Now it’s your turn to have a say. Did you think that Inside Llewyn Davis was just another soundtrack passed off as a movie by the Coen Brothers? Were you disturbed by the drugged-out sexploits of former Mouseketeers because Spring Breakers lacked critical distance? Inspired to redecorate your home after watching Stray Dogs? Or maybe you once again believed in the magic of cinema when Joaquin Phoenix fell in love with his phone?

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During Poland’s many years under different occupying powers, Polish mothers came to serve as the preservers of Polish culture, carrying on traditions, history, and the native language at home. The idea of the feminine as the link to a buried past underlies the instigating incident of Ida, a film about an orphaned nun who learns she is Jewish from her aunt, a powerful pro-Stalinist judge with an independent outlook. The two embark on a road trip to uncover painful, recent history against the only slightly thawed backdrop of rural Poland in 1961. FILM COMMENT interviewed Warsaw-born director Pawel Pawlikowski (My Summer of Love, The Woman in the Fifth) from London about the film. Ida, which opens theatrically in the U.S. in May, screens at Sundance today and on Thursday closes the 2014 New York Jewish Film Festival. 

You originally worked on this script with Cezary Harasimowicz, and it had more of an action feel to it. Why did you feel the need to change the story, and why did you choose to work with Rebecca Lennkiewicz?

It wasn’t about the writers. It was where I was with the story. I usually write my own scripts, and I like to have a partner to kick it around with. So when I was kicking it around with Cezary, I was actually working on two other scripts, and I wasn’t really focused on this one. I was knocking around ideas, and out of it came something a little clichéd and mechanical. When I came back to the project later, I reconfigured it and tried to make it less plotty, less obvious. Basically the sort of film that I’d like it to be, the sort of film I like. I also wanted to introduce the character of the aunt, Wanda, who wasn’t very prominent in the first attempt. 

But I usually work on the script throughout the whole process—I re-wrote whole sections of Ida in prep, during rehearsals and even during the filming. It’s not like there’s a script and then I go and execute it. The script is always growing, evolving in my own peculiar method. It’s not like the usual film made in the U.S. or even in Britain. It’s more like an ongoing process based on a simple structure that then gets complicated, simplified again, complicated again, introduce some characters, take them out, and slowly, out of it, distills something in the end that’s very simple. 

So when you’re collaborating with someone, do they come in towards the beginning of the project, or towards the end, or throughout?

Usually the beginning. Part of the problem with my method is that you need 60 or 80 pages completed to get funding, so a lot of it is trying to knock out something that you can go to funders with while knowing that it’s going to be worked on and improved. So the whole filmmaking process is like a dance with a series of partners: at some point it’s a co-writer, then it becomes the production designers, the actors, and the DP. It’s a series of collaborations but in the end, it’s all part of the same process. Even if I’m working with the actors and DP and good production designer, I keep thinking, inventing, and scrapping things. Writing and all the rest of it is all part of the same process. It’s a very odd method, but I keep getting away with it.

The film has a very distinctive look that reflects films shot in the Sixties, from the use of black and white and the academy ratio. What films did you revisit when preparing to shoot this?

None, really. I watch films all the time, but there wasn’t an obvious source for this one. I keep watching 8 ½ by Fellini, which has nothing to do with this, but because it gets me worked up about the whole business of filmmaking. I used to love the films of the Czech New Wave in the late Sixties, but I wasn’t watching them now for this. It’s like I have a group of films that I’ve watched for decades, and they’re somewhere in there.

The real inspiration for how this film looks was my impatience with cinema, where the vein of cinema is going. I wanted to make an anti-cinema film where there are no pointless camera moves, no pointless close-ups. I’m not emotionally excited by the power of cinema’s tricks anymore. Maybe it’s my personal midlife crisis. I’d love to see something that was calm and meditative, where you suggest more than show, where each kind of shot has some kind of density and tension, not just in the drama and the acting, but in the visuals, and where acting and image and sound are all part of the same thing. When I watch most films, with some exception, I always ask myself: “Why is the camera moving? Why is there a close-up now? Why does this have to be handheld now?” It was a way of purifying, getting rid of habits, and doing something really simply. Looking at a picture, contemplating it, while not really reading the emotional charge. But staying away from the kind of cinema rhetoric that I’m finding myself more and more impatient with. Maybe it’s my last film, like a farewell to my career—although I don’t have much of a career.

My family’s photo albums from that period also influenced me. Not literally restaging them, but just the atmosphere of these photographs. It’s not like they’re great photographs, but there’s something about them that gave me an impulse to do it like this. That’s how I remember that time, through the prism of early childhood memories, and from family albums.

I think the way in which things are framed, and how much sky is in every shot—when you’re in a rural area, that’s what dominates. It’s beautiful but also oppressive.

That’s good to hear. That wasn’t the intention from the beginning. I only wanted to not move the camera and have the 4:3 in black and white. But when I was doing camera rehearsals in some locations, I was sort of bored with the framing of it in a wide shot, so I asked the cameraman to tilt up just to see what it would give us, and it looked interesting. There was something forlorn about the characters with all that sky above them. Usually people get lost horizontally in landscapes, but here they look lost vertically. But then because I liked it, I kept going like that—it was more intuitive than an intellectual decision.

Returning to the idea of collaboration, how did you balance working with the two different cinematographers?

The first cinematographer [Ryszard Lenczewski] dropped out very soon, partly because he felt ill, but also because he didn’t like where it was going. So I ended up shooting it with the camera operator, Lukasz Zal, who’d never DP’d a film before, and had no fear and no reputation to lose. He was really positive, enthusiastic, and brave. Lukasz was a real blessing because he’s a talented lighting cameraman, but his enthusiasm for doing something rather eccentric helped me with the whole process because that excited him, and we started contributing in the same direction.

It does look like the work of someone who’s very established. Which is also true of Agata Trzebuchowska [who played Anna/Ida], who you chose for this part after fellow director Malgorzata Szumowska spotted her in a Warsaw café. How did you balance working with a nonprofessional and working with an actress [Agata Kulesza, who played Wanda] who has a great deal of experience?

Well, they have different needs as actors. In the end, my only criterion in all of these different parts of the process is if it doesn’t ring true, if it isn’t exciting, if it isn’t expressive, I get rid of it. During rehearsals with the actors, we figured out what does and doesn’t work. I cast well, so I knew that the two knew what they were doing. What matters is what’s there on the screen at the end of the process, so when I’m looking through the viewfinder of the monitor, I like this, I don’t like that…The older actress [Kulesza], the virtuoso, was offering a lot, and what she was offering needed to be channeled all the time, sculpted, and often reduced. And she got into the character really deeply, because she rehearsed and researched a lot, and we spent a lot of time thinking through Wanda’s character. With the younger Agata, it was using some characteristics she has, and sculpting within them, and then, at some point, livening her up. The good thing is that they both got on really well, and the older Agata created, or helped to create space for, the younger Agata so she didn’t overwhelm her with her personality and the personality of her character. She left space for Ida to exist, which was not easy.

It was also difficult because there was no coverage in the film. There were few cuts inside the scenes, basically: most scenes were done in one take. So to have both of them to perform while the lighting’s right, when the framing’s right—the camera doesn’t move, so you can’t correct anything during the take, and then you can’t cut your way out of trouble either. It was a challenge that frightened everyone at first, but then they got motivated by it. They felt this concentration: everything has to happen from this angle in this image. It really created a bit of magic.

You shot this with only one camera?

There were no cuts. Each scene was done mainly from one angle. We didn’t rearrange lights for each scene. This was the ideal shot for this scene, these are the ideal movements of the actors, so they need to coincide and feed off each other, all in one take.

What were your guiding principles in terms of filmmaking when telling this story?

The general thing is to take things away. With production designers, the obvious thing to do is to create a realistic environment with bits and pieces from the period. And what I was doing was constantly taking away and leaving only a limited number of objects in the shot, which would carry more force. So the image isn’t an imitation of reality, but it’s a reality in its own right. It works through suggestion rather than replicating reality. The work we did there was finding the right elements and stripping away all the make-believe realism, the extras. Not to try to imitate reality, trying to get away from the pseudo-realism—a shaky camera, a lot of camera moves and extras. I was more interested in a stripped-down suggestive world, which has some of the quality of dreams. When you finish watching this film, you remember it as some dream landscape rather than some replica of reality.

Yes, absolutely. The intentional sparseness in the frame you mentioned, plus other, unintentional, uncontrollable things, like fog or haziness.

The funny thing is I would cut out images that seemed too beautiful. I tried hard for the images not to feel like beautiful images in their own right. They would never be divorced from the emotional content and the actors’ presence, from the dramatic subtext of the scene. I get annoyed by pretty photography that's in love with itself, that doesn't point beyond itself.

It wouldn’t fit the subject matter. Did your background as a musician influence how music fits into the film?

Again the idea, like in every other area, was “less is more.” I would only put in bits of music that really had some kind of a charge. And that includes the pop songs of the period, which I remember from my early childhood and haunt me still, and Coltrane bits, and bit of Bach and a bit of Mozart. It was basically bits of music that I like and thought would enhance the film. I didn’t want “filmy” music in the film. And the sound design is very simple as well, but it’s very hard to do simple sound design because most films attempt to imitate reality, so there’s just a lot of noise. Whereas here, there’s not a lot of camera movement, there’s not much going on, so each little noise is very crucial. So that was a tricky process with the sound mixer who had never done this type of quiet film before, where every scene isn’t rescued by music. But here, the music comes in as a dramatic character—they were dramatic events in the film. There was no score composed for the film, except for the two bits that seep in, but I didn’t want it to be noticeable. Mostly it’s just selected sounds of that world, very few elements that suggest, rather than replicating reality.

This was your first film made in Poland. Was the experience of shooting there different from previous films you’ve made? What was the reception there like?

The experience wasn’t so different—the crews are great in Poland, and everyone was really excited by the project and the kind of weirdness of it, I suppose. It was great doing the location scouting because it allowed me to discover my country again, and I spent weeks and weeks driving around finding the right farmhouse and small town. I hadn’t spent much time outside of Warsaw, which I visit regularly, before this. We had a really lively, creative team, who I hadn’t worked with before, and it was great to “discover” them.

Generally, the reception was very enthusiastic—we won two festivals—and pleased that there was a Polish film that didn’t try to imitate preexisting cinema. In Poland, we had a tradition of original cinema once in the late Fifties and Sixties, and then there was Kieslowski, but a lot of Polish cinema just imitates Western cinema, especially Anglo-Saxon cinema—not just commercial thrillers or romantic comedies, but Ken Loach-style social realism. And this film isn’t about an issue, or social problems, nor is it a romantic comedy or a thriller. So some people seem to like that it’s of its own kind, and has the confidence Polish cinema once had to go its own way. There were some fringe political reactions—I’m talking about some patriotic voices, patriotic in the wrong sense—that it’s an anti-Polish film, and some people didn’t like that she leaves the secular world in the end, that she turns her back on life. There were all sorts of comments, but I’ve never had such great reviews in all my life. I was taken back a bit.

I tried to make a film that’s resonant, but not in the least explanatory or didactic—that feels coherent but doesn’t teach you a lesson. She’s a particular character, and it’s difficult to be in Poland in 1961, and to be a woman—I mean, what options are there? Both heroines finish with the impossibility of life. So I didn’t want to stir things up too much, but just allow the audience to enter that space created by the film and make it resonate differently for everyone.

