like an audition—I would shoot people while they were telling me their earliest childhood memory. It was a way of getting used to their faces with the camera. By the time 10 minutes had passed, I’d filmed their faces from every angle and we’d gotten to know each other a little bit. That was in Montreal. In Paris I made friends with a casting director who knew all the adventurous actors that were willing to throw themselves into odd independent projects. I just met people for coffee or lunch and explained the project . . . and I guess assured them that I was sane.

I kept fearing Charlotte Rampling and trying to wrap quickly in case she got mad at me and slashed my skin open with a bullwhip. I’d make sure all her scenes were done first—out of fear and respect—but then she’d end up lying around for hours because she liked being on set so much. She was real sweet.

On a technical level, this is one of your most complex—and colorful—films. Can you explain that part of the process in terms a Luddite might understand?

I’m kind of a Luddite too—the effects are all Evan. While the boys are taking care of the soundtrack, and tuning color palettes, and things, I just sit in a rocking chair and write the intertitles. I never wanted to make color movies before because I felt the palettes meant too much, that I wasn’t smart enough yet to say enough with the color.

Careful (92) is beautifully done in color—it looks like old hand-tinted photographs.

Yeah. I knew what I was doing there—I insisted on just using two colors at a time and I was being cautious. But I didn’t have reason for color again until now. There are just so many variables that you can have in a movie and I wanted to make color one of them here. Evan and his brother Galan—who is the production designer and the graphic designer on the film—really worked on palettes and color timing. They’re basically self-taught; over the course of the project they just taught themselves. We color-timed all the rushes—the movie wasn’t edited and then color-timed, they actually color-timed 4,000 hours of images. It’s very time-consuming, but very important to get into the mood and the flavor. It’s just too hard to edit with this really hideous, raw video. Especially for a movie like this, where the look matters so much.

What about for something like the superimpositions and double exposures? Do you have an idea of the effects you want to use while writing and shooting each individual piece, or does that only come into play in the editing room?

I synch really well with my editor, John Gurdebeke, and editing really is filmmaking. I’ve often said that if he wants to be called a co-director that he’s welcome to the credit. He says: “No thanks, I’d rather be paid.” [Laughs] Filmmaking is just ridiculously collaborative. Sure, every now and again one of us will suggest slightly fewer double exposures, or maybe a few more.

You have this recurring edit of cutting to and from the same image rapidly, messing with its temporal unfolding. In a previous interview you likened this to foreplay, explaining that your movies are all about the tease rather than the completion.

[Laughs] Yeah, it’s a technique Rebecca Sandulak [DP of Cowards Bend the Knee, 03] and I worked out when we were making Cowards. We wanted to create the effect of a daydream about, say, your favorite romantic moment. The way you might think to yourself about a memory: “Wait, I didn’t go slowly enough, I didn’t enjoy that enough.” So you go back in your head and work back up to that moment again—and then stop there for a while, and then maybe just rock back and forth before zooming off to the next thing you want to daydream about. There’s a little bit of that left in our editing style. It really fit with Cowards perfectly, because it was a remembered story; I wanted the way of remembering this story of mine to be neurological and skittish like that. It’s really just scrolling in Final Cut Pro, and it’s just part of our vocabulary now. We’re trying to get off it—it’s a bit like poppers, very easy to get hooked on.

Fetishism is always prominent in your films. There’s fetishism in a literal way—Isabella Rossellini’s glass legs in The Saddest Music in the World [03], or in this film, the mustache, the bone breaking—and then there’s the fetishism of silent movies as a form.

I’m an obsessive, I know. But it’s like I don’t believe in ghosts unless I’m holding a camera, or engaged in a project. Then ghosts are handy things and I believe in them as story elements. It’s the same thing with fetishes, I guess. I find myself only believing in them when I’m holding camera. They’re very useful because they focus all the attention on one thing for a while. You’ve got to tell a real human story—you’ve got to condense it down to a few minutes. In this movie especially—some of these stories are whole life times concentrated into a few minutes.

I remember trying out The Dream of a Mustache on my granddaughter as a bedtime story when she was 4, and saying to her, “There’s a dead man lying on the floor.” She really loved hearing about this dead man on the floor with a mustache. And then I said, “Well, the mustache had a dream,” and she said, “This is getting too scary,” and made me stop. And I thought well, this is good—she’s buying it, and being frightened by it at the same time.

I realized later that the bone breaking is just Vertigo [58]. I’m going to be busted. But I like the idea of just remaking a woman. And if you’re a bone-knitting specialist, I guess that you would do it by breaking, re-breaking, and then setting.

It was so eroticized.

Yeah, we just downloaded a bunch of hard-core porn moans.

With regard to silent films, I just don’t believe the film industry ever should have let go of that language—it evolved hastily, but I don’t think it should have jettisoned that vocabulary when we still have room for it. So I just keep everything, using some discretion while doing so. But I didn’t actually particularly like silent film until I started making movies. I was accused of making silent films years before I actually made one—I just made films that reminded people of them. I guess I’ve always approached novel reading and movie watching as if approaching a fairy tale. And when it came time to finally write about stuff, I just thought everything is happening within the precincts of the fairy tale somehow. And silent movies are just one step closer to fairy tales: they have to have types in them. There’s something mannered about the writing style. It’s very liberating.

You’ve said in the past that melodrama for you is human nature not being repressed, rather than human nature exaggerated. Does that theory still hold true for you?

Yeah. I think good melodrama un-inhibits the truth. It might redefine screaming “I want my cha-cha heels” in Female Trouble, but if there’s some truth in it, it will feel right. What I find really strange is when a movie doesn’t have the courage to be melodramatic because it’s considered to be a disgraced art form, so the plot will be melodramatic but the performances will be pitched to contemporary naturalism. It just seems ball-less—that’s not right, that’s gendered: it just seems chicken. You should have the courage to meet the preposterous, psychologically true premise with the performances and color scheme. So someone like Almodóvar, or John Waters, Kuchar, Lynch, Buñuel—they do it well.

You’re often placed in the same camp as those directors, but it seems the comedy in your work is the most overlooked element—everyone wants to discuss your films in a very serious way. This movie is hysterically funny.

Yeah, I had a good friend tell me—this was back before I started getting bad reviews—“You get really good reviews, but the feeling I get from those reviews is that I’m going to be tested after I read them, or I’m going to have to write an essay.” Which is sort of like saying stay away! It’s just too serious. But me? Serious? I’m a goofus.

Do you have any favorite silent films that you find on par with or even more deranged or absurd than your own work?

There’s some, I almost feel like not telling... but I will. I love the Alexander Dovzhenko that seems to be outside his canon—The Tip of My Mother’s Purse [aka The Diplomatic Pouch]. Almost anything by Dovzhenko other than his canonical films, Arsenal [29] and Earth [30]—they’re great, I love them but they just seem too reverential in their views. His other stuff is eccentric beyond comprehension. [Aleksandr] Sokurov is just amazing, though he’s not silent—I don’t know where he gets his ideas from. I like those guys [Leonid] Trauberg and [Grigori] Kozintsev from the Soviet Union—the eccentrics—they had long careers well into the Fifties and Sixties but I like their silent films. One of their first films was The Overcoat [26]—the un-subtitled version is on YouTube, and it’s so strange. There’s so much still that hasn’t been released. It’s nice to know there’s still material to be discovered. Being a guest director at Telluride this past fall was wonderful because the festival director, Tom Luddy, would send me all kinds of things to look at. I saw a Lupu Pick movie called Sylvester [24], and that one is really wonderful and strange. I don’t know if that will ever come out. There’s one copy at the George Eastman House.

This is one of your least autobiographical works—and also the least “Canadian.” You’ve said that My Winnipeg [07] was an attempt to exorcise the city from yourself. Is this project proof that was successful?

It really is. You cure yourself of your subject when you take on a film, and you become so sick of it. You’re already sick of it before you’re finished making the film—and then you have to sit through a sound mix and screenings and talk about it a lot.

I thought the flapjacks were perhaps a reference to some obscure Canadian silent film in which flapjacks solve all problems.

[Laughs] Yeah, it seems like it would be. My leg is broken! Quick, a flapjack! Evan cooked that one up. The flapjacks just keep reappearing. We only have so much imagination. “I know, we need a flapjack here!”

Criterion just released a DVD of My Winnipeg, so I suppose you relived it to do the special features.

I did, yeah. Evan did the special features—the four cine-essays. One on Elms, one on puberty . . . I think I’m incorrectly credited as co-creator of those but Evan created them himself as part of an ongoing project of documenting the city. I love them—it’s great to have my co-director working on My Winnipeg retroactively. I’m very proud of the movie and very proud of the Criterion release. It saved that movie—its earlier release got tangled up in some bankruptcy proceedings. I was indulging myself in a lot of self-pity being the only director of a movie without a DVD, and now it’s got the best.

It’s no surprise that Ryan Reynolds is splendid and unsettling as a wholesome-looking serial killer in Marjane Satrapi’s The Voices. This perennially underrated actor has one extraordinary specialty. He’s nonpareil at suggesting a spiky sensibility under the affable veneer of a romantic lead or the athletic poise of an action hero. In Satrapi’s sporadically engaging mix of psycho-thriller and splatter comedy, Reynolds exacts a full measure of empathy for Jerry Hickfang, a cheery rube who inflicts terrible punishment on a string of unsuspecting ladies. Like him, they work at a modest tub and toilet factory in an ailing North American small town.

The Voices starts out as a classic seriocomic tale about the “new guy” on the job. Is his super-amiability just a put-on? Or is he simply ultra-pleased to be employed in the packing and shipping department of Milton Fixture and Faucet? Only his boss knows that he sees a government-appointed shrink. Except for a couple of impressionable gals in the accounting department who flutter at his cuteness, his co-workers consider him awkward and eccentrically upbeat, like a walking smiley face. Reynolds embodies this functioning schizophrenic so naturally, you believe that people around Jerry think he’s one weird go-getter, not a psycho focused on visions they can’t see. He has no human friends. He drives home to an isolated apartment above a defunct bowling alley and converses with two talking pets: Mr. Whiskers, a tabby, and Bosco, a mastiff.

Reynolds provides their voices, too—an abrasive Scottish burr for Mr. Whiskers and a deep, consoling Southern bass for Bosco. Reynolds contributed an uncredited cameo to Seth MacFarlane’s talking-teddy-bear smash Ted (12), and The Voices contains onslaughts of Ted-like sexual wisecracks from Mr. Whiskers, the archetypal loner cat, as well as slobbering and butt-sniffing from Bosco, the archetypal owner-loving dog. In this film, though, the talking-critter gags are funny, especially Mr. Whiskers’s erotic excitement over big cats tearing apart prey on a National Geographic TV show.

Satrapi best sustains the tension in the first half-hour, as her camera follows Jerry through a game of existential hopscotch. He embraces factory life with unnerving enthusiasm, dissembles to his kindly psychiatrist, Dr. Warren (Jacki Weaver), about whether he takes his meds or hears voices, develops a crush on a sexy British émigré named Fiona (Gemma Arterton), and tries to carve out a psychic middle ground between his ruthless, misanthropic feline and his laid-back, ethical canine. (Jerry doesn’t acknowledge that both characters emanate from his own conflicted nature.) Mr. Whiskers warns Jerry that drugs will reduce his friends to furry pets. Jerry tells Dr. Warren that without medication, he “finds moments of inspiration and beauty” when “the secrets of God and man are revealed” and the universe is “a totally pleasant place.” In other words, his drab, funky apartment becomes a squeaky-clean condo, and the factory turns into a vibrant musical-comedy setting—not just when Fiona leads a conga line during an office party (set to the O’Jays smash “Sing a Happy Song”), but also when Jerry envisions a team of forklifts performing a ballet mécanique in the parking lot. We learn in his therapy sessions that Jerry’s mother heard angels. When Jerry suddenly sees Fiona as an angel, complete with wings, we know that she, too, is bound for glory. His first killing is accidental. Or is it? After all, his victim stood him up for a date. Jerry strives to believe he’s not responsible for any carnage. He contends that Mr. Whiskers swayed him. The cat does argue that Jerry is a predator who comes alive only in the act of killing. Bosco tries to cajole Jerry into viewing himself as a good man—at least until Jerry commits his second murder.

Satrapi and her screenwriter, Michael R. Perry, use every tool at hand, including jolting flashbacks, to accentuate Jerry’s extreme quirks and to bring his tragic family subtext to the fore. Midway through, we learn that he assisted his mother in her bloody suicide. Few childhood traumas get re-enacted in adulthood more literally and repeatedly than Jerry’s does here, and that’s too bad. A movie as outrageous as The Voices shouldn’t be so explicable and neat. Satrapi is ingenious at expressing the rift between reality and Jerry’s world. Emotionally, though, she never finds a way to square our queasy identification with the murderer with our craving to see justice done for his victims.

Screenwriter Perry has compared Jerry to the gentle giant Lennie in Of Mice and Men, but when Lennie kills a woman it really is a fluke and the gal is an unmitigated minx. The Voices splits our sympathies. Production designer Udo Kramer’s goal was to make the audience want to fly with Jerry “to heaven. ” Indeed, in the sparkling number in the closing credits, Jesus Christ (Michael Pink) and Jerry, and his mom, dad, and victims, belt out their own spirited rendition of “Sing a Happy Song,” with Day-Glo couture and choreography that mixes the dance styles of Busby Berkeley, Hullabaloo, and Soul Train. Sadly, once the giddiness of the song and dance wears off, the movie leaves the audience in limbo.

Satrapi’s powers of invention keep you watching; so does Reynolds’s remarkable range, from crybaby to butcher to dazzling song-and-dance man. With Dr. Warren he’s in turn a vulnerable little boy, a mischievous adolescent, and a fed-up adult who wants to know point-blank what’s wrong with him. At age 38, Reynolds is a multitalented actor who still has superstar potential. In 2009, he displayed amazing versatility in three major releases. In Anne Fletcher’s glossy romcom The Proposal, he played the executive assistant and fiancé of convenience to a hard-driving publisher (Sandra Bullock). Reynolds exuded geniality but also had the wit to use it as a mask. He pulled the audience in by signaling his character’s disbelief at the absurdity of it all. In Greg Mottola’s funky, heartfelt coming-of-age film, Adventureland, Reynolds was subtle and affecting as a small-time rocker who repairs rides at a Pittsburgh amusement park—a good-looking guy with strictly surface confidence. Reynolds even enlivened a segment of Gavin Hood’s leaden X-Men Origins: Wolverine as the mercenary Wade Wilson, aka Deadpool. In Reynolds’s characterization he employs wisecracks as a verbal smoke screen and cuts through fusillades with Katana swords like a lethal Iron Chef. (The first Deadpool feature, starring Reynolds, is scheduled for February 2016.)

In the last half-decade, Reynolds has gone through his own recession, mostly because of his botched superstar breakthrough in Martin Campbell’s Green Lantern (11). Despite his valiant attempt to bring some soft-shoe grace to a clunky 3-D superhero spectacle, Reynolds got the blame in most pop media—the curse of being the high-profile player in a Hollywood fiasco. Since then, any box-office failure he’s appeared in has been cited as a professional comedown for Reynolds, whether it was an engaging cartoon like Turbo (Reynolds played the title snail) or a DOA comic-book movie like R.I.P.D.

These setbacks haven’t shaken his confidence. In The Voices, Reynolds is always persuasive, whether Jerry is flattering himself with points of pride—like his nasal, breathy, pseudo-Asian pronunciation of his favorite chow mein joint, Shi Shen—or blissing out while dancing solo with Fiona after that office-party conga, doing a gleeful frug halfway between Ringo in A Hard Day’s Night and Elaine’s notorious dance in Seinfeld. You even buy that he can forge a genuine loving connection to a more sincere woman from accounting, Lisa (Anna Kendrick), a sweet divorcee who responds with compassion when he breaks down in tears at his childhood home. She’s so eager for romance that she ignores all of Jerry’s warning signals. She assumes he’s deep, not deeply troubled.

Satrapi lavishes affection on her characters; that’s why it’s disconcerting when she starts to kill them off. She won international acclaim eight years ago for the animated adaptation of Persepolis, her autobiographical graphic novel, which she co-directed and co-wrote with Vincent Paronnaud. They teamed up again in 2011 for the live-action adaptation of her graphic-novel fable, Chicken With Plums. But the story about a musician who loses his artistic spark and gives up on life lacked the ineluctable pull of Persepolis, with its nuanced, galvanizing tale of Marjane growing up absurd in revolutionary Iran. And the film’s self-conscious design raised the question of whether Satrapi was a filmmaker or a static painter, treating each scene as a self-contained tableau. The Voices is the second film she’s directed solo. (The first, Gang of the Jotas from 2012, has not been shown here.) It’s a giant step forward for Satrapi, and not just because this is her first film from another writer’s script. Even Persepolis drew more on marionette theater and shadow puppetry than cinema. It duplicated the imagery of Satrapi’s graphic novel, but not the electric connections between panels that made it a page-turner. The graphic novel Persepolis starts with a self-portrait of Satrapi at age 10, followed by, in the next frame, a class photo without her. “I’m sitting on the far left so you don’t see me,” she explains in a caption, instantly keying readers to notice the links between panels and to guess what transpires in the white space between them.

The Voices translates graphic-novel kinesis into a headlong movie narrative. Satrapi prods you into a heightened state of awareness as she indicates that Jerry sees the world through pinkish rose-colored glasses. She resists immediate contrasts of illusion and reality. Instead, she lets you see how Jerry plays director in his own unmoored life. He chooses angles of vision that emphasize the positive even in the parking lot of Milton Fixture and Faucet, where a pink pyramid of packages distracts us from noticing the rotten siding on the factory walls. Satrapi expresses Jerry’s growing reliance on Mr. Whiskers and Bosco visually. They move from off-camera or off-kilter conversations to closeups and group shots, where they go head-to-head with Jerry. In my favorite scene they spread out on a sofa and talk back to their TV, much like the families on Bravo’s The People’s Couch.

Satrapi brings out the hidden strengths of all her female performers. Arterton’s crackling bored-dame timing firms up Fiona’s blowsy charm, while Kendrick nails the neediness as well as the niceness in the good girl Lisa. Ella Smith completes this trio of karaoke muses as Alison, a big-hearted co-worker who puts out feelers for any sign of sexual intrigue. These three are never funnier than when they execute this film’s coldblooded variation on Mombi’s heads in Return to Oz.

With everything this film has going for it, why is The Voices still unsatisfying? It’s as if Satrapi and Perry ran out of ideas after deciding to use humor to walk the audience inside a serial killer’s head. A climactic scene of Dr. Warren under duress, dispensing “10 years of therapy in 10 seconds,” is mostly witty and well acted, especially when she compares Jerry hearing voices to herself enduring thoughts that psychotherapy is not legitimate. But when she says “being alone is the root of all suffering,” it does not encapsulate this very busy movie.

We know Jerry is alone. Still, The Voices is so jam-packed with visual pizzazz and talking-animal and office jokes, we don’t feel Jerry’s tragic solitude in our bones. Satrapi’s film plays more like a cautionary fable about denial, or a satiric portrait of a dead-end town, where the height of entertainment is karaoke singing at a bar or an Asian Elvis impersonator at a Chinese restaurant. When The Voices has to get dead serious, it’s like a karaoke version of Red Dragon.