1. Boyhood Richard Linklater, U.S.

Richard Linklater’s movie connects the characters with the audience unlike any picture I’ve ever seen. While it was centered around Mason’s “boyhood,” I became just as interested in watching his parents and siblings grow up around him and how they impacted his life. The song “Hero” by the indie band Family of the Year made this film so innocent and personable, and you often find yourself holding back tears. I think one of the many reasons this picture is raved about is that every audience member can connect something Mason went through to their own personal life, and that really hits home.

Andrew K. Rawls, Charlotte, NC

Matchless and genuine.

Lindsay Riordan, Melrose, MA

So much more than just a unbelievably ambitious project of 12 years realized. It’s a deeply moving, profound film—and possibly more so than any movie to come before it—it is about life.

Gavin Miller, Overland Park, KS

2. The Grand Budapest Hotel Wes Anderson, U.S.

Wes Anderson made his most Wes Anderson–like film to date (which will excite many and cause others gripe) and unexpectedly created a masterpiece. Once again we are pulled down the rabbit hole into his beautifully quirky universe. The film is packed full of clever and oddball moments—the large man hosed down in the bathhouse between the Author and Mr. Moustafa’s chitchat, or the escape from prison using tiny pickaxes—never leaving us short of a good laugh. Ralph Fiennes graciously steals the show in what is one of his best, may I dare say best-ever, performances as the hotel’s extraordinarily dedicated concierge. On top of Anderson’s classic and charming style Grand Budapest adds a new level of complexity and profundity, which was never fully hashed out in his previous films. Zero and Monsieur Gustave H.’s endeavors are touching and heartfelt just as they are hilariously entertaining.

Laura Schwab, Brooklyn, NY

Wes Anderson’s colorful caricature, sets, and costumes have not always meshed cohesively with some of his darker themes, but the contrast works brilliantly in this film. This is one of the most sophisticated and grown-up movies Anderson has made since his masterpiece The Royal Tenenbaums, and never before has Anderson made a film that deals so explicitly with good and evil.

Aden Jordan, Los Angeles, CA

3. Under the Skin Jonathan Glazer, U.K.

With the Internet flooded by fan adoration and scholarly analyses already shooting down the pipeline, I’ll confine myself to calling this a unique, and uniquely terrifying, cinematic vision in every way.

Maria San Filippo, Philadelphia, PA

I can’t honestly say that I enjoyed this movie, but I still admire it. Filming random encounters with heavily accented Scotsmen, Glazer manages to make the human race seem alien and unknowable.

David M. Hurwitz, San Diego, CA

4. Birdman or The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance Alejandro G. Iñárritu, U.S.

I have seen this three times in the theater already, and am looking forward to more. Brilliant, lively, exceptional cast and script; stunning cinematography and editing. I get excited just seeing the previews. And what a score! The blend of drum kit and classical selections is surprising. And Emma Stone hits out of the park!

J.R. (John) Thelin, Buena Vista, VA

While I wasn’t head over heels for Birdman like most, I found the film incredibly entertaining and impeccably acted, but it isn’t quite as deep as it thinks it is. I must also confess I’ve never been an Iñárritu fan and haven’t liked a single one of his self-serious, miserable films. But, this is his best film by a country-mile. And how can you not like or root for Michael Keaton? It’s great to have him back here and at the very top of his game. But as great as Keaton is, the whole film is stolen by Edward Norton’s egotistical Method actor and Emmanuel Lubezki’s virtuoso cinematography.

Evan Coury, New Kensington, PA

5. Ida Pawel Pawlikowski, Poland

Beautifully structured film that captured the grittiness of post war Poland through an innocent and a damaged and weary soul. This rough but emerging landscape shows a war and then Communist-weary society as exemplified by Ida’s aunt and beautifully contrasted by Ida’s protected innocence and beauty. The well-written and -filmed story allows Ida to see this world and discover truth of family’s demise. This ultimately allows her to decide the path most fulfilling to her. The cinematography allows us to view her awakening from her perspective and draw us closer to her. Superlative filmmaking.

Tim Streb, San Francisco, CA

6. Only Lovers Left Alive Jim Jarmusch, U.S.

As a news cameraman in Detroit, I get to see a lot of that glorious ruin of a city. But Jim Jarmusch still managed to take me places I’d never been, and I now have a new favorite spot: the house that Adam the vampire calls home. It has since been purchased and is being restored, much like the city around it. The best line in any movie last year: “This place will rise again. There’s water here. When the cities in the South are burning, this place will bloom.” Kudos to Jarmusch for celebrating the immortality of great art, and for showcasing one of this country’s masterworks, the city of Detroit.

Jeff Jewel, Howell, MI

7. Inherent Vice Paul Thomas Anderson, U.S.

Three viewings and each one feels like I’ve seen a different film. Paul Thomas Anderson brings out some truly amazing performances from one of the best cast since Mann’s Heat. Easily the funniest movie of the year yet also a picture that isn’t afraid to be hauntingly serious and slapstick crazy in the next scene.

Kevin Ringgenberg, Denver, CO

I am not sure what to make of Inherent Vice, as Paul Thomas Anderson, brilliant filmmaker that he is, has made three complicated films in a row, each of which takes a second viewing to fully or even to somewhat grasp. But this has made me sympathize with both the film’s admirers and the detractors. The answer to the proverbial “Who is right?” question will probably be determined in the year 2020, when I have hopefully seen this film for a third time.

Tilly Gokbudak, Salem, VA

8. Whiplash Damien Chazelle, U.S.

Hands-down some of the most riveting directing and editing in years. This isn’t a film about jazz, it’s a film about manipulation and control with a jazz-history backdrop as flawed as the characters’ psyches and motivations—which is fitting. Consistently surprising, and a testament to the filmmaker’s ability to make any subject a fascinating, white-knuckle experience without resorting to cheap thrills or standard tropes.

Stacey Davies, Pomona, CA

9. Gone Girl David Fincher, U.S.

I got in a fight with my wife the night we saw Gone Girl (we had already bought the tickets) and I was a little dismayed to discover that while, under the direction of the great David Fincher, it was certainly a well-made film (the murder scene in particular was absolutely brilliant), the thing didn’t sting at all. At all. And I was in a position to get stung. The problems of these people do not resemble my problems in the slightest. The whole thing was a cartoon. Just a slickly made melodramatic potboiler not all that different from something like Double Jeopardy and just as easy to comfortably dismiss.

Alan Jackson, Roy, UT

I was at the world premiere of this at the New York Film Festival, and was part of the group of people in Alice Tully Hall that saw it before anyone else in the entire history of time—I was at the earliest showing that day. David Fincher, another master of cinema, makes one of my favorite films all time. A perfect film. I love this one so much.

Sam Garcia, Kerrville, TX

10. Nightcrawler Dan Gilroy, U.S.

A raw look at the underbelly associated with achieving the American Dream. And all too often, those who play dirty don’t get caught.

Shonda Lackey, Bronx, NY

11. Two Days, One Night Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne, Belgium/France

The Dardennes by now have proven that they can work with both stars and nonprofessionals, and have them work together to form a believable world and situation. One word I always associate with the Dardennes is conviction, and Marion Cotillard’s performance has exactly that, conviction.

Carlo Pangalangan Labrador, Woodside, NY

Marion Cotillard’s understated realism makes this universal tale resonate, and anyone who’s been desperately out of work or trying to keep a job will connect at once. A kitchen-sink drama that feels more docu- than narrative, this film proves that you don’t need grand stories with multiple levels to deliver a cinematic experience that is poignant, emotional, and most of all, true.

Stacey Davies, Pomona, CA

12. Snowpiercer Bong Joon-ho, South Korea

A timely film highlighting the problems inherent to inequality, set in a futuristic world where climate change has threatened the entire human race. As a bonus, it’s one of the most violent films you’ll see and includes some of the year’s best action sequences.

Luke Melone, New York, NY

13. Goodbye to Language Jean-Luc Godard, France

Godard has been reinventing numerous aspects of cinema for over 50 years but 2014 may have witnessed his most audacious cinematic reinvention to date when he challenged the abused format of 3-D. In the hands of nearly every other director, 3-D is nothing more than a gimmick to give audiences the illusion that movies have extra depth so that they can pay higher ticket prices. Godard uses 3-D to show film lovers that movies can visually communicate creativity and ideology in a more significant manner that spoken language. Whether it’s showing hands flipping through pages of a book or close-up shots of the human anatomy, every image of Goodbye to Language is a testament that Godard is light-years ahead of every other director in the imagination department. I would not be surprised if I do not see a better film during the remainder of this decade.

Juan Olmos, Houston, TX

14. Selma Ava DuVernay, U.S.

It’s a small miracle that a mostly unknown, modest underdog like Ava DuVernay would come to land the daunting filmmaking task of getting Martin Luther King Jr. and his politics right, and it’s a huge relief to see she’s succeeded in impressively resourceful ways. Her Selma is a prime example of how to make the most out of what little you’ve got, an undertaking that’s actually benefited from her position well outside of Hollywood access and without the rights to Dr. King’s iconic speeches. Wisely choosing this moment and locale allots equal attention to that time’s bounty of commemorated figures, and it ensures the film’s focus holds on the tension between a president’s executive reluctance, the organizational cunning of a clergyman, and most importantly the events and anger mobilizing the people of Selma. But the unequivocal talent responsible for bringing Dr. King back to life is David Oyelowo, this year’s greatest male performance that tilts the scale of biopic acting away from precision parroting and toward impassioned, unpredictable intimacy. DuVernay’s knack for intimacy with character and setting—made all the deeper by her continued collaboration with the incredible cinematographer Bradford Young—is her greatest gift as a storyteller, making Selma feel far less of a summary and more of present-tense history in the making.

Joaquin Villalobos, Denver, CO

15. The Immigrant James Gray, U.S.

The themes of Catholic guilt, familial violence, and moody Northeastern settings that have dotted the James Gray cinematic landscape for years now gets cross-pollinated with 1920s New York. Marion Cotillard is splendid as Ewa. The Immigrant succeeds in developing the three main characters with depth and feeling. They are all flawed but acutely drawn people. Even the small roles of Ewa’s aunt and uncle, who make an uncompromising decision, resonate with honesty and moral ambiguity. Gray, so strong with each new passing effort, has crafted an intimate epic that not only gives Cotillard one astounding monologue in a confessional booth, but an ending that both devastates and uplifts its corresponding couple.

Joe Baker, McKinney, TX

16. Force Majeure Ruben Östlund, Sweden

Brings you face to face with one of the dark sides of human nature. The grandiose eerie setting echoes the theme brilliantly.

Sean Wehrli, Astoria, NY

17. Foxcatcher Bennett Miller, U.S.

A stranger-than-fiction web of ambition, mental illness, sport, and wealth is the basis for this true-crime drama by director Bennett Miller. The film is set apart by an unyielding atmosphere of unease, as well as its powerhouse cast, including star comic and former Daily Show cast member Steve Carell, disguised by a prosthetic proboscis as the menacing, shy, and, at last, inexplicable Du Pont. His is an eerie and revelatory transformation.

David M. Holmes, California, MD

18. Mr. Turner Mike Leigh, U.K.

A story of someone who’s ahead of his time and doesn’t have—or care to have—the charisma to bring the world along with him. Set to beautiful cinematography and immersive acting. The best movie about art I’ve seen since Russian Ark.

Jacob Shamsian, Great Neck, NY

19. Interstellar Christopher Nolan, U.S.

The scope, the score, the webs of moving color, tidal waves as big as countries, an M.C. Escher–inspired Tesseract, and all of it grounded in an elemental story of father and daughter. You can feel the dust between each character’s fingers even when they’re a million miles from the farm.

Will Bareford, New York, NY

20. Stranger by the Lake Alain Guiraudie, France

My brother-in-law once met Lemmy Kilmister of Motorhead fame in a bar, and the two struck up a conversation. When they were done chatting, Lemmy shook his hand and said: “Sex and death forever” (or so the legend goes). Freud might approve of this notion intellectually, but Alain Guiraudie knows how to give it to us on an itchy and immediate street level. His post-cruising Cruising reminds us how easy it is to be the moth burned in the candle’s flame, and that maybe that’s the fate we’ve been looking for all along.

Brett Scieszka, Glendale, CA

The Tale of Princess Kaguya Isao Takahata, Japan

Seamlessly transports viewers to the realms of dreams and nightmares alike. Heartbreakingly concrete and magically distant, this animated movie from Studio Ghibli offered the most comprehensive cinematic experience of 2014.

Kat DeGuzman, Nashville, TN

Lucy Luc Besson, France

Action picture with woman as main character!!!

Barb Kundanis, Boulder, CO

Calvary John Michael McDonagh, Ireland/U.K.

It surprises me that this film is not on more lists or receiving much love during this award season. John Michael McDonagh’s words combined with Brendan Gleeson’s strength transform this film about a little Irish town into a big conversation on individuality, redemption, and religion. Providing one of the most talked-about endings, it boasts subtle, intelligent performances by Chris O’Dowd, Kelly Reilly, and Dylan Moran.

Andy Gyurisin, Winchester, VA

General Comments

Only Lovers Left Alive

To me, the worst thing that has happened this year is the proliferation of recliners and food service at many movie theaters out here in New Jersey. I can see this for the Met Opera and prize fights, but asking you to reserve seats online for morning bargain matinees is insane. People I know who only go to the movies on Saturday night or are very fat love this, but I hate it. And the food is pretty dreadful too, and if you don’t eat at least some overpriced snacks, they don’t want your business. And I would repeat the same thing I have in the previous two years: I am seeing more and more films on DVD/Blu-ray and not in theaters. Will film going soon be restricted to theaters in big cities and the small screen for the rest of us?

Regina Domeraski, Lyndhurst, NJ

A remarkable lack of écriture cinematographique, as Bresson called it. A lot of satisfactory films, a few good ones, and a couple of very good ones. But greatness? Future classics? I doubt it. And while I see Linklater’s Boyhood hailed as a masterpiece, I was intrigued and tickled reading about its existence. Left the theater feeling like Linklater had missed his own boat. A chance to really change the way films are made, to twist plot, structure, timeline, etc. Instead, we got a pretty predictable mainstream Hollywood family tale, just shot over 12 years, edited in a neat chronological order. Godard = a scandalous dud (other than the cool 3-D stuff). 

Yves Beauvais, New York, NY

What a year in film! Revelatory re-releases by William Friedkin, Alain Resnais, Wojciech Has and Chris Marker, some of the best of the repertory screenings taking place in Northwest Film Forum running of Scorsese’s “Masterpieces of Polish Cinema.” In contemporary cinema, Seattle International Film Festival presented the single screening of Aleksei German’s otherworldly journey into the distant past/future, like witnessing a Pieter Bruegel painting made real. Alejandro Iñárritu created a joyous, playful meta-narrative membrane that the viewer passed through, moving back and forth across the barrier between life and art. Other highlights included; Jonathan Glazer’s austere study on genuine Otherness, Jim Jarmusch’s love letter to human ingenuity through the eyes of eternal aesthetes, Ari Folman’s psychedelic Orwellian wonderworld, Hiroyuki Okiura’s touching and beautifully rendered tale of pre-adolescence, and Paul Thomas Anderson successfully doing the “unfilmable.” Just to name a few.

Jefferson W. Petrey, Seattle, WA

Benoît Jacquot came of age in Paris at the onset of the Nouvelle Vague and emerged in the mid-Seventies as a key figure of his generation. The formative films he saw at the Cinémathèque Française would echo in his own work: his discursive real-time surveillance of a working girl, La Fille seule (95), closely and cunningly recalls Varda’s Cléo from 5 to 7, and his first leading lady was none other than Nouvelle Vague icon Anna Karina. His widest acclaim to date arrived for the award-winning Versailles drama Farewell, My Queen (12), starring Lea Seydoux as a lady-in-waiting. Kent Jones observed of the film that the suspense derives less from palace intrigue and more from the protagonist’s inner turmoil—a construct Jacquot has characterized as “mental time,” also a useful concept for his latest film.

3 Hearts, which opens theatrically on Friday and kicked off Rendez-Vous with French Cinema, concerns two sisters (Charlotte Gainsbourg and Chiara Mastroianni) who are involved with the same man (Benoît Poelvoorde). Their mother—played by Mastroianni’s real-life parent Catherine Deneuve—senses imminent disaster. The formidable cast of the melodrama-tinged story testifies to Jacquot’s reputation as a perceptive and compassionate director of actresses, having elicited sensitive turns from stars (Isabelle Huppert, Dominique Sanda) and then-newcomers (Isild Le Besco, Virginie Ledoyen) alike.

Jacquot took a moment during his busy New York visit to chat with FILM COMMENT about his seminal experiences—including his extraordinary stint working with Marguerite Duras—and how 3 Hearts fits into his career.

In a previous interview with FILM COMMENT, before making 3 Hearts, you said that your films had not been explicitly emotional, and you wanted to make one in which emotions were everything. How much of a departure is 3 Hearts for you in terms of your past work?

It’s true that for someone like me, who always makes films, and makes them for the joy of making films, often the idea that I have before I begin shooting the film, and the ideas I have about the film after I’ve made it, are different. Once it’s completed, I see the film in another way. I think with 3 Hearts, it’s a little bit complicated. Now, I see it as a film that’s a logical progression from the film that came before it, the film that came after it, and the films that will follow that. Before I started working on it, I had been thinking that it was going to be an attempt to make a film that was more affective, in the Freudian sense of the term “affect.”

Do you think that filmmakers today are reluctant to treat emotions head-on? Or, that they feel audiences can only handle emotions when they’re tackled intellectually or delivered with irony?

It really depends on the filmmaker. I know that for me, it was very difficult to go to the emotion in its heart. But that’s also why I was interested in trying to do so. In many of my films, when I approach emotion, it’s in an indirect way. What’s interesting is then to see what is the emotion that suddenly comes up and jumps from behind you and appears.

Going back a bit, you grew up in Paris during the Nouvelle Vague. It must’ve been a great time to be a budding cinephile, at age 11 or 12.

That probably is around the time my interest in film started, because it was when 400 Blows and Breathless and Le Beau Serge were all coming out. I had learned more about the films before I actually saw them. I was very much taken by the discourse of these directors, what it was they were saying, and I really wanted to see their films. I had to go. I was just barely an adolescent at the time—I went to see them secretly. I went after school, I went without telling my parents, and I snuck in through the backdoor to be able to see them. I think that after seeing the films I became a real cinephile. I have always been very attached to this idea of being a filmmaker, and of the act of filmmaking itself as being something clandestine, where there’s always some question: is the filmmaker really an artist? I think it goes back to those secret entrances into the films.

Were there particular filmmakers who resonated with you then, who struck you as being greater artists than just craftsmen?

Many of the New Wave directors were people who came from a background of having been film critics, writing for Cahiers du Cinéma, which I read at the time. I considered them to be in this category of what was then called “Hitchcocko-Hawksiens,” who were people along the lines of Alfred Hitchcock and Howard Hawks: they considered themselves moviemakers but didn’t consider themselves artists the way a Picasso or a Stravinsky defined themselves as being an artist.

Have you written any criticism yourself?

No, but before I made my first film—and I made my first film when I was really rather young—I was very close to a lot of the people who were writing for Cahiers du Cinéma. We’re talking about the Seventies, people like Serge Daney and others. I was very close with him. Of course, he’s no longer with us, but I’m still pretty close with a number of the people who were writing at the time.

Early in your career you worked as assistant director to Marguerite Duras, who was the subject of retrospective recently at Lincoln Center. Most of her films were shown, including the ones that you worked on, Nathalie Granger and India Song.

There were also others. Le navire Night is actually a dialogue between Duras and me.

What was it like apprenticing under her?

I liked her a lot, but she had this one quality, that she detested cinema. She detested cinema but adored making films. That’s her paradox. At the time, she was involved in the making of a lot of films. The shooting would usually be very short, maybe two or three weeks at a time, and there would be several during the course of a year. Normally, the shooting would take place at her home. She had a home in the country. She also had one at the seashore. The locations would be in places where she lived. She used a lot of the same actors repeatedly: for example, Delphine Seyrig, Gerard Depardieu, Jeanne Moreau. So it was kind of a club or this little family of people that she worked with. She really welcomed us there almost like the hostess, and she made me responsible for the part that she really didn’t like, which was the actual making of the film.

One of the first things I would do is to convey to the actors why it was that they were there. This was something she never liked doing, and so it was always up to me to tell them. I ended up creating this kind of Duras language, Duras-speak, and I was responsible for telling them what it was that they were doing there, between the time you say action and the time you say cut. She didn’t make films for that period between the time of saying action and the time of saying cut. She made films for everything that happens before and everything that happens after, but not for that very act of filmmaking itself. [Laughs]

Was it just the process of making films, the mechanics of making films that she didn’t like? Or was it the idea of narrative cinema?

No. She just had this extremely hostile idea of what film was—that it was like the garbage that was left over after literature and writing, that it was not on the same par. Her theory, or her belief, with two or three exceptions, is that all filmmakers were generally failed writers. The exceptions were for her Chaplin and Dreyer and Charles Laughton’s Night of the Hunter. She could see a film like Night of the Hunter a hundred times, Barbara Loden’s film Wanda, as well. For her, she considered that to be at the same level as literature. The rest was just shit.

Night of the Hunter was written by James Agee, who was a writer, and not a failed one at that.

Many films from writers aren’t very good. Even Land of the Pharaohs by Howard Hawks is from a Faulkner script. Duras liked Faulkner, but he worked on the script, and if she had seen Land of the Pharaohs, she would’ve died laughing. We used to argue about this all the time. I would say: “Land of the Pharaohs is a really good film.” She would say: “How could you say that this piece of garbage is a really good film?”

If she thought film was a lesser art, why did she keep making them? Was she trying to elevate the medium or was it just masochism that led her to make 20 films?

She didn’t have a very progressive attitude about cinema, as she felt that this was a lamentable symptom of what 20th-century life had become. I think this prevented me from ever having a really close kind of relationship with her because I didn’t see it that way. I tend to think that writers like Henry James and Dostoyevsky are not as great artists as say somebody like Fritz Lang. That’s why I make films. Otherwise, I would write novels.

Long before she dons glass slippers, Cinderella proves she has no glass jaw in Kenneth Branagh’s captivating Cinderella. Chris Weitz’s spirited, literate script imbues a sparkling heroine with a sturdy moral compass, just as Weitz did when he wrote his Philip Pullman adaptation, The Golden Compass (07). Free of silly princess fantasies, this Cinderella (Lily James) stays true to a general code—“have courage and be kind”—and a specific mission: honoring her father and mother’s love despite the cruelty of her grasping, malicious stepmother (Cate Blanchett) and Drisella and Anastasia (Sophie McShera and Holliday Grainger, respectively), the woman’s two noxious offspring.

Without resorting to post-Wicked good-girl/bad-girl reversals in the manner of Maleficent and (dare I say it?) Frozen, Branagh and Weitz see the fairy tale afresh. Working from Charles Perrault’s 1697 version, which underpins most modern retellings, they set the tale in a storybook, pre-industrial 19th century, filled with pastoral and courtly charm. This Cinderella doesn’t pander to anyone or take anything for granted, including the stepmother’s unremitting sadism and the ingénue’s serenity, even after her stepparent reduces her to being a scullery maid. (Originally named just plain Ella, she becomes Cinder-ella after she falls asleep exhausted near a fireplace and her face gets smeared with soot.)

Unlike the 1950 cartoon, which starts after the death of Cinderella’s mother and barely limns her father, this movie swiftly and feelingly portrays Cinderella’s relationship with both biological parents. Her mom (Hayley Atwell) passes down her belief in courage and kindness and her faith that animals and humans, and humans and fairy godmothers, are indelibly bonded. When the heroine’s fairy godmother (Helena Bonham Carter) creates a carriage from a pumpkin, then turns a goose into a coachman, mice into horses, and lizards into footmen, this crucial turning point releases all the magic, humor, and cathartic power at the story’s core. No other movie Cinderella matches it.

Cinderella’s dad (Ben Chaplin) insists that her mom is always present at the heart of their home. Cinderella realizes that he is there, too, after she loses him to illness. In this film, the source of the stepmother’s meanness and sadness is her jealousy of the dead woman, even after her husband has died. So when the stepmother tears Cinderella’s gown to pieces on the night of the prince’s ball, it’s fraught with emotion. They’re fighting over a mother’s legacy.

Cinderella is brought to tears, but she’s never defeated; barely a moment passes before she carries a bowl of milk to the old homeless woman who turns out to be her fairy grandmother. Being “belle of the ball” is not in this Cinderella’s vocabulary. She wants to cross paths with a handsome townsman named Kit (Richard Madden), whom she first stumbles across while galloping through the woods as he heads up a stag hunt. Little does she know that Kit, her kingdom’s Prince, has thrown the ball open to all his female constituents, not just native and foreign aristocrats, in hopes of seeing her once again.

Were it not for Branagh’s brio, this version of the story might have been merely briskly intelligent rather than enchanting (as was The Golden Compass, under Weitz’s own direction). This eclectic, unpredictable filmmaker is in peak form here. At the start he seems addicted to high spirits, but as in Much Ado About Nothing (93), there’s heart as well as hardiness in his work with the ensemble. Lily James is perfect casting for a smart, vivacious Cinderella. As she also shows on Downton Abbey playing Lady Rose, she knows how to convey delight without descending into dopiness. She matches up beautifully with Hayley Atwell as her ardent mother and conjures a more elusive connection with Ben Chaplin as her dad. They generate a wonderful calm when he quotes Shakespeare to her, or when she reads to him from Samuel Pepys’ diary (awfully racy reading, come to think of it, unless it’s an expurgated edition).

But the movie really ignites when Blanchett swoops into the picture as the stepmother. With hair turned a shimmering red, this performer has never been more strangely glamorous on screen than she is as this usually sexless and forbidding figure (her counterpart in the Disney cartoon resembles an evil grey-haired schoolmarm). It’s as if Branagh and Blanchett view her as a glammed-up criminal matron like Marlene Dietrich in Rancho Notorious, or as the femme fatale of matriarchs. She’s devastatingly frank about devoting herself solely to the betterment of her biological daughters. Yet she’s also aware that they’re doltish and crude compared to herself or Cinderella. Out of panic and desperation she manufactures, or womanfactures, a spidery allure. She makes clear to Cinderella that she married a second time for security, only to have the replacement spouse expire on her. She now must use her wiles, rather than her daughters’ nonexistent appeal, to snag deep-pocketed suitors. The stepsisters are inevitably overdone, but it’s still fun to watch them tussling through the house just as their mother is telling Cinderella how swimmingly they get along—a scene Branagh shoots quite wittily, in a single shot. And Blanchett breathes a fervid sort of irony into this spiritually parched female. When she overhears how much her second husband loved his first wife, her stricken expressions pull you in because you don’t know what’s been wounded, some genuine pocket of affection or her inescapable, overpowering pride. Blanchett is so strong that she threatens to throw the movie off-balance. James must draw on her tremendous reserves of grace for Cinderella’s ardor and goodness to hold the screen against her charismatic stepmother’s wrongdoing.

Branagh, though, supplies James with stellar support on the side of the angels. Adorable dizziness is hard to pull off, but Helena Bonham Carter does it without strain as the fairy godmother. She, too, looks fabulous: she’d be super in an updated Clairol ad, declaring, “If I have one paranormal life to live, let me live it as a blonde.” Her unpredictable verbal rhythms are ideal for a good witch who appears to work on improvisatory instinct, bursting open a greenhouse with an expanding pumpkin, then using the shards and fittings as the accoutrements for a carriage. Bonham Carter plays off-kilter brilliantly, without the usual tics—as if you sense her twitching on the inside.

Just as important, Richard Madden plays the Prince (aka Kit) with an approachable, understated majesty. It’s crucial that the Prince be surprised and pleased by Cinderella’s directness, especially when she says, of hunting a stag: “Just because it’s what’s done doesn’t mean it’s what should be done.” Madden comes through with aplomb. Her challenge makes him prince up with a sensitive regality. Derek Jacobi is superbly understated as his father, a gentle, ailing King, light-years removed from the cartoon’s caricature of masculine boisterousness. Branagh and Weitz round out the royal characters with impeccably matched opposites: a sinister-suave Stellan Skarsgard, as the Machiavellian Grand Duke, and the redoubtable, big-hearted Nonso Anozie, as the Prince’s trusted Captain of the Guard. In this film, even the royal crier (Alex Macqueen) has a fetching, farcical hauteur.

Branagh stages and shoots Cinderella and Kit’s first meeting with finesse, the camera tracing semicircles around each of them as their horses circle each other. He and cinematographer Haris Zambarloukos (who also worked with him on Thor and Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit) bring a romantic exuberance to Dante Ferretti’s royal sets, allowing us to exult in pomp and circumstance. Ferretti designs a magnificent ballroom for the couple’s dance, and in a rare failing, Branagh neglects to give us a complete shot of Cinderella descending the staircase from the prince’s point-of-view. Yet the dance itself, choreographed by Rob Ashford, is everything it should be. You feel the prince is lifting up this merchant’s daughter and gliding her along in a way that showcases her, not himself.

The film’s crystalline quality sometimes works against it, especially in one crucial, climactic passage. The fairy godmother casts a spell that keeps the stepmother and her daughters from recognizing Cinderella at the ball. But many partygoers do see her as she is, before she rushes away and loses a glass slipper. So it seems odd for the Captain and the Grand Duke to try the slipper on the foot of every female in the country, no matter how old or plain, in order to discover her identity. The humor of incongruity doesn’t entirely compensate for the storytelling clumsiness.

Branagh does bring off the most difficult setpiece with exhilarating bravura: Cinderella’s coach-and-four returning to its original state at the final stroke of midnight. As mouse ears sprout back on the “horses” and lizard tails emerge from the liveries of the “footmen,” it’s like a theme-park ride touched with the highest and best kind of children’s poetry—the kind that’s also fun and memorable for adults. Branagh’s production echoes Perrault’s rhymed morals. For Perrault, Cinderella’s key quality is charm: “Without it you’ve nothing; with it, all.” Sans her fairy benefactor, though, Cinderella’s talents would have gotten her nowhere: “They’ll never help you get ahead / Unless to spread your talents farther / You’ve a willing godmother, or godfather.”

On the whole, this movie’s message is more like the one Perrault put after a story called “The Fairies”: in the Neil Philip–Nicoletta Simborowski translation, “Diamonds and gold / Get us all stirred; / But there’s more true worth / In a kindly word.” 

Tacita Dean, FILM, 2011. Courtesy Frith Street Gallery, London, and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York/Paris; Photograph J. Fernandes, Tate Photography

Sitting on the cool concrete floor inside the dark, massive Turbine Hall of London’s Tate Modern museum watching Tacita Dean’s FILM was a singularly awesome and provocative experience. A short, silent, 35mm anamorphic movie projected on a white block nearly 50 feet high, Dean’s art installation was a film about film itself. Screened for free on a loop for five months at the Tate from late 2011 to early 2012, FILM filled the space with crowds and projected images, allowing its creator a platform to advocate for the future of the preferred medium for her work while at the same time mourning its potential demise. Even though film was seen as fading away, Dean’s FILM, filled with images of nature seen on a large scale, seemed so alive.

Three years later, the British artist placed a few frames of film stock in front of the 30 people (curators, archivists, filmmakers, and executives) joining her around a table in a boardroom at the Getty Center Museum in Los Angeles. As she sat down for a private meeting alongside Hollywood director Christopher Nolan on Sunday morning, Dean challenged her small audience of colleagues to pick up the film strip and study it. How could we let it slip away as a medium to shoot, project, and archive movies, she asked pointedly during the private session. The small art edition offered as a gift for each person in attendance was aimed at enlisting their support for her cause.

The goal of the private meeting was to develop plans to boost film’s image among filmmakers, particularly in relation to digital tools and technologies; emphasize the importance of education programs that incorporate film and analog filmmaking techniques; inspire initiatives to support museums, festivals, archives, and rep cinemas that want to screen movies on film; encourage engagement with film as an art form; and advocate establishing universal criteria for archiving films photochemically.

That afternoon, nearly 500 people gathered to hear Dean and Christopher Nolan consider how to reframe the future of film. Before it’s too late. “Film is another protagonist,” she explained during the discussion. “It invents things that you cannot imagine.” She said that she embraces the “resistance” that comes from working with film and explained that as an artist those challenges and hurdles are part of what makes working with the medium so special.

“You’ve got to stop viewing film as a technology. It’s a medium,” Dean implored Nolan when the two Brits met for lunch last year. It didn’t take much more convincing for Nolan to flex his considerable muscle in Hollywood, a city that could (and would) change the course of film’s future.

Tacita Dean (center) and Christopher Nolan (right) with Kerry Brougher from the Academy Museum (left) and Kodak CEO Jeff Clarke at the Getty Museum on Sunday. Photo by Nicole Shibata/The Getty Research Institute

Last summer was a dark time for the future of film, Nolan and Dean, sitting next to Kodak CEO Jeff Clarke, told insiders on Sunday during the private boardroom meeting. They’d rounded up Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences CEO Dawn Hudson, Los Angeles County Museum of Art Director Michael Govan, cinematographer John Bailey, editor Carol Littleton, and leaders from archives such as George Eastman House, UCLA, The Film Foundation, and about a dozen others for the strategy session and luncheon before their public talk.

“We are at a precarious juncture,” declared Kerry Brougher, Director of the new Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Museum that is slated to open in Los Angeles in two years. With good reason, Brougher struck a cautious tone as he started the conversation between Dean and Nolan on Sunday.

The fall from favor for film has been swift in recent years. Filmmakers working at all budget levels, both for the studios and on independent productions, have abandoned film as their medium of choice. Some have cited cost concerns while others have said that digital gives them greater opportunities in the postproduction process. Nolan argued this weekend that much is being lost amidst the shift, including the option of film for those like him who still prefer analog image capture, a medium-specific format for watching movies at museums, festivals, and rep cinemas, as well as a reliable process for archiving movies.

“What I’m hoping we are doing here today is acknowledging the need. That we need film projectors, we need film prints, we need these things forever,” Christopher Nolan said during the discussion. “We shouldn’t view film as a technology that is there to be supplanted, we should view it as a medium. We want to see a world where it’s there as a choice.”

Dean also emphasized her concern in her comments, reflecting a longstanding interest in a cherished medium facing extinction. In her art, Tacita Dean seems to be drawn to disappearance. “All the things I am attracted to are just about to disappear,” she was quoted as saying frequently in a 2011 New Yorker profile that noted her work’s elegiac tone. Earlier that year as she embarked on the grand Turbine Hall commission, she wrote an impassioned piece for the Guardian in the wake of learning that her local film lab would immediately stop printing 16mm film.

“Film is chemistry: chemistry that has produced the miracle of the moving image,” Tacita Dean wrote in the Guardian. “My relationship to film begins at that moment of shooting, and ends in the moment of projection. Along the way, there are several stages of magical transformation that imbue the work with varying layers of intensity. This is why the film image is different from the digital image: it is not only emulsion versus pixels, or light versus electronics but something deeper—something to do with poetry.”

Following

Nolan’s first feature, Following, was made on 16mm film, and his subsequent work has been shot, produced, and projected on film. He met with Kodak CEO Jeff Clarke more than a year ago at the start of this campaign to preserve his analog manner of working. At the time the legendary company was on the brink of shutting down, having ceased several operations and having laid off many employees. Today, though, things are looking much brighter for a brand that has been practically synonymous with film for over a century.

Nolan (along with J.J. Abrams, Quentin Tarantino, Judd Apatow, and other directors) recently instigated a deal between Kodak, the last remaining producer of film stock, and the big six Hollywood studios. The pact, announced last month, will keep Kodak in business as the supplier of film stock for the studios for production, postproduction, and archiving.

On Sunday, Nolan reiterated that critically acclaimed and award-winning movies are being shot on film. Recent examples include Oscar nominees such as Richard Linklater’s Boyhood, Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel, Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Leviathan, Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice, Morten Tyldum’s The Imitation Game, and Nolan’s own Interstellar. Upcoming examples include Judd Apatow’s Trainwreck, which will sneak at SXSW this week; J.J. Abrams’s new Star Wars film along with other sequels and studio reboots (Batman v Superman, Jurassic World, Cinderella, Entourage); and the next James Bond installment.

On stage in the afternoon as well as at the private morning session, Kodak’s CEO Jeff Clarke was emphatic.

“We are all in,” he said of the company’s commitment to the medium of film. “I couldn’t say that six months ago.”

Christopher Nolan related that witnessing Kodak’s public pronouncement about its commitment to film was the most important thing he heard spoken on Sunday.

The recent survival of Kodak means that film’s death sentence has been stayed. The question facing filmmakers and the film industry is whether the recent successes are enough to completely revitalize the embattled medium. Kodak CEO Clarke admitted that the company is still losing money but added: “We are committed because we believe it is important artistically and that it is a business that will come back.”

Tacita Dean, Kodak, 2006. Frith Street Gallery, London and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York/Paris

If film is to survive, artists and aficionados will have to be convinced that it is a viable medium at a moment when the move to digital formats and platforms is considered forward-looking.

In the short term, Kodak intends to expand a program aimed at making it more inexpensive for independent filmmakers to shoot on film, and the Hollywood studios will bolster the film manufacturer with deals to guarantee usage. Now advocates are looking to educators, those at museums, archives and other institutions, media outlets, and film critics to help them frame the issue.

On Sunday afternoon in front of the standing-room-only audience at the Getty, Tacita Dean said that among her current concerns, are the very words used when film is discussed today.

“The thing we have to resist most of all is this description that it is dying, old-fashioned, and that if you want to use it, that you are in some way retrogressive, that you are a luddite,” Tacita Dean explained. “I think that has been so dangerous . . . No one wants to be seen as backward-looking, so they advocate for digital.”

As many agreed at the boardroom session, corporations have aggressively promoted digital products and platforms at the expense of film, and the need is clear for a reality in which analog and digital can coexist.

David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows is—as far as its story goes—an old-fashioned horror film with an immensely simple premise. There is this malevolent being, and if you’re unfortunate enough to become Its target, It will come and get you.* Just what It wants with you, and why, is never quite clear. One of Its victims in the film is killed, with a leg bent horribly out of shape, while someone else suffers a fate that’s differently distressing, not only because of what It does, but because of the guise It takes while doing it (you’ll have to see; suffice to say, things get a little oedipal). The peculiarity of It is that It takes different forms, appearing to victims sometimes as a stranger, sometimes as a person they know: as one person puts it, “Sometimes I think It looks like people you love just to hurt you.”

Sometimes It takes a form that’s inherently scary—not rotting-corpse scary, just creepy, like a hissing rat-faced boy or an alarmingly tall man looming in a doorway. And sometimes It looks like some kid from high school. And crucially, no one can see It except Its prey. Early in the film, late-teens heroine Jay (Maika Malone) and her date Hugh (Jake Weary) leave a cinema in her Detroit suburban neighborhood because of a girl in a yellow dress; he sees her, but Jay doesn’t, and that’s the first, seemingly innocuous chill in this ingeniously subtle film. We never see her either, but somehow the thought of that girl in a yellow dress sends a chill up my spine for reasons I can’t quite fathom.

So the premise is simple: “Wherever you are, It’s walking straight towards you,” Hugh says. But it’s a little more complicated. Essentially, It is a curse that’s sexually transmissible. As Hugh explains to Jay after they have sex, the only way to get rid of It is to sleep with someone else, who becomes Its next target; but if It kills that person, then the curse comes back to you, and if It kills you, It comes for the person who passed It on to you, and so on. Now this setup clearly raises the possibility that we might be dealing here with that old horror favorite, the extended AIDS metaphor—although Its capacity for recurrence makes It Follows more like a herpes horror movie.

But perhaps more teasing is this question of where Hugh’s knowledge, which he expounds with such expert certainty, comes from in the first place. Where does the chain of knowledge begin? Who fucked Hugh and told him what he needed to know to survive? Who did that person get the story from? Who worked out the rules of escaping It in the first place? Whether or not It Follows is also about sex, its underlying theme is communication. Knowledge of It, like the curse itself, passes from person to person, one at a time. It travels in a straight line, albeit a reversible one that runs both ways, all theoretically heading back to a single point of origin—but an origin that can never be located or pinned down because It is a figure of absolute indeterminacy. I sincerely hope that no one ever tries makes an It Follows sequel that explains everything—that would make the whole premise not just less fascinating, but a lot less Derridean.

The whole straight-line business also makes It Follows a rather retro horror story in the sense that only one person, apparently, can be Its target at any time. That would not only militate against this being an AIDS metaphor, but also make it something other than classic “contagion horror”—this film’s curse doesn’t spread virally (as in epidemics, or on the Internet), but only passes on serially. It’s a pre-Web old-school passing-the-curse movie (cf. Jacques Tourneur’s Night of the Demon) and as such, a drama about a moral dilemma: at its core is the question of whether, in order to survive, the prospective victim is willing to make another person’s life hell. This is the quandary facing the altogether sympathetic Jay—one given a piquant ironic twist by the fact that, guess what, there’s more than one guy willing to help out by sleeping with her.

As well as simple-yet-complex, It Follows is also agreeably familiar-yet-original. The premise of the Unnameable Pursuer is a premise explored in its many variations by the great English short-story master M.R. James (1862-1936) whose ghouls tend to be summoned unwittingly by their victims—as in “‘Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’”, one of many stories whose BBC TV adaptations have terrified late-night viewers for several decades (James’s “Casting the Runes” was the original for Night of the Demon).

The distinctive, personal touch to It Follows lies in Mitchell’s fresh, lucid take on youth, suburbia, and the everyday—all familiar American horror themes, but also ones he explored in his widely liked non-horror debut The Myth of the American Sleepover (10). Mitchell’s opening establishes his mundane canvas. We’re on a wide, leafy suburban avenue in broad daylight—the archetypal Elm Street, if you like. A teenage girl in a negligee bolts out of her house in terror, dashes across the street, as the camera pans round to follow her—then rushes back to the house, and suddenly out again. It’s a crazier, more confused path than horror cinema’s usual flight-in-fear—all watched at a coolly detached distance, in a long unbroken take.

There’s another great long take later, when Jay and her admirer/protector Greg (Daniel Zovatto) are looking for Hugh at his high school. Here the camera slowly pans round 360 degrees, sweeping across the ordinary comings and goings at the school—then finally, as if out of the corner of its eye, catching a girl walking towards us in the far distance. The creepy thing about such sightings is that we can’t always tell whether we’ve really seen It or not, even if the figure in question appears to be lumbering inexorably on, automaton-like; some regular people, it seems, just happen to lumber, and this uncertainty principle is cleverly exploited throughout.

At moments It Follows becomes, less suggestively, just a story about a bunch of kids banding together to outwit a demon. There’s a fairly nail-biting confrontation sequence at a deserted swimming pool, and while I enjoyed the tension—and the echoes of Tourneur’s Cat People—I slightly regretted the shift away from a pensive, nervous register into an all-out showdown. It Follows is most effective when teasing you with the unsaid—for example, leaving you to wonder whether there’s any logic to the specific guises that It takes (discussing the film, Mitchell has hinted that there is, but that he’s not about to reveal it).

There’s another ghost story element to the film—the presence of Detroit. The action is set largely in the city’s suburbs, and around a nearby lake; but some of the film heads into the abandoned city areas that we’ve seen in countless documentary photos (and in Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive). Mitchell handles Detroit’s dilapidation poetically and atmospherically, notably at the start, when Jay is tied up in an old car park to have It explained to her (the stills misleadingly suggest torture porn, possibly a devious publicity ploy on someone’s part). But overall the crumbling streets and houses present the city itself as a phantom—as if Detroit and its abandonment are the real Repressed of this horror tale set in cozily sheltered suburbs.

It Follows isn’t short on grace and idiosyncratic style. Michael Gioulakis’s cinematography, more art-house than genre with its eerie pools of light at night, brings an arrestingly static, tableau-like quality that echoes the highly staged scenarios of Gregory Crewdson’s photos, each of them conceived as a horror movie in miniature. Alongside knowing visual echoes of Halloween, there’s a deep vein of John Carpenter in the simple but unnervingly effective electronic score by Disasterpeace, which runs from almost subliminal background booms to crunching, sometime strident dissonance (I’ve just listened to some on my laptop, and even heard this way they’re still deeply troubling).

Then there’s some sweet, emotionally engaging acting. Maika Monroe is a very watchable heroine—tough-vulnerable, intensely likable, if not quite brimming with charisma. It’s actually her gentle, sad-sack admirer Paul (Keir Gilchrist) who’s the most emotionally involving figure. Jay, in her late teens, is the only one of her circle who’s graduated from childhood to being a sexually active adult: her sister Kelly (Lili Sepe) apparently hasn’t, neither has their bookish friend Yara (Olivia Luccardi), who’s constantly reading Dostoevsky’s The Idiot (and reciting ominous lines) on a seashell-shaped miniature e-reader. Neither has the devoted, poignantly melancholy Paul; Jay gave him his first kiss at school, he ruefully reminds her, but she’s gone on to sleep with guys like Greg, the tough, sexy rebel across the road. Paul, meanwhile, is one of those sad, shy boys who watched the girls they loved at school grow up faster than them, leaving them sexually stranded and emotionally bereft. When Paul shyly offers to sleep with Jay, you cringe a little, and laugh, but you feel for him too: the suggestion is self-serving, of course, but also touchingly heroic. Paul’s relationship to Jay is the tender emotional core of the movie, perhaps even more than her fight to survive—which is partly what makes the film so singular, and perhaps so personal. See it as the story of a heartbroken boy who also can’t help following the girl who’s out of reach, and Mitchell’s film could easily be called The Curse of the American Sleepover.

* I’m using the upper-case “I” because it feels right; echoes of Stephen King are incidental, but I suppose, not entirely inappropriate.

This year, extra-cinematic events created meaningful connections among some of the films screened at the International Film Festival Rotterdam. Aside from the victory of the “radical” left coalition in the Greek elections—hopefully the beginning of the end of neoliberal policies in (southern) Europe, whose effects on film festivals are not incidental—two other significant things took place: King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia died, and the Kurdish militias of YPG (a guerrilla army mainly composed of young Muslim women) liberated the Kurdish town of Kobani, which had been under siege from ISIS for the past few months. Both of these occurrences naturally relate to Adam Curtis’s Bitter Lake, which received its big-screen premiere at IFFR.

Bitter Lake

King Abdullah's death was met with mournful respect by Western leaders (the Obamas flew to Riyadh for his funeral) even though the kingdom he ruled over with an iron fist forbids women from driving and walking in public unaccompanied by men, has beheaded 10 persons in 2015 alone, and banned public cinemas until very recently, when an IMAX that exclusively shows science documentaries opened in Khobar. (Where are all the freedom-loving cinephiles when it comes to Saudi Arabia?) Curtis’s Bitter Lake  makes clear why this brutal tyrant has been so reverently treated by democratically elected Western leaders. An ailing Franklin D. Roosevelt met with the Saudi monarch shortly after World War II to discuss business and secure privileged access to the oil-rich region. Curtis patiently tries to untangle the confidential, friendly relationship between Washington and Riyadh, and to debunk the nebulous narratives that have distorted the nature of every Middle Eastern conflict that has taken place since WWII. It is no easy task, which is reflected in Bitter Lake’s labyrinthine form. The narrative that emerges from this thoroughly researched documentary is far removed from the daily fictions of mainstream media coverage: economic interests, not democratic values, have acted as the guiding principles behind every invasion in the region, and Western powers have never hesitated to side with the worst forms of fundamentalism to maintain control over the region and its resources, usually in the name of anti-communism and against secular Pan-Arabism. Though none of this is news to those who are familiar with the historical record, it’s shocking to see how the forces we’ve so bravely fought against—like the Taliban or ISIS—were actually spawned by Western powers who subsequently lost control over their creations, like Frankenstein and his monster. 

Angels of Revolution

The sudden and radical upheaval of a revolution can destabilize the emancipatory process it initiates and lead to self-destruction, as shown in Aleksey Fedorchenko’s Angels of Revolution. Set during the 1934 Kazym rebellion, the events are "based on a true story"—a claim that should be taken with a grain of salt—and raises crucial issues facing any society undergoing revolutionary change. We follow a group of Soviet avant-gardists in their utopian quest to bring revolutionary art forms, as well as the art of revolution, to the most remote corners of the newly formed Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Rather stiff and formulaic in its tone, Fedorchenko’s film explores not only the dawning of the Russian revolution but also its inborn failure. Unlike Chinese Communists who built a broad social network long before coming to power, Bolshevism was a predominantly urban movement with no meaningful connections to the vast rural areas of Russia. Angels of Revolution details the doomed attempt to convert a profoundly heterogeneous society, in which the innovative forms of Constructivism and Communist Futurism clashed with ancestral cultures unwilling to undergo such a sea change. The cultural and anthropological differences that ran between the Bolshevik intelligentsia—presented here in their noblest and most experimental incarnation—and the preindustrial communities living miles (and centuries) away from the urban hotbeds of Soviet avant-garde become painfully evident in the film’s finale. When the intrepid avant-gardists reach a village of Khanty people in western Siberia, they encounter an ancient culture and a different language that is utterly unreceptive to their theremin compositions and experimental cinema. Though the film struggles to render its characters with verisimilitude, the director strikes a laudable balance in terms of representation, neither falling prey to demonizing Soviet expansionism nor overly romanticizing cultures untouched by progress. What Angels of Revolution shows, as impartially as possible in narrative film, is the fundamental incompatibility between the original utopia of the Soviet revolution and the anthropological diversity of the sprawling country in which it took place. The inevitable conflict between these two irreconcilable aspects will paradoxically bring about the brutal elimination of both experimental art and rural cultures, amidst the slaughters committed by the Red Army. 

Internationale

The civil war between Red and White Russians and, later, Stalin, would wipe out the last traces of the avant-gardists’ idealistic project. Also screening at IFFR, in the “Everyday Propaganda” program, was a somewhat anachronistic example of revolutionary formalism, Internationale by Alexander Shein and Alexander Svetlov. Made in 1970, long after artistic experimentation was obscured by the reactionary tropes of Soviet realism, the 22-minute short revisits the lessons of their country’s art by the paranoiac light of the Cold War. Through split screens, dialectical montage, and the rhetoric of anti-imperialism, the mendacious projections of the great Soviet nemesis, America, are colorfully demolished: in the shadow of the Statue of Liberty, racial persecution thrives, and behind the waving stripes and stars of the American flag are the war crimes of the Vietnam War. Yet the long-anticipated promises of democratic capitalism that transformed rotten Soviet apparatchiks into equally despicable oligarchs remained only a mirage for a large part of the population. Many in the former USSR, in a perverse historical fall backward, are now nostalgically longing for the ugly old days—a testament to the deceitful nature of globally pervasive neoliberal thought more than the “beauty” of Soviet communism.

“Chosen humility can be truly regal, but vanity run to seed is not a pretty sight”

—George Bernanos, Diary of a Country Priest

“I got a big ego (Hahaha)
I’m such a big ego (Hahaha)
I got a big… (Hahaha) ego,
She love my big (Hahaha) ego,
So stroke my big (Hahaha) ego”

—Kanye West, “Ego (Remix)”

Echo and Narcissus, John William Waterhouse 

I am not an easily shocked man. The recent news of Boko Haram pledging allegiance to ISIS, thus forming, in the words of my Saturday morning G.I. Joe, a “ruthless terrorist organization determined to rule the world,” for example, I took as due course. But the recent appearance of a trailer and 12-minute excerpt of something called #AnnieHall was enough to penetrate even my hardened carapace.

The above are teasers for an upcoming Kickstarter to finance a feature, the complete script of which¹ can be found at the #AnnieHall website. The proposed film, per the description provided there, concerns “A 40 year-old neurotic comedy writer [who] recalls his failed yet fun-filled romance with a millennial Jewish woman”—a 21st-century Annie Hall reboot that “flips pivotal elements” of the original “while updating jokes and pop-culture refs.” The key flip, as you may have inferred, involves the interfaith relationship of the central couple. Writer/director/star/garbage-person J.D. Oxblood’s answer to Woody Allen’s Alvy Singer is a Catholic Midwestern transplant called J.P. Porter, while Porter’s exotic shiksa is Minnie Wohl, “a nice yeshiva girl from Forest Hills” (Charly Bivona). (Bivona, per her official bio, has studied at the “Purple Rose Theatre Company in Chelsea, Michigan,” founded by native son Jeff Daniels in 1991, and named after Allen’s The Purple Rose of Cairo, in which Daniels starred.) The dead-unfunny trailer is a Cannibal Holocaust–grade ordeal, though undoubtedly its most mortifying moment comes in the “kicker,” a horrifying, seemingly endless tonsil-jousting make-out at the Brooklyn Bridge Park, with Oxblood latching onto Bivona like an Alien face-hugger. (It in fact lasts only a couple of seconds.) It does not help matters that he’s wearing a suit with some of the widest pinstripes that I have ever seen.

If you are, like myself, a glutton for punishment, you can attempt a side-by-side comparison between the scripts for Annie Hall and #AnnieHall, the proposed feature, which follows the same scene-by-scene structure, with Oxblood providing his contemporary tweaks along the way. For example, in Alvy’s hookup with a reporter, now old-hat ho-hum oral sex has been exchanged for spanking, and the line “Sex with you is really a Kafkaesque experience” has been changed to “Having sex with you is very empowering.” This, it should be said, isn’t so far from the spirit of Allen’s work, as he’s often made a point of including scenes in his films where he exchanges rave postcoital reviews with a lover, and in some respects #AnnieHall, stripping Allen’s material of his charisma by providing his worst-ever “stand-in,” might be seen to underline the perceived solipsism of his own work, a matter which has been discussed clear to death.

#AnnieHall

One key difference between these projects, of course, is that in 1977 Woody Allen had compiled a significant body of evidence which suggested that people did, in fact, find him interesting enough to follow him along on a bit of navel-gazing while, charitably speaking, no comparable sample exists for J.D. Oxblood. Allen had directed six movies, starred in these and several others, released three albums of his stand-up comedy, and guest-hosted The Tonight Show. Oxblood, in the trailer for his as-yet nonexistent feature, edits himself into an appearance on The Daily Show. Allen essentially plays himself but, as the decidedly Allen-influenced Louis C.K. would do on Louie, he has downplayed his own success so that it won’t act as a barrier to audience relatability. Oxblood, again, is editing himself into an appearance on The Daily Show. It’s the difference between pretending to have less than you have and pretending to have more; neither is necessarily more honest, but one is a good look and the other, to say the very least, is not.

#AnnieHall, a sick-making piece of imposture, screams vanity project—but aside from the ol’ Potter Stewart “I know it when I see it,” I found that when I tried to formulate a comprehensive definition of what, exactly, defines a vanity project, I came up lacking. To stay a moment longer with the present example, one obvious difference is financial. United Artists, on the basis of Allen’s proven commercial appeal, were willing to entrust him and his collaborators with $4 million dollars in order to make their movie. By contrast, J.D. Oxblood must pass his hat around to friends, friends of friends, and anyone else who might be drawn to his Kickstarter campaign in order to achieve his vision, such as it is. Leaving aside the matter of expressing the muse for the moment to take a strictly materialist view, we can separate the production of art—let’s call it “original content,” per a press release about Peter Berg’s new production company that I just received—into professional and amateur spheres. (The second term is not meant as a pejorative, but rather to be used in the original sense.) Original content produced professionally must seek to serve the profit motive. If the profit motive is not the principal incentive, either by necessity (nobody’s buying) or design (you’re not selling), original content that is being produced on the amateur level may yet be tradable in other forms of capital—self-esteem, intellectual distinction, or sexual peacocking.

That last form is key—I refer you again to Mr. Oxblood’s spit-swap ending to his #AnnieHall trailer, joining a storied tradition of men using the pretext of narrative art to pair themselves romantically with younger actresses, or otherwise to establish their undiminished virility. Oxblood, to his credit, establishes the age difference between his character and Minnie, and makes it an element of his film. Such is not the case in 2005’s Double Down, the movie that attracted a measure of cult recognition to its writer/producer/director/star Neil Breen. Breen has the bearing of a rumpled, beef-jerky-limbed Garry Shandling, though the way in which he presents himself to the camera suggests he fancies himself a rugged Jack Palance type. In Double Down, Breen plays a super-hacker, ex-fighter-pilot, and counterterrorism agent named Aaron Brand who went rogue after the government, fearing his growing power, assassinated his fiancée. In the film’s ongoing voiceover monologue, Brand pines for the departed “love of his life,” his lyrical longing (“Come back again… I am your spirit”) interspersed with cutaways to stock shots of bald eagles. I imagine that this must be what people who don’t like Terrence Malick movies see when they watch Terrence Malick movies.

Double Down

Brand tells us that he and his bride-to-be met when they were 7 years old, though apparently working as a government op puts some city miles on you, because when we see the fiancée in a flashback, she appears to be at least two decades his junior. Shortly afterward, we’re shown the killing itself, which occurs while Brand and his fiancée are bathing in some kind of outdoor spring, she presenting her be-thonged backside to the camera. After the deed is done, Brand floats next to her corpse in the pool, facedown and bare-assed in his abjection, such exhibitionistic effrontery being something of a unifying theme among the films discussed here.  

According to various profiles tied to the 2014 distribution of Breen’s third film, Fateful Findings, the Las Vegas-based auteur self-finances his cinematic endeavors through his work as either a licensed architect, a real-estate agent, or both, according to what source you look at. The combined budgets of Breen’s corpus would likely be only a fraction of what went into the most famous vanity film of the 21st century, a hazy tissue of elliptical conversations and wobbly end-over-end pigskin-tossing titled The Room (03). The brainchild of California entrepreneur-turned-multihyphenate Tommy Wiseau, The Room offers a bit of a twist on the older-auteur/younger-starlet pairing, though in a fashion that ultimately serves to reinforce Wiseau’s narcissism. Wiseau’s character, Johnny, is oblivious to the fact that his “beautiful” bride-to-be, Lisa (Juliette Danielle), is cheating on him with Mark (Greg Sestero), his “best friend.” (I feel obliged to include both of the quoted designations, as they are repeated several hundred times in the course of the 99-minute film.) While Danielle and Sestero both appear to be a good quarter-century younger than Wiseau, this fact is never once addressed in The Room; Wiseau does, however, make sure to include ample footage of his impressively gym-toned, if knotty and oddly mottled, body.

I haven’t read The Disaster Artist, Sestero’s 2013 account of The Room’s production (written with Tom Bissell), and I didn’t need to in order to recognize Wiseau’s movie as a film à clef—the work of an embittered man who’d been fitted with the horns of a cuckold, or at least imagined himself to have been wronged, using the license of fiction in order to take his revenge on those whom he perceives as his betrayers. The film ends with Wiseau staging his own suicide—the ultimate solipsistic act—though here he’s allowed to indulge in the Tom Sawyer fantasy of gloating over the spectacle of the emotional devastation that his death inspires, as mourners heap themselves onto the body of too-sensitive-for-this-rotten-world Johnny, realizing all too late the error of their ways. Engineering this sort of spectacle would be embarrassing for an artist of any age, though it is doubly so because Wiseau is (conservative estimate) pushing 50 here, and it’s not without reason that “Die middle-aged, leave a Bowflex-toned-but-sort-of-weird-looking corpse” isn’t a saying in common usage—if you’re to lose your youthful glow in outliving Chatterton, the silver lining is that you’re supposed to get wiser. (A dispensation must be made for artists, such as Vladimir Mayakovsky and Yukio Mishima, who managed to elevate self-destruction to the level of performance art.)

The Room

For Wiseau, when Tommy/Johnny dies, all light goes out of the world with him, while Breen, to borrow the title of Allan Dwan’s final film, depicts himself as The Most Dangerous Man Alive. In both cases—the martyr fantasy, the “vengeance is mine” posturing—there is a messianic impulse at work, and of my favorite movies of last year takes the delusional self-importance of the vanity film to its logical extreme. This would be Nick Corirossi’s brazenly off-putting Hector.LA, or, as it is titled onscreen, Henry Jaglom’s Nick Corirossi’s The 5th Belief. Made in the form of a vanity movie project from the turn of the millennium that has survived, at least in compromised, fragmentary form, to the 32nd century, it stars Corirossi as “Nick Corirossi,” a balding sleazebag making a trash movie with the stated intent to “get pussy,” though as it happens, the eventual parents of the world’s savior meet on his set, and the film in which they appear somehow survives as the lone relic of human civilization as we know it. (Parodying middle-aged men playing half their age, the 27-year-old Corirossi plays middle-aged.) Corirossi’s touchstones include Jaglom, a marginal filmmaker who has for years eaten lunch off the fact that he used to eat lunch with Orson Welles (the logo of his Rainbow Films company, featuring Welles, is among the pieces of found footage employed here) and self-promoted new projects on a billboard at Sunset and Downey, and Eric “Enter the Void” Schaeffer, whose YouTube series “Eric Schaeffer: Life Coach” I will link here without comment.

When you’re working without promise of a paycheck, you open yourself up to a certain amount of suspicion, and so any amateur effort runs the risk of being tagged a vanity project. And where self-absorption is expected or at the very least tolerated from the young, the films I’ve addressed thus far have in common the odor of midlife crisis—a sudden decision to launch oneself as a filmmaker without any previous track record, blowing the bankroll on cast and crew instead of the stereotypical sports car.² If you are a bored teenager making movies just for the fun of the thing, your amateur efforts fall under the auspices of backyard filmmaking, a phenomenon that I have written about in the past. If you begin making self-financed movies starring yourself and your cohort of friends in your twenties or even into your thirties, with or without the prospect of financial gain, you will be safely working in the moderately respectable established tradition of American independent filmmaking—though this doesn’t come without increasing attendant risk of being accused of narcissism, as in the cases of Swanberg, Dunham, et al. When you start making movies in middle age, using your personal fortune, you haven’t even got the excuse of heedless youth, and the risk of appearing a creeper is high.

If Wiseau and Breen’s films have value—and they do—it’s because while failing to pull off the most routine plot machinations, they achieve something else through virtue of their mere existence, representing gate-crashing incursions into show business by individuals who haven’t been vetted through official channels, and never, ever would be. These films might be classified as a species of outsider art, or art brut, produced by men who, while seemingly completely out of touch with popular culture, nevertheless are compelled to produce a distorted version of its formulae, men who look in the mirror and see a matinee idol looking back.

Fateful Findings

Where filmmakers working in the shadow economy of the independent tradition have some sense of community, with attendant obligations and social pressures, The Room and Double Down are works in which seemingly no checks or balances have been applied to their creators’ most haywire impulses. In a recent interview, the filmmaker Albert Serra, a deeply boring Catalan whose soporific burlesque of cocksure alpha confidence has won him several admirers, states: “Like me, [Buñuel] was not coming from the world of cinema, and he would never talk about other filmmakers. Buñuel stands alone. And this is what I want to achieve. I don’t like other filmmakers, I’m not interested, and I hate all filmmakers that came from the academy.” The director of Story of My Death, of course, knows the rules of the game he’s playing backwards and forwards, and it is for this reason that he is presently enjoying a 10-day stand at the Tate Modern—the figure from outside “the world of cinema” that he’s describing is someone closer to Tommy Wiseau. There has been some debate over what the title The Room means, though to me it must apply to the airtight, locked chamber of Wiseau’s mind, where nary a ray of self-consciousness penetrates.

The pathos of the disjunction between ambition and perceivable reality, as evidenced in the cases of Wiseau and Breen, is a subject of considerable allure—the success of works like Ed Wood and American Movie, both of which concern outsiders lacking the financial resources of our subjects at hand, speaks to this fact. And so, naturally, plans are now in place to make a major motion picture of The Disaster Artist—though I am perhaps being overhasty in using the word “major,” for James Franco, the current poster boy for overreaching mediocrity along with Joseph Gordon-Levitt, is slated to direct the movie, and per some reports is also planning to star as Wiseau, opposite his brother, Dave, who would play Sestero. There is a conceptual gambit to be read into this, as there always is with Franco. Per the critic Michael Koresky, in a recent exchange: “Joseph Gordon-Levitt and James Franco share a disturbing egotism that nullifies whatever minor talents they have (Franco can be very funny; JGL can feign genuine likability). Not to always bring it back to Ethan Hawke (but why not?), but when he takes on genre garbage he throws himself into it whole hog and actually elevates it, whereas Franco treats them like high-concept experiments and ends up condescending to it.” In addition to the various film projects that he has directed since 2005’s The Ape, Franco has produced fiction, essays, gallery exhibitions, and mixed-media theater, and throughout the course of doing so has been accused of using his fame to create opportunities for himself that he does not, by any available evidence of merit, deserve, just as Wiseau used his personal fortune to give himself the big break that no casting director in his right mind would have ever given him. Here we might conclude that the vanity project has something to do with power and privilege, though in this, again, it resembles the entire moviemaking system, only more so.

The Ape

The case of Franco brings us, naturally, to another sort of “vanity project”—incursions of show business into other fields of artistic endeavor, with greater or lesser success. Only this week I was alerted to the fact that Val Kilmer was selling his original artwork online at prices that are, let us say, somewhat disproportionate to the accomplishment of the work. Elsewhere I was reminded to the existence of Michael Madsen’s poetry, praised by Dennis Hopper, himself a photographer of note, as was the late Leonard Nimoy, who also released five albums on the Dot Records label of Nashville, Tennessee. Perhaps the most common celebrity sidebar is the musical project, the annals of star-rock having given us Franco’s band Daddy, Thirty Seconds to Mars, The Bacon Brothers, Dogstar, Thunderbox, Wicked Wisdom, Juliette and the Licks/New Romantiques, 30 Odd Foot of Grunts, The Return of Bruno, “MacArthur Park,” and forays into anodyne wet-blanket indiepop by Scarlett Johansson³ and Zooey Deschanel, just for starters. (It should be noted that in other cultures, for example the Cantopop and French traditions, for stars to have a musical project is the exception rather than the rule, and that Anglo-American celebrity may be an outlier in this regard.)

The more I look for a categorical definition of the vanity film, the more unsalvageable the term comes to seem—a distinction meant to impugn the motives of a creator, conferred according to one’s relative tolerance for the work in question. I toyed with the idea of reframing the discussion in the strictly materialist terms of star versus anti-stars, to wit: people pay money to see the star; the anti-star pays so that they can be seen. This construction doesn’t hold much weight either, for I doubt that many of the works I’ve been discussing were undertaken with the intention of losing the investment, as it is a particular function of narcissism to believe that one is as interesting to everyone else as one is to one’s self—as, indeed, some of the examples I’ve chosen have proven to be, thus transmogrifying the “delusional” anti-star into the star proper. Indeed there is something hypnotic about Wiseau’s screen presence—his Anne Rice–inspired sartorial sense, his odd shyness and incessant chuckling, as if at an inside joke known to himself alone—and why not? Wouldn’t you be laughing if you could blow a reported $6 million with total disregard for a return on the investment?

These compunctions notwithstanding, I will put forth a tenuous definition of the vanity film. It is the work of an outsider which assumes the privilege of an insider, which asks “Why Tom Cruise and not me?”—then doesn’t stop to consider the myriad reasons why not. Rather than recognizing and working within the limitations imposed by the circumstances of its production which separate it from the Big Time, the vanity film refuses to admit to the existence of these limitations, as it denies the effects of age, and all laws of plausibility. It originates outside of show business, and embodies the egotism without which there can be no show business. “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity,” per Ecclesiastes—a statement which someone, I forget who, noted logically includes itself in the condemnation.

1. Among my favorite elements are the footnotes (“Reference: Slavoj Zizek- ‘Art of the Ridiculous Sublime, On David Lynch’s Lost Highway’), and the moments which betray the author’s feigned insider status, and desperate desire to be proximate to celebrity culture. (“Excellent place for a cameo, as Truman Capote did in Woody’s film.”) Oh, and there’s also this: (click to enlarge)

2. The history of art, it should be noted, has more than its fair share of late-blooming creators, men and women who abandoned the métier that they worked in for another largely or wholly unrelated, in midstream, as it were, and those who kept their day jobs. Literature perhaps offers the most viable examples, with Sherwood Anderson, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, George Eliot, Anthony Burgess, Muriel Spark, Raymond Chandler, Henry Miller, all having launched themselves in midlife.

3. Not so long ago I bore witness to Johansson performing New Order’s “Bizarre Love Triangle,” preceding the song with the “self-deprecating” aside: “Superstar karaoke, right?” Totally, ScarJo, I can see you get it. Regarding the other projects listed, they are the love-labors of, respectively, Jared Leto, Kevin Bacon, Keanu Reeves, Steven Seagal, Jada Pinkett Smith, Juliette Lewis, Russell Crowe, Bruce Willis, and Richard Harris.

When Michael Almereyda transposed Hamlet to modern-day, millennial New York, he audaciously set the “mortal coil” soliloquy in the Action aisle of a video store. Sporting a ski cap, Hamlet (Ethan Hawke) considered his options in the wake of his uncle Claudius’s takeover of the family multinational, Denmark Corp. Such embellishments could have come off as arch or affected, but Almereyda’s film demonstrates how surface alterations only crystallize the perpetual resonance of the play’s universal themes.

Fifteen years later the filmmaker returns with Cymbeline, a distinctly unorthodox take on one of Shakespeare’s later, less familiar works. Cymbeline (Ed Harris) is the head of a drug-running Briton motorcycle gang, facing reprisal from the police force if he stops buying their silence. His daughter, Imogen (Dakota Johnson), has secretly married the indigent Posthumus (Penn Badgley), who, banished by Cymbeline, is compelled to wager on his bride’s fidelity by Iachimo (Hawke)—who in turn forges damning evidence through means Shakespeare could have never contrived.

Almereyda’s Cymbeline, which opens theatrically today and played in Film Comment Selects, is set in the United States, complete with modern accouterments (iPhones, Google Maps). His film of pioneering social psychologist Stanley Milgram, Experimenter, starring Peter Sarsgaard and Winona Ryder, premiered at Sundance in January and garners strong praise from Amy Taubin in our March/April issue. Almereyda spoke with FILM COMMENT about zeroing in on the prickly emotions and drives at work in Shakespeare’s play.

What made you choose to adapt Cymbeline?

Partly because I feel it’s been neglected. There hasn’t been a movie of it to speak of. There’s a BBC production that’s pretty tame and insubstantial. It was done for TV, and it’s more of a filmed performance than a true movie. And there’s a 1913 American silent film, which I didn’t know about until just a few months ago. Twenty minutes of that survive. But in terms of really dealing with the play, taking it on its own terms and also trying to interpret it, I knew no one had done that. It would be fun. And Ethan Hawke agreed. He was the key figure in making it possible to make the film, and between the two of us, we felt it was an opportunity to introduce people to the play—to start from scratch and make an exciting new movie.

How does adapting a lesser-known play differ from working with Hamlet?

It’s very different. But I still tried to approach it step by step, scene by scene, as a collision between contemporary reality and the world that Shakespeare was defining, and to see how those two things talk to each other and intersect. And there are things that feel very resonant in all of Shakespeare’s work, and we were just trying to focus on what was resonant to ourselves. So there’s a whole element of Cymbeline that I cut out or minimized, that has to do with national identity, about the British empire, and that obviously didn’t translate into a version that’s set in America with American actors, with themes that seem particular to the moment.

But Shakespeare anticipated so much and dealt with themes that were timeless. So what drew us in had to do with the relationships between men and women. It’s not as referential, you could say, as Hamlet, but there are still a good many layers to it—of things that get referenced or reflected from Shakespearean tradition. But maybe audiences can’t chuckle as much. There’s a different relationship, it’s true. Different expectations.

What guided your edits of Shakespeare’s text?

I wanted to distill what was most moving to me. And that had to do with the way the men were underestimating the women in their lives, and misjudging them, mistrusting them, and trying to manipulate them. That seemed poignant. As Ethan pointed out, it’s almost like a Neil LaBute play in places. So the edit had to do with what we focused on. And we minimized the epic sweep because it’s a low-budget movie and that wasn’t within the budget. So there’s still a fair bit of violence—the play’s violent—and there’s a fair bit of dissonance between the violence and the black humor. But there’s also a triumphant happy ending that Shakespeare wrote, and that I tried to embrace, and I think we’re pretty true to the play. I don’t think we really deflated or deflected many things that Shakespeare intended. Or who knows what he intended?

Granting the timelessness of Shakespeare’s themes, there’s always some difficulty transposing a Shakespeare play to the modern era. A few points present themselves where you have to confront their illogic in a contemporary framework, and the one that stood out here for me was: why would Posthumus give Iachimo permission, by way of a bet, to seduce his new bride? How does that fit into a recognizable 21st century?

Ethan was very articulate in coming to terms with that. And he said what at first might seem to be clunkiness in the writing may in fact be the point that Shakespeare’s making. That Posthumus’s pride is just the cover for his insecurity, and that there’s a habit that men can have—especially younger men—to either idealize the women in their lives or consider them whores. It’s an either/or, and there’s no middle ground. The messy truth that they might be just as complicated as men is inadmissible. So, since he’s projecting this idea of innocence on Imogen, he’s altogether too ready to accept the worst, and he does. And the speed at which he falls and flips is very human, and it’s a kind of ugly truth. And Penn [Badgley] was able to embrace that. I thought he did a convincing job.

The play has comic-book and fairy-tale elements, but that part of the play points to a psychological truth, I think. I hope it’s not too implausible in the movie, because we meant to take it head-on, and to convey him as a character who goes under, who submits to his worst fear. And fear and death are invoked throughout the text of the play, and they are the enemies, in a way, more than the villains themselves. There are dark currents that rise to the surface of Posthumus, and I felt it was truthful within the context of the story.

It’s a late play for Shakespeare, and it consolidates and perhaps mocks many ingredients of his past works—tropes like exiled princes and sleep potions and characters passing for the opposite sex. Do you see a parodic quality to it?

Yeah, I think it’s pretty much without question, but it’s not merely a self-parody. It’s a way of playing with his materials. It’s like he’s reapplying, re-exploring material that he’s been through before. And also, most movingly to me, there’s an element of forgiveness. There are plot elements and situations that result in death and disaster in the Tragedies, but here Shakespeare rescues people, he allows them to live, he gives them a reprieve. And the theme of the play is redemption and forgiveness, and I find that powerful, and it surely rises beyond parody. But there’s certainly a sense of playfulness, and I hope that’s in the film, too—that there’s a mix of tones, the parody jostling up against a sense of real. Auden has written about the late plays: it’s a world of fairy tales, but it’s also a world that, as it unfolds, you’ll be inclined to cry, because there’s a real sense of emotional connection to the characters even though it’s a fantasy world. I hope to convey something of that in this version.

Was the biker gang context always in your mind?

This was written before the advent of that little show called Sons of Anarchy, which I really haven’t seen. So it’s an embarrassing reflection of my own delusion, my own stubbornness, that I was thinking of Roger Corman movies, Wild Angels, I was thinking of friends of mine who had experience with bikes and bikers, and I wasn’t paying attention to TV. And maybe that’s sinful, but I was rankled when Jupiter tried to retitle the film, but I couldn’t really control it. I was glad that they went back to the original title. I watched half an episode [of Sons of Anarchy] on the back of an airplane seat, and I didn’t think it had much to do with Shakespeare, even though I’ve been told it has a lot to do with Hamlet. And stylistically, the mood, the tone, the look of it, I don’t think has much if anything to do with my movie. I mean, have you spent time with Sons of Anarchy? Did it remind you of Cymbeline?

I haven’t seen it. What your film reminded me of was Knightriders, where Ed Harris plays the leader of a Renaissance Fair bike gang.

I haven’t seen that either, I’m remiss. Yeah, that was like his first movie. George Romero, right? Well, maybe it’ll be on a double bill sometime.

I read an interview with you from around the time Hamlet came out, in which you said you had a number of biopic scripts you were interested in getting made: Nikola Tesla, Amelia Earhart, James Dean, Edgar Allan Poe. What’s the status of those, and why is it more difficult for you to get a biopic made in this climate where the market is flooded with them than to get a Shakespeare film made, which seems a lot more difficult?

They’re both difficult. Biopics tend to be difficult because they’re period, so there’s a whole layer of artifice and money. But I had some luck, you know. I have another movie coming out this year [Experimenter] that’s a biopic, about Stanley Milgram, an experimental psychologist, and the reviews have been heartening. It was at Sundance and I’m very happy with how it turned out, so I gained some courage and dusted off my Amelia Earhart script and I want to make that next. This is not an easy thing to do because you need airplanes that fly and crash, but the key is casting, and I’m hopeful that I’ll be able to make that movie sooner rather than later.

And I dusted off the first script I ever wrote, and I was startled to find how much it still spoke to me—it’s a biopic about Nikola Tesla. The trick with biopics, obviously, is you focus them. The clichéd biopic, the sprawling biopic where someone’s life is a conventional arc, doesn’t interest me, and probably doesn’t interest many people. But it’s still thrilling how much reality serves up, how many true stories there are—there are lots of great stories to tell.

On the set of A Poem Is a Naked Person

For years, fans of Les Blank traded rumors about A Poem Is a Naked Person, a documentary about musician Leon Russell that was finished in 1974 but never released. Shot over a two-year period, the film observes the musician at his studio compound outside Tulsa, Oklahoma; live in concert at New Orleans and Anaheim; and during recording sessions for his roots album Hank Wilson's Back in Nashville.

A singer, songwriter, and producer, Russell had recently worked with Bob Dylan, George Harrison, and Joe Cocker, while simultaneously embarking on a solo career. A professional musician since the age of 14, Russell had been a member of The Wrecking Crew, an informal Los Angeles group that backed countless rock and pop singles and albums. Russell played on records by The Byrds, Frank Sinatra, and Herb Alpert. He drew from a broad swath of American musical styles, from rock and soul to country, gospel, even easy listening.

In Blank, Russell found a filmmaker whose tastes ranged just as widely. Now, thanks in large part to Blank's son, Harrod, the movie is finally screening tonight at the South by Southwest Film Festival. And this summer Janus Films plans a theatrical release, followed by a Criterion Collection Blu-ray/DVD package.

Just as he did in his 1970 documentary The Blues Accordin' to Lightnin' Hopkins, Blank uses Russell's music as a gateway into a striking and largely vanished world of floating motels, goose grabs, and tractor pulls. In A Poem Is a Naked Person Blank's camera not only documents the dusty storefronts and spare streets of small-town Oklahoma, but works its way into a wedding, a powwow, a parachute championship, “catfish noodling,” and building demolition.

The songs recorded on film range from spirituals to honky-tonk laments, from waltzes and breakdowns to Russell's own singles: "Tightrope," "Shoot Out on the Plantation," "A Song for You." Harrod Blank describes A Poem as a gumbo.

A Poem Is a Naked Person

"And a gumbo is only as good as the ingredients you put into it,” Harrod said in an interview in New York last month. “Leon Russell, George Jones, Willie Nelson, they all make this gumbo pretty strong.” Harrod, who was 9 at the time of the shoot, spent the summer with his father in a motel for fishermen on a lake next to Russell's compound.

"Each room had its own boat slip," he recalls. Les turned one of the rooms into an editing bay, working first on a Moviola he shipped from Hollywood, and then on an eight-plate KEM editing table supplied by Leon.

"At the time it was the Rolls Royce of editing machines. We could play three pictures at the same time, and two or three soundtracks," Maureen Gosling, a longtime Blank collaborator, said by phone. "We were able to edit Dry Wood and Hot Pepper at the same time we were shooting Leon's film."

Gosling remembers being in Dallas with Blank when he got a call from Russell and Denny Cordell, a producer and his partner at the time in Shelter Records. "They had liked his films, wanted him to consider doing one on Leon. We drove from Dallas to Oklahoma and never went any further, we just stayed there. We ended up there for two years."

A sound recordist and editor, Gosling collaborated with Blank for 20 years, on films like the grueling Fitzcarraldo chronicle Burden of Dreams (82) and In Heaven There Is No Beer? (84). For A Poem Is a Naked Person she used a Nagra tape recorder with a shotgun boom mike; Blank shot in 16mm color stock with an Eclair NPR.

A Poem Is a Naked Person

"I guess we filmed about 50 or 60 hours of footage," Gosling said. "For Nashville and the concerts there were two additional cameramen. The recording session in Nashville, Leon actually produced a complete album in three or four days."

Blank and his crew captured extraordinary concert footage—intimate, sweaty, incantatory music shaped for the moment at hand, with Russell and his musicians feeding off the responses of their audiences. The studio recording sequences have a different sense of intimacy, of polished professionals displaying casual, almost effortless expertise.

Blank filmed at Bradley's Barn in Nashville, birthplace of hits by Loretta Lynn, Conway Twitty, and other country stars. A Poem Is a Naked Person features some of the best country musicians alive at the time, including George Jones, accompanied by only his guitar, a cigarette, and a Budweiser as he casually tosses off a majestic version of "Take Me."

Russell's encounters with musicians yield some of the best material in the film: pianist David Briggs, part of the famous Muscle Shoals recording team; Willie Nelson, showing in concert just how he would help shift country music into a completely new direction; folkie Eric Andersen working his way through "Time Run Like a Freight Train."

Harrod said his father's penetrating camerawork was a result of luck and patience.

A Poem Is a Naked Person

"He would be filming with one eye and looking out with the other ahead of the shot. He would anticipate when to move the camera,” Harrod said. “In Lightnin' Hopkins, people going across the street, he just kept following, he didn't give up. He kept following, and finally something happens. He's shooting because he thought it was beautiful and then it would develop and he would get lucky."

In the 1970s, concert movies were prestige items, at times vanity projects, at the least a way for musicians to connect with a new marketplace. 1967's Dont Look Back introduced Bob Dylan to a wider audience, while Monterey Pop, Festival Express, and Woodstock brought the festival experience to those unable to attend. The Rolling Stones appeared in Jean-Luc Godard's One A.M., were the subject of the documentary Gimme Shelter, and commissioned Robert Frank to make a feature about them. Led Zeppelin released The Song Remains the Same; The Band made The Last Waltz with Martin Scorsese; and Russell himself appeared in Mad Dogs & Englishmen, a feature about a 1970 Joe Cocker tour he helped produce.

Gosling believes that Russell and Denny Cordell, his partner at Shelter Records, had seen The Blues Accordin’ to Lightnin' Hopkins, a brilliant, atmospheric portrait of a relatively obscure musician.

"They may have expected a more traditional film," she said. "At the same time they had seen Les's films so they knew that they were not exactly typical. As we went along, we let [Russell] know what we were filming. But long periods of time would go by before we would see him or go on the road with him. So there was lots of downtime, that was when we filmed these other things."

"I don't think Leon wanted to be interviewed a lot," Harrod suggests. "When Les couldn't do interviews, he went around and filmed what he was attracted to: lake footage, sunsets, beautiful women, eccentric characters, Oklahoma folk."

A Poem Is a Naked Person

Russell was in the midst of one of his most creative periods, but he may have felt conflicted about the music industry as a whole. His single at the time, "Tightrope," reflects some of that ambivalence.

"We definitely had some difficult periods, there were disagreements or problems, but we usually got through them. And Les did get to finish editing the film," Gosling pointed out.

"I have some letters that I wrote to my parents during that time," she added. "In one of them I wrote that we had double-system projection set up in Leon's recording studio. Several times we showed them dailies, three or four hours of stuff at a time."

"There was an ‘original' cut in 1974, but Les kept chipping away at it," Harrod explained. "As he got older, he got less patient for the slow parts and would cut them out. We kept it the way he wanted. Now it's 90 minutes. I think he cut out 12 minutes. And when I looked at it, it totally made sense why he did."

Russell and Cordell would end their relationship in 1976, leaving the fate of A Poem Is a Naked Person still up in the air.

"I don't know specifically what happened, but I know there were a lot of rights issues," Gosling said. "I don't even know if Les realized that before, how hard it would be."

"I'm still working on rights to 29 songs," Harrod said, a week before the SXSW screening. "That's probably why this hasn't come out before.”

Maureen Gosling during shooting

"On the other hand, Les wasn't very good at communicating, and he wouldn't be willing to compromise. If he came and filmed you at your house for dinner, you'd forget he was even there. What did my grandmother say? ‘He disappears into the wallpaper.’ And of course Leon didn't want to compromise either."

Picture two passive-aggressive artists engaged in a staring contest, neither one willing to blink first.

"Leon wrote somewhere that his music expresses his love," Harrod said. "Love is in his music. And Les, his love is in his camera. He only films things he has positive feelings for. He doesn't want to dig up dirt on somebody, and he would never do that about Leon."

Still, the inability to release A Poem Is a Naked Person was a heavy blow to Blank.

"I remember seeing him with his head in his heads, 'Woe is me,' dealing with his demons," Harrod said.

Harrod oversaw the digital restoration of A Poem Is a Naked Person and has been a prime factor in the movie's release. "It was his dream to see this released. My whole career's been about art cars and filmmaking. I sort of put my life on hold to see this through."

Les Blank during shooting

Gosling still remembers the moments on A Poem they missed: Leon and Bob Dylan seeking privacy on a canoe, Phoebe Snow singing "Poetry Man," an incendiary take of "It's Gonna Rain" by the O'Neal Twins that somehow vanished.

Blank had an uncanny ability to express music in visual terms.  His next project, Chulas Fronteras, elected to the National Film Registry, probed deeply into Tex-Mex culture while spotlighting stars like Flaco Jiménez. Gosling also hopes to see more of his work released, including a documentary on Ry Cooder and an unfinished piece on Huey Lewis and the News. Harrod recently discovered unseen footage of Dizzy Gillespie, and admits that more buried treasures might be found.

As for Leon Russell, he re-entered the spotlight with the release of The Union, his collaboration with Elton John and Bernie Taupin, in 2010. Life Journey, his latest collection, came out in 2014. Russell will be attending the SXSW screening of A Poem Is a Naked Person.

"He's in for a big surprise," Harrod says. "I think he's going to find a lot of love from this."

Perhaps as a side effect of being forced to watch Battleship Potemkin multiple times in film school, many contemporary critics use “formalist” as a pejorative. However, the films of Eugène Green adhere to the rigorous conventions of the Baroque theater and succeed in parsing philosophical issues with a winning wry sense of humor. His latest, La Sapienza, is a rich work that approaches the experience of aging through two sets of couples: French middle-aged married professionals who have lost their passion for work and each other in the face of the modern world; and an adolescent Italian-Swiss brother and sister. Meeting by chance in a park in Switzerland, the couples pair off by gender. Alexandre (Fabrizio Rongione) reluctantly takes his younger counterpart Goffredo (Ludovico Succio) under his wing, repeating a tour of Italian architecture he undertook as a student, and their relationship slowly comes to mirror that of Baroque architect Francesco Borromini and his younger assistants. At the same time Alexandre’s wife, Aliénor (Christelle Prot), and Goffredo’s sister, Lavinia (Arianna Nastro), establish a thoroughly nurturing and warm rapport.

FILM COMMENT digital editor Violet Lucca spoke to Green after La Sapienza’s premiere at the Locarno Film Festival.

How do you go about composing a frame? Do you begin with an image or do you begin with an idea?

Actually, all of my frames are composed, at least basically, when I write the script. If there’s a dialogue, it’s more that I have my own convention for making something strong come out of the actor when he’s speaking. At the beginning, since it’s less intense, I film in a more or less normal way: that is, the camera is behind one of the speakers so that you see his shoulder or part of his head, what in French is called en amorce, and then you see the other character looking at the person he’s talking to. But when it becomes more intense, I start putting the camera between the two characters, so that the spectator receives fully what someone [in the conversation] would receive. I think about the progression so that usually the intensity increases, the frame becomes more and more close-up. The waist, then chest, then bust [i.e., head and shoulders], and then just part of the face. And then if it’s a very long conversation, as in The Portuguese Nun [09], where there’s a 20-minute conversation, I go farther away and then closer again. So these are very simple things, but that’s what I like. Simple things are, for me, strongest.

I also like to try and capture the energy that comes from absence, or from absence after presence. So, for example if a character is going to enter the frame, I usually start with an empty frame and, for example a foot shot, a foot frame—I do a lot of foot frames. I often start on the ground and then the feet enter, so the spectator feels the distinction between the empty space where there’s no presence and the physical presence. And then sometimes if a character goes out of the frame, I still keep the camera there because I want the spectator to feel the transformation of the inert matter, where there is still the personal energy of who was there, who is no longer visible but who remains present by his energy, and by his absence.

Why did you choose this particular Baroque rivalry and pair it with this contemporary story of these older people being revitalized and finding meaning through mentorship?

Because Borromini for me represents the true artist—that is, an artist who believes in his art and whose first concern is not to succeed socially but to go through what he thinks is the necessary path towards his art. When people think about the history of architecture and Romans in the 17th century, it’s always the rivalry between Borromini and Bernini. And for me it represents two points of view in relationship to art. It’s something very vital and with a great deal of meaning today, because a great deal of what is produced today as art is actually just a means of getting wealth and social position, but there’s no real artistic engagement. Often the most interesting artists are not the most visible in the social sphere.

There’s also a spiritual conflict. In France the conflict is very important in the 17th century, between the Jansenists and the Jesuits. And for me, the French have an ideology which came from the 18th and 19th century, and which is taught in school as distinct about France from all other countries—France being classical and not having gone through “Baroque is a sin.” They always oppose what they call French classicism—the word didn’t exist in the 17th century, and even less the concept—to Roman baroque. But actually, in the context of French culture—as in the way that I define Baroque culture—the culture around Port-Royal, the center of Jansenism, was actually the most Baroque culture in France. I make a parallel between that opposition and the opposition between Borromini and Bernini.

Bernini worked mainly for the Jesuits and his spiritual director was Gian Paolo Oliva, who was the Supreme General of the Jesuits. Borromini was very pious but it was a private sort of piety. In the Roman context, his work resembles what the Jansenists value in French [architecture] because it’s very pure, it’s all just white. For example, in the Sant’Ivo alla Sapienza [a church Borromini designed], it’s just white forms, but the energy comes from the conflict between the forms and not from just superficial decoration, which is mainly what Bernini [used], at least in his decorative style. Sant’Andrea al Quirinale is also purified but it’s very academic actually, it follows rules, and...voila. Have I answered your question? [Laughs]

And why did you pair this story with the story of the architect and his wife?

Because what he goes towards is la sapienza—sapience in French—that is, knowledge which leads to wisdom, which is not the same thing [as knowledge]. In all pedagogical relationships an older person can always give information and know-how to the younger person, but a younger person can also bring a spiritual opening to it. I have to get along very well with younger people and now, even though I am not very well known, a certain number of young artists contact me and I’m in contact with them because they want me to look at their work, and I do that very willingly. But at the same time it’s not completely altruistic, because I learn things also from them. It’s not egoistic either—

It’s an exchange.

It’s an exchange, it’s a human relation, and I think that happens with the two couples, the two men and the two women [in La Sapienza]. And also there’s the idea of sacrifice, which is at the heart of all religions, actually, and the subject is opened already when they go to visit the Holy Shroud, because Goffredo realizes that, if it really isn’t the shroud of Christ, then he says it’s the shroud of another Christ that has also been sacrificed. There’s the idea that an artist is not a martyr but someone who gives, who makes a sacrifice in his life. We know nothing about Borromini’s personal life—he had apparently no real personal life. He had some friends with whom he had some intellectual exchanges, but otherwise he was a completely solitary person. And so when, in the scene that [dramatizes] Borromini’s relationship with his young assistant, he says that “I did the sacrifice for you,” Alexandre realizes it’s also for him, and that in a certain way Borromini made a sacrifice for him through his art and also through his life. It’s a sort of Christ-like idea that the artist is a human reflection of the sacrifice and the spiritual sacrifice.

There’s a lot of doubling in the film: visually, such as when the older couple is eating at the dinner table in the restaurant, and in a broader sense, in the two deaths that shape their lives. How did you choose that motif? Is it referencing architecture or is it something in a different direction?

No, I always say that one of the reasons why I feel so strange about my work is that modern thought is always conceptual—it begins with concepts and evolves rationally. Whereas I naturally have—it’s not something I choose [laughs]—what I call a “mythical” way of thinking.  In contemporary language, when someone says that something is “mythical,” that means it’s not true, but that’s the opposite of the word’s real meaning. The word “myth” comes from mutos in Greek, and in the archaic Greek and Homer, mutos means “truth-sayer,” and in the classical period it takes the meaning of a story, a narration. It always means a narration which by simple unfolding expresses a truth. And so I tend to think in mythical terms. I’m not very enthusiastic about psychoanalysis. I think I’m closer to Jungians than Freudians. So this idea of doubling as you say, it came naturally to me; it had to be part of the story, and afterward I realized what it meant, but at first it just came as if I was telling a story to children to bedtime and it came that way. And then I realized that I was right to do it because it had a lot of meaning.

How do you choose your actors? How much room do they have to experiment with a gesture or a vocal inflection?

I choose them mainly for what I feel that they have as a person. Also for their physical aspect, but for me the physical aspect always suggests something interior. Christelle Prot, I’ve worked with her in several films. I did my first film [Toutes les nuits, 01] with her, which I shot in 1999, so it’s been 15 years. And Fabrizio [Rongione], I’ve seen him in a lot of films—in all the Dardenne Brothers films and in certain Italian films. The Dardenne Brothers co-produced one of my films, and when we presented it in Brussels, I found him also interesting as a person, and in addition he’s bilingual. The two young actors, we had to do auditions to find them. There were auditions in Turin, and they sent me videos of the audition. I didn’t know Arianna had an important part in another film, but of all the girls I saw, she interested me the most. And Ludovico, I think for the [part of the] boy they did at least 30 or 35 videos, and the only one who interested me at all was Ludovico. He has a physical aspect which corresponds often to my young men characters, but there was something, his way of speaking, something interior which cannot be quantified. And when I met them both I was sure that they were the right choices.

As far as working with them, we just do usually one or two readings of the script before shooting, and I prevent them from making psychological intonations, because psychological intonations are always forced. They come from the psychological theater, and people have the habit now of accepting them as real or natural, but they’re not natural at all. For example, if you say a sentence, when there’s a punctuation you do a descending cadence and when there’s a full stop you do a big descending cadence. And in psychological acting, since the actor doesn’t want to recognize that he’s saying a text that has already been written, when there’s a punctuation he always goes up. So I just make them go down. Otherwise I just ask them to talk as if they were talking to themselves, because I don’t want them to think, I don’t want an intellectual interference with the flow of interior energy. When you speak to yourself, the words have a lot of importance, but you don’t try to convince yourself of something, so you’re not looking for rhetorical devices.

I voice a lot of affection for the actors that I film with Raphaël [O’Byrne, DP on all Green’s films]. Recently there was a screening in Paris of Toutes les nuits, my first film, which I hadn’t seen it in five years. And two of the main actors were there, and Raphael as well, and they were very moved. Someone came to see me and said that you can see how much compassion I have for the characters—and actually the actors because the actors are the characters. It’s a nice word: compassion not in a patronizing sense, but in the sense of a spiritual communion and understanding.

I have one more question. So the character you play—

The Chaldean.

You might see that as expressing some feelings you have about the U.S., or why you left the U.S.?

No, it’s related to the powerful connection between architecture and existence, for the group or for the individual, which the Chaldeans [evoke]. The Chaldeans are being chased out of Mesopotamia [editor’s note: an area that includes Iraq, Syria, Iran, and Turkey], which is where they have been living for 2000 years, probably even more than that. But no, as far as what I call “Barbaria” [the U.S.] in the film, I had the impression when I was very young, 5 years old, that everything that goes through me is language, and what was spoken around me, I didn’t feel it had that value. So I started on a quest to find the language. When I was an adolescent, I thought I was going to go to Great Britain or Ireland to make my life through English, but I realized that even English, real English, doesn’t correspond to my interior being, and it had to be another language. So it became French. [Laughs] I respect English, but…

What made you choose that particular culture, the Chaldeans, anyway?

I just shot a documentary on the Basques, but the Basques resist, whereas before the “Barbarians” made their war in Iraq, there were a million Chaldeans. It’s not only that they have a religion, but they have a language, which is the only vestige of what was the general language of all the Middle East. It was the language of Jesus, it was the language of the Jews at the time of Jesus, and this language is only living as the language with this population now. It will be like Yiddish or another language where the people are dispersed, the survivors. After one generation, the language will disappear.

The language of the Chaldeans is one of the bases of our European culture, because it was the language of Jesus and the apostles and probably the first Gospel, and St. Matthew was probably first written in Aramaic. So it’s related to the fact that all of our culture is disappearing. But besides its value as the disappearance of a language from a human group, it could have been a Caucasian language or a language from South America, of course.

This Friday the Film Society of Lincoln Center begins a theatrical run of Jauja, the product of an unusual collaboration between Argentine auteur Lisandro Alonso and American star Viggo Mortensen. It’s not the first foray by Mortensen into unfamiliar terrain, and “terrain” is the key word: the setting is 19th-century Patagonia, at land’s end, where his character, a Danish military engineer, ventures into the backcountry in search of his daughter. Mortensen (who delivers both Danish and Spanish dialogue) also produced and created music for the film, which was co-written by poet pal and fellow San Lorenzo fanatic Fabián Casas.

Born in New York but partly raised in Argentina, the actor hereby adds to a growing list of artistic activity: publishing (through Perceval Press), photography, and of course soccer blogging. He attributes the germ of Jauja’s idea to imagining the aftermath of an unnerving personal story: a female friend of his moved to live with a lover in the Philippines, only to be found shot dead years later. As the film’s story takes its own extraordinary (and mind-expanding) turns, Jauja opens more questions than it seeks to answer, and last May, at the Cannes Film Festival, I happily snuck in the chance to ask Mortensen two myself.

I’d like to talk about some of your specific decisions as an actor in the movie, because in your performances you are often so specific with physical aspects—your face, body, posture, the angle you hold your head, all these things. Could you talk about how you were inhabiting this character?

I’m always conscious of how best to get things across, but I also have a sense of what works with the camera, and as a photographer, what works in terms of camera framing, light, lens size, all that. But essentially, I’m doing things that the character would do, and that’s based on me searching—well, I’m finding, too. This guy’s a military man from Denmark, and at the age of the character in that period, he will have been in two very important wars against Germany: in 1848, which Denmark won, and 1864, which was a brutal defeat against the Prussians. Those uniforms are very specific, and for the guys who were in both those wars, the details are specific. The little medal he has, which I was able to find in an antique shop in Denmark, has two heads on it—the king of Denmark in the first war and the second. Every soldier, no matter if you’re a private or a general, got this service medal. Most of the soldiers in those wars were farmers, and you’d see them 50 years later, in the turn of the 20th century, working with pigs or in the fields, and they’d be wearing their medals.

There’s something like Don Quixote about a guy in Patagonia who says: “It’s OK, I’ve got a job to do. I’m going to put my uniform on and my medal.” It’s ridiculous, but for him it’s not ridiculous at all. It’s what you’re supposed to do. And then it gets more ridiculous when they steal his horse and his rifle and his hat. He just keeps going, because he believes in what he’s doing—just like he believes he’s going to make sense logically of many things. He’s got this Western, Northern European attitude, which is: things happen, and there’s an explanation for everything scientifically. There are names of things—tribes, people, races. There is North, South, East, West. There is sunshine. There is darkness when it’s night, and so on and so forth. It’s all: “I’ll find her.” By the end of the story, he’s hearing this imaginary voice that’s asking, what is it that makes a life function, makes sense, and move forward? And he says, “I don’t know,” and smiles and finally gives up, and kind of makes sense of everything.

I saw one reading of the film as having an element of commentary on imperialism. What’s your take on that?

I read something about that. Obviously we were conscious of the fact that we were showing a period when the westward expansion was happening. It was the same thing that was happening at the same time in North America, in Canada and the United States, and also in Australia and New Zealand, although in New Zealand they never really conquered and eradicated in the same way as they did in Australia and the United States and in Argentina, where the war was called “The Conquest of the Desert.” It was a brutal war, a genocide, basically a clearing of the Argentine frontier for settlement and agriculture and exploitation.

But the guy I’m playing is just there. He’s got a job as an engineer. The ditch that they’re digging was a real historical thing they did to keep Indians out of the province of Buenos Aires. They dug this long ditch, which was like the Maginot Line, but maybe it worked out better than the Maginot Line did. But as far as this film being a commentary on imperialism, that’s a leap. Whenever a movie is interesting and thought-provoking—and a movie works—it gives rise to all kinds of speculation. If a movie isn’t interesting and is annoying, people don’t go to the trouble to find these fantastical explanations.

I went into Pierre Morel’s The Gunman with my hopes up, because Sean Penn has done some of his best acting in genre films. In Brian De Palma’s gangster movie Carlito’s Way (93), as a criminal lawyer who turns criminal, Penn is excitingly unpredictable. With circular wire-rims that narrow his eyes and an ugly perm tumbling around his shaved-back hairline, he looks like a soft-boiled egg in a hardboiled world. Emotions don’t just flush this face, they dent it. In Sydney Pollack’s espionage thriller The Interpreter (05), Penn is a soulful Secret Service agent who ends up guarding a U.N. translator (Nicole Kidman) after she eavesdrops on an apparent assassination plot. (It's a marvelous setup: he needs to know everything about her, and she doesn't want to give anything up.) The agent had a troubled marriage that ended when his wife died in a car crash, but Penn doesn't overdo the moroseness; his rue lends fluidity to his just-the-facts-ma'am stance.

In The Gunman, which Penn also co-produced and co-wrote, he plays a character in some ways similar to the Secret Service man in Pollack’s movie. In the main body of the action, he’s a retired mercenary named Jim Terrier. He’s been seeking salvation through good works in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where (as we see in the introductory sequence) he killed the Minister of Mining in 2006. Suddenly, in his eighth year of atonement, Terrier himself gets targeted for execution. He zigzags from Africa to London to Barcelona, evading or eliminating bad guys at every turn while seeking information from old cronies who’ve risen high in “legitimate” businesses. He also reconnects with his ex-lover, a medical aid worker he abandoned after leaving Africa abruptly, under orders, right after the assassination.

Before long, Jim Terrier is operating on adrenaline and exhaustion. If that combination elevated the hero of The Interpreter into becoming a more open and intuitive man, it reduces the hero of The Gunman to sober efficiency. Penn plays Terrier’s determination so intensely that even the man’s conflicts seem single-minded. Penn may think he’s being genuine and urgent, but the effect is to assure the audience that Terrier is certain to prevail. Nothing could be more discouraging for admirers of Penn’s witty and unruly talent than this unimaginative performance. If hope is “the thing with feathers,” by the end of this film I felt totally plucked.

As a skillful butcher of men, Penn displays a lot of his own beef: he is packing tons of toned muscle as well as firepower. He even gets to surf forbidden African waters, which is meant to establish Terrier as an individualist and a rule-breaker when he’s working for an NGO. I don’t think this is a vanity production, and even if it were, the vanity wouldn’t be what’s wrong. This actor celebrated for relief work in Haiti sees The Gunman as a chance to expose how global players wrest away the resources of mineral-rich, poverty-gutted, politically unstable countries like the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

At a recent press conference, Penn admitted that the film is not a political movie, but he expects young people who see it to respond with greater awareness to news reports about the DRC. He has also said that the film honestly portrays the consequences of violence. But once you commit to the violence that comes with an R rating, how many young, semi-sensitive viewers will line up for it? And how many reports on the chaos and exploitation of the DRC will they ever be exposed to if it doesn’t pop up on Last Week Tonight with John Oliver or The Daily Show?

In Penn’s mind, the film is about a “conflicted man” killing “very bad men” largely for self-serving reasons. To him, that sums up the difference between this film and the same director’s Taken (08), which boasts an inherently romantic actor, Liam Neeson, swinging into action to save his daughter and other defenseless virgins. But underneath its imitation of maturity, The Gunman is just as mechanical as that earlier film and equally reliant on the vengeful emotions behind payback. (For me, Morel’s best movie remains his first, District B-13.)

I was never a Taken fan, but it did re-launch Neeson, in his mid-fifties, as a major action star, and that wasn’t merely because of his imposing height and melodious voice. Playing seasoned men with physical skill sets makes Neeson magnetic; he mixes angst with gallows humor and tough-tenderness, in just the right blend for sane people in an increasingly insane world. Penn conjures no special aura in The Gunman. When it comes to the lunatic game of macho heroics, he’s only a super-respectable contender. Idris Elba, who makes the most of a glorified cameo as an Interpol agent, once told me that one of the great movie challenges was “to play a larger-than-life character vividly and believably. It's a popcorn, have-fun type of thing, but you can't over-act in it, and you can't under-act in it." Elba negotiates that line with all his righteous masculine presence. Penn gets stuck in neutral.

In the intriguing opening, Penn and his co-writers, Don McPherson and Pete Travis, depict NGO bases as rough-hewn havens within a fractious, bloody milieu. Director Morel cooks up some genial camaraderie among Terrier and his mates, especially a salty Brit named Cox (Mark Rylance) and gradually leads us to understand that they’ve been overseeing the construction of a landing strip. Even then, Morel overplays his hand. Javier Bardem, as Terrier’s friend Felix, looks at Terrier’s lover Annie (Jasmine Trinca) with such undisguised longing—and at Terrier, when he’s with her, with such undiluted jealousy—that his presence undercuts whatever blitheness the resourceful, energetic Trinca draws from Penn. Bardem’s heavy-lidded gaze signals just what’s coming next. I wrote in my reporter’s pad: “It’s David and Bathsheba all over again.” Sure enough, Felix is the liaison between the mercenary group and their mysterious employers—the man who makes Terrier the “designated trigger” for the hit, with orders to exit the continent as soon as his job is done. At least the kill itself is shot and staged with precision as well as impact. My expectations were high when the movie leaped ahead eight years. Indeed, the most effective action scene comes when Penn, having gone straight, gets ambushed and dispatches some scary-looking thugs in brutally efficient combat. (Terrier’s muscle memory is impressive, too.) This sequence’s power comes partly from the way it initiates an innocent Congolese aid worker, Eugene (Ade Oyefeso), into Terrier’s world of carnage. Oyefeso brings so much freshness to his scenes that you want him to stay in the picture.

Terrier and the movie leave him behind as the film devolves into a cat-and-mouse game with several dull cats and one extremely brawny mouse. Ray Winstone does inject some scruffy warmth into the film as Terrier’s London-based comrade Stanley, his one genuine pal. Sadly, I’m not giving anything away. Rylance plays Cox, who now works for the company that ordered the pivotal hit, with such transparent duplicity that you wonder how he ever seals a deal, while Bardem mugs his way through the role of the rapidly deteriorating Felix, who reacts to Terrier’s reappearance as if he knows the jig is up and all is lost. That’s true for the movie, too. With Annie back in step with him and Stanley helping in the background, what’s left for Terrier to do is run the usual gauntlet of physical and emotional traps, shoot-outs and explosions, culminating in a splashy setpiece at a bullfight. When Hitchcock staged a suspenseful climax at a sporting or cultural event, it hinged on some beautiful piece of timing and/or droll bit of business: the cymbal-crash in The Man Who Knew Too Much, Mr. Memory’s need to be true to his act in The 39 Steps, or Robert Walker’s straight-ahead focus on Farley Granger playing tennis while everyone else follows the ball in Strangers on a Train. In The Gunman, Morel merely exploits the physical obstacles of the bullring’s chutes and corridors, and, of course, its bulls.

What’s ironic about The Gunman is that its source novel, by Jean-Patrick Manchette, published in America as The Prone Gunman in 2002, is everything this movie isn’t—stylish, original, uncompromising, suffused with vital black comedy, and political not just on the surface, but at its core. Manchette died young, at 53, in 1995, but he left an indelible mark. He translated American thriller writers like Ross Thomas as well as Alan Moore’s milestone graphic novel, Watchmen. He adapted his own novel, L’Agression, for Claude Chabrol’s too-little-known Nada, a prescient, sardonic attack on terrorism and anti-terrorist excesses. In The Prone Gunman, set almost entirely in France, Manchette’s antihero, Martin Terrier, is an expert in capitalist compartmentalization—a ruthless killer for hire who is also a romantic joke. His one goal has been to earn enough money in a decade to marry a socially superior hometown girl—his “Anne,” not Annie. But she doesn’t wait for him and isn’t really into him, except as a means to escape from bourgeois boredom.

In The Gunman, Jim Terrier is afflicted with a post-concussion syndrome that rarely becomes an issue. In The Prone Gunman, Martin Terrier endures an extended period of muteness—“complete aphonia,” triggered by the shock of seeing Anne in bed with someone else—and ultimately winds up with a bullet lodged in his brain. He’s unable to have intercourse with Anne for more than three minutes at a time, plus one minute for foreplay. As one Gallic psychologist puts it, this length may be extremely brief compared to the behavior “of cultivated and imaginative people . . . But it’s very close to the American national average of the fifties.” The Gunman has been made to satisfy that kind of American. It contains many quick climaxes but few sustained pleasures.

“Does everyone else think about fucking as much as I do?” the 15-year-old Minnie (Bel Powley) wonders shortly after losing her virginity to her mom’s boyfriend, Monroe, in Marielle Heller’s The Diary of a Teenage Girl. Minnie is newly initiated into the secret world of sensual pleasures, and as her wide eyes dart wantonly around her favorite comic book shop, cartoon penises suddenly spring free from every fly in the room. Heller’s adaptation of Phoebe Gloeckner’s graphic novel is an emotionally honest and refreshingly liberated coming-of-age tale set in the golden-hued and drug-soaked San Francisco of the 1970s.

As the film navigates the sensitive subject matter of underage sex without ever exploiting it, it’s hard to believe this is Heller’s debut feature as both a writer and director.  Her passionate attachment to the material comes through in every detail from the carefully outfitted period costumes to the impeccable casting. “I really understood the story,” Heller said, “and that’s the most important aspect of directing for me.”

Drawing on her acting background, Heller elicits a truly staggering performance from newcomer Bel Powley, who carries the weight of the movie on her slight shoulders as Minnie discovers her sexuality can be a means to both self-worth and self-destruction. Kristen Wiig delivers as Minnie’s substance-dependent bohemian mother, particularly in the film’s darker second half, and Alexander Skarsgard infuses the conflicted Monroe with a great deal of sympathy and subtle comedy.

FILM COMMENT spoke with Heller days before the movie’s New Directors/New Films opening-night screening tonight, to discuss everything from Minnie’s baby-blue bellbottoms to Patty Hearst to her own adolescent anxieties.

You come from a writing/acting background in theater, but this is your first film script. I’m curious to know how the project evolved, not only through its different drafts but also through its different iterations: this was first a stage play before going through the Sundance Screenwriters Lab.

When I read the graphic novel, I was just so moved and blown away by its really honest depiction of a teenage girl. I felt so compelled to do something with it that I called the publisher and just started rambling about how I felt like I needed to make this into something. It was totally project-based: it wasn’t like I was looking for something to write, it was more like when I came across the material I knew I had to write it. So I started developing it into a play, which of course had its own creative language—it had a much smaller cast, and was much more contained. It was pretty non-linear and non-realistic.

When I started developing it as a movie, it took on this whole other world. I got to develop the script at the Sundance Screenwriters Lab, which was such a great experience. You get to have some of the best screenwriters in the world read your script and give you their thoughts about it, and a lot of the time they’re conflicting. You get a lot of different opinions and become really clear about what you feel about your story.

The script balances so many different relationships. Did your focus shift to weigh certain aspects more heavily throughout the development process?

The focus definitely shifted and grew throughout the writing process. I ended up focusing more on the mother-daughter relationship than I had in the original script. The scope of the world continued to shift: I’d combine characters in the book into one character, create additional characters, and eliminate others. The character of Aline Kominsky, who is Minnie’s artistic idol in the film, wasn’t something that existed in the book—not in that form. She would write letters to this character [in the book] but I needed to personify that, so I created this animated character that she starts talking to. That came out of conversations at the Lab. People really responded to the character so I expanded it to make it an emotional touchstone in the script.

The mother-daughter relationship does ultimately take narrative precedence, and I understand Kristen Wiig was the first actor attached to the script. Can you talk more about the development of that relationship and your casting of Wiig in the role?

Yeah, it became clear to me in the writing of the script that although the central relationship is between Minnie and Monroe and their affair, in a lot of ways the catalyst for the whole story is the relationship between Minnie and her mother. She’s always dealing with her feelings toward her mom, and that affects everything in the story.

When I first even thought about Kristen in the role, I was really excited. She wouldn’t be the person that casting agents would have in mind for a young mother in the Seventies who’s an alcoholic and dealing with her own demons. I know that Kristen can really tow that line between the truly dramatic and comedic and live in this place where she feels authentic. Kristen and I are friends, and this was the first time I’d ever approached her with a project. The relationship in the script had developed to a place where Minnie and Monroe’s dynamic was really complex and difficult, and I hoped that Kristen would find it to be an exciting challenge. I’d shot a little teaser to show the tone of the film, which she really liked, and she ended up signing on quite early. Once I pictured her in the role, I could find the shape of the film and who I wanted to cast in the other parts. I went to Alexander [Skarsgard] next, and it grew from there.

Bel Powley’s performance is truly astounding. In your Q&A at the Sundance premiere, you said you cast her off a tape. Did you have a chemistry read between her and Skarsgard? Their dynamic is obviously quite a tricky one to pull off.

Yeah, I found Bel really early on in the casting process, and she was so incredible, but I couldn’t believe that I had found my girl yet—especially one I hadn’t met. I was comparing everybody to Bel throughout the process, and I knew I needed to see her in person to see if she and Alex worked well together, and if the three of us could work together. Because we need to have such a crucial and trusting relationship in order to go into the depths where she needed to go.

At some point after many months we got Bel and Alexander out to New York, and we spent a couple hours going through scenes from the script. I just felt really comfortable and knew that this was my girl—I couldn’t imagine anyone else doing the part. I can’t be happier for the attention she’s getting. She’s in every single scene of the movie, so every single day of filming for 24 days she had to be on. She had to have the entire film memorized and be ready to jump from scene to scene, and she had to carry every scene of the movie. It’s a huge job for such a young actress, but Bel is very mature. 

Minnie’s character is such a delicate balance: she’s very mature in some ways, and still completely a kid in others. In spite of the more risqué aspects of the movie, the costume design and the animation keep her firmly grounded in a sense of childlike innocence.

The costume designer Carmen Grande and I talked a lot about reflecting the evolution of her growing up in her costumes. Sometimes she can look like a really young kid and then when she ventures out in to the city—like in the Rocky Horror scene—she starts changing how she dresses and you can see that she looks a little bit more grown up. By the end she’s somewhere in between, because she’s realized she doesn’t need to grow up too fast. Similarly, with the animation, we viewed that as a reflection of her emotional state, so it was really important that the style and the skill were reflecting wherever she was in her life.

It was really important to be always crystal clear on where she was in her journey in each scene, and to track that in all of the different design elements, as well as her performance and how we shot it. The art department was really conscious of that. We had to work on that a lot, because obviously you don’t get to shoot a movie chronologically.

The opening sequence really sets the tone: that low-angle shot of her in baby-blue bellbottoms hiked up just a little too high.

[Laughs] It’s funny because at the Sundance Lab we did a little workshop about opening sequences of movies. We watched the beginning of The Graduate and Nashville, and I can’t remember what else, but it was a really good discussion about what your opening images set up. It made me think very carefully about what I wanted mine to be. So I came into the shoot really knowing that I wanted the first image to be of her butt sauntering through the park in a pair of awesome Seventies bellbottoms.

We got so lucky the day we filmed that in Golden Gate Park. It had been raining right before, and we’d had so much fog and clouds and really wanted to have a sunny shot of her walking though the park. As we arrived, the clouds parted and the sun came out and we got this perfectly beautiful day for that opening shot—it was so great.

In film school they usually advise students making first features to avoid period pieces at all costs because they’re difficult to make and hard to get financing for.

Thank God I didn’t go to film school so I didn’t know any of the things I should be nervous about. [Laughs] I wasn’t even aware of how ambitious I was being with a lot of this movie, setting it in the Seventies with so many different locations. There was a pleasant naiveté to all of that. I heard a quote by Francis Ford Coppola along the lines of: “If anybody knew how hard it was to make a movie, they would never do it.” I think that was true. I didn’t know that wasn’t supposed to be something you do in a first feature, I was just so excited politically by what was happening in the country in that time period. I’m from the Bay Area so I was excited to set the movie there and about what we could explore visually in that era. I wanted to do that authentically—not the costume-party version of the Seventies, but rather to try and capture the realness.

Speaking of the political backdrop, the most explicit reference in the film to the outside world are the Patty Hearst trials that we see on TV in Minnie’s living room. Obviously this could be read as simply an indicator of the time and place, but it also presents this element of Stockholm Syndrome or brainwashing in contrast to the relationship between Minnie and Monroe, which is not meant to be read as simply manipulative.  

I’m so glad that came through. There’s a mention of the Patty Hearst trials in the book, but it was very brief. I remember reading about 1976 and what was happening in San Francisco at the time and realizing everybody would have been tuning in and watching this trial. They would have been devouring it the way that when I was in high school we were devouring the O.J. Simpson trial. I interviewed my mom and my mother-in-law, who were both feminists in the Bay Area at the time, and was asking them how they viewed Patty Hearst, trying get a read on where everyone was falling at the time. They were very politically active and actually saw her as kind of silly.

But I thought there was something interesting about Charlotte [Bel’s mom] trying on being political. It’s not exactly her forte, but the Patty Hearst trial for whatever reason captures her attention, and she can relate to her and sympathize with her. I imagine that she was someone who had middle-class parents and rejected a certain lifestyle in favor of the bohemian life in San Francisco.

The trial was questioning whose responsibility this young woman was: is it her own personal responsibility, or is it society that needs to take responsibility for her? I read an article saying that if this trial had been in 1966, the verdict would’ve been that society needs to take care of this poor girl, and if it had been in 1986, the consensus would’ve been that she needs to pull herself up by her bootstraps and take responsibility for her own actions. In 1976, America was somewhere between those two realities politically, and I just thought that was so indicative of this time period and I tried to use it as a metaphor for Minnie’s story. That’s what everyone wants to know when hearing about the film: who’s responsible? Minnie? Monroe? Her mom? I wanted not to cast judgment but just present the story.

Thematically, sex and love are frequently confused but both become so clearly linked to Minnie’s developing a sense of identity. The thought that somebody loves her changes her profoundly. The ways in which she measures her self-worth is an important difference that develops between her and her mother. 

That was a really important theme for me in trying to remember what it felt like to be a teenage girl. There were blurred lines for me between sex and love and self-worth—it’s so easy when you’re first exploring your sexuality to think that if somebody wants you sexually, it means they love you. As a society we tend to show girls that their self-worth is very wrapped up in a man desiring them. There’s that confusion between external love and self-love and finding your own self-worth in somebody else. Hopefully by the end we feel that Minnie has grown beyond the idea, but that’s something that her mom hasn’t evolved past.

I also find humor in the limitation of our lives as teenagers: she can’t imagine that anyone else will ever want to have sex with her in her whole life. I remember thinking that—when will I ever get this opportunity, and if I do, maybe it will be the only time it will ever happen. It’s hilarious in hindsight—you have your entire life to be a sexually active person, but when you’re that age you just can’t imagine it. She can’t see beyond that week, let alone that year of her teenagerhood. I find that to be some of the funniest stuff in the film: “I didn’t know if I wanted to fuck him or not, but I didn’t want to pass up the chance because I may never get another.”

I love the letter she leaves for Monroe on his car.

[Laughs] Yeah, the “I know you think I’m fat” letter. That’s another thing that I think is very universally a female thing. No matter what your body type is, we all go through a phase where you think everybody thinks you’re fat. It’s such a hilarious mentality.

With its murky images of pagan rituals, voiceover referring to a war spreading across Europe, and general sense of malaise among the young, Virgil Vernier’s Mercuriales brings worrisome tidings of life on the Continent—and beyond. Yet Vernier’s free-associating exploration of the lives of two young women in the shadow of the twin Mercuriales office towers outside Paris is also one of the most encouraging dispatches from current French cinema. By extracting rich, strange metaphor from the circumscribed territory of the French suburbs, Vernier creates an inexhaustibly layered portrait of contemporary life and elevates his film to a cosmic level.

While Mercuriales is Virgil Vernier’s first fiction feature, he is a familiar presence on the European festival circuit for his work in documentary film, notably Simulation (06) and Police Station (09), a diptych on the French police co-directed with Ilan Klipper. Yet as the conversation below makes clear, his work cannot be easily pigeonholed. From his earliest self-produced shorts, Vernier has attempted to capture the state of France today by combining documentary and fiction in a way that evokes tales and figures as ancient as civilization.

FILM COMMENT talked to the writer-director about the reality of the French suburbs, the alchemy of celluloid, and finding connections across time and space. Mercuriales screens March 22 and 26 in New Directors / New Films.

In an interview with Cahiers du Cinéma five years ago, you mentioned you were writing a film that would feature two young women, one from Eastern Europe and one from Orléans, which would be like “Joan of Arc in the Paris suburbs.” How did that idea evolve into Mercuriales?

I’ve had the idea for Mercuriales for over five years. When I discovered that there was an annual Joan of Arc celebration in Orléans, I felt like making a medium-length film that would allow me both to try out some things I wanted to do with a pair of young women and certain stylistic things I wanted to test before I made a feature. So my producer and I decided to make the small film Orléans [12], which gave me the opportunity to create the character of Joane, who I later brought back in Mercuriales, as if Orléans was a prequel to that film. I just changed it so that in Mercuriales the character no longer comes from Orléans, because that seemed too self-referential. Now she’s from the Paris suburbs.

In Mercuriales, you create a portrait of a specific time and place through an abundance of references to other times and places. How do you structure these references to create a contemporary portrait?

What interests me in making a film is to talk about something that appears to be very small but make that thing start to resonate in increasingly large concentric circles. In concrete terms, that means that a film taking place in a Paris suburb can echo what is happening in France, Europe, the world, and that it even starts to resonate with the cosmos, the galaxies, and Mercury, and that all of this collides. The same goes for all the different eras. That’s how I understand life. I see things in the news that make me think of events in the Middle Ages or myths in the Bible or tales by the Brothers Grimm. That’s just how I think. I like to make these comparisons and points of equivalence visible through images.

How do you organize meaning in your films? For instance in Mercuriales, the twin towers at the beginning might remind the viewer of the World Trade Center. Much later in the film, a kid mentions the World Trade Center, confirming the viewer’s intuition in an unexpectedly trivial context. How do you conceive these connections?

I do everything I can to allow chance to have its way. By that, I mean that I try to make things come about. If it happens, great, the parallels will take place. If it doesn’t happen, too bad, because I don’t want to force reality to say things that it doesn’t. That night, that boy talked about the World Trade Center, but I had never written any lines for him. I just suggested that these boys talk to each other about conspiracy, fantasies of state secrets, lots of topics I personally find fascinating, with the idea in the back of my mind that there might be a vague echo of things in the film, starting with the collapse of the World Trade Center, which inaugurated the 21st century and is an event that can resonate all the way to the Paris suburbs. The entire film is constructed that way. There are mythological figures—actually I don’t like to say “mythological,” it’s become an overused word—there are figures that fascinate me, figures from the world of dreams, and I try to work to make connections with them in reality. I track those connections down. Sometimes it happens, sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes we keep them in the edit, sometimes we don’t.

Your answer makes me want to ask how you made this film, in concrete terms. I know you wrote a script, but now I’m learning there was also improvisation.

I don’t really like the word “improvisation” because it reminds me of bad amateur theater where everyone is pretending to be someone else. What I prefer is a kind of hyper-radical form that comes from what some people call documentary, which is to limit yourself to filming reality in the rawest, most anti-fictional way, like a pure window onto the world. The films I made before were really like that, because I hated fiction, I thought it was a completely outdated artifice. But with Mercuriales, I did have the desire to bring back an imaginary aspect which would entail filming people, things, and places for what they are and to try and create intersections between all these things. But without ever forcing people to say things or lying or tampering or manipulating through editing. It’s more like points of dialectical correspondence, like one image next to another image equals this other thing, or a story told three minutes into the film will resonate with a landscape seen after an hour and a half. The girls talk about a dragon, and at the end of the film, you see a dragon destroying everything.

So what did the script look like? What was your approach to shooting and editing?

I’m torn between the desire to answer you and my desire to keep my secrets, because it’s hard to explain, it’s so trivial but at the same time… I’m incapable of answering that. Let’s just say that I chose people whom I like, who vaguely resemble the fantasy of a screenplay that I wrote, without any dialogue, just with the idea to make a film in which two girls, one from the East and one from the West, meet by the Mercuriales towers and from that to try to follow every possible thread found in scenes from contemporary life. Once I met the young women, they told me about their lives and I would ask them if they would be willing to tell such and such a story in a specific scene or to do some specific thing they knew how to do in real life in another scene. I try to follow every single possible thread of what each person and each landscape can bring to the film. I think and think and think so that all of this can merge in a natural manner and seem perfectly self-evident.

Yet some elements in Mercuriales seem to belong to the realm of heightened fiction, like the voiceover. How did you conceive the voiceover?

It came from lots of little texts and drawings and images cut out of newspapers, which I gave the girls to see how they would react to all that. Images and texts that fascinate me, things I copied out of books and others that I wrote in a second state, a waking dream state, as if I were hypnotized. As a result, the writing isn’t even thought out. It’s like when a kid draws and doesn’t even know what he’s doing. It’s like outsider art. I’m not trying to make literature or beautiful writing, but when I see that the girls hold on to some of the texts because they speak to them, I let them say those in the voiceover. I recorded it without quite knowing where it would go in the film, but I told myself it was part of the film’s matter, just like the act of cutting out articles in newspapers.

Were you surprised by the film?

It sounds silly to say so, but yes, I was really dazzled when I saw it coming together. During the shoot, I was extremely charmed by certain things that seemed really strange on the page but actually seemed so natural in shooting. Then editing is like sorcery, it’s like magic formulas, suddenly two sequences put side by side create a new meaning. So I was dazzled, as if a monster was rising before me and I couldn’t even control it anymore.

What drew you to the Mercuriales towers?

They’re totally mundane towers, like you could find in any Western city—or in fact in any city that has experienced that expansion of capitalism that led to the building of financial zones. These areas always have the same architecture, made of steel and one-way mirror windows in which the sun gets reflected. These structures seem to be the totems of a civilization that wants to magnify the power of the economy and money and to always be higher. All these totems strike me as being rich with meaning now that there’s been an economic crisis. In the past, they seemed to be urban aberrations, but now they already look like the totems of a lost civilization, which is in crisis and in danger of collapse and being destroyed by planes and people who want to make a revolution.

On a more personal note, I grew up facing those two buildings. I could always see them from my childhood bedroom. I saw them as monsters towering over the highway, with their long legs, or like male and female figures side by side, like two twins reflecting each other. All that seemed full of significance, and when I learned that one of the towers was called Tour du Levant [East Tower] and the other was called Tour du Ponant [West Tower], it gelled perfectly with my idea of a film dealing with East and West. Then I discovered that several rooms in the towers are named after Greek deities. That extravagance taps into a wealth of stories.

The film is haunted by Eastern Europe. Why did you want to make Eastern Europe present in the French suburbs? And why is the character of Lisa from Moldova?

The first thing is that I myself am of Romanian background, though I had never been to Romania until this year. In my family, I always heard these strange tales about Romania and other Eastern European countries, tales featuring vampires and set in a period in which quasi-barbaric customs still took place, a little bit like that festival I show in the film in which men pretend to sodomize each other and pour alcohol on themselves, kind of a weird Dionysian Bacchanal. And on top of all that, there was still a war going on in Eastern Europe in the Nineties—I’m trying to talk about war in the film, in the form of an imaginary but very present war. It was Europe and yet there were still wars taking place, barbaric wars like the ones in the twentieth century or the Middle Ages. The character of Lisa, from Moldova, grew up in Tirana, in Albania, which remained a dictatorship until 1996, and other countries against a backdrop of war. And because she’s obsessed with this violence everywhere, when she gets to the Paris suburbs, she recognizes a sinister history on the nightly news, reminiscent of the burning of girls on public squares, like witches. It all reminds her of what she experienced in the East. Even the suburban Paris landscapes, with those colorful facades, which are exactly what you find in Tirana or in Soviet cities.

As for Moldova, I didn’t have a particular preoccupation with it, it was simply because I met Ana Neborac [who plays Lisa] and she was from there. If she had been from Albania, she would have been from Albania in the film.

Mercuriales depicts the Paris suburbs in diverse and sometimes surprising fashions, which occasionally borrow from science fiction or evoke Eastern Europe. Did you set out to dispel preconceived notions of the suburbs?

No, I tried to… well, I tried to make a film! I mean that I tried to do something that wasn’t the TV news or one of those films made without thought, just to be sensationalistic. I tried to make a film with the Paris suburbs that I know, in which I did some of my growing up, and that are not at all like what you see on the nightly news. At the same time, I wanted to avoid being naïve and acting as if everything was just fine. I did want to deal with that whole atmosphere of insecurity that the French papers talk about, and which is repeated all over the world, and with the connection to terrorism. But those aren’t the root problems in the film. The root problem is solitude, the state of feeling lost and being bored in your life. I wanted that voice from the media to be present, but to make it an object of ridicule, because when it comes down to it, the girls hang out in the street in short shorts and they don’t get assaulted. And that’s how it really is. There’s no climate of permanent danger on the streets at night.

I was a little surprised that the two young women go to stay at a country house, which seems such a trope of French auteur film in an otherwise very unusual film. Why did you choose to have them do that?

I don’t really ask myself whether something has been seen in a film before. I’m not trying to be original, actually. The trip to the country came very naturally. At one point in the film the two girls hit a dead end—they can no longer manage to exist in that Paris suburb and they have to go elsewhere to see if things would be better there. It could be the countryside or anywhere else, like the seaside, it doesn’t matter. The essential thing was to get out of that Paris suburb to see if there was anything new out there. What I think is a little different from a film where this would be an expected thing is that actually it’s sad in that house. The utopia doesn’t happen, it doesn’t take. It’s nice to watch the sunset on the first day but quickly all the problems in the film return and make their trip a vain illusion.

Why did you shoot in 16 mm?

For lots of reasons. But I thought it’s what would allow us to avoid a current imagery I don’t much like, which is still trying to find itself. HD is still trying to find itself. It hasn’t been figured out yet. It hasn’t achieved that state of grace that I tried for. I tried to find something that would allow us to not be in any particular era. It could be an image of an imaginary future but it could just as easily be an unknown past. We needed that alchemical thing, like the poets used to say. Celluloid is chemistry, you develop it through a chemical process. There’s a revelation that takes place, something magical that resembles the film, I think.

What’s your perspective on French cinema today?

I’m not expecting many surprises from cinema. I think many people have trouble existing in cinema and doing adventurous things because they have money problems. So they’re forced to make movies to make money. So there’s no frisson. There’s nothing unsettling. I’m always looking for something where suddenly someone is showing me something I’ve never seen.

Do you know the incredible feeling of suddenly having an idea, something that seems completely self-evident, a very beautiful idea, which you tell yourself you can make into a movie? I’m chasing after that unique feeling, I’m constantly trying to make myself available for that moment of inspiration to happen. That’s what shooting is. And I like to see something very inspired like that in other artists, something I’ve never seen before, which makes me dizzy and gives me a new perspective on the world today, something I totally don’t understand but it seems to abound with very new, potential meaning. I love what is very new.

Translated by Nicholas Elliott

Kumiko, The Treasure Hunter

A literature teacher of mine used to insist that the only travel stories worth telling concerned one-way journeys; voyagers with return tickets had nothing of interest to recount. There’s ample support for this view in the conclusion of Interstellar, which made the odyssey to another galaxy and back seem about as momentous as a trip to your nearest laundry. Then again, there’s also plenty to refute it in the history of war cinema, especially post-Vietnam films, in which what so often fascinates us is the fact that the person coming home is never quite the person who originally left.

At any rate, two of this week’s releases are radically committed to the idea of the one-way journey—and while it might seem a spoiler to tell you that outright, it soon becomes clear that both films’ voyagers into the unknown are destined to stay in the unknown.

Kumiko, The Treasure Hunter is a modest but quietly mesmerizing piece from the Zellner Brothers, David and Nathan; it comes closer to the mainstream than any previous work by this productive Austin duo, who for years mined a sometimes lurid seam of lo-fi eccentricity before making their features Goliath (08) and Kid-Thing (12). Executive-produced by Alexander Payne, Kumiko sees the Zellners going international with a road movie based on an urban legend concerning the death of a young Japanese woman, Takako Konishi, found dead in Minnesota in 2001.  According to the story, which spread following a misunderstanding of the facts, Konishi was obsessed with finding the suitcase of money hidden in deep snow by the Steve Buscemi character in the Coens’ film Fargo; and while it’s almost disappointing to know that this bizarre tale already existed before the Zellners latched onto it, they make something distinctively outré, and altogether poignant, from it.

Kumiko, The Treasure Hunter

The film begins in Tokyo, where Kumiko (Rinko Kikuchi, Japan’s best-known female film export) lives amid clutter, alone except for her pet rabbit Bunzo, and earns her living as an “office lady” in a joyless work environment. Unmarried and getting too old for a job that’s traditionally for the bright-eyed and ambitious, Kumiko is miserably isolated and clearly undergoing a breakdown—which is either triggered, or intensified, by her Fargo fixation. The film begins with a strange episode in which a determined Kumiko walks to a coastal cave, where something she’s seeking is buried among stones; it turns out to be a VHS of the Coens’ film. It’s the strangest episode here, because we don’t know whether it is dream or reality; and if it is real, then we don’t know how Kumiko knew to look for the tape, whether that was what she was after in the first place, or whether she planted it for herself. Whatever this scene’s status, it establishes the tone of unreality and obsession that mark the entire film.

Before long, Kumiko does a Marion Crane, skipping work with her boss’s credit card and flying to America. It’s just possible that the ensuing voyage through the snowscapes of the Midwest is itself Kumiko’s delusion, although it’s not presented as such. Indeed, it seems very much grounded in the real, in the observation of a mundane world that must seem surpassingly strange to the eyes of a Japanese traveler, but that already looks pretty odd as depicted by the Zellners—a world in which drabness co-exists with folksy Americana, epitomized by a roadside statue of Paul Bunyan’s blue ox. This admixture of the bizarre and the deadpan dreary underlies the comic roles played by the Zellners themselves, with their earnest, careworn demeanor—producer and co-writer Nathan as an evangelical airport travel guide and David, who co-wrote and directed, as a gauche but well-meaning deputy who takes Kumiko to a Chinese restaurant in the hope of finding a Japanese interpreter. This gently comic view of middle America—neither all-out zany nor mocking—offsets suspicions that the film’s first part might be merely a Western fantasy about the horror of Japanese working conditions. Kumiko’s office life can be seen as simply an amplification of the way that any patriarchal work environment will crush the soul of an employee, especially a woman, who is fundamentally different from her peers.

Kumiko’s trek is a classic case of the journey on which the traveler sheds every bit of extraneous baggage, and the self is reduced to its barest rudiments. By the time of the profoundly ambivalent ending, Kumiko has become a peripatetic wraith, trudging across snowy plains in a cape made from a hotel eiderdown. She’s less a person than an incarnation of implacable forward motion. Rinko Kikuchi’s performance is a feat of minimalist self-containment, revealing little of Kumiko’s response—other than muted bewilderment—to what she finds on her travels, but powerfully conveying her determination to push ahead, becoming more closed-in and self-sufficient with every step. 

Jauja

Like Kumiko’s voyage, the journey in Lisandro Alonso’s Jauja is based on a myth—but while the Zellners’ heroine is headed towards a specific magnetic point that may not really exist outside the Coens’ movie, the trajectory in Jauja leads into the open, unmapped spaces of the irreducibly unknown and unknowable. Alonso begins his film with a caption telling us that Jauja is a mythical land of plenty which many have sought, getting lost in the process. In reality, Jauja is a city in Peru, but it’s also a metaphor—the phrase país de Jauja means “land of milk and honey.” In Alonso’s film, the more appropriate translation might be “never-never land”—and it’s by no means certain that this no-place is what the protagonist is seeking in any case.

Jauja is set—according to Alonso’s notes, although the film never states this—in Patagonia in 1882, and all we know from what we see on screen is that a small detachment of Argentinian is soldiers posted on a remote stretch of coast inhabited mainly by loudly roaring seals. Posted with them is Danish captain Gunnar Dinesen (Viggo Mortensen), accompanied by his teenaged daughter Ingeborg (Villbjørk Mallin Agger). The company’s boorish lieutenant, Pittalunga (Adrian Fondari), first seen bare-chested and masturbating in a rock pool, has designs on Ingeborg, but she elopes with a young soldier. Dinesen rides off into the wilderness after Ingeborg and her lover, but it’s a dangerous terrain—inhabited by indigenous people whom Pittalunga contemptuously names “coconut heads” and commanded by a renegade officer named Zuluaga, a sort of Kurtz of the pampas, said to have gone mad, to wear a dress, and to be possessed of superhuman powers.

Much as it resembles a classic American Western, Jauja is every bit a Lisandro Alonso film, with all that entails. Since his 2001 debut La Libertad, Alonso has been Latin American cinema’s great poet of slowness and solitude, but, mesmerizing though his last feature Liverpool (08) was, it seemed to represent a point of exhaustion in its particular strain of screen nomadism. This was a work that caused even devout adherents of “slow cinema” to wonder whether we hadn’t finally seen enough of films in which a man walked across Patagonia very, very slowly.

Jauja

Jauja gives us that again, up to a point, but it’s also different. Co-written with poet and novelist Fabian Casas, this is Alonso’s first venture into out-and-out fabulism, in which the journey becomes not just implicitly mythic, as in Liverpool and Los Muertos (04), but overtly so. Once the hero lights out for the grasslands—which soon become a labyrinth of rocky outcrops, then an altogether more lunar prospect—Dinesen* has lost his map, his inner compass, and much of what had defined his stable 19th-century officer-class self, including his hat and his horse.

I won’t say too much about what happens en route, except that the story eventually ceases to be remotely realistic and becomes truly dreamlike, metaphysical, mystical—classify it as you will. Jauja seemed to me to drift into a too-vaporous impasse during an eerie episode in which, in the middle of nowhere (but where are we ever, the film really asks, except Nowhere?), Dinesen encounters a strange elderly woman, played by Danish veteran Ghita Nørby. But then the film goes somewhere else again, in an enigmatic, subtly dazzling twist—with faint, eerie echoes of 2001—that makes you question the laws of space and time (perhaps), and of narrative and imaginative logic (definitely).

Jauja is a departure for Alonso in other ways. One is the casting of a known star—and Danish-American Mortensen, raised in Argentina, might have had this film tailor-made for him. He’s rather wonderful in the role of a taciturn military father, touchingly comical as he subsides into embarrassed fluster at his daughter’s vagaries; then he assumes the true grandeur of a Western hero as he sets out into the altogether Fordian desert, where he becomes, like Kumiko, a walking embodiment of determination and absolute solitude. 

Jauja

The other departure is a highly stylized visual approach; DP Timo Salminen, known for his work with Aki Kaurismäki, shoots in a 4:3 ratio with rounded edges, redolent of 19th-century photographic vignettes. The early, hyper-composed images suggest still photos: the opening shot of Dinesen and Ingeborg, sitting together like twin statues, the father with his back to us; and later, Ingeborg standing immobile in a blue dress, a horse nearby, grassy hills in the background. Later, the landscapes remind us that ’Scope is not indispensable for evoking vastness: the tight parameters of these frames encourage us to imagine an infinity outside their edges. Rich colors suggest both dream and the artifice of Hollywood Westerns: deep blue clouds on a sky fading to yellow at its base resemble a painted backdrop; pools of golden firelight in a night shot are manifestly lit, as if on a studio set. Visual leitmotifs suggest threads through the maze: pools and streams whose mirrored surfaces suggest doors into other worlds, a tin soldier that turns up in unexpected places.

Jauja is hugely suggestive for what it doesn’t show: notably the historical context, only alluded to on screen, but explained in Alonso’s notes, of the genocidal “Conquest of the Desert” undertaken in the 1880s by Argentine troops against Patagonia’s indigenous peoples. Also unseen are the land of Jauja itself and the possibly apocryphal Zuluaga (unless that’s his arm, in a deliciously comic shot, creeping into frame to steal Dinesen’s hat). It’s a wonderful sound film too, with birds, wind, sea and seals sonically “framing” those vignettes at the start, and an extraordinary moment in which Dinesen rides off into the far desert singing, while his voice comes right into the foreground. Mortensen himself, on piano, also collaborates on the score with guitarist Buckethead—their sparse, lyrical interlude marking the point at which the film truly crosses the border into dream territory.

Like Kumiko, and like Alonso’s previous work, Jauja is one of those films that specialize in the profound making-strange of natural landscapes, turning the real into the backdrop of hallucination: I’m thinking of Zabriskie Point, El Topo, and, of course, Jarmusch’s Dead Man. These are all examples of the metaphysical or oneiric Western, in which the traveller’s soul contacts to its sparest essence—and in which the real treasure, the mythical object for which the film sets out, is finally nothing more than the very film that it ends up being. 

*His very name, echoing Isak Dinesen, the nom de plume of writer Karen Blixen, evokes the realm of the imaginary.

“The tendency to spread the suffering beyond ourselves. If through excessive weakness we can neither call forth pity nor do harm to others, we attack what the universe itself represents for us. Then every good or beautiful thing is like an insult.”

—Simone Weil, from “Void and Compensation” section of Gravity and Grace

The great Prussian writer, Heinrich von Kleist, on the verge of losing his patronage, given to clenching his fists in awkwardness, is coming on to his cousin, Marie, at a tea party. “Would you care to die with me?” he asks her by way of a pick-up line. Marie (Sandra Hüller) rebuffs him, with a scrunched-up smile and touch of his arm, as if she were responding to a boyishly imprudent method of flirtation. But when Heinrich (Christian Friedel) meets the girlish and guarded Henriette (Birte Schnoink), her admiration of Kleist’s work and the recent diagnosis of a grave illness make her a prime candidate for his star-crossed suicide pact. Jessica Hausner’s fourth feature, Amour Fou, plays all this as a kind of domestic horror film, her characters like bureaucratic functionaries in their own lives. Their whims and fears alike seem not much more than the dejected byproduct of a social order as neurotic as it is inflexible.

This mordantly funny gloss on early-19th-century mores encompasses Henriette’s husband, Friedrich (Stephan Grossmann), a good-natured doofus and tax collector defined his by a Germanic ability to “sensibly” and programmatically weigh any and every matter with considerable detachment. But as Geoffrey O’Brien once wrote of Kleist, “He is the least quotable of great writers,” and this film is similarly resistant to encapsulation or toe-tagging. This is in large part due to Hausner’s career-long preoccupation—as in Hotel (04) and Lourdes (09)—with irreducible and invisible forces, supernatural even, the repressed and unseemly hidden away in the attics of our lives. They’re those things we keep trapped in secret compartments for fear they will one day overwhelm us—with emotion, with the inexorable pull of that which is so great and horrifying it is beyond purpose or reason, and as such some kind of beautiful.

Hausner’s subtle, intricate sound design in Amour Fou embodies this feeling, the muffled creaking of furniture, softly clinking cups, and distant animal sounds giving a sense of some ghostly, far off Presence, more reminiscent of the spaceship claustrophobia of sci-fi than other period pieces. Weil’s understanding of the ways in which bereavement takes shape for someone and contributes to their understanding of who they are, how we take up residence inside pain as it takes residence within us, corresponds with Hausner’s productively obscure mysticism; and Hausner’s sense of “the unknowable,” which settles over her work like a faint mist, is tantalizingly Weilian.

Amour Fou transforms this idea/worldview into an aesthetic mission statement, the foundation of and best explanation for its sensationally peculiar tone, the varied and manifold effects it has on the viewer. FILM COMMENT spoke with Hausner about the film—which is currently having its theatrical run at Film Forum—when she was in town in January as part of First Look at the Museum of the Moving Image.

At one point Henriette speaks a line that seems to go through everything in the film: “A figment of imagination which is as real as reality.” It seems to inform the look of the movie, and the actors’ performances, and I was wondering how you were thinking of this line while you were making the film.

I agree that this is probably one of the central lines in the film. I remember that when I was constructing the script, I was reading a book by Slavoj Žižek. I think he’s a very interesting philosopher, and he also talks a lot about cinema, but this book that I was reading was about the French philosopher Lacan. Žižek describes the idea that if you are close to someone or if you love someone, you see yourself very much in that other person, and I think that as soon as you think this way, every sort of reality becomes very subjective. And this interested me very much. I think that in Amour Fou, this is really the question. What is really happening, what are the feelings between those persons, and what is it that they only imagined? The male character, Heinrich, has a very strong vision of what he thinks love should be like, and he tries to adapt reality to his vision actually. For Henriette, on the other hand, this difference is not very clear. She lives a little bit in an illusion and she seems to not be able to act in a really willful way.

All the characters, some of them tacitly, but definitely Heinrich in a very aggressive way—quiet but aggressive—are imposing an idea they have of somebody else on that person. There is a clash, it seems, between each person’s self-conception and the other person’s idea of themselves.

Yes, that is what made me think about what love can be after all. As we said before, everyone has their own reality. It’s a very subjective question of perception, and as soon as you understand this, it’s really the question of whether love can exist at all if you’re not even able to see another person the way the other person really is. I think that is not possible. You’re so submerged in your own thoughts and have your own way of thinking and feeling that you will always somehow misinterpret the other person.

The look of the film represents this too, because it almost feels like you’re inside their conflicting emotions. There’s so much talk of souls, and the rooms are so large in relation to their bodies. Many of your compositions center the characters and there’s all this negative space around them, and you have such a feeling of the walls, how constricting and definite those walls are.

Yes, the mise en scène in this film is a bit like in a play, but a bad play. [Laughs] What I mean is that the movement of the actors is not natural. The difficult thing for me was to find actors that have a very natural way of acting. Although the dialogue seems complicated, they still have a very casual style of speaking, because on the other hand the movement and the whole composition of the frame is very constructed. It seems like the characters are somehow part of a game. They move as if they were in a chess game. The reason for this was that the whole film goes around this question of individuality or what the characteristic or inner self of a person is. Who am I at all? And the people in the film are very much bound by the rules of the society they live in, and this is also why they seem to be so unoriginal in a way, stiff, or they behave in a very polite way or the way they talk or behave is very unified. They’re not individualists. Maybe Heinrich is the most unconventional character, but the reason is really that individuals are part of the society, and this is a very modern aspect of the film, because it’s the same in our society. It may be more obvious to show it in the 19th century because you may think that in the 19th century, the rules were strict and so on. But I think that in our society the rules are just as strict, they just have different ways of being imposed on the people.

There is an incredible shot of a maid putting fire into a stove while the bills are being paid in the background two rooms away. You get that sense of an entire household functioning on a daily level.

Yes. And for example, in the whole conversation about the political situation at the very end, when the two characters are dead, the husband and the others have to continue talking about what is important to them. I tried to have this sort of perspective throughout the film—as in the scene that you described with the maid—in which there are different perspectives and the maid, for example, is like a silent witness to all the scenes. Nobody would ever think: “What is she thinking about it?” But in the very end it’s her and the girl in the frame, and for me it was very important to really give that feeling that there isn’t one truth there.

There is something that I can’t get over, that I find very compelling about Heinrich espousing how he can only find fulfillment in death and then taking more tea. It represents something of the contradictory nature of suicide.

Yes, and also the banality of it. I think I was also interested in really spoiling this romantic idea, any sort of romantic idea. Even if you’re going to die, you might be hungry before you die.

In another scene, you have this beautiful, long stretch of road in the foreground and then when Henriette and Heinrich are in the carriage going to the country retreat, you only show the last bit of them going around the bend. It’s an incredibly poetic image, but traditionally you would just show the carriage in the middle of the frame going down the road. Your composition, and only showing the final leg of their voyage, suggests the end of something—there is a kind of deathly appeal to it.

Sometimes when I think about the editing, I really think about what point is the most unexpected point to cut in and out of a scene. So sometimes I really try to be very much aware of what the convention of editing and structuring a scene is, and how you might do it differently. It’s also a way of giving the spectator this feeling that the story is not going to end with an easy solution. I think the whole story that I am telling in this film is a combination of bits and pieces and different aspects, and I’m really trying to give a kaleidoscope of different people’s emotions or actions, but it’s surely not going to lead you to some security in the end. There is no way of really explaining it after all.

Vogel in the end says something like: “It was out of love after all.” I like that very much because I thought, when I was writing the script, the film is okay if he is right and wrong in the end. It shouldn’t be that you think “No, he’s wrong” but also not “he’s right.” There has to be a sort of “Hmmm, I don’t know if he is right.” You cannot make a line and say this is the sum of it all. It’s not possible. And this example with the carriage on the street in the woods is just an instance of this. I selected that very moment to give you the feeling that, oh, maybe I missed something, that the carriage is nearly gone. It’s not that you get everything on the silver tablet and you just have to consume it. It’s more like: “Oh what was it actually?”

Could you talk about the repetition of the music in the film?

The repetition of the music is also part of the idea to create a rhythm within the film that is not smooth but that has strange interruptions. It’s also a way to give the spectator the feeling that 1 and 1 maybe doesn’t equal 2 but some other number. It’s about confusion and also about space, to give you the feeling that it’s more like watching a painting: you see one point of the painting and it’s your decision to look over there or look over here. You have some time to make your way through the image, and those songs from the beginning to the end belong to the same concept. Some of them break the rhythm of the love story, and I think it hurts a bit and you can say it’s too long but on the other hand, I think it’s right for the film to have a feeling of real time—this is the time it took to sing that song. It’s also a break.

I’ve never seen anything like that in a period film or really any film I can think of, where such deep feelings of longing and anxiety and also just basic private details—like Henriette’s autopsy—are revealed in a public setting and it’s not a source of controversy.

I think it’s got a lot to do with the humor. I was looking for this sort of black humor. Sometimes I have the feeling that when I’m making a film, on the one hand, I try to focus on very existential or brutal or homicidal topics, but on the other hand, I need this sort of lightheaded and slightly distant point-of-view, and I think humor is the sort of glasses that I like to put on. Otherwise, for me it would not be bearable, and I love Luis Buñuel very much—he has this sort of humor that inspires me a lot, and it’s a lot about absurdity. And this idea that you were talking about—“Oh would you like to die with me in front of a group of old ladies who drink their tea?”—this is a sort of humor that comes out of absurdity, because if you put the rules of society upside down, like Buñuel very often does, then automatically you feel uneasy as a spectator. You have to laugh while he’s saying it in front of everyone.

There’s something so strange about the placid nature of the movie. It’s like a still body of water but underneath there are all these things, all this roiling, fish eating other fish… That tone, and also these night scenes that are only lit by lamps, in connection with your material, it creates a ghost story atmosphere.

Yes. This reminds me also of my other films. It’s very often the case that I show the surface of something, and as soon as you have this feeling that it’s only the surface, you immediately ask yourself what is behind the surface, and I think my films are very much about this question of what is behind it all. It is a sort of supernatural question. You can call it the spirituality or the soul of the human beings, or God or whatever. It’s this question of whether there is anything behind it.

When Vogel is trying to convince Henriette to go to Paris, he doesn’t say: “I can lose you.” But he says: “I will try everything to keep you.”

Yes, I like that also. It’s part of this old-fashioned language. I was reading a lot of letters and diaries from that time, and the wording is a little bit different: sometimes it’s so technical. He talks about her like she was a pet or something, and he has to keep her alive.

Having the maid constantly in the background and on the periphery makes you aware of the invisible labor that keeps a bourgeois household like that of the Vogels’ running. When you were writing the script, were you coming up with different actions for her to perform in each of those scenes or how you wanted her to interact with the family?

When I wrote the script, I was only focusing on the so-called love story between Heinrich and Henriette, and on the political conversations that Vogel has with the other men. I was writing the first draft of the script before I made a lot of research about the period, because I didn’t want to fall into the trap of making a real period picture where you try to show everything very accurately. After finishing the script, I started doing a lot of research, because I was aware of the fact that when I do the mise en scene, I do have to know what it was like. But I only tried to pick the information that was really helpful for me to tell the story, and I remember that the idea of the maid came through the research, because I suddenly understood that the way a house functioned was very different from what we know nowadays. Nowadays, you’re much more lonely, the private space is much bigger. I think that at that time, the public was much more mixed in with the private. Several people lived in one room and because there wasn’t the technology that we have today, you had to communicate much more and you had to work together much more. And so the woman of the house, Henriette, worked with the maid, washing the clothes and preparing the dinner, and all those thoughts made me develop this idea that I have so many people in the frame all the time.

I think it’s probably also because I wanted to show that somehow it’s a sort of society-portrait, and I didn’t want to focus on the individual story of two characters but to show a whole society. I remember that in the script, there were many scenes where there were only the two characters, and then in the film, these became scenes where for example the maid appears and disappears, or the girl is present, or the dog, in the background—you’re never really alone.

Throughout the movie, the sound has a kind of spaciousness to it. You get a sense of the size of the rooms, and the distance that footsteps will carry.

I remember that I was discussing this with the mixer. He proposed to have the outside noise much louder throughout the film, and then I always told him: “No, the window is closed. Don’t make it sound as if the window was open. Let’s close the window.” That was the motto of the mixing: that the noise exists outside, the horses, the voices, the footsteps. It’s like on another planet. It’s very distant and it’s of course because of that feeling of the huis clos, of the closed interior. There is no way out.

The gestures of the hypnotist running his hands just a few inches above Henriette’s body and wiping them off—was that something that you found in your research?

Yes, I did a great deal of research on the whole medical aspect of the film. Also about the illness that Henriette has, and the whole part of the doctor, finding out how they made a diagnosis, what sorts of illnesses, what sorts of treatments they knew about. And at that time, the end of the 18th century, this sort of hypnosis, this mesmerism—Mesmer was actually an Austrian doctor and he used this sort of treatment for the first time. He believed in a sort of animal magnetism, that the body has magnetic lines, and if he does this, he cleans the magnetism of a body. That was very popular at the time, and it did have some effect. It’s like a predecessor of the hypnosis and psychotherapy that Freud and the others used at the end of the 19th century. It gave way to those kinds of psychological treatments also, because during these treatments, people started to talk and during the hypnosis, like in my film. At the time, they didn’t know yet that that could be interesting, but later Freud used this—he noticed that during the hypnosis, people started to say truths about themselves.

When Henriette is singing Mozart’s “Das Veilchen,” for the first time, in front of the dinner guests, she has her hands in front of her and she’s swaying a little bit. It’s childlike and it’s in direct counterpoint to the singer we see at the beginning of the film.

Henriette is a very childlike woman. That was also very important in respect to her relationship with her daughter. For me, there was always this question: how can a woman just leave her child behind, and want to die? And I think the fact that she is a child herself is the answer. They’re like two sisters saying goodbye when she leaves. She doesn’t have that motherly feeling of responsibility somehow. 

Israeli filmmaker Nadav Lapid follows the terrorist tale of Policeman (NYFF ’11) with the rich, sinuous story of a gifted 5-year-old artist and the woman who latches onto him. The Kindergarten Teacher presents the mysterious but unsentimental spectacle of a poet prodigy: when seized by inspiration, heavy-browed Yoav (Avi Shnaidman) paces and recites lines that teacher Nira (Sarit Larry) eagerly records like the follower of a great philosopher. Lapid’s fascinating gloss on the artistic soul and bold reimagining of the child in cinema takes yet another turn as the ideal-driven Nira grows ever more zealous.

FILM COMMENT spoke at length with Lapid last year at the Cannes Film Festival shortly after the film’s premiere. The Kindergarten Teacher screens March 24 and 25 in New Directors / New Films.

I wasn’t sure what to expect from this film having seen Policeman (11). This is such different subject matter, on the surface. And it’s hard to make a movie at least partly about literature. When did you get the sense that this is something you would actually make a movie about, and that it could work out?

First of all, I have an interest in the use of text in cinema—how words are deformed and transformed by cinema. Objectively, certain sentences can have a certain meaning, but cinema can take them to a very subjective place, and can completely transform their meaning to something else. For example, the radical manifesto [in Policeman] speaks with very classical sentences. Here, I was fascinated by the idea of not only talking about poetry, but transforming words of poetry into an almost substantial thing and yet not falling into the cliché of the poetic film. You know, these poetic films where you see sunshine, sunset, etc. However, in this film, there is a battle, tension, or maybe collaboration between poetry and vulgarity, between poetry and the world, or the universe, and life, which are always also a bit filthy and vulgar. So I wanted the poetic dimension of the movie to come out of the highest and the lowest. And I think the film constantly works on this dialogue between highest and lowest. In the end, this was about me rediscovering the time when I was 5 years old.

Were you vaguely embarrassed by that experience?

For 25 years, I didn’t want to hear anything. I was completely embarrassed. [Laughs] And so it began with the text. You know, it’s not that I think that the poems are good or bad. But I felt that there was something true about their existence. I think that the fact that they are real poems allows you to feel the truth behind them, without any connection to their artistic value. I wanted to put these words in the film and to base the film on four lines—to write a film about a woman who hears four lines and they change her life. I’m happy with the result, and I think that in a way the film is much more existential than the pitch. The pitch might be seen as an idea that’s too good. So I felt that the film should ruin the quality of its concept a little bit. And I hope that the film slaps these poems from time to time.

Yeah, I think it does. And part of that also comes from the use of a child. A child always contains contradictions. Even when he’s really bright, he’s a prodigy, but he’s still just a kid.

Completely. And I think there is always this question of his consciousness. To what extent does he understand that the thing that comes out of his mouth is a poem? And what does he understand by the word “poem”? And does he see himself as a poet? When he hears someone else—such as the babysitter—perform his poem, does he understand that it’s his poem? I mean, is it like a director’s strange remake or criticism of his film? Because we are all conditioned to think in this auteurist way—the idea that the film belongs to its auteur. But is the child aware of this notion of the auteur?

Is auteurism an instinct or is it learned…

Yeah, exactly.

There is an interesting overlap, with the child as an artist, in terms of self-consciousness and unself-consciousness. When I’m doing interviews, I’m sometimes asking filmmakers: “What did you think when you were doing this?” And people are just like: “That’s just... what I felt I was doing.”

Exactly. And when you think about it, the child is able to investigate or to put on the screen the basic act of poetry. This relates to questions like: what is inspiration or what is like to write? I mean, can you even answer these questions? The kindergarten teacher is like a journalist, who insists on asking: “Where did it come from? Describe the inspiration.” I think that this is a good question to ask knowing that it can’t be answered.

You can just circle it.

Yeah. I think that it’s really important to insist on it even though this determination is vain.

Part of the teacher’s problem lies in trying to control that creative impulse and in trying to hold it up as a symbol beyond itself. And for me, that’s the tie—not that there has to be one—with Policeman: turning an ideal into extremism.

Exactly. For example, the kindergarten teacher goes on a trip to save this kid, or maybe his poems, from everyone, including the kid himself, and to save herself, and to save the universe. These words for her are like an atomic bomb that she is going throw on vulgarity, and she will purify the world. I mean, her aspirations are enormous. She lives in a small apartment in Tel Aviv but she dreams of the sun. The only problem is that she doesn’t have the words. She has this tragic-ness about her, because she knows what should be said but she doesn’t have the means to say it. At the same time, when you take a poem and you transform it to something that has utility, that is a weapon, in a way you also betray poetry or you don’t understand it.

A person who believes in an ideal could be selfless because he believes in an ideal outside of himself, but it ends up being wrapped up in him anyway. The kindergarten teacher obviously has a certain amount of fulfillment in her life, but there’s also something missing, so it ends up being about her.

Completely. I think it’s about her. It’s about her because, in a way, the artist himself is not so interesting. You know, there are all these legends: “Before writing the poem, he would walk from this side to the other. Before writing the poem, he would stand on his head.” These are like gossip, it inflames all these emotions like fascination, jealousy, admiration, violence.

Let’s talk about some aspects of the filmmaking and how you planned that out. I can’t even imagine how you managed to work with the children in that way. Those must have been really stressful scenes to shoot.

[Laughs] There were moments that were almost like a heart attack. That sequence shot, which is very long and heavily choreographed, really depended on those 20 5-year-olds who are in it. Those are moments when you really pray to the God of Cinema to save you.

You get such an interesting dynamic from the main child and his friend. How did you work out their routine? Did they come up with that?

First there was the casting—the decision to have 5-year-old kids. And I had some big hesitation, because I don’t have kids, and two years ago I couldn’t even distinguish a 5-year-old from an 8-year-old. Today, I can identify the kid’s age from his shadow. In the beginning, it was clear for us that we would do more or less what everyone does, which is taking the 8-year-old kid and claiming  he’s just had his 5th birthday and hiding it afterwards.

And shoot him from the knees up or something…

Yeah, like 20 years old but childish. But then when we started doing the casting, I noticed that there is a strange combination in this age, 4 to 5, that is very relevant to the film. A great dynamism of thought and imagination on the one hand, and something not totally done, not totally completed on the other—in the way he stands, the way he moves, the way he articulates things. You know, sometimes he even falls down while walking. And I think this has something that’s really relevant to this question of poetry and consciousness and the way we observe things. So I understood that if I want to work with a child, the idea is not to transform him into a small adult but to face this “other,” this mysterious, not entirely completed thing, with an adult camera.

The way the camera works in this film is not like in a children’s film. In front of the camera, they are not adults, they are children. I think that the fact that the camera is not “generous” with the kids is very important. The camera is not progressing towards the kids, it doesn’t say: “Okay, these are kids,” and the kids are not helping it either—in a way, they do whatever they want. So these kids—both 5 years old—quickly developed a relationship that’s quite similar to the one in the film: one admires the other and the other despises him. Well, not despises, but the main kid was completely under the submission of the more powerful kid and this dynamic was precisely accurate. Except that sometimes I had to save them from each other! [Laughs]

It’s interesting how movies use children, because sometimes it becomes a horror movie—as if the idea of an intelligent child or a child having more autonomy is scary. Or they might make the child less threatening by making her “cute.”

Of course. For me, a child brings to the game this uncontrolled thing in a good way, and this allows the director to challenge his own cinema. Because it’s very tempting at certain moments to do endless mise en scène if you know how to move the camera and you have a good cameraman. So it becomes easily fascinating—a lot of people borrow it and why not? “And then we’ll do another traveling shot, and then we’ll go here,” etc. But I think you must create a contradiction, you must slap this auteurist satisfaction, you must meet your opposite and the opposite is the kid. It’s the same for the kindergarten teacher.

I wanted to ask about Sarit Larry, who plays the kindergarten teacher. What was it like for her to work with the kids?

Very difficult. Also, the kid was very suspicious towards her. I think in a way he tortured her a bit, in the way that the character tortured his kindergarten teacher. She really tried to work with him, and from time to time he would do a nice gesture to show his affection for her, and then automatically take a distance. Usually, you know, actors can act and I don’t believe so much in this idea of creating the same exact dynamics as in life. But here it was really something that came from them. This game of seduction, of his consciousness of his power over her, her permanent attempt to get his affection, and the way he consciously or unconsciously uses it—all these were parallels between the story and the real situation.

Something that also plays into this is the film’s tone and use of humor. It’s amusing for much of the time, but as the movie goes on, it acquires a sinister undertone. That must have been something that you were very carefully cultivating and developing.

I think there is also this dichotomy between humor and sinister tone because of the fact that the humor in the film is a certain kind of humor—we all know these moments when someone says something or makes a gesture which might seem odd or humorous, and you smile and look at his face and you see that he’s not smiling at all. When she sits with the kid in the bathroom and calls him an “honorable poet,” there is this kind of a humor. Even when you describe this, it sounds like it might be a lot of things. A 5-year-old stands in front of a woman in the bathroom of a kindergarten and she asks him: “Honorable poet, what do you think about love?” But at the same time, according to her logic—and her logic can easily be respected—this is the thing to do, because if you believe in the power of words and you think words are worth more than life, this kid, who is able to say such words, needs to be asked about them and interviewed. And she should look at him and ask him in the middle of this Hanukkah song: “How does the poet observe reality?” So I think that’s why it’s funny and not funny, and sometimes it’s a little bit dangerous, but there’s a real truth in it.

Another movie that had this kind of story might have something about the media in it: getting famous, going to the news, etc. But you don’t take that path at all.

No. It’s a little bit like Policeman, this anonymous hero. At the end, you feel like this strange tale would be known more or less only to its participants. And that’s why they’ll also have to carry it with them for the rest of their lives or whatever.

It’s a story that the cops would tell each other.

Exactly.

Are you working on a new story now? Will you still be working in Tel Aviv?

My next film will be shot in Paris. It’s a film about an Israeli guy going to Paris. It’s from the Israeli point-of-view but it’s a little bit on this Israeli-Europe, Tel Aviv–Paris axis.

What’s it about?

It’s about an Israeli guy who tries to become French. But about being a filmmaker these days… I remember once—and this is maybe something that drew me to make this film—Olivier Père, the head of ARTE, was talking about debut filmmakers and said that people tend to say that years ago cinema was better. But he thought that this generation is the first generation of big filmmakers who don’t have a public anymore. I mean, you can nuance this and say it’s not that horrible. When you see all these people eager to watch a wonderful film like Winter Sleep [also screening in Cannes], you might think there is still hope. But it’s true that there is a marginalization of a certain genre and of a certain way of thinking about cinema, which is worrying. And even if these things are not going to disappear, the fact that they are becoming marginalized might change their essence. So I think being a filmmaker today sometimes feels like you’re going in one direction and there’s a thousand people going in the other. But I don’t necessarily mean this in a heroic way.

I guess some filmmakers respond by working in TV. Is that something you are interested in at all?

No, not that I have anything against it but… I’m not a big consumer of TV series. I know that there are some TV series that are supposed to be excellent. I can’t even judge if it’s real myth—you know, people who say that big Russian works like War and Peace equal The Sopranos. I’m ignorant about it so I can’t judge. But I think that there’s something about the uniqueness of movies that enables you to make something that is not only developing the characters. People always talk about how the characters are interesting and all that. I think film enables you also to ruin the story. As I’ve told you, I for instance tried a little bit to deform the pitch, to deform the story. And this is something that for me you are not committed to do in a TV series.

Who are some filmmakers that you like who ruin or deform in that way?

I’m a big fan of Nuri Bilge Ceylan and Carlos Reygadas. He definitely ruins the story—in a good way! [Laughs] And Elia Suleiman. It’s this uncontrolled thing in a movie that, without sounding too banal, is a little bit like poetry. Poetry from the point of view of something unpredictable, not always understood. It’s strange to tell a poet: “I didn’t understand the development of your poem.” I mean, you wouldn’t speak like this. And there is a certain genre of cinema that still permits this way of thinking, but you have the feeling that it’s opposed to the majority who demands answers and development all the time and that it can be pitched and financed and applied to a capitalist or consumerist way of thinking.

In certain poems, for instance, you don’t know until the very end—and it’s really hard to judge—if you’ve heard the deepest truth or a kind of vain thing. It moves all the time between two poles: it might be the deepest truth or it might be nonsense. Quite often cinema is demanded to be in the middle because it’s demanded to be an acceptable truth, which will prevent it from going deeper. At the same time, it’s protected. No one would say it’s nonsense.

Right. It has to be plausibly radical.

Yeah, exactly.

So you said you don’t have any kids. How did this experience make you feel about having kids?

When I was studying film in film school, I used to make wedding videos to make some money. And I promised myself that I would never get married, and four years later I got married. Let’s see if it will be the same with kids! [Laughs]

Bandh Darwaza

From 1984 to 1993, the Ramsay family were the kings of Bollywood’s “doom boom,” a brief spot of grimy horror in the otherwise squeaky-clean Indian film industry. The Ramsays had enjoyed success in rural markets with horror movies throughout the Seventies (“Places where even the trains don’t stop, that’s where our business was,” Tulsi Ramsay said in a 2009 interview), and horror had occasionally been caught creeping around Bollywood’s margins. In 1984, the Ramsays released Purana Mandir, the second-highest-grossing film of the year (and their biggest financial success), and it sent monsters smashing into the mainstream. 

Between their first moderate horror hit, Do Gaz Zameen Ke Neeche (72), and the last gasp of their empire of evil, Mahakaal (93), the seven Ramsay brothers each did their part. Gangu was the cinematographer, and lensed the best-looking Ramsay movies. Tulsi and Shyam co-directed many of them, but Tulsi was also the one who cared about production design while Shyam was the one who cared about editing along with brother Arjun, who handled postproduction. Kumar was the writer, Kiran did sound, and Keshu did lighting and filled in wherever he was needed. Auxiliary Ramsays included patriarch F.U. Ramsay, who was a failed movie producer before his sons convinced him to try horror, while mom and various sisters-in-law who cooked for the crew and did makeup.

Horror lived fast and died young in A-list Bollywood cinemas because unscrupulous producers, not the least of whom were the Ramsays themselves, quickly began churning out Purana Mandir knock-offs, generating a glut of goopy gothics that flowed like sticky ichor from a wound. The formula was easy: a prologue set in the past to establish an ancient curse, a present-day ruined mansion haunted by a slow-moving monster, and a bunch of teens who show up and provide the body count. Calling them cookie-cutter is insulting to cookies, as witnessed by this list of the Ramsay Brothers’ Ten Horror Movie Tropes.

Ripping Off Western Horror

Mahakaal

If a movie went into the Ramsay Brothers’ VCR, it was totally stripped for parts with minutes. With billowing banks of fog and whole neighborhoods of gothic dungeons and ruined graveyards lit by swathes of primary-color lightning, Ramsay movies are the visual spawn of Hammer films and Mario Bava movies. But even on a scene-to-scene level, they love to steal. Their uniquely surreal possession movie, Veerana (88) features a group of cloaked wizards with giant, prune-like heads who sit around a table in an underground dungeon silently rocking back and forth, and lifts both the TV static screen from Poltergeist and the head-spinning from The Exorcist (spicing it up by having their evil witch’s legs also rotate 360 degrees before she kills). Their big-budget attempt to make a genuinely quality movie, Bandh Darwaza (90), takes pages from Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and Mahakaal is almost a scene-by-scene remake of A Nightmare on Elm Street. It’s actually surprising how easily its plot (ancient curse visited on parents winds up seeing their children chased by a monster child-murderer) translates into Ramsay-Land. 

Local Ruins

Veerana

The Ramsays didn’t spend money on sets, but instead filmed on location, usually at the same handful of mansions, temples, and graveyards located within a few hours’ drive of Mumbai. These places were reused so often that they took on the comforting quality of old friends. The dungeon haunted by the crusty-faced monster in Tahkhana (86) was outfitted with some swinging chains to become the lair of the knife-gloved, mulleted Freddy Krueger imitator in Mahakaal, and it’s also the same dank dungeon found in Purana Mandir, which was partially shot in a mansion later reused in Purani Haveli (89).

These aren’t just locations but emotional powerhouses that add as much charge to the scenes as the characters. Sometimes more. In Purana Mandir, a father hates the idea of his daughter having sex because all women in his family are cursed to die gruesome, pus-spewing deaths the second they give birth. He takes a hard line against romance until her hunky beau smashes through a portrait of said father (who’s in costume as his own ancestor), revealing a long tunnel leading to a dank dungeon in her familial mansion where the key to ending this anti-sex curse lies festering in a locked cage. Freud, anyone? 

A movie like Purani Haveli meanwhile starts with nothing more than shots of empty rooms as screams echo on the soundtrack, before an ominous disco number introduces a series of close-ups of statues and paintings depicting the crucifixion of Christ. Which leads to another Ramsay staple...

Close-Ups of Dead Animals and Statues

Purani Haveli

Purana Mandir was the Ramsays’ first big hit, so they can be forgiven for only including one stuffed cheetah, but to their credit, they got the maximum mileage out of cutaways to his frozen, snarling face. Knowing a star when they saw one, their subsequent films featured walls encrusted with taxidermy (including dogs, unfortunately) and paintings of animals (German shepherds in Veerana, horses in Mahakaal) that provided visual exclamation marks. In Veerana they ominously zoom on so many different stuffed dead animals that you can’t even tell what’s important to the scene anymore. Their mega-budget Bandh Darwaza took an aesthetic leap forward by featuring ominous zooms on living horses and bats instead. Sometimes these creatures are actually part of the plot, as in Veerana, in which cinematographer Gangu shot them from every angle possible. Thanks to his energetic approach, it’s one of the Ramsay’s best movies. One scene was shot through a fish tank, which at first seems like a purely visual flourish, but then a young girl (possessed by a dead witch) uses her freaky staring eyes to make the tank explode in front of her concerned aunt. And in Purani Haveli, the monster has one weakness: close-ups of statues of Jesus. 

Giant Statues

Mahakaal

The Ramsays also loved giant evil statues, and every single one of their movies contains at least one of these suckers, which Tulsi Ramsay jealously guarded from rival marauding producers in the family prop warehouse. In Mahakaal, the statue is a giant skull-face made of dead bodies. In Purani Haveli, it’s a skull-faced demon wearing a suit of armor that comes to life and crushes its caretakers with one massive metal-shod foot. Unfortunately, its menace is undermined by the fact that it doesn’t so much stride through the halls of the spooky old mansion as hobble along like an arthritic turtle, totally incapable of bending its knees. In Veerana, we get a massive Satan seated on a throne that shoots fire from his upturned palms, ready-made for a heavy metal album cover. The giant evil statue of Bandh Darwaza is a bat with outstretched wings and red-light-bulb eyes that bursts into flames whenever the horny evil vampire does.

Picnics

Purani Haveli

Every Ramsay movie features musical numbers because, come on, it’s Bollywood. But except for Bandh Darwaza, which ambitiously stages them in dungeons, crypts, and rainy backyards at night, these musical numbers were shot as cheaply and thoughtlessly as possible, usually in broad daylight, in parks, at the beach, or beside ponds. The narrative excuse to use these locations was always the same: let’s have a picnic! There are so many picnics in Ramsay Brothers movies that one begins to become uneasy. What does all this picnicking mean?

Purana Mandir springs for a musical number in a nightclub, and Veerana delays picnics for as long as possible, but Mahakaal more than makes up for it. After one of its characters is raped, her friends cheer her up by taking her on a picnic, driving her around on the hood of their jeep like a dead elk while they stand in the back and wave beach toys from side to side. The lyrics they sing could hardly be more salacious: “Come on, you know you want to / Come on, you know you want to / Come on, you know you want to... have a picnic with me.” Which leaves one to wonder exactly what “picnic” means in this context. A few scenes later, it’s pretty clear what they mean. In Mahakaal, “picnic” means “Let’s stay overnight in a weird hotel run by Hitler Johnny Lever.” 

Fat Funny Guys

Mahakaal

Like death, Johnny Lever is an inescapable fact of Bollywood. A permed, short, fat, “funny” guy, he can be spotted in hundreds of movies cutting up and making audience members silently contemplate suicide. In Ramsay movies, he actually brings some level of professionalism to his Michael Jackson impersonation in late Ramsay movies like Mahakaal and Bandh Darwaza. Before those, the Ramsays couldn’t afford Johnny Lever and had to hire Johnny Lever imitators. In Purana Mandir, it’s comedian Jagdeep in a curly comedy wig and sporting a speech impediment. In Purani Haveli, the fat comedy guy dresses in a burqa and suggestively gnaws a long white radish on a bus as a farmer leers and murmurs: “I like the way you get that down you.” In Veerana, the fat comedy guy emerges naked and hairy from a bathroom and invites another character inside because he “just dropped the soap.” And when Johnny Lever shows up in Mahakaal—both as a Michael Jackson–imitating dork and his twin brother with a Hitler mustache who runs a motel—his first joke is sexual, as he speculates that they’re both the bastard sons of a traveling salesman. 

Weird Sex

Purana Mandir

Ramsay movies are full of cross-dressing, actresses showering in bathing suits (to avoid censorship), songs with dirty lyrics (“Can you take it?” goes one in Mahakaal, “Can you take it all the way?”), and their monsters are basically sexual urges on legs. The witch in Veerana copulates with and then eviscerates her victims. In Bandh Darwaza, the vampire Neola is summoned to impregnate the infertile protagonist’s wife. There is sex all over these movies, and the camerawork in most scenes can best be described as leering, zooming in on the cleavage and sweaty thighs of its lead actresses, as the young men strip down to show off their muscles.

Ramsay movies usually escaped the censors because they flew under the radar, circulating mostly on the rural circuit, but after Purana Mandir was a big hit they attracted more attention. Veerana, one of their only movies to feature a female monster, was held up for a year with censors insisting on 46 cuts, trimming everything from the expected (shots of stripping for a bath, suggestive dialogue) to the unexpected (the brutality of the villagers needed to be toned down during a lynching scene, and the censors ordered the removal of a shot of a man being kicked in the nuts). So the Ramsays just sublimated their weird sexuality even further. After Neola is murdered in Bandh Darwaza, he returns from the grave and looms over the female lead who is draped in a revealing white sari and wrapped in chains, writhing on the floor of his tomb while he stands over her, dripping viscous white fluid from his hands before sensuously sucking her blood. 

B-List Actors

Veerana

Sure, the Ramsays hired name actors like Johnny Lever later on, but when they started in the Seventies, their motto was “No stars, no cars,” which meant that their cast and crew took the bus to locations and they didn’t hire stars. Instead, they went for beauty-pageant winners, children of famous actors, and novelty thespians. Jagdeep was famous for his role in Sholay (which was later spun off into its own movie); Jasmin, the bulging-eyed witch from Veerana, was a model who made three movies and disappeared; and Puneet Issar (Purana Mandir, 3-D Saamri, Tahkhana) was famous for throwing the punch that almost killed mega-star Amitabh Bachchan in Coolie. 

Monsters in Chunky Makeup 

Purana Mandir 

The real stars of Ramsay Brothers movies were their monsters. Sometimes they resembled little more than walking wads of rubber cement. Sometimes they were screaming pieces of wood. In Purani Haveli, the hairy monster that stalked the halls of the haveli had the long shaggy hair, unkempt beard, and slow stumble of a Portland hipster who’s into craft beers. But their best monster was Anirudh Agarwal, star of both Purana Mandir and Bandh Darwaza. A 6-foot 7-inch civil engineer, Anirudh was a glowering, towering presence whose cheekbones look like they were hacked from a tree trunk and whose forehead looks like it could crush stone. 

In Purana Mandir he played a gargantuan devil-worshipper who sucks out eyeballs and provided nightmare fodder to thousands of Indian children. But his best role was as Neola in the last Ramsay movie, Bandh Darwaza. With the smoldering screen presence of Tony Todd (Candyman), Agarwal stalks the familiar ruined havelis with his Drac cape a-flapping until the finale, when he does what every monster does at the end of a Ramsay movie: he explodes.

Final Monster Explosion

Purana Mandir

Every Ramsay movie ends with the monster exploding. Every single one. At the end of Bandh Darwaza the giant bat statue with light bulb eyes blows up, and so does Agarwal. There’s an exploding witch at the end of Veerana. And Purani Haveli takes it up to 11. Its hairy hipster monster stumbles out of a church where he’s been weakened by exposure to all those close-up shots of Jesus statues, when the cross on top of the church is struck by an optical lightning bolt (another constant feature of Ramsay movies are the same stock shots of optical lightning used over and over again), which sends it plunging to the ground, piercing the monster’s chest. The monster promptly explodes and catches on fire. If the monsters in Ramsay movies are basically enormous, undead, walking, homicidal phallic symbols, then it’s only fitting that they explode at the climax.

Patriarch F.U. Ramsay died in 1989, and the family’s big-budget attempt to recapture their glory days, Bandh Darwaza, limped out of theaters after only two weeks. Audiences didn’t care much about Mahakaal, and their attempts to remake their classic films have largely been met with yawns. Shyam and Tulsi moved to television with their Zee Horror Show that ran for 364 episodes from 1993 to 1998. Keshu Ramsay changed his name and kept working in Bollywood, eventually achieving what his brothers only ever dreamed of: mainstream respectability. He’s the producer of the popular International Khiladi series. When Keshu was contacted for an interview around 2009 about his old days as part of the Ramsay Brothers, he reportedly said over the phone, “I do not think that I would like to talk about this anymore”—and hung up.

LINKS! LINKS! LINKS!

It’s hard to find recommendations for Bollywood movies, because the Most Important Bollywood Movies of All Time aren’t always the most fun, and if you ask Indian Bollywood fans which movies are their favorites, their taste often runs more to great performances and dialogues, rather than the real crazy stuff that Western newbies to Bollywood want. So today’s links are a free hit of rough ’n’ ready fumes from the Bollywood bong that should get your head spinning.

… But first, let’s give a brief moment of appreciation to Todd Stadtman’s beautifully designed book on 1970s Bollywood action movies, Funky Bollywood. I could quibble with bits, but overall this is a truly great, accessible guide to about 58 action movies, five spy films, and five Westerns from Bollywood’s silver age when big stars, big budgets, and big blockbusters were the order of the day. This book just came out this week from FAB Press, and reading it makes you want to fill your eyes to overflowing with all the psychedelic glories of old-school Bollywood cray-cray.

… Nothing says Seventies Bollywood more than the first five minutes of Amitabh Bachchan’s Don (78). There are no subtitles on this clip, but who cares? Watch an explosive entrance by the Big B, then groove to the deep green funk of the opening credits, and hang in there for Don himself (yes, he’s a mafia don named Don) killing a man for wearing the wrong shoes. Bolly-Heaven Achievement... unlocked.

… Aalavandhan (01) is a Tamil movie (remade in Bollywood as Abhay) directed by and starring Kamal Haasan as twin brothers. One is a SWAT commander; the other is a psychopath. When SWAT brother tells his imprisoned brother he’s getting married, his insane bro decides his brother’s fiancée is Satan and busts out of prison to kill her. In this scene, he’s out on the streets and off his meds and has to resort to recreational drugs to control his psychosis. The Oscar for Best Use of Ronald McDonald in a film goes to...

… If you want more Kamal Haasan, his Dasavatharam (07) features him playing 10 roles—10!—including President George W. Bush. Yes. That is correct. President George W. Bush.

… Okay, so it’s a Tollywood movie, but Telugu (and Tamil) cinema are where many of the best cinematographers and best action directors come from in India, and Bollywood’s always poaching talent from its Southern cousins. Why? Just check out this chase scene from Alluda Majaka (95), which doesn’t know when to call it a day, and that’s quite all right.

… Lest you think it’s all about Tollywood, Bollywood still dishes up the awesome with movies like Aankhen (02), probably the best movie about a gang of blind men recruited to pull a bank heist that also features musical numbers ever made.

… And let’s not forget beautiful moments of ridiculous action ballet from Bollywood flicks like Singham (11), a throwback to the old-school action movies of the Seventies, with Ajay Devgan as a badass cop.

… For psychic whiplash, there’s nothing quite like watching the terrorist training montage set to “Mere Watan” from Fiza (00) in which future Bollywood dance sensation Hrithik Roshan plays a radicalized Islamic assassin preparing to knock off a couple of politicians with balletic grace.

… Later, Hrithik would star as a mentally handicapped chap in the E.T. knock-off (with musical numbers) Koi... Mil Gaya (03). And he’s going to spend decades atoning for that.

… If you’re just in it for the music, this Rough Guide to Psychedelic Bollywood sales page lets you sample close to 30 tracks from Sixties and Seventies Bollywood numbers and it’s a sweet, skunky introduction to the genre.

… If you’re in it for the dance craziness, Bollywood has still got it in movies like ABCD (Anybody Can Dance) (13). This Indian response to So You Think You Can Dance? shoots moments of heavy ultra-drama out of its eyes like lasers, as in this moment when the dance teacher returns in the nick of time to rescue his young students from defeat in an underground dance-off.

… But special effects, action, and ridiculous car crashes aside, what Bollywood does best is give some truly magnetic performers the kind of showcases celebrities haven’t gotten since the big Technicolor Hollywood musicals of the Fifties. It’s completely electrifying to watch Aishwarya Rai own the screen so totally in her early movie, Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam (99), using nothing more than her eyes. In the “Nimbooda Nimbooda” number from the film she basically collapses time and space using sheer screen charisma. If you can turn her off before she’s finished, then check with your doctor: you may not have a soul.

One never knows what to expect from Hungarian filmmaker Kornél Mundruczó, whose mythic investigations of human nature have established him as one of the most singular voices of contemporary European cinema. From Johanna (05), a musical retelling of the Joan of Arc tale, featuring a drug addict turned sex saint, to Tender Son: The Frankenstein Project (10), an audacious revival of Shelley’s iconic monster-against-creator scenario, Mundruczó hasn’t ceased to challenge the taboos that lead to alienation and marginalization within society.

In White God, Mundruczó turns his camera on dogs, that dispossessed species which was once man’s best friend... Betrayed and abused by their human masters, the unwanted beasts of the film rise up and claim the respect that is due to them. Centered upon the struggle of a girl, Lili, to reunite with her beloved mixed-breed Hagen, White God is a symphony of emotion, at once succeeding as drama, revenge, and adventure film, in chronicling Hagen’s journey to rebellion. Mundruczó sets his moral tale against the backdrop of a mutating Eastern Europe, in which the tensions created by capitalist and nationalist tendencies reinforce the social divides.

Winner of the Un Certain Regard prize at the 67th Cannes Film Festival, White God screens in New Directors / New Films on March 20 and 21, and opens theatrically on March 27. In an interview with FILM COMMENT this week in New York, Mundruczó discussed his influences for White God, his admiration for J.M. Coetzee and Liszt, and his continual desire to echo social realities in his work.

The movie starts with a quote by Rainer Maria Rilke: “Everything terrible is something that needs our love.” Can you talk a bit about what this quote means to you and why you chose to open the movie with it?

I think this movie reflects what is the majority, and that the majority creates the minority. And also, we create our monsters, and we label them as monsters, street dogs, minorities or what have you. And that Rilke quote goes against that idea. It’s revolutionary because it says we have the responsibility to be part of that system or not. That’s why I wanted to protest at the beginning and say what this movie is about.

The opening sequence where Lili is biking on the empty streets of Budapest, chased by the dogs, actually happens towards the end of the film. Starting with that sequence is also a way of announcing to your audience what the movie is really going to be about.

Yes, exactly. I put that sequence at the beginning of the film because I didn’t want to cheat the audience and let them think they would be watching a different kind of film. With the quote and that opening sequence, I am saying: “Okay, you must use your head when you watch this film.”

You’ve said before that in White God, you wanted to portray Eastern Europe in a state of transition. How do you think this transition is expressed in the film?

I’ve felt that over the past five to eight years, Eastern Europe and Hungary have completely changed, and I wanted to reflect that through the cinematic language of this film. That was the most important thing for me, to find the cinematic language, the theme and the story that would allow me to talk about that. I don’t believe in the Eastern European prototype anymore, because it just doesn’t reflect our reality; there is no slowness, no timelessness, no melancholy anymore. That’s just gone. It’s an ideal from the past, which comes from our authors. When I started out in the 2000s, we weren’t too far from that reality, but now we are really far. I felt like you simply can’t tell the truth through that type of filmmaking anymore. That’s why the main task for me was to find a form, a cinematic language through which I could react.

I think that what a lot of people have called the blending of genres in White God is actually your way of reacting, because it seems like reality itself is fragmented and can’t be contained in a single genre.

Totally. I think it really comes from reality, because there are remnants of the Soviet era all over Eastern Europe. I think that after the economic crisis, and after September 11, there’s been a huge moral crisis. And this new kind of cinema or cinematic language, and these new kinds of moral stories are important nowadays, because you can’t find your way in conservative art anymore. That’s my feeling as a person and it’s really rare to find movies that reflect on this.

White God was inspired by J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, a novel set in post-apartheid South Africa, where dogs emerge as an important motif. You actually adapted the novel for the stage first and used many of the actors in White God. What is the relationship between the novel, the play, and the film?

I’ve had two major literary influences in the past years, which have really changed my thinking: one is Coetzee and the other is Vladimir Sorokin. Those writers really tell me a lot about my reality as an Eastern European, which is strange because one is almost a fantasy writer from Russia and the other one is a South African author. But I felt that Coetzee’s world and how he’s talking about exile, territory, racism, colonialism, and the redistribution of a country is my Eastern European reality, but at the same time, it’s so distant. He’s very close to the idea of the film of course, but not totally. I staged Disgrace, and I’ve read all of his books since then.

White God is like a silent film because of the dogs’ silence. They only express themselves through their eyes, and the camera confronts us with these looks.

Absolutely. That’s why we used the music, to create a silent movie. Of course they can’t speak in a human language, but they talk with their eyes. They can be with us, and they can give a lot of emotion. And in front of our cameras, they really did give emotion. I think they give more emotion somehow than the human characters. Everybody was really surprised, including me, by how strong those moments were. That’s the meaning of this movie. The dogs’ protest is in their eyes and their head and their strength to create and give their own emotions to us humans. There is a beautiful quote in the last Godard movie Goodbye To Language: “Humans don’t like themselves as much as dogs like humans.” This is so true. And that’s what you can feel in this movie.

And it’s not just that they are silent because they are animals, it’s as if they have been silenced by humans.

Yes, I agree.

Speaking of looks, I think the dog-fighting scene is key. Hagen has been trained to kill and he does. But at the end, he stares at the dead dog and bends his head in shame. It’s a moment of moral understanding, Hagen’s recognition that he has lost his innocence.

Absolutely. In that moment, we give him an epiphany. He’s the most moral after his first killing. That’s really contradictory but it’s so true. Because then when we follow his thriller or horror journey, we understand his steps, because he can choose between good and bad, which is not something animals mostly do, but he represents our anger. So this is one of the most important moments in the film, and also one of the most difficult scenes to create. Of course no animals were harmed, and it was very difficult in the editing room to cover the playful happiness of the dogs. [Laughs] But in the end, it’s this idea that humans are the ones who create wild animals out of dogs, because dogs in themselves are close to humans, they are part of their families.

White God deals with Lili and Hagen’s parallel loss of innocence. Why was it important for you to have this mirror?

I felt from the very beginning that I needed a human protagonist, and that it needed to be a young woman, especially because in Eastern Europe women’s position in society is very different from the West. This kind of rebellious attitude is much more revolutionary, the way she keeps her innocence. But on the other hand, I need to have characters with dimension, not just “good” ones, so of course they make mistakes as well, as we all do. For me, her role and character development is more important than Hagen’s, because Hagen is a hero from the Forties: he’s clean and heroic, and you almost can’t have a human character like that anymore. But for her, there are hard questions that come with her age and the pressures of society, like “Okay, do I want to do good for myself, or for everybody else?”

You build a sense of frustration in the father’s character, who bears similarities to David Lurie in Disgrace. It’s as if he’s stuck, unable to exercise his authority the way he wants to. The conductor seems to have this frustration too.

Actually in a small country like Hungary, we all have this frustration as citizens. Maybe you wanted to conduct the New York Philharmonic, but instead you ended up conducting the Youth Orchestra in Budapest with the same level of talent. So of course you feel a great deal of frustration. Everybody feels like their life is not good enough, that they could be somebody else, somewhere else. And those characters are like that. The father was a professor in a University who was fired. So now he works in a slaughterhouse and the conductor is the same. He works with the children in an authoritarian way because he hates himself, not because he doesn’t like children. It’s easily recognized in Eastern Europe, although it might not be as simple to understand in the West why they are so rude. But I really like the father’s way because he’s learned his lesson somehow through this story. And yes, you could compare him to David Lurie.

It’s interesting how Sándor Zsótér who plays Lili’s father also played Lurie in your stage adaptation.

Yes, exactly. I mean the father is close to that character in one hand but on the other, it’s because Zsótér is a good actor. [Laughs] He’s actually a theater director.

The dogs’ escape from the pound and their subsequent passage on the streets of Budapest is a cinematic tour de force. It’s not only technically impressive, it becomes an icon of revolution with Hagen leading the masses to freedom, almost in the vein of Eisenstein’s Strike. How did you conceive that sequence?

Yes, it’s very avant-garde and very Soviet. We watched Soviet propaganda movies, like Kuleshov and all that.

I think the music also emphasizes that.

Yes, absolutely. It was written using Liszt’s “Hungarian Rhapsody,” but at the same time we were also inspired by Shostakovich’s symphonies, especially “Leningrad Symphony,” which is huge and heroic but also very aggressive and powerful. And that was the main influence, these early avant-garde Soviet movies, so Eisenstein, Kuleshov, all those authors. And of course we have some influence from Hitchcock’s Birds.

Yes in the attack scene.

Even Jurassic Park inspired me sometimes. This was our childhood. You watched Soviet movies on the TV, but at the same time in the cinemas there were things like Blade Runner, Terminator, and Jurassic Park.

You have a strong attachment to music both in your film and stage work. In White God, you use Liszt’s “Hungarian Rhapsody” as a leitmotiv. In the final scene when Lili plays it on her trumpet to the dogs, the Rhapsody feels like a hymn to humanity, an invitation to a return to innocence and harmony. In this respect, it reminded me of the last scene of Fellini’s Orchestra Rehearsal, where music ends anarchy.

I’ve seen Orchestra Rehearsal a long time ago so I don’t remember. But the “Hungarian Rhapsody” is really important to me. It was really difficult to work with because it’s so iconic in Hungary. Franz Liszt, who was German, traveled to Hungary and loved it so much he started to write pieces about freedom and about finding your identity with the minorities. This piece of music is about that. It’s about freedom, about minorities, about the revolution of minorities. Now, Hungarian Nationalists use it without any sort of freedom. So I really wanted to reclaim the music’s true spirit through its repetition. I think that at the beginning of the film, you simply don’t understand what it is and think they play it just to play it. But when the dogs attack the concert, you understand what this music is about, and also at the end, when Lili plays it on her trumpet. This motif is absolutely about how to be human, but it actually comes from the Brothers Grimm tale.

The Pied Piper of Hamelin.

Yes, I felt this was really what music could do. To make peace through music is somehow to be human.

The music takes the dogs back to reality and their former innocence, like in a fairy tale. They’re back to being children.

Absolutely back to being children, but at the same time, the humans lie down as well. They want to be their equals.

You’ve always made fable-like films. In one of your interviews, you say: “I couldn’t tell the story of a gypsy family in Hungary even if I wanted to. I think that if you make a sociological film, you move even farther away from the truth.”

I believe that folktales and fables say more about our reality and life than realism can per say. But I’ve felt that way from the beginning. Of course I can watch a realist, minimalist movie, but I always have a sense of “Yes, but that’s journalism.” So what more can I understand from that movie that I don’t understand from a website or newspaper about a topic? Why are we making a film out of it? So I believe in making tales and dramas and tragedies in a Greek sense. With this form, you can be much freer as an audience member to find your way, and you get more than when you are under the pressure to understand and witness a social problem. That’s my feeling but there also beautiful films made in that style.

Why do you think Eastern European audiences might need this mixture of realism and fantasy, which Emir Kusturica for instance so brilliantly achieves in his cinema?

I’ve never thought about this. But I think the question is for whom you have solidarity for. So I think in Turkey or in Hungary or in Mexico, you will run with the dogs and it’s so simple. And if you are in Germany or France or whatever, it might be the opposite. It’s a question of perspective. It’s always a question of perspective, depending on where in the world you are watching from.

Despite the disapproval of 67 percent of his countrymen, in July 2014 Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe lifted longstanding constraints on Japan’s military forces. Afraid of the consequences, mainstream news media and cultural outlets have implemented a strategy of self-censorship against criticism of the Japanese government. When a man set himself on fire in protest against Abe’s government last June, mainstream media pretended they didn’t notice. Comedy duo Bakusho Mondai was banned from joking about politicians by the NHK, the national public broadcast organization, on the 2015 edition of its popular New Year’s show. Further discouraging opposition is the Special Secrecy Law of 2013, which protects state secrets and carries the threat of imprisonment.

This frankly alarming state of affairs has been ripe for acerbic satire, and 30-year-old independent director Yohei Suzuki stepped up to the challenge with his brilliant 2014 debut feature, Ow (Japanese title: Maru). When Tetsuo, a jobless man living with his parents, finds a spherical object hovering in the corner of his room, he freezes like a statue. His girlfriend, his recently unemployed father, and city policemen are also rendered immobile upon setting their eyes on the enigma. The spell eventually wears off, but all are left in a state of lethargy. While nobody else seems to care, young reporter Deguchi risks his sanity to investigate, a more or less fruitless enquiry to which the film dedicates its latter half.

Still relatively unknown in his country, Suzuki’s first feature after 10 years of making shorts is a genuinely bold statement all too rare in contemporary Japanese cinema. Recalling Luis Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel and Nagisa Oshima’s Death by Hanging, Ow is an eccentric comedy that is absurdist in tone, deadpan in delivery, and biting in its social commentary. FILM COMMENT spoke with Suzuki via Skype as he prepared for his first trip to the United States to introduce the U.S. premiere of Ow in New Directors / New Films on March 24 and 25.

The paralysis your characters go through in Ow is a provocative metaphor of the inertia of contemporary Japan. To what extent did you conceive the film as a commentary on the current state of your country?

When a formidable event occurs in front of their eyes, most people respond by staring in blank amazement. In March 2011, Japan faced such an incident with the Great East Japan Earthquake. In response, society reacted with widespread self-censorship and self-regulation. Certain TV advertisements and the theatrical release of Clint Eastwood’s Hereafter were canceled for fear of insensitivity. This is Japan. When faced with something truly overwhelming, Japan will censor itself to the point of debilitation. In fear of being trapped in a vicious cycle, Japan chooses to suffocate itself with a noose of its own making.

But I didn’t want to just flat-out criticize this response. Although the characters in my film are physically numb, many thoughts are circulating in their minds at an incredible speed. They just can’t translate their thoughts into action. It’s a paradoxical situation. Still, I wanted to encourage the characters into action, and I don’t disapprove of their response. I believe people should be able to express themselves in whatever form that expression takes.

Your movies often have a non-human character that seemingly controls the fates of its human characters. The entire drama of your short film, Mono mono mono mononoke (11), is based on an invisible presence that is only described by one of the characters. Another early short of yours, Killed in the Air (06), similarly engages with invisibility, as the air and tension between the various characters are the focus of the film.

Ow certainly has a relationship with my short films in which the air represents something that is concretely present but is not visible. Although I don’t dwell much on its appearance, I’ve thought about what the spherical object represents. I wanted it to come to the foreground and the people to operate around it. I guess I’m not as interested in people.

While the drama unfolds, members of the Suzuki family pass away, fall critically ill and lose their sanity. Despite all of this, it seems their relationship gets ever stronger.

The slow but sure destruction of the family is something I did for the sake of comedy. Despite their situation, the family keeps moving onwards. I’m sure it’d be easier for them to fall into despair. No matter what obstacles they face, they try to remain hopeful. Although the only choice they have is to live on, it’s very strange to observe their lives from the outside. I wanted the film to have this awkward feeling.

Still, they end up arguing and getting in each other’s way, adding to the suffocation and immobility of the story. This feeling is enhanced by the family’s house at which most of the action is staged. Was the house the primary location from the outset?

Actually, the original script of the film covered a broader spectrum of activities further beyond the house. For many reasons, we re-wrote the script to make it mostly a chamber drama. As it’s a low-budget film, we didn’t have much choice. The house itself was offered for rent at a very low price, which was great, but unfortunately it was right in the middle of the Nishinari-district in Osaka. The area is considered the slums of Japan, and it has been used as a setting for the underworld, like in the Nikkatsu Roman Porno film Confidential: Sexula Market. It’s where many yakuza gangs have their offices, and we heard they aggressively oversee the area. We originally wanted to do more outdoor shoots but, out of fear, ended up shooting mostly indoors. I had to be cautious. It’s a very strange place. We saw many people on the streets who were actually in a state of paralysis, just like the characters in my film! They were just staring blankly into thin air. Before we had any time to rethink our decision, we found ourselves in the epicenter of crime and oddity in Japan.

Although you describe it as a decision made out of necessity, I feel the setting corresponds with the themes of the film. There’s also the amusing paradox of having a spherical object that seems to be a planet, which implies a cosmic dimension, floating around in the corner of a room.

At some point in the film, the protagonist Tetsuo murmurs the words waku waku wakusei, which is an onomatopoetic wordplay in Japanese that could translate to “planetary fun fun fun.” A planet suddenly appears in the periphery of the main character’s field of vision. Halfway through the film, the reporter realizes that the orb is moving. In my mind, the object goes into an orbit based on an unexplained gravitational pull, which also ends up drawing the “circle” [maru] of the title. I wanted everything in the film to operate on a circular basis. Although the orb is an abstract presence, I wanted to take it to the limits of representation. I wanted it to remain conceptual and abstract. As it’s on an orbit, it’ll probably return one day, which might call for a sequel.

Was there ever a point when you considered not showing the object at all?

Not really. I always wanted the object to be round. In my mind, I had the scene where Tetsuo and his girlfriend Yuriko first encounter the orb since the beginning of this project. Tetsuo points, the film cuts, and the shot that follows depicts a floating orb. The particular edit was important for me. I didn’t want the spherical object to be seen in the same shot. In my mind, cinema is about bringing together things that don’t have any business being together. I guess it’s pertains to the basic principles of the montage theory. How can I build something entirely new by bring A and B together? I think a directorial voice can be found in the ways in which a director brings together A and B that ostensibly have nothing to do with one another.

It’s not just the editing—the idea can also refer to the application of genre. I think of Ow as a family drama but it’s also a science-fiction film. I wanted to bring together two genres that didn’t have anything to do with each other.

Was Tetsuo always the main character for you? I didn’t feel any one character was the protagonist. Tetsuo is in an inactive state from very early on in the film.

Personally, I feel Tetsuo is the protagonist. I didn’t want the film to be an ensemble piece, but I did want to shift Tetsuo’s centrality to allow other characters to take center stage. In a sense, I wanted the story to be about the battle between Deguchi, the reporter, and Tetsuo. The final scene [of a fight] is a reference to the final battle in Scanners by David Cronenberg. Although it’s completely serious for the two characters, we can’t help but laugh watching them as outsiders to the action. Saying that, the last scene was only conceived the day before the actual shooting.

What other filmmakers came to mind during the making of this film?

My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done? by Werner Herzog was on my mind. A character played by Michael Shannon barricades himself inside a house and takes a flamingo hostage. I wanted my film to have a similar sense of absurdity. I also stage a hostage situation in which its treatment in the outside world contrasts with what is going on inside.

Your film had support from the Cineastes Organization Osaka (CO2), which is one of the key supporters of independent cinema in Japan. Can you describe how they support independent films?

CO2 annually support three projects based on original scripts. A jury makes a selection and the three chosen projects are awarded with 600,000 Japanese yen (approximately $5,000). It’s the only place in Japan that has such an initiative. They gave me a grant based on an early draft of my script and introduced me to Yukiko Koyama, with whom I wrote the final script. She’s one of the instructors in the filmmaking workshops that CO2 organize. CO2 is also associated with the Osaka Asian Film Festival, which is where the three completed projects eventually have their world premiere.

We often assume Tokyo to be the center of independent cinema in Japan and overlook other sites of activity beyond the capital city. Can you describe independent filmmaking outside of Tokyo?

Osaka has the strongest scene outside of Tokyo. It might just be my personal impression of Osaka, but it’s cutting-edge compared to what gets produced in Tokyo. It’s a place famous for its noise music; for example, the band Boredoms came out of Osaka.

Personally, I don’t think the Japanese independent film scene is based in Tokyo any longer. Saudade [Katsuya Tomita, 2011], which had some overseas festival exposure, was set in Kofu city, Yamanashi prefecture, which is west of Tokyo. It seems people are moving out of Tokyo to the countryside to make independent films. This is also my strategy. Mito City, Ibaraki prefecture, where I live, has lately given birth to many independent films. The film Playback [Sho Miyake, 2012], which had its world premiere at Locarno Film Festival, was also shot in Mito, as was Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s film Touching the Skin of Eeriness [2013]. It seems Mito is the place where independent films are being made. Just like the Nouvelle Vague was born out of Paris and No Wave films came out of New York, I feel a new independent cinema is emerging from Mito and it’s the place to be.

Will your next film be shot in Mito?

Yeah. Mito is a historically intriguing place. During the Meiji Restoration period of the 1860s, Mito was a major player in politics. As the Perry Expedition came towards Japan, people discussed whether or not Japan should remain closed from outside influence. Scholars in Mito advocated a radical right-wing political philosophy, sonnō jōi, which literally translates to “revere the emperor, expel the foreigners.” It was a type of extremism. In their critique of the Tokugawa shogunate, these scholars were the first to suggest the emperor was the heart of Japan, an idea that was based on the principles of the Shinto religion. While Japan became despotic in the 20th century, the emperor became a symbol and the root of all of this was in Mito.

My next film draws some influence from Nagisa Oshima’s 1967 film A Treatise on Japanese Bawdy Song, which traces the history of civil protest in Japan. The activist students in the film sing the folk song “Yosahoi-bushi,” which was a protest song that was sung in the Meiji period at speeches made by activists of the Freedom and People’s Rights Movement. Precisely one hundred years after the Meiji Restoration in 1868, the Zenkyoto (All-Japan Federation of Students) movement emerged in 1968. In the 1960s, Japanese citizens were divided on the concern of whether to accept protection from the United States, with the Anpo U.S.–Japan Security Treaty set to be re-signed in 1970. In the 1860s, people debated whether or not to allow foreign influence after Japan had been a closed country for centuries. With the Abe administration shifting Japan further towards the right, we’re currently facing a similar situation. I want my next film to express that what we are experiencing now already has a precedent in the past.

As well as its political significance, the film will be set in Mito because of a certain location. One of the three biggest garden parks in Japan, Kairaku-en, is located in Mito. Inside the park, there is a cave where apparently there is a growth of luminescent moss. For me, the notion of a luminescent moss in the dark evokes the feeling of science fiction. The film will be based on a character who walks into the cave and travels through different periods in Japanese history.

I’m also making another film in Mito, which is more for entertainment. Mito is known to be the birthplace of natto [fermented soybeans]. The film is a zombie film. The birthplace of rotten soybeans becomes the birthplace of rotten people. The Mito citizens try to revitalize the appeal of their rural city with the zombies and it turns into a tourist hotspot. The Japanese film industry is so insular and uninterested in appealing to oversea audiences. I think this is a problem. My hope is for this film to reach beyond Japanese audiences—for the sake of the survival of Japanese cinema. I want to dream bigger than the Japanese film industry.

Translated by Julian Ross