Just under a year ago, the Chilean feature Gloria became what you’d have to call the feel-good hit of an otherwise glum Berlinale competition. Any film that ends with its heroine on the dance floor, getting down to what’s effectively her own disco theme song, is bound to come across as feel-good one way or another—although as upbeat endings go, Gloria’s is deliciously slow-burn and more than tinged with ambivalence. Writer-director Sebastián Lelio, whose fourth feature this is, has a confident way of parceling out exuberance and melancholy in a setting of mundane everyday realism. But this is also one of those films that you can’t imagine without its magnetic and superbly nuanced central performance, and it’s no disrespect to Lelio to say that Gloria is as much Paulina García’s film as it is his (at Berlin, she won the Silver Bear for Best Actress).

García plays Gloria, a woman in her late 50s, divorced for some 10 years. She still lives alone but regularly attends singles events, putting on her glittery glad rags and keeping an eye out for attractive older men, who seem fairly receptive. She thinks she’s landed a winner when she exchanges glances—and then yet more glances—with the dapper Rodolfo (Sergio Hernández), with whom she quickly winds up in bed. Gloria seems confident about Rodolfo as a prospect—a confidence the viewer might not share, since he seems a little hesitant, a little stiff, and a little too easily embarrassed. Besides, there’s that torso-flattering corset he wears, though it doesn’t seem to bother Gloria, who twice in the film yanks it off with gusto: if romance can withstand the sound of ripping Velcro, it must have something going for it.

The relationship starts as fun—Rodolfo is a former Navy man, now the owner of an adventure park where adults can swing on bungee-style ropes (which Gloria has a ball with) and take part in paintball games. But both lovers carry considerable baggage. Gloria has two adult children with their own domestic complications (her yoga-instructor daughter is about to leave for Sweden to join the father of the child she’s expecting). And Rodolfo has two adult daughters and an ex-wife, as of one year, that he hasn’t yet really left behind, and they are forever troubling him with distress calls (the insistent ringing of his cell phone is one of the film’s leitmotifs).

Still, the couple’s sex, evoked in brief, tightly shot scenes, seems pretty hot. Gloria is one of those very rare films that not only show two people, both some way over 50, getting naked together, but also don’t suggest that it’s a big deal in any way. But the closer the couple get, the more we sense that there’s going to be friction. The sticky moment comes when Gloria’s son hosts a family get-together, at which her ex-husband is present and old times are talked about fondly. There’s someone left out, and the fact that we can barely see that person in the scene—Rodolfo’s awkwardly frowning features hover in the background—brings home the painful exclusion this shy, earnest man feels, which is why he quietly gets up and sneaks out, barely noticed.

Having said it’s Garcia’s film, I should also add that it’s substantially Hernández’s too. This patrician-looking but soft-faced actor previously worked with Lelio in his The Year of the Tiger (11), and you may recognize him as the lead in Raúl Ruiz’s swan song Night Across the Street and as a military officer in Pablo Larraín’s No. Rodolfo’s nervous delicacy, and the weary self-pity that always seems about to surface, tell you that he’s nowhere near as well-adjusted to the single life (or to life, period) as Gloria. You can possibly imagine them as a couple who have been together for years, but it’s harder to imagine them making it work now—and that’s partly the drama’s appeal, the discrepancy between the relationship we see, and the hopes (and self-deceptions) that Gloria seems to invest in her lover.

Editing the film together with Soledad Salfate, Lelio builds the narrative on discreet temporal jumps and occasional gaps, around which he and co-writer Gonzalo Maza build insights into the daily stresses of Gloria’s life: the impersonal office where she works, a problem neighbor noisily cracking up, casual visitations from said neighbor’s sphinx-like hairless cat. That animal prompts Gloria’s cleaner to tell a magnificent non sequitur of a story about Noah’s Ark, a digression which seems to have wandered into the film as mysteriously and casually as the cat enters her apartment.

As a heroine, Gloria is magnetic because she’s so unremarkable—a middle-aged woman who holds down a job, cements her family together, keeps her own psyche on an even keel, and goes about seeking love and sex with a mixture of confidence and nervousness that everyone can surely identify with. A telling detail, suggesting that she hasn’t quite shaken off the past, is a pair of huge windshield-like glasses that make her look a little more matronly than she needs to, from more or less the same era as the film’s disco numbers. García has a neat way of signaling Gloria’s old-school femininity—the little flicks of her hair as she steps onto a dance floor, her half-coy, half-saucy inspection of Rodolfo. And García takes the role’s physicality in her stride—including the nudity, sexual and non-sexual, not to mention the half-nudity, waist down, in the scene where Gloria gives Rodolfo a no-nonsense shove into an armchair and takes what she’s after.

One of the producers here is Larraín, whose own films—notably Tony Manero, Post Mortem, and No—have picked over the horrors of the Pinochet years. While it’s not a political film in the same way, Gloria clearly emerges from contemporary Chilean reality. We glimpse TV coverage of street protests, one of which is seen in the background while Gloria sits alone in a café, and it’s presumably part of Chile’s wave of student protests against a stagnant education system, a youth movement identified with its charismatic figurehead Camila Vallejo. Gloria herself is identified with a faintly bohemian middle-class liberal background: at one get-together, her friends do an impromptu performance of Antonio Carlos Jobim’s “Waters of March,” while at that awkward family dinner, someone alludes to social disillusion and a “spiritual revolution” taking place in Chile. Rodolfo’s main awkward contribution to that conversation is the complaint “There are no leaders now”; it’s never made explicit, but this comment, together with his Navy background and his identification with guns (even if only the paintball variety) suggest that he was one of the many right-wing Chileans who, as Larraín’s docudrama No pointed out, were perfectly content to see Pinochet in power.

Incidentally, there’s no obvious connection with the Cassavetes film of the same name—though you wouldn’t want to get on this Gloria’s bad side any more than that of the Gena Rowlands character. Nor is the closing theme song, alluded to above, either the Them number or the Patti Smith variant; it’s the original Italian “Gloria” from 1979 by Umberto Tozzi. You may be more familiar with the Laura Branigan cover.

Rudderless

William H. Macy’s feature-length directorial debut, Rudderless, follows Sam, an ad exec (Billy Crudup) struggling to turn his life around after his teenage son dies in a school shooting. Refusing to engage with loved ones, he descends into alcoholism and moves onto a boat, working small menial jobs. Sam’s grief begins to lift after he discovers a cache of tapes and lyrics for songs his son had written, and performs one of the songs at a local bar. Quentin (Anton Yelchin), a young, awkward musician, encourages Sam to start playing the songs with a band which invigorates both of them—until he finds out the songs weren’t written by Sam.

Rudderless doesn’t tread any new ground, but the material is deftly handled by Macy (who also co-wrote the script) and is emotionally effective. Yelchin and Crudup play off one another well, and the supporting cast (Laurence Fishburne and Felicity Huffman) is equally strong. The movie also manages to clear a major hurdle: the quality of the music. If the songs that everyone is supposed to feel so strongly about aren’t all that great, it can quickly sink a premise like this. But to my ears, the music was effective, and I could see it resonating with a lot of people, much like the film itself.

R100

Hitoshi Matsumoto’s R100 is pretty much the definition of a “specialty title,” so if it does appear at a theater near you, consider yourself lucky. In the film, a mild-mannered father and salaryman whose wife is in a coma sees his world further disrupted after he joins an S&M club that specializes in surprising their clients in public. Each dominatrix has a distinctive bizarre technique of humiliation: one repeatedly dumps him into a fountain; another smashes his sushi before he can eat it; another is adept at spitting. The visits yield him moments of bliss, until the encounters cross the line and threaten his livelihood and his family. The film comes with its own running commentary via sequences with a censorship committee who are supposedly viewing the film and critiquing what is happening (“Why does an S&M club have a CEO?”).

As the intensity and strangeness of the dominatrix visits escalate, R100 achieves a giddy, absurd comedy that is truly unique. In addition, the breaks in the action provided by the censorship committee bring to mind Godard’s joyful tactic of pointing out the cinematic apparatus. (The film’s title parodies the Japanese ratings system, suggesting that no one under the age of 100 will understand what they are watching.) R100 is definitely not be for everyone, but for that segment of the audience who are on board with Matsumoto, the film will be a lot of fun.

Camp X-Ray

Peter Sattler’s Camp X-Ray seeks to put a face on Guantanamo Bay by exploring the relationship between Amy (Kristen Stewart), a young female soldier on duty, and Ali (Payman Maadi), one of the prisoners she is tasked with guarding. Amy must go through the learning process of handling prisoners from a different culture, as well as negotiating the gender politics of the armed forces, which are not in a woman’s favor. While the film makes an admirable effort to address topics (and a place) that many in the U.S. would prefer to ignore, it will disappoint anyone looking for a grittier, uncompromising approach. And, acting aside, Stewart might be the least convincing soldier since Michael J. Fox in Casualties of War. However, for the significant portion of the moviegoing public who favor a superficial narrative that tugs at the heart strings, Maadi’s performance fits the bill.

The Babadook

The Babadook is an artful classic treatment of the haunted house/possession genre. In Australian actress Jennifer Kent’s directorial debut, a single mother (Essie Davis) struggles to handle her unruly 7-year-old son. The day the boy was born, his father was killed in a car accident, leaving both mother and son with deep psychological scars. His tantrums worsen after the mysterious appearance of a children’s book about a boogeyman named Mister Babadook. The boy claims he needs to prevent the monster from killing his mother, and she grows more and more spooked by apparent threats against them.

In many ways the film is like an Australian companion piece to The Conjuring, as it shares several themes and hits many of the same notes in pursuit of frightening its audience. While that alone would warrant a hearty recommendation, Kent adds a deft visual style, and fleshes out a familiar yet distinctive children’s boogeyman character, tying his existence to the emotional discord that exists between the mother and son. The result is a refreshing, and not gory, approach to horror that scores high on the scare-meter.

Any filmmaker undertaking a family portrait has to strike the right balance between conveying a very personal experience and fashioning a more broadly engaging narrative. In Papirosen, Gastón Solnicki rarely points the camera away from his Buenos Aires kinsfolk, even as they get ready in the morning and traipse around shirtless in the evening. It’s quite possible to settle comfortably into the viewpoint of his loving gaze and treat the film as a 74-minute compilation of gorgeous home movies. But that would be unfair to the filmmaking accomplishment of Solnicki, who spent so much time with camera in hand that his family seems not to notice him at the Passover dinner table; who ultimately pared down over 200 hours of footage, spanning a decade; and who emerged with a poignant documentary about the legacy of a traumatic past as experienced across four generations.

The film opens in voiceover, with Solnicki’s grandmother, Pola (who sounds like a warbling klezmer viola), recounting being taken at age 16 from Poland to the concentration camps. Her brother and many relatives were killed, but she survived and eventually moved to Buenos Aires to raise her family. But while Pola talks about the past, more recent times appear on screen: the director’s father, Victor, and young nephew, Mateo, ascending in a ski lift, followed by Super-8 footage of Gastón’s parents as kids, beaming at the camera. It might sound like a simple contrast—Pola’s account of suffering versus later scenes of happiness—but there’s something unsettling about the ski lift’s metal apparatus against the snow-covered mountainside, and the silhouettes of family members caught silently on film like ghosts.

Even in the company of loved ones, some of whom never experienced the war for themselves, latent memories of suffering still seem to cast a dark shadow. Though there is no actual footage from World War II, it is as if the film bears a trace of PTSD; like Chantal Akerman, whose own films bear the imprint of the past, Solnicki is a second-generation survivor. Here he sometimes dwells on the sounds of passing trains, and during a sequence at a fashion event, he points his lens at a barbed-wire fence and the emaciated back of one guest. He often catches family members when their faces are lined with deep exhaustion. At a time when the world’s remaining Holocaust survivors are reaching the end of their years, Papirosen poses an important question: how, and how much, does the psychological residue manifest itself?

Something about the film’s muted tone suggests that the inner turmoil is in fact constant—especially for Victor, who was born during the war and is the film’s central focus. He is rarely shown discussing the past, but his actions reveal a desire to recover the childhood that he missed, moving from place to place (“escaping the Russians”) without papers. Late in the film he returns to Czechoslovakia, where he spent his first two years; at an antique shop in Prague, he spends an unusual amount of time deciding whether to buy a toy car. Though Gastón is present, filming, Victor seems distant, occasionally recalling a memory, as though he is busy refashioning the past for his own peace of mind. The moments of blissful reprieve from internal gloom always involve family union: Victor reading to his grandson, or the family sitting down to dinner together, or old footage of a bar mitzvah suddenly filling the frame.

As much as Papirosen traces history through genealogy, like many such documentary accounts, it also simply underlines the enduring importance of devotion to family. There is some sense that younger generations without the same historical fortification aren’t demonstrating the same deep parental love that Victor possesses. Gastón’s sister at one point laments how her (eventually ex-) husband no longer helps her take care of the kids—she says it was a “mistake” not to have married someone like her father—while his brother Alan, glowers during his infrequent visits for dinner, and announces a desire to distance himself from everyone, which saddens his parents. But for the older generation, the proximity to hardship has deepened their compassion for our sons and daughters, even as wounds from the unhappy past seem impossible to heal.

Unlike reality-TV mainstays like Seconds From Disaster or Air Crash Confidential, Charlie Victor Romeo functions without dramatic music, CGI simulations, voiceovers, or testimony from aviation experts. All of the dialogue in the film, which is based on a 1999 play, comes word for word from actual black-box recordings retrieved from six different ill-fated airplanes. Set entirely inside the cockpit, save for an occasional, grainy shot of a faceless air traffic controller speaking into a microphone, the illusion of the airplane as a safe, normally functioning machine dissolves.

Despite its fraught premise and 3D presentation, Charlie Victor Romeo is far from a disaster movie. There are no stories of heroism or survival, nor is the movie concerned with fetishizing (or even depicting) the spectacle of collisions. Each segment begins the same way, with text giving the date of the crash, a blueprint of the plane, and the flight number. And each segment concludes just before the moment of impact, cutting to details about the cause of the accident and the total number of fatalities and survivors. Still, the narratives aren’t entirely predictable: some show the peril gradually unfolding, while others begin with the plane already in distress. All are relentlessly tense, and we savor the comfort of duration: as long as the plane is in the air, some hope remains. The fourth account—an Alaska Airlines flight that runs into a flock of birds—is particularly devastating because it unfolds so quickly, with less than five minutes between the beginning of the crisis and the crash. The third account, by contrast, involves a lengthy back-and-forth between the beleaguered pilot and co-pilot as they desperately try to figure out what’s going wrong. 

Charlie Victor Romeo is too deliberately impersonal and distanced to be labeled conventional docudrama; the same small cast appears across multiple segments. It’s a meticulous depiction of trauma, fashioned into a feature, though introductory text assures us that any edits to the dialogue were made for time or clarity, not for content. The bare-bones structure and presentation (3D effects aside) are in service of a sobering conceit: that these frightening incidents strike without notice and often without reason. Sometimes, there’s not even enough time to diagnose, let alone prevent, the problem. As viewers, we have the clarity and burden of hindsight. Charlie Victor Romeo is rooted in fear and panic, but it’s also a deeply empathetic film. It terrifies us with its unflinching fixation on these desperate scenarios, and while the directors eschew characterization entirely, we’re nonetheless bound by an instinctive compassion—a genuine, often futile hope that these people will make it out alive.

The film’s only shortcoming involves its use of stereoscopic 3D. The intention is to cultivate a feeling of proximity—to bring us directly into the cockpit. Nothing jumps out at the screen, but the light lost as a result of this technology does the film a disservice, especially during some of the early segments. While it’s affecting to see the beads of sweat on a pilot’s forehead, the overall image quality is sometimes a bit fuzzy. Since the visuals are largely static, there doesn’t seem to be any specifically filmic reason to use 3D, and it comes across as an attempt to recapture the theatrical intimacy of the original production. At times, the 3D presentation nearly contradicts the movie’s intentional—and effective—minimalism. 

Given post-9/11 aviation anxieties, the film feels almost anachronistic. These crashes are never caused by terrorism or deliberate sabotage; they’re accidents, the product of pure happenstance. Charlie Victor Romeo lingers on moments of catastrophe but stops short of showing the wreckage or the subsequent emotional fallout, and the dry presentation sidesteps melodrama or exploitation. Instead of acting as a piece of morbid voyeurism, the movie tasks us with caring about the basic survival of a group of strangers. It’s about both the immediacy of human connection and the devastation of despair when all hope is finally lost.

Infinitely Polar Bear

Set in 1978, Maya Forbes’s Infinitely Polar Bear stars Mark Ruffalo as Cameron, a father of two young girls who has a nervous breakdown and struggles with bipolar disorder. The pressure on Cameron ratchets up when his wife, Maggie (Zoe Saldana), makes the difficult decision to pursue her MBA in New York, leaving the girls in his care in Boston during the week. Nail-biting moments—will Cameron be able to keep it together enough not to attract the attention of social services?—alternate with scenes of quirky family togetherness.

The autobiographical roots of Forbes’s story work to the benefit and detriment of the film: no crisis is manufactured to raise the stakes, but there’s also no dramatic catharsis. Instead, Infinitely Polar Bear presents an honest account of the family’s struggles to stay on track, and it proves heartfelt enough that there’s no need to manipulate the audience. While Ruffalo gives a characteristically strong performance, it is Saldana that really shines as the heart of the film. She creates a deeply nuanced portrait of a mother and young African-American woman in the Seventies who makes sacrifices to better the lives of her family while shouldering the burden of her wild-card husband and raising kids.

Blue Ruin

In Jeremy Saulnier’s Blue Ruin, a peaceful vagrant, Dwight, seeks out vengeance when his parents are murdered. But in doing so, Dwight and his remaining kin become targets for the killer’s wealthy, deadly family. As an action thriller, it’s a rarity, eschewing bombastic high-concept set pieces for the intimate tension of one man’s multiple moments of truth, as he faces down the unrepentant souls who destroyed his family. We’re immersed in a world where vigilante justice is a plausible reality and each bloody action will assuredly have an equally bloody reaction (if not worse), inevitably culminating in a tragic conclusion for all parties. Blue Ruin also puts on dramatic display the vicious mindset that the NRA and unchecked gun-loving culture have ingrained in a significant portion of our country. It’s a long, hard look into the abyss.

Obvious Child

Funny and sweet but never cloying, Gillian Robespierre’s Obvious Child focuses on Donna Stern, a 27-year old aspiring comedienne living in Brooklyn. Donna’s style, on stage and off, is to riff on every single thing that is happening to her; nothing is sacred. Her material grows exponentially when she is first dumped by a two-timing boyfriend and then finds herself pregnant after a one-night stand with Max, a sweet but square young professional (“He’s so Christian he’s a Christmas tree”) who under normal circumstances would never be in her circles.

What follows is Donna’s journey to Planned Parenthood to have an abortion, but Obvious Child is not an “abortion rom-com.” Anchored by an entertaining and charming performance by Jenny Slate and supported by a strong cast including Jake Lacy, Gaby Hoffman, David Cross, and Polly Draper, the film ironically sidesteps the lowest-common-denominator gags that are typically auto-tuned into standard romantic comedies. It also deftly portrays a stand-up comic doing raw material that comes out of her experiences; it’s a world where scatological and self-referential humor is part of life.

Cooties

Jonathan Milott and Cary Murnion’s horror-comedy Cooties tracks a group of schoolchildren who have turned into zombies after eating bad chicken nuggets. They’re bent on killing and eating the teaching staff who survived the initial outbreak—a motley crew of emotionally arrested and clueless adults. Although the cast is a motherlode of comic talent (including Elijah Wood, Rainn Wilson, Alison Pill, Jack McBrayer, Leigh Whannell, and Nasim Pedrad), the film lacks restraint and cohesion. Striking the proper balance between the “horror” and the “comedy” is always tricky, but Cooties has no real interest in horror, using its gross-out gore solely for jokes. There are brilliant and weird moments of hilarity, usually courtesy of Whannell and Wilson. But though the humor makes some commentary on what the education system is feeding kids today (literally and figuratively), the gags are middling.

Embarking on his mammoth investigative documentary Shoah in 1975, Claude Lanzmann began by spending a week in Rome, interviewing an Austrian Jew named Benjamin Murmelstein. These interviews never appeared in Shoah, however, as Lanzmann has subsequently explained; they were too long and too complex, and would have required a degree of commentary that Shoah could not have accommodated. The Murmelstein sessions are now the basis of Lanzmann’s mesmerizing, three-and-a-half-hour The Last of the Unjust, and you can see why they merit a film of their own. Murmelstein’s complex, troubling case casts particular light on what Lanzmann’s introductory text calls a “capital, both lateral and central” aspect of the Holocaust: the so-called “model ghetto”—in reality a concentration camp with a facade of horrifying duplicity—named Terezin, or in its German name, Theresienstadt.

Murmelstein was a Viennese rabbi who in 1944 was appointed by the Nazis as the head of Theresienstadt’s Jewish Council—the third, and last surviving, of the camp’s successive “Elders,” as they were known. The Jewish Councils were administrative bodies formed at the Nazis’ behest, and their Elders found themselves in the most untenable of positions—expected to do their oppressors’ will, while themselves occupying a derisory situation of supposed autonomy. The Councils, the film shows, were a singularly callous device for obliging the Jewish community’s own senior figures to administer its oppression. This is nowhere clearer than the case of the first Elder of Theresienstadt, Jakob Edelstein, ordered by the Nazis at 4 a.m. one day to appoint an hangman for executions that morning: his choice was to find a candidate in the next few hours, or be hanged himself. The story plays out as the blackest farce: Edelstein approached three butchers for the job, but they refused, and the executions were eventually carried out by a morgue attendant who agreed to do it in exchange for rum and tobacco. Edelstein was nevertheless executed a few weeks later; his first successor, Paul Epstein, was also summarily killed.

However, Murmelstein, the third Elder, lived until 1989, and one of the key questions Lanzmann’s film asks is how he survived. When Theresienstadt was liberated, Murmelstein could have fled, but he stayed to be arrested and tried by the Czechs, and was acquitted of the charge of collaboration. Even so, he was widely despised among Holocaust commentators; the Jewish scholar Gershon Scholem believed that Murmelstein should have been hanged. Now Lanzmann has collated the interviews that, in the filmmaker’s view, vindicate him: indeed, Lanzmann lays his cards on the table in his opening captions by calling Murmelstein “brilliantly intelligent, the cleverest of the three [Elders of Theresienstadt] and perhaps the most courageous.”

The film begins by filling in the background to Theresienstadt’s creation. Where Lanzmann’s approach in Shoah was famously to eschew archive material, The Last of the Unjust has an extraordinary piece of documentary evidence at its core—a 1944 propaganda film entitled The Führer Gives a City to the Jews. This stages a fictitious imagining of life in Theresienstadt: men playing chess, old ladies reading in the sunshine, children playing, a football match. The image is of a leisured spa existence, and—as we learn from Lanzmann’s recitations from Murmelstein’s own 1961 book about the camp—the Nazis peddled the lie that the place would offer its residents “a view of the lake and a panoramic terrace.” Early on, many Czech Jews were lulled by the promise of a benign ghetto; the very fact that Terezin was only 80 kilometers from Prague allayed fears of deportation, and certain death, further east. The propaganda film culminates (in the extract seen here) in an irony so grim that Lanzmann has no need to underline it with a comment. One of Theresienstadt’s “convenient” facilities was its Zentralbad, its communal bathhouse; in it, we see naked men taking showers.

The real conditions of Theresienstadt were horrific; an 18th-century barrack town, Terezin was built to house 7,000 soldiers, but contained 50,000 Jews during its peak periods. The reality is laid bare in the extraordinary sketches we see by talented artists among its inmates, horrifying but sometimes defiantly cartoonish images of daily routine in an earthly hell.

Murmelstein tells Lanzmann: “Where Theresienstadt begins, the lie begins too. The whole town is built on a curse. A Jew did not live there—there was no life. A Jew did not dwell there—it was no home.” But what could it mean for someone to preside over such a place as administrator to his own people, answering directly to Adolf Eichmann? It meant assuming a caricatural form of autonomy, as Murmelstein says. There was the possibility of doing good for his people, he explains, though the role was by nature thankless: to be Elder, he says, is to be “caught between hammer and anvil . . . between the Jews and the Germans . . . [The Elder] can deaden a lot of blows. But he takes all the blows.” When Lanzmann asks, “You had a taste for power, didn’t you?” Murmelstein replies: “It was power without power.” The Elder, he says, was a marionette, “but the marionette had to act in such a way that his comic nature would alter the course of things.”

Much in Murmelstein’s career testifies to his courage: in 1939, he could have chosen to stay in England, which he briefly visited, yet he returned to Vienna. He received passes for himself and his wife to emigrate to Palestine, but gave them to a student who was as a result able to leave Austria with his wife (the film says nothing about the fate or opinions of Mrs. Murmelstein). “I believed I had something to accomplish,” Murmelstein says—initially, helping people leave the camps, something that was possible if they emigrated immediately. His position—in Vienna, he was given the job of researching and writing reports on emigration for Eichmann—allowed him to get many people across occupied France to Spain and Portugal, and beyond. Did he abuse his power? No, Murmelstein says, but admits he had “a taste for adventure.”

As Elder in Theresienstadt, Murmelstein attracted enmity for what inmates saw as his harshness, but he presents himself as exercising a form of “tough love.” He says he contained a typhus outbreak by obliging people to have vaccinations, pressuring the reluctant by withholding their food until they cooperated. He improved living conditions—but he did so under the ghetto’s so-called “embellishment,” a whitewash operation intended by the Nazis to fool the Danish Red Cross. Lanzmann asks why he played along with this mendacity; Murmelstein says it was because it gave his people a chance of survival. He compares himself to Sancho Panza: “pragmatic and calculating, while others are tilting at windmills.” It’s notable, incidentally, that this manifestly erudite man tends to invoke literary, classical, and popular references—Orpheus and Eurydice, Scheherazade, Little Red Riding Hood—rather than Biblical ones, and his few Biblical comments concern Christ rather than Old Testament themes. One wonders whether it’s because this exiled pariah is renouncing everything normally identified with the rabbinical role.

Murmelstein in Rome in 1975 cuts a strange figure: bluff and stocky in tweed and horn-rims, narrating in German in a singsong, pugnacious manner, coming across like a no-nonsense bohemian man of letters. He’s a fine rhetorician, a clever arguer (he makes a very neat, almost catty retort when Lanzmann invokes Scholem’s condemnation of him: a scholar of mysticism is about as qualified to comment on his actions as Freud was on Moses!) and above all, an expansive raconteur. He characterizes himself as Scheherazade, telling stories for survival: that is, telling his people’s story to Lanzmann, but also helping the Nazis tell the false story of a benign Theresienstadt in order for the place not to be shut down, which would have meant its population being sent for extermination.

But Lanzmann notes something worrying about Murmelstein’s reminiscences, and his focus on organizational detail; he seems oddly detached from, not empathically engaged in the horrors he recounts. Challenged, Murmelstein responds cleverly—troublingly so, you might think, which perhaps confirms Lanzmann’s point. “If, during an operation, a surgeon starts crying over his patient, he kills him. You don’t get very far by weeping and wavering.” But who can say what self-cauterization of the soul is required to make oneself a good surgeon in times of extremity?

Lanzmann himself appears prominently, both in 1975, listening to Murmelstein on a roof in Rome, and now, in his late eighties, as he visits the sites involved and reads from Murmelstein’s writings. Today’s Lanzmann mostly narrates facts, but he sometimes can’t help expressing rage, in his measured rumble: reading an order to hang several men for compromising “the honor of the Reich,” he spits, “Nazi grandiloquence. Totally abject.” The places he visits look bucolically lovely today, even innocent, but are irrevocably tainted by the atrocities done there. Lanzmann is a sort of counter-exorcist: instead of dispelling ghosts of the past, he makes sure that haunted sites stay haunted, that their quasi-sacral status as places of witness is kept alive. He commandingly but modestly communicates his own sense of feeling overwhelmed in the covered arcade where hangings took place at Theresienstadt, and on the grassy expanses of its Small Barracks. No less grimly eloquent is a simple three-and-a half-minute driving shot along the ramifications of the walled town, both magnificent and ominous; or the shots of its streets today, exuding de Chirico–like desolation, despite children’s voices audible in the distance.

The film ends with Lanzmann and his subject strolling cordially together in Rome; Murmelstein comments that the interviewer has been the last of many dangers he has had to face in his life, and adds: “I’m not afraid of you, either.” It’s clear that Lanzmann, in 1975, has been won over. He makes it clear in his opening text how he regards Murmelstein today—“he does not lie; he is ironic, sardonic, harsh with others and with himself”—and notes that it is Murmelstein, echoing André Schwarz-Bart’s novel The Last of the Just, who refers to himself by the epithet that gives the film its title. Not everyone has been convinced by Murmelstein’s account of himself: a Holocaust survivor recently quoted in The New York Times complained that Lanzmann had been “sold a bill of goods.” But the director has stated that he wished to “rehabilitate a man . . . unjustly cursed”—certainly a man who could never emerge from history as an innocent. But then Murmelstein was no doubt thinking partly of himself when quoting Isaac Bashevis Singer’s comment that the people of the ghettos may have been martyrs, but never saints. True, Murmelstein’s is the only account of himself in Lanzmann’s film, but his is hardly a complacent apologia. At one point, Murmelstein comments: “An Elder of the Jews can be condemned. In fact, he must be condemned. But he cannot be judged. Because one cannot take his place.”

Having produced seven features and two shorts in a mere eight years, Quebecois filmmaker and former film critic Denis Côté has rapidly established himself as a fickle auteur whose signature is predicated upon overturning conventions and upsetting expectations. Working hastily as a matter of principle, he has annually rolled out a film that significantly revises his style while still preserving what makes his work unmistakably his. Which isn’t to say that there aren’t continuities across his oeuvre: his films are littered with solitary outsiders (such as in his last fiction feature, 2010’s Curling) and intelligently assembled glimpses of contemporary society’s unsettling and under-scrutinized byproducts (as with the frigid, unnatural menagerie in his last doc, Bestiaire, from 2012). His latest, Vic + Flo Saw a Bear, once again finds Côté attempting to take his artistry in new directions while also making room for the thematic and aesthetic concerns he has obsessively pursued since his debut, Drifting States (05).

The film opens with the arrival of sixty-something Vic (Pierrette Robitaille) at her new residence, her indisposed uncle’s inoperative sugar shack located in the densely forested boondocks of Quebec. Vic, it turns out, is free on parole from what was apparently a life sentence. (Spoiler: we never learn what she did to wind up in the joint.) Her parole officer, Guillaume (Marc-André Grondin), is a highly patient but strict customer who alternates between trusting her and sternly cracking down on her various half-truths and ex-con mishegas. Vic’s lover, Flo (Romane Bohringer), first appears as a giggling, writhing body beneath the covers with Vic—prison lovers reunited on the outside and picking up where they left off, though with radically different scenery. (Another spoiler: the reason for Flo’s incarceration is similarly elided, although her past makes its presence felt in a big way soon enough.)

Côté is not known for his prowess as a storyteller, but there are several compelling plotlines woven into the fabric of Vic + Flo: ornery Vic’s relationships with her uncle’s shirtless teenage caretaker (Pier-Luc Funk), who’s transfixed by his RC helicopter, and the boy’s scowling hulk of a father (Olivier Aubin wearing, yes, a Canadian tuxedo); restless Flo’s two-timing with various johns at the local dive; Vic and Flo’s half-assed investigations into Guillaume’s sexual orientation; and much more.

The plot quietly turns on a dime when Marina (Marie Brassard) arrives on the scene. Initially, she’s just a weird stranger asking permission to ride her ATV on Vic’s uncle’s property in exchange for gardening lessons. But the revelation of Marina’s true identity (a slow-burner that Côté unfolds with perverse patience) proves a means for the director to take the narrative somewhere else entirely, swapping the slightly offbeat, deadpan humor of the first half for a provocative reworking of the crime film tropes he appropriated in his earlier All That She Wants (08). Vic and Flo hurtle toward fates consonant with the lives they led before jail, and Côté reservedly unravels the narrative tapestry before abruptly tearing it to shreds.

The violence that fuels the film’s staggering gear-change is graphic, but its apparent severity is a function of its incongruity relative to everything preceding it. Far from trafficking in brutality for brutality’s sake, Côté plays it in a self-consciously sophisticated way but also makes no effort to conceal his giddiness about eliciting intensely visceral responses. With its rigorous visual style (strongly frontal medium-wide shots; long takes; mildly miraculous tracking shots; a palette consisting of blown-out whites and ice-cold blues) and its often Sphinx-like cast, Vic + Flo makes for a strange and affecting experience, albeit one that’s more admirable than likable. Even so, Côté and his collaborators have crafted an astounding movie that doesn’t care about being adored but that certainly demands to be dealt with.

Vic + Flo Saw a Bear opens February 7 at Anthology Film Archives.

Thanks to the cultural hoarding of the Hapsburgs, a visit to Vienna’s delightful Kunsthistorisches Museum epitomizes the term “embarrassment of riches.” The institution was a rewarding stop during a recent visit to the city for the Vienna Film Festival, which had a rather more manageable scope but contained its own riches. The selections of the 51st edition, screened in an assortment of older cinemas each with its own personality, ranged from a program showcasing the Sensory Ethnography Lab to a sampling of 3-D Asian cinema (including a Vietnamese action film), while an in-person Will Ferrell tribute rubbed shoulders with the Austrian Filmmuseum’s Jerry Lewis retrospective.

The Viennale doesn’t strive to plant world-premiere flags, and its judicious scope and discerning sense of juxtaposition distinguishes it from other festivals. While you’ll find crowned heavyweights such as Tsai Ming-liang’s Stray Dogs, they don’t hog attention, leaving space for a moviegoer to piece together an idiosyncratic journey and share in the sense of freedom demonstrated by artistic director Hans Hurch, who programs the festival.

Ricardo Bär

And so why not pay a visit to Ricardo Bär, a Rouchian endeavor about an Argentine farmboy who is balancing studies for the priesthood with responsibilities at home? Directors Gerardo Naumann and Nele Wohlatz helped make Ricardo’s schooling a reality, and they devote a little too much energy to framing their reflexive role. But their incidental document of a German-descended rural community finds an intriguing settler’s mix of conservativism and experiment alive in Ricardo, an earnest young man prone to Asperger-esque discursions. Eduardo Cozarinsky’s personal investigation Letter to a Father also delved into Argentina’s rich immigrant history via the filmmaker’s Jewish gaucho grandfather and peripatetic Navy father.

Soft in the Head

The Viennale’s other adventures in filmmaking ranged from the latest by octogenarian cine-idol Jean-Marie Straub (Un conte de Michel de Montaigne, a world premiere), to Soft in the Head from restless Brooklyn filmmaker Nathan Silver. Silver, who directed Exit Elena, thrives on the buzz and clash of domestic anxiety and stories of intrusion, observing collisions and connections among personalities with different rhythms and backgrounds. In Soft in the Head, he contrasts two families, by way of a shy, slightly arrested neurotic named Nathan, out of place living at home with his Orthodox parents; and a young woman, Natalia, who escapes after a bad breakup into a small group home run by a slow-talking saint of a man. As others have observed, the dinner table (perhaps specifically the holiday dinner table) appears to be a key dramatic model for Silver, who brings forth a post-Cassavetean energy that remains to be fully harnessed.

Double Play

In Double Play, filmmaker and cineaste Gabe Klinger brings together James Benning and Richard Linklater, a pairing that might cause a double take, until you learn all that they do share: later-in-life turns toward filmmaking, a love of (and history with) baseball, an openness to temporal experiment and formal rebirth, and a curiosity about defining American-ness that is itself particularly American. Drawing liberally from an onstage interview at the Austin Film Society, clips from the two directors’ films, and visits to Linklater’s editing room (where Boyhood is up on the console), Klinger creates a conversational structure for the film, making Benning’s visit with Linklater the throughline of the film. He also opens up the typical docu-portrait frame with, for example, long shots of Benning and Linklater playing ball—a flexibility of staging that lives up to the film’s billing as an installment in the venerable Cinéma, de notre temps series. Double Play illustrates how the two filmmakers’ sensibilities converge and diverge—Benning’s solitary approach, say, versus Linklater’s directorial self-identification as a kind of “coach”—as in an extended rendezvous you might find in certain Linklater films.

Katell Quillévéré’s Suzanne and Gilles Deroo and Marianne Pistone’s Mouton both piece together troubled arcs of maturation. In the well-acted Suzanne, a pregnant woman leaves her trucker single-dad and sister, straining their fragile family bonds; in Mouton, an oddly patient young man, who procures legal separation from his mother in the opening scene, perseveres as a cook in Lower Normandy—until his life is blindsided by the kind of event you might find in a macabre, two-paragraph news item. Mouton performs a certain trick as its narrative cruises past this opportunity for rubbernecking to continue in unexpected ways, and Suzanne too revivifies a French subgenre of scrappy delinquency with its elegantly attenuated chronology and ably earned lump-in-the-throat sentiment.

A Thousand Suns

The Viennale also pulled off the feat of unearthing a largely unknown quantity with its six-feature retrospective of Gonzalo García Pelayo, a Spanish filmmaker of the late Seventies and early Eighties later known as a shrewd casino gambler. You could also lose yourself in a cinematic universe of your choosing through the Filmmuseum’s Lewis retrospective—which, like so many 35mm smorgasbords these days, can feel like the last of its kind, and all the more vital for it—or Louis Feuillade’s surreally prolonged 1918 espionage serial Tih Minh. (My highlight: watching Shirley MacLaine out-Jerry Jerry in Frank Tashlin’s 1955 Artists and Models, at a packed screening where the person behind me sounded like she might actually die from laughter.) Another kind of retrospective came in the documentary-like stylings of A Thousand Suns (Mille soleils). Actor-filmmaker Mati Diop charts cinema and personal history by exploring the mythical past and the henpecked, mildly ignoble present of Magaye Niang—the urban-cowboy star of the 1972 Senegalese classic Touki Bouki, directed by Diop’s uncle Djbril Diop Mambéty.

Without prior direct experience of past editions, it’s hard for this correspondent to rate the Viennale’s 2013 showing, though certainly the nearly hundred-thousand-strong attendance numbers reflected robust popular interest. In any case, the Viennale is a place whose particular poise you’re almost hesitant to trumpet, lest it be overrun.

“Martin Scorsese Presents: Masterpieces of Polish Cinema” runs Feb. 5-16 at the Film Society of Lincoln Center.

In 1946, twenty-year-old Andrzej Wajda enrolled as a painting student in the Kraków Academy of Fine Arts. At the time, Poland was a shattered nation: its borders had been dramatically re-drawn in the wake of the Second World War, its artistic output dammed, its buildings leveled, and an inconceivable one-fifth of its population—including many of its prewar cultural luminaries—murdered. The country was about to enter seven years of strict Stalinist rule, during which it would exist politically as little more than a Soviet satellite state. In the arts, socialist realism would become nearly ubiquitous.

For Wajda and many of his fellow artists-in-waiting, something was missing. “We had seen the smoking chimneys of the crematoriums,” he later recalled, “the arrests, the street roundups, the Warsaw uprising—and our teachers were like Cézanne, who, when he was asked what he did when the Russians advanced on Paris, answered: ‘I painted some landscape studies.’” There was, Wajda granted, something defiant about painting landscape studies during wartime—but the postwar years called for a different kind of rebellion. In 1949, Wajda abandoned the fine arts and entered the Łódź Film and Theatre School. “We thought that we should paint in a different way,” he would later say of his class at the Academy. For Wajda and a generation’s worth of young filmmakers, that “different way” was cinema.  

A Short Film About Killing

Of the nine filmmakers including in the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s “Masterpieces of Polish Cinema” series, curated and organized by Martin Scorsese’s venerated Film Foundation, Wajda is one of only two who could conceivably be considered a marquee name among American audiences. (The other is Krzysztof Kieslowski, represented here by the harrowing A Short Film About Killing—expanded from an entry in his 10-part “Decalogue” series—and his midcareer masterpiece Blind Chance.) The rest of the featured directors range far and wide, both in style and content. Here one finds, among others, Andrzej Munk, who injected a grave, rueful sense of humor into his evocations of Poland’s recent wartime past; Janusz Morgenstern, a former assistant director to Wajda who went on to a half-century-plus directing career of his own; and Wojciech Has, best known in the States for his kaleidoscopic, space-twisting adaptations of Jan Potocki and Bruno Schulz. Two directors, Wajda excepted, have been given what amount to mini-retrospectives: Krzysztof Zanussi, whose scathing, tonally schizophrenic 1976 drama Camouflage, about the rivalry between an idealistic young linguistics professor and his Mephistophelean mentor, opens the festival; and Jerzy Kawalerowicz, a leading light of Fifties and Sixties Polish cinema equally adept at claustrophobic noir (Night Train) and formally dazzling art-house allegory (Mother Joan of the Angels).

The series is limited in scope—selections range from 1957 to 1987, with the lion’s share drawn from the late Fifties, early Sixties, and Seventies—which makes it all the more remarkable that the films included diverge so radically in their interests and means. There are, of course, omissions, some gutsy (beloved early films from Polanski and Kieslowski are ignored in favor of less familiar fare), others understandable (Andrzej Żuławski and Walerian Borowczyk, I imagine, lost the festival’s midnight-movie slots to Has), and a few perplexing (Jerzy Skolimowski’s pre-emigration work is mysteriously absent, as is Ryszard Bugajski’s long-banned, politically explosive Interrogation and anything by Poland’s best-known female filmmaker Agnieszka Holland). By and large, though, it’s a revelatory program, proof that vital, imaginative art can—and frequently does—flourish even in oppressive climates.

Night Train

In the early Fifties, when Soviet control of Poland was at its peak, the climate was likely too oppressive for much art to flourish; before it could return to its prewar cultural standard, the country needed a thaw. In October of 1956, it had one. Stalin had died three years earlier, and the Soviet Union’s influence over Poland was starting to slacken. The situation took a decisive turn when, after a series of violent worker’s revolts, Władysław Gomułka was named First Secretary of the national Communist party and set in motion a range of reforms. The period of liberalization that followed was brief—Gomułka’s rule soon became no less oppressive than his Soviet predecessors—but critical.

It’s hard to imagine a film like Munk’s 1957 Eroica being made at any other time: a caustic, absurdist portrait of war-torn Poland divided into two unrelated stories, the first a broad comedy concerning a bumbling would-be resistance fighter cuckolded by a Hungarian lieutenant; the second a sober, bitterly ironic story of divided loyalties and misplaced faith set in a POW camp. Munk was a key member of what has since been dubbed (a little unimaginatively) the Polish School, and Eroica’s formal ingenuity, earthy sense of humor, and keen-eyed political satire would all become hallmarks of the movement. You could argue that the school’s name is more significant than it sounds: there’s a sense in which directors like Wajda, Kawalerowicz, and Munk, after years of watching Polish artists submitting to the Soviet Realist tradition, were trying to develop a distinctly Polish cinematic sensibility, rooted in the country’s particular needs and concerns.

Mother Joan of the Angels

It’s often said that the Polish School began in 1955, when Wajda released his enormously influential debut film A Generation (the first of what would become a trilogy devoted to Poland’s violent recent history). Equally important, though, was the film industry’s shift that same year to a system based around discrete production units—the most prominent of which, Kadr, was responsible for many of the period’s masterpieces. (See enough of the Film Foundation’s selections, and you’ll have the stop-start rhythms of the unit’s typewritten logo permanently stamped in your memory.) Kadr was managed by Kawalerowicz, whose Mother Joan of the Angels in 1960 was one of the Polish School’s major triumphs: a feverish anti-fairy-tale centered around a convent of (apparently) demon-possessed nuns and the virginal, self-flagellating priest who shows up to exorcise their beautiful Mother Superior.

Kawalerowicz restricts the film’s action to the fortress-like convent, the open field surrounding it—an empty expanse radiating out from a charred, portentous stake—and the area’s makeshift tavern-cum-stable, which makes for a bawdy, secular counterpoint to the spiritual warfare afoot next door. Over the course of the film, that spiritual battle gets re-cast—courtesy of cinematographer Jerzy Wójcik, who also shot Eroica and Wajda’s Ashes and Diamonds—as a literal battle between light and shadow: in one shot, a parade of white-habited nuns march in single file from a dark passageway into a patch of blindingly bright sun. In some respects, the film’s thematic landscape is as stripped-down as its physical setting; it’s fascinating to see Kawalerowicz reducing his narrative to a set of well-trod oppositions (sacred vs. profane, spirit vs. flesh, Christians vs. Jews), then giving the movie’s formal structure—its dizzying camera setups and continuity-defying cuts—the job of complicating, challenging and expanding those oppositions. The movie is constantly veering from meticulous third-person detachment to handheld first-person immersion to jarring second-person accusation, and these shifts in perspective lead to equally extreme ambiguities of tone: at any given point, you could take Mother Joan as either a sober reflection on the power of men to bind and abuse women’s bodies, or a campy, baroque slice of Gothic horror. And yet the film’s haunting, unshakable quality comes, I think, from its refusal to provide a comforting alternative to the two equally destructive ways of life it depicts. The wayward nun, the ascetic priest, and the drunken barfly all, in the end, suffer from the same, equally intractable sort of loneliness—and the only two characters with the wisdom to escape it end the film in an early grave.

The Saragossa Manuscript

This particular brand of storytelling—short on consolation, rich in irony, heavy on negative moral judgments but stingy with positive moral prescriptions—is a kind of postwar Polish specialty. It’s present in much of the output of the Polish School’s short-lived golden age, which came to a premature end in the second half of 1960. It was at that point that the Polish United Worker’s Party, still under Gomułka’s leadership, started to tighten its hold on the film industry. As new waves blossomed in France, Japan, Brazil and Czechoslovakia, Poland’s cinema receded—for the most part—into the shadows. (There are, tellingly, only three films released between 1961 and 1971 in the Film Foundation retrospective: Kawalerowicz’s Egyptian historical epic Pharaoh, Tadeusz Konwicki’s Jump, and Wojciech Has’s The Saragossa Manuscript, a literary adaptation—albeit one of the stranger literary adaptations ever made.) For the rest of Gomułka’s rule, the national film industry functioned primarily as a government organ and an outlet for state-sponsored national mythologizing—with a handful of key exceptions (chief among them Skolimowski’s Barrier and Polanski’s Knife in the Water).  

Then Gomułka’s rule ended. In 1970, after a series of disastrous worker’s strikes, he was succeeded by Edward Gierek, who would remain in power for the rest of the decade. A happier time was soon underway for the film industry, with Kadr renewing operations and a new stock of directors, actors and cinematographers coming to prominence. During this period, Has was able to make his second adaptation of a Polish literary classic, this time turning to a work with a considerably darker history. The Hourglass Sanatorium (1973), shot in dense, heavily contrasting colors by Witold Sobocinski and awash in visual clutter, was based on the great last work of the Jewish fiction writer Bruno Schulz, whose death at the hands of a Gestapo officer in 1942 has given a morbid tinge to his literary reception ever since. Schulz’s sometimes fantastical stories, which often speak of intensely private kinds of loss—loss of family, of childhood, of home and imagination—have come to speak just as strongly, if unintentionally, about historical, national, and cultural loss, and Has’s film, seen in this light, becomes a kind of duet between the individual memories of Schulz’s narrator and the collective memory of a community mourning, among other things, the premature loss of Schulz himself. (Long segments of the film take place in a lively, bustling prewar Jewish neighborhood.) This was a bit much for the party authorities; for ten years, Has was effectively barred from making another film. 

The Hour Glass Sanatorium

The Seventies were a remarkably productive decade for Wajda: he made eight films between 1970 and 1979, including Man of Marble, the first installment in his decades-spanning trilogy of films set, respectively, before, during, and after the 1980 birth of Solidarity. (Man of Iron, the second entry, is one of the Film Foundation’s opening night selections, though it would arguably make more sense at the end of the series; it says explicitly and urgently what many of these films only express by analogy, allegory or metaphor.) For Janusz Morgenstern, a filmmaker who came of age in the early Sixties, this second thaw signaled a decline in productivity—but it also gave him the freedom to make the sensitive, quietly devastating To Kill This Love, a portrait of a young, penny-pinched urban couple under pressure from within and without. The economic pressure from without is, one senses, a trickle-down effect of the party’s lack of concern for the urban working class, but Morgenstern, with the exception of some regrettably on-the-nose allegorical interludes, never lets his heroes—primarily his self-absorbed, thoroughly confused male protagonist—entirely off the hook for the film’s sad stream of betrayals and disappointments. It’s a movie made with deep intelligence and respect, and one of the Film Foundation program’s secret highlights.

The most important Polish filmmaker to emerge in the early Seventies was arguably Krzysztof Zanussi, who graduated from the Łódź Film Academy in 1966 after flirting with careers in physics and philosophy. One gets the sense that, for Zanussi, those two disciplines continued to have a certain mystique; they were tantalizing what-ifs, roads untaken, and closed-off parallel lives—not unlike the three possible futures that unfold one after the other in Kieslowski’s Blind Chance. They hang especially heavily over Zanussi’s third feature, The Illumination, a fragmented time-lapse record of a young physics student’s passage into adulthood. Life, in this film, flits by inconclusively, reduced to a series of standalone flashes and brief illuminations. The young man drifts through his college education, his military service, a painful early love affair, a shy courtship, a tense marriage, and, finally, fatherhood as if each were just another episode in a dream from which he expects to wake; his life, pace Virginia Woolf, is in fact “a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged.” If the parts do, in the end, cohere into a luminous whole, it’s thanks to a pair of factors: Zanussi’s skill at tracing a coherent narrative through all these splintered, discontinuous scenes, and DP Edward Kłosiński’s ability to give each shot at once the worn-out luster of a home movie and the quicksilver glint of an immediate sensation. In a generation of Polish films that are, for the most part, too practical-minded, skeptical, and independent to submit to epiphanies, The Illumination might be the entry most open to the prospect of genuine revelation. 

Illumination

For Poland, the turn of the decade was accompanied by a different kind of revelation. In August 1980, thousands of workers took up a mass strike at the Lenin Shipyards in Gdańsk under the leadership of Lech Wałęsa; the following month, with Wałęsa as their chairman, they created the country’s first independent labor union. For the next year, the Solidarity movement accumulated followers, influence and force. In 1982, it was forced to move underground—nearly a year after the communist party, under increasing Soviet pressure, had declared martial law. That, anticlimactically, is where the story of the Film Foundation’s series ends. Only one selection, Kieslowski’s A Short Film About Killing (87), dates from after ’82, but it wasn’t until 1989 that Polish citizens witnessed the legal rebirth of Solidarity—and with it, the country’s first free elections in nearly half a century. It might seem like an odd move on the part of the series’ curators to stop their account on the brink of such a decisive revolution; on the other hand, it’s fitting that a tribute to a national cinema so dependent on narrative and moral ambiguity should end with a kind of ellipsis.

Is there a distinctly Polish cinematic sensibility? From the titles included in the Film Foundation’s series, one theme emerges consistently, if not universally: the tension between the individual, with his or her distinct set of memories, loves, preferences and projects, and the demands—both moral and practical—of the wider social world. If Poland’s cinematic output has traditionally been defined, at least in part, by its constant efforts to distance itself from the soviet realist tradition, which has always advocated for the individual’s unconditional submission to some state-approved greater good, we might expect the country’s directors to swing hard in the opposite direction, to make radically interior films in which the individual’s sole right and duty is to preserve, at all costs, his or her individuality. The facts are more complicated. In these films, it’s not always clear how much the heroes owe to themselves and how much they owe to others, how far they ought to let themselves be directed by social forces beyond their control, to what extent they can assert their own individuality, and to what extent they should. One possible explanation for Wajda’s special prominence in Polish cinema—aside from his immense talent, intellect, and sensitivity, which get some filmmakers much farther than others—is the attention he gives these questions, not only as moral conundrums but as practical, immediate realities. 

Ashes and Diamonds

Ashes and Diamonds, which Wajda made in 1958, is the classic example: a square-jawed, rakish Home Army assassin tasked with taking out a high-ranking Communist official holes up in the same hotel as his target, meets a gorgeous barmaid downstairs, talks her into his room, and ends up falling head over heels in love—thus placing his mission, and his status as a defender of his country, in jeopardy. The setup—what happens when a person’s political obligations come into direct conflict with his duty towards those he loves?—is essentially tragic; there are no happy endings available here. Like Victoria in The Red Shoes, a brilliant dancer torn between creative and romantic fulfillment, the hero of Ashes and Diamonds self-destructs. And as in that Powell and Pressburger film, his self-destruction is treated as the only dignified, suitably tragic solution to an intractable problem.

Two years later, Wajda made Innocent Sorcerers, his first film set in what was then modern-day Poland. In the movie’s opening minutes, a young, handsome, white-haired jazz drummer meets a cute girl at a bar after one of his shows (that’s a fussy, nervous Roman Polanski on upright bass) and conspires with a friend to take her home. In his apartment, they act out an elaborate pas de deux, each taking turns dodging the other’s advances. (The whole encounter is set to an omnipresent, anxious jazz soundtrack by Polanski’s future go-to composer Krzysztof Komeda.) By morning, he’s realized, almost in spite of himself, that he loves her—but when he steps out of his apartment, he returns to an empty room. After a futile search, he finds her waiting for him at home, to his surprise, and ours. She makes what seems like her final exit, he pretends to be asleep, and—having gotten to the edge of the stairs—she retraces her steps back to his room, sidles in and shuts the door. It’s easy to see how Innocent Sorcerers could, at the time, have struck audiences as a little too smooth, soft or slight. In retrospect, however, with its intricate series of setbacks, deceptions, feints, and advances, it plays like a prescient, touching metaphor for Poland’s slow crawl towards independence, in part because it promises what Ashes and Diamonds seemed to disavow: a happy ending. 

In the arts, developments and accomplishments that come to seem outmoded, things of the past, have a way of reasserting themselves back into artistic practice, often without being recognized as re-assertions. The traditions of 19th-century American landscape painting and of the diorama and panorama have been periodically revived by a range of filmmakers, as have the Lumière Brothers’ Cinématographe shows that provided early cinema audiences with arresting cine-documents of local and exotic people and places.

Koyaanisqatsi

During recent decades, Godfrey Reggio and Ron Fricke have directed a series of features that often evoke these earlier forms. Their collaboration on Koyaanisqatsi (84; Reggio directed, Fricke saw to the cinematography) produced one of the more popular and influential avant-docs in recent memory. Reggio and Fricke went their separate ways after Koyaanisqatsi: Reggio, to complete what he called the “Qatsi Trilogy” (qatsi means “life” in the Hopi language), with Powaqqatsi (88) and Naqoyqatsi (02); Fricke, to make the IMAX film Chronos (85) and the theatrical features Baraka (92) and Samsara (12). Both Reggio and Fricke have used technical means unusual for feature filmmaking—complex forms of time-lapse in Koyaanisqatsi, Chronos, and Baraka; elaborate slow motion in Powaqqatsi—to create panoramas of cultural sites and practices that, in Fricke's words, represent “humanity's relationship to the eternal” or at least to evoke a global consciousness.

Visitors, like Reggio’s earlier features, was developed in collaboration with composer Philip Glass, but while it sometimes evokes the Trilogy, it is distinct both formally (Visitors was shot in elegant black and white on 3K and 5K high-def video and released in 4K) and in terms of its subject matter: Reggio's focus is on portraits of individuals, nearly all of them in close-up, interspersed with more panoramic imagery filmed in areas of Louisiana that had been, five years earlier, devastated by Katrina.

Reggio's use of the close-up evokes Warhol's Screen Tests of 1964-66, in their composition and their use of black and white, as well as in their meditative pace (the Screen Tests were shot at 24 frames per second, but shown at 16 frames per second), though the kinds of gaze that interest Reggio are quite different from the gazes of the Factory visitors at Warhol’s 16mm camera. Visitors seems part of a contemporary revival of interest in the cinematic portrait, shared by Susana de Sousa Dias, whose 2009 film 48, an extended 2009 meditation on mug shots of political prisoners incarcerated during the 48 years of the Salazar regime, uses some of the same subtle visual strategies as Visitors; and by Stephanie Spray and Pacho Velez, veterans of Harvard's Sensory Ethnography Lab, whose Manakamana is a series of portraits of visitors to the holy site of a Nepalese goddess, filmed on a cable car.

Visitors is not for everybody. For a good many sophisticates the ambiguities of Reggio's imagery and the pomp of its mood will seem mindless and pretentious. But for those who can enjoy the experience of looking at Reggio’s stunning imagery within the context created by Glass’s elegant compositions, and who can appreciate an experience of cinema akin to the experiences enjoyed by early audiences for the Cinématographe and the various media that were premonitions of cinema, Visitors can be powerful and meaningful.

Scott MacDonald spoke with Reggio about Visitors in December 2013.

Visitors

It’s been more than a decade since you finished Naqoyqatsi. How long has Visitors been germinating?

What has become Visitors went through a series of progressions. I started the process in 2003, just after Naqoyqatsi, but it was seven-plus years before there was any funding for the film. My first thought was a film called The Border. I had become interested in working with Butoh theater, especially with the emotive expression of human faces, but I couldn’t get the amount of funding I needed to make the film.

The Border transformed into Savage Eden. An image of two-and-a-half primates in a pew came to me. I did a whole scenario for Savage Eden. It dealt with “isms”: scratch the surface and there’s an “ism” within us all. It was to be an anarchic, comedic piece dealing with the ideology of books, flags, walls, and screens…

Then in 2005 Katrina happened. Being from New Orleans, this affected me deeply; a lot of what’s in Visitors is a result of Katrina. I went down to Louisiana to see the debacle, which enforced my idea of Savage Eden, but then I took it into another direction, which I called Evidence. Again, I couldn’t get anything more than a documentary amount of money—about a million dollars. I know it sounds ridiculous to refuse so much money, but I knew how to budget what I wanted to do, and I didn’t want to shoot a doc. At the time, other people were doing docs about Katrina (I’d seen Spike Lee’s When the Levees Broke).

I visited Louisiana a lot during the four years after the hurricane, and I noticed that while what I had first seen was the evidence of an enormous storm, a catastrophe, as the places I was visiting sat there and moldered over several years this evidence became like a big set for the ruins of modernity, a modern Pompeii. This gradual transformation revealed something that I could not have seen had I taken the money just after the hurricane.

holy see was the working title of Visitors throughout most of the making of the film, but my feeling is: “When in doubt, cut it out.” While I loved holy see as a title, I didn’t want it to get confused with the Vatican or be too obtuse or misunderstood. For me that phrase was like “Holy smoke!” “Holy shit!” “Holy moly!”—“Holy see!” To see is what Visitors is about—to see that which the eye cannot see, to make the invisible visible, to see that which is hidden in plain sight.

What was the final budget?

Just over $4.6 million, most of which is the below the line: that is, it’s all going into the film. The funding started mid-to-late summer 2010. Dan Noyes let us shoot a bit in Louisiana before we actually had the rest of the money, then we regrouped again in February 2011 and worked through May 2011, doing some more shooting in New York; then we regrouped in March 2012 and worked through the end of the year and three months into 2013. Altogether, within a three-year period, about two years of work.

At what point did Philip Glass become involved?

Well, in all my projects, I keep him informed—when I’d go to New York, I’d usually sleep on his kitchen floor and we’d talk. He’s been involved in Visitors since 2003. We began shooting Visitors in New Orleans and the Louisiana swamps during the autumn of 2010. I asked Philip to come down with one of his producers to join us on the locations. Philip likes to experience firsthand what the camera will see. He was also at the Bronx Zoo when we first shot the gorillas—that was very moving to him, I think. He also came to the studio where we were shooting the people who were playing video games, watching TV. By coming to the locations, he gets an original hit, a connection to the project.

I always ask Philip not to write a note until he’s really marinated in the ethos of the film, in its emotive atmosphere. He came and saw all the film selects (we shot over 630,000 feet for Visitors) and talked with us about creating a dance of music and image. Normally when composers work on theatrical films, they do musical cues that can be anywhere from fifteen seconds to a few minutes at most. Here, we were asking for a full orchestral score: in effect, a narrative for the film, an emotive armchair in which to view the images.

That process takes time.

Philip’s first writings were beautiful, but they were too symphonic and tended to overwhelm the images. He understood our feedback—and started over. At one point he had a Eureka moment and said: “What you’re asking me to do is write for the attention of the audience; I get it.” He went back to his studio and we got two pieces of music in less than a week, and they were spot on. Philip’s activity in terms of writing and then recording the score took about six months.

Visitors

The earliest shoot was in Louisiana?

Yes, towards the end of 2010 we shot for almost six weeks. The building that has “Novus Ordo Seclorum” (“New Order of the Ages”) on it—we came up with that name—is an Art Deco building from the Thirties. It had a “VISITORS” sign embedded in the wall, and my colleague Ray Hemenez and I were really keen on shooting it—and that ended up as our title. It’s not important that the audience knows this, but tattooed on the masonry that makes up “VISITORS” are at least six bullet holes. I came to feel that that’s really what we were, and are, “visitors,” and I liked the ubiquity of the word because you can interpret it in any way you wish.

The Art Deco of the building and the opening titles suggests the first half of the 20th century, the era when America came to see itself as leading the world.

That monolithic building has a real presence. I thought it could stand in for modernity itself. Its voice fills the frame.

Is the abandoned amusement park imagery also from Katrina?

Yes, that was the Six Flags franchise, built up on platforms above the swamp, with big cement-slab sidewalks. When the hurricane came across, the water swamped the park and now it’s full of alligators and snakes—and is used pretty regularly for photography. It has a ghostlike feel.

It’s unusual to do the kind of extended close-ups—portraits—so important in Visitors, in a theatrical film. I was reminded of the Andy Warhol Screen Tests.

I’ve not seen the Warhol films, but that reference has come up before.

In Visitors there seem to be at least two different kinds of facial close-ups, plus a sequence of close-ups of hands mimicking gestures used with modern digital technology. At the beginning the faces seem to be looking at us, they seem to be conscious of the project they’re part of.

Those portraits were what I call “from the inside-out”; the people were consciously sitting for portraits. All my effort involves getting organized in the hope that spontaneity is going to take over. And it does, usually. As a crew we discovered the virtue of an inhumanly slow move into the face so that the face you see at the beginning of the shot is not the face you see at the end.

After the finger-play section and the beginning of the Six Flags movement, which is called “Off Planet/Games,” we go to a little girl who’s singing, then to another little girl who has the longest single shot in the film, then to four children each watching television, followed by the Big Clown face at Six Flags, then to a whole other series of portraits of young people who are playing video games. All of these young people knew they were being filmed, but they were asked to do what they normally did when they played these games. As soon as that digital screen came on, it was like a tractor beam; each person went out of a self-conscious state and became entranced by the virulent presence and demands of the game. We could record that entrancement by filming directly through the mirror that was reflecting the video game screen. 

You don’t see the screen they were actually paying attention to, which was bounced onto a two way mirror that we could shoot through. I had used that technique for a little film called Evidence [95] that I did in Rome. And Errol Morris uses his version of it for his interviews. It’s used on television all the time.

Visitors

How did you eliminate all the details of the space around the faces you filmed?

We shot all the portraits on what I call “the blackground”—something that was part of the original motivation of the project. I wanted to do the film in black and white and in infrared. Color contemporizes the film image and would have been less emotive. In some cases this can be useful, but for this film I didn’t want to represent the contemporary; I wanted to put Visitors in an otherworldly zone.

During the making of Naqoyqatsi, I’d realized I wanted to do a film that involved split screen, but I wanted a way to use split screening that would be hidden in plain sight, and the “blackground” was important for this; it allowed me to put multiple faces together next to each other in pans and dolly shots in the editing room, and without any visual distraction from the intensity of the faces. Every portrait was done separately—except for the sports bar where people are clearly in a group. There’s only one bit of color in Visitors, the blue of the earth at the end.

How did you get the moon shots?

The moon shots are based on precise maps from NASA. I did see a shot of the moon that I loved from JAXA, the Japanese equivalent of NASA—they did a run over the moon in 2005. But that image was in 1080 resolution, which couldn’t work on a big screen, so we used a 3-D program, and over four-plus months, we built three different moons. Quite a task.

Of course, in any art, and particularly in the case of—dare I say—poetic cinema, much more is suggested than is intended by those who make it. The meaning, in this case, the subject of this film, is the person watching the film. While I wanted to avoid a didactic piece, I ended up realizing that what I was making was an autodidactic film. Visitors has no intrinsic meaning, all meaning is in the eye of the beholder. Each member of the audience must become the storyteller, must become the character and plot of the film.

The films I intend are beyond the limits of my capacity to achieve. The process I employ is collaborative. I always work with people more talented than I. Jon Kane and the young crew of Optic Nerve (in Red Hook, Brooklyn) were my principal collaborators, and together with Philip Glass we made Visitors. For what I do, I is we.

All your films have felt like emotional warnings, more or less to the effect that we’d better learn to be human, to be gentle, while there’s still time—it’s a “Look, let’s get serious” message.

Yeah, it is. And as you say, I’ve had that “message” through all the work I’ve done. I can see Visitors as a requiem.

What went into your decision to use Triska, the gorilla?

I looked at a lot of representations of gorillas, most of which are gorillas as monsters—maybe in some films they represent the interior of who we are, but always they’re a violent presence. In reality, gorillas are sedentary. I’ve worked with chimpanzees, and, compared to gorillas, they’re on steroids. The reason I chose Triska, who is a lowland gorilla, is that, in the great primate line-up, the face of the female lowland gorilla is most similar to ours.

I was out at the gorilla exhibit in the Bronx Zoo for almost three weeks, a mind-blowing experience. Literally tens of thousands of people came to see the gorillas. It’s a very popular site. We had to shoot on a platform above the crowds. People go nuts trying to get the gorillas to go nuts! It’s unbelievable.            

Loren Eiseley has said that we have not seen ourselves until we’ve seen ourselves through the eyes of another animal. And there’s René Dubos’s beautiful book So Human an Animal—we have a lot to learn from those we’re here with. In that long pan shot past five human faces, leading to Triska, she becomes the adult in the room.

I assume you mean to allude to the original King Kong at the very end, when Triska is on the movie screen in the movie theater within our theater.

Well, not really. The last shot is a key to the autodidactic nature of Visitors: here we are, looking at a screen, and a screen is looking back at us. Throughout, the film has been about this reciprocal gaze. Also, I believe in bookends. As soon as you put a frame around anything that is (or is posing as) art, people have the propensity to conjure meaning, because of the limit that is offered. Beginning and ending with Triska is a kind of framing.

Visitors

The New Orleans material causes Visitors to seem more personal than some of your other works. This film led you back home.

I’ve wanted to film in Louisiana for a long time but had never had the opportunity. I grew up around the swamp that you see in the film. My father was born less than two miles from it in a place called Olivia, between New Iberia and Jeanerette on the Bayou Teche, and I spent a lot of my adolescence in that swamp. I know its power, and felt it would be the perfect companion for what I was trying to suggest with the moon. The contrariety of the swamp has a palpable primordial presence, other worldly.

Knowing the swamp, I knew that had we filmed it in the summer, it would be full of beautifully colored flowers and the greens would be magnificent—but the water levels could be as high as 12 feet in the place we shot, so you wouldn’t see the root structure of the trees. Also I wanted the imagery to have a unified look, so shooting at the end of November was the best time. The water was inches deep in some of the places we were filming, and you could see the root structure of the cypress trees.

With the mist and the gray scale, those shots seem very Edenic.

The camera is showing us something our eyes can’t see. I’m told our first dreams come in black and white. A lot of words go into creating the shooting script of a film like this, deciding on the point of view, getting everybody on the same page and into one breath, one heartbeat—but at the end of the day we’re making a pictorial composition, a syntax for the eye. It’s not about text; it’s about texture. Until the film is shot, it’s just on paper; once the film is shot, the paper goes out the window and we’re left with the material of the medium—the image-in-time—and that’s what we have to work with.

Essentially, the people in Visitors, be they humans looking at you or people playing games, are the doubles of who we are. In daily life we see ourselves as doubles through shadows, reflections, and spirits, but we can also see ourselves through other people. Their gaze brings us into a dialogue with ourselves, but the specific nature of the dialogue is up to the viewer.

Without presuming to know or explicate the “reasons” for the off-and-on hard drug use that eventually killed Philip Seymour Hoffman at age 46, it’s safe armchair-psychoanalyzing to say that he probably, to some degree, used it to fill the same kind of emotional void that he was so skilled at plumbing in numerous performances. The actor, who died on February 2, has a filmography bristling with incomplete, broken men whose dysfunctional relationships with the world reveal themselves in social incompetence, self-destruction, and violence. One of the most icily empty dirtbags ever put on screen is Hoffman’s Dean Trumbell in Punch-Drunk Love (02). The scam artist/gangster, who uses a Utah mattress store as a front, threatens to extort the “businessman” played by Adam Sandler, who Dean assumes is loaded. After Hoffman makes the telephoned threat, P.T. Anderson, a repeat collaborator with the actor, gives him an extra beat as you see the red, dead eyes of a vessel of pure criminal, unfeeling anger and moral desolation.

This brief look is a few seconds in only a handful of minutes of a performance, better known for Hoffman’s apoplectic “Shut, shut, shut, shut, shut up!”, an early example of the actor’s distinctive mastery of The Outburst, loud moments when an always volatile character purges stifled bile. In Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead (07), it’s a tear-streaming “It’s not fucking fair!” hurtled at wife Marisa Tomei. In The Master (12), the outburst arrives suddenly, mid-sentence: “If you already know the answers to your questions, then why ask, pig fuck!?” In Capote (05), the release of rage is no less blindsiding for being quietly lisped by Hoffman’s Truman Capote to the incarcerated subject of his book, Perry Smith (Clifton Collins, Jr.), who’d begun to see the writer as a friend and equal: “I know what ‘exacerbate’ means. There is not a word or a sentence or a concept that you can illuminate for me.” To fans of acting that exists wholly to serve the text by disappearing into a film’s texture, these kind of moments might seem like showboating. They arguably beckon you to temporarily step outside the world of the movie and acknowledge a moment of appreciation for Hoffman’s art and effort. But this is a crime only if you aren’t willing to handle and be entertained simultaneously by the film itself and acting that calls some attention to itself, which isn’t a chore when it’s in the hands of a performer as frequently mesmerizing as Hoffman.

Whether it speaks to the aforementioned void or not, Hoffman excelled at playing mopes. There are few more miserable creatures than his gas-huffing widower Wilson in Love Liza (02), a film written by Hoffman’s brother, Gordy, or his Caden Cotard in Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York (08). Caden, like Wilson, has also lost a wife (to an exciting new art life in Berlin), and Hoffman’s shell-shocked mutedness throughout the film is a necessary counterbalance to Kaufman’s outsized big-idea splatter, and the wilder performance of Samantha Morton. In Todd Solondz’s love-it-or-loathe-it Happiness (98), Hoffman’s morose Allen, whose voice croaks with depression and who spends his days masturbating to neighbor Lara Flynn Boyle (while callously oblivious to Camryn Manheim’s sincere overtures), is an exaggerated parody of social retardation, appropriate for the film’s graphic-novel-like pastiche of caricatures.

When Hoffman wasn’t fulminating or moping, and often when he was, he could be hilarious. Smaller roles allowed him to find the one best tack to take with a character, and he usually found the funniest and most novel. In The Talented Mr. Ripley (99), he’s the fey hepcat Freddie Miles, whose appearance halfway through the film is timed to spoil Tom Ripley’s labored seduction of glamorous Dickie (Jude Law) and Marge (Gwyneth Paltrow). For like his old friend Dickie, and very much unlike Tom (Matt Damon), Freddie is a genuine member of the privileged class, and Hoffman oozes the kind of born-rich entitlement that Tom can only mimic. Whether shared-headphones listening to jazz with Dickie or just standing at a remove sneering through Tom’s posturing, Hoffman never flinches from the arrogant menace of the character. And he has the film’s funniest line: catching Tom sneaking a look at Dickie and Marge having sex on their boat, he spanks Tom with a deathly withering “Tommy, how’s the peeping? Tommy, how’s the peeping. Tommy. Tommy. Tommy. Tommy. Tommy.” (Hoffman was an expert risk-taker with repetition.) In Boogie Nights (07), his frustratedly pen-chewing Scotty J., a sweaty bag of unrequited lust for Mark Wahlberg’s Dirk Diggler, has the film’s most discomfiting scenes. Proving the importance of casting a villain right in an action film, he steals Mission: Impossible III (06) as Owen Davian (or others wearing a perfect Owen Davian mask). In The Big Lebowski (98), Hoffman’s prissy chipperness as the title millionaire’s personal assistant makes an absurd contrast with slovenly Jeff Bridges. In Moneyball (11), he brings sympathetic world-weariness (and paunch) as the old-school, anti–Billy Beane Athletics manager Art Howe. Hoffman even elevates fare as negligible as the Ben Stiller-Jennifer Aniston vehicle Along Came Polly (04), with a bizarre, phlegmy turn that provides a welcome disruption of the rom-com’s rhythms.

It’s easy for late-artist tributes to turn into lists of beloved works and performances. (Those lucky enough to have seen Hoffman on stage, where he directed successfully in addition to acting, would surely have additional praise to heap on.) It’s even easier to garland the deceased with a phrase like “the greatest actor of his generation,” which some Hoffman tributeers have done, as if that’s a measurable benchmark. Better for a stranger to just call the actor’s death for what it is: a tragic loss, for his partner, children and all appreciators of the acting art.

Last fall at the New York Film Festival, the filmmaker Arnaud Desplechin talked with FILM COMMENT about his latest work, Jimmy P: Psychotherapy of a Plains Indian, which opens next Friday. Benicio Del Toro stars as a shell-shocked Native American veteran of World War II, alongside Desplechin regular Mathieu Amalric as his analyst. Based on an actual case study, the idea, Desplechin revealed, had been occupying his mind for quite some time, and his two actors, in their approaches to performance, proved to be a prime fit for the roles.

How did you come up with this project?

It’s a book I had read decades ago—one decade ago, something like that—that I had loved, and I remembered I had used bits and pieces of it in Kings and Queen. I knew that there was a project—this idea which haunted me. After A Christmas Tale, there was this big fear of making a remake of La Vie des morts—it was this threat on me, and after that the plot was just all these people coming from the same family trapped in a house, so it was really between the characters coming from the same background, all of them being Caucasian, being from the North of France, Roubaix. So I guess that after this film or during this film, A Christmas Tale, I said I wanted to escape to this sort of thing, to deal with characters who do not share the same background, and that’s the bottom line with Jimmy P.: the friendship between a Jewish guy and a Native American guy, so two guys coming from two different universes. I thought that perhaps I would be mature enough now to try and work on that, even if I read this book so many years ago. I used bits and pieces from the book in Kings and Queen. I love the dialogue between the patient and the doctor. I used these dialogues and transformed them to work with actors on the previous films. The more I worked on it, the more I realized that it was fantastic material.

You have an ongoing relationship with Mathieu Amalric, but why Benicio Del Toro?

This is the first time in my life when I’m writing for actors. Usually when I’m writing characters—perhaps it has to do with the fact that these characters did exist in real life, perhaps that committed me to writing for actors. But I remember explaining the project to the producer, and he was saying: “Yeah, but who would be Dr. Devereux?” So I looked at some Hungarian films, and I thought it would be a fraud not to work with Mathieu, even if Mathieu is French. He’s from a Jewish family, coming from Poland, so I thought it would be nice to use him.

I saw a lot of films done in the reservations, or films coming from Hollywood, and looking at Native American actors or non-Native American actors playing Native American parts—Truman Capote, those kinds of films. And still, I was never happy. I never saw my Jimmy in these films. I could see victims, but I couldn’t identify with them. What a movie star is bringing to me is that I can see my own life depicted on screen. I thought it would be nice to have two movie stars coming from two different backgrounds, and coming from two very different traditions of acting, because it is also a film that deals with the difference of acting—the French way of acting and the American way of acting.

And I was really struck, more deeply than I express here, by the performance Benicio gave in The Pledge—where he was playing a Native American. I haven’t seen a Native American role in recent American film as deep and as violent as what he gave in The Pledge. It’s just a stone of pain that you can see on screen. This mumbling that Benicio had, to me he had the ability of being Jimmy. And after that, thinking about his life—what a strange fate it is to arrive in America at the age of 14 and to become American, and never to be an American—always an outsider. Still, wanting to be part of the Hollywood system. I thought in his own life, he was sharing something with Jimmy.

You mentioned something interesting: the film being about, in a way, French and American styles of acting. Would you talk more about that?

With Benicio, it seems me there are two movements in the acting process or the directing process. The actor needs to have some loneliness with this character. He needs to make the character his own, so he needs to get rid of the director at one point of the process. That’s his character, not your character. But also, to bring the character to life, at one point in the process, you need to share the character with the director. You need to expand this wonderful moment where you don’t know who is the character—is he the director or the actor?  It seems to me that during the shooting, you have this tradition coming from the Actor’s Studio, that the character belongs to the American actor. But during the prep, you have all of this intense discussion and preparation in the American process because Benicio is such a hard worker, and he’s really a genius. We had all these sessions working on the script together where we could share the character, and then I had to give him the character during the shooting.

It seems to me that when I’m working with Mathieu, the process is the opposite: during the prep, Mathieu wants to get rid of me, he has to find his way with the character: why did I accept this film, why did I accept this part? What do I share with the character? With Benicio, all these sessions are so intense, but during the shooting, as soon as Mathieu has a problem or difficulty or pleasure that he wants to share, there’s an exchange, one to one.

Your films tend to be rooted in a sense of place or ethnic identity. This particular film is rooted in a place—Topeka, Kansas—which isn’t really home to either of the characters.  Did you try to get away from or push back against your own work in a way?

I think that the film has to do with identity for sure, but with exile too. There are two levels of exile. Jimmy is an exile because he is Native American, and obviously Devereux is exiled because he’s a Jewish European.  They have nothing to do except work on this cure and become friends.

Topeka is a desert. I sent an assistant there to do some scouting and to see the real place where the plot did happen. Topeka is nothing, it’s really nothing. It’s a nowhere place, it’s absurd.

Did you find your process changing working with an English-language script? Did you take fewer takes, more takes?

Very few takes. Was it because of the American acting—this idea of being a spectator, of taking one shot and not trying to influence it and just receiving it? Was it because of the plot itself? The words have to appear for the first time. I was asking the actors not to play their lines before the first take. We also shot the film in six weeks, and so during the prep and the shot list, I thought to shoot it this way, to have one or two takes, if I wasn’t happy with it, I had to change my angle and come up with another way to film the scene. I can’t have ten takes of the same thing. I guess it brought me back to the Eastwood way or the John Ford way—a few takes, and that’s it.

Is it true that you watched The Exiles at the beginning?

It’s funny, I remember that when I met Benicio. I sent him the script, and then he came to Paris and I gave him the book and I brought him a DVD of The Exiles. I remember when we started, he told me: “The Exiles is a good film.” We were working during the day on the script, and after that, during the evening, I would go back to my hotel. And on the second day, Benicio saw The Exiles again during the night. And he said to me: “It’s really a good, good film, no?” And after that, the third time, he saw it again and he said: “Actually it’s a masterpiece.” Because there’s so much information about what it is like being an assimilated Native American and all of the paradoxes that can mean. So this film is crucial. It’s also that when I saw The Exiles, it was really a shock to me. During the writing process, I was working with a French writer, Julie [Peyr], and I was saying to her: “Don’t be too fascinated with the exoticism. Remember that what we have to tell as a plot is a French doctor in Roubaix working with a Roma patient. Try to bring the feelings back to something we can experience in France.” That’s what I saw when I saw The Exiles. I saw that, even if it’s a period piece, it’s incredibly modern. I’m sure Benicio used it a lot.

Did you have a lot of input on the accents in the film?

I’m able to impersonate the Hungarian accent, so I could work on that. On the Native American part, the differences were too subtle for me. I could hear that there is something beautiful that wasn’t slang. There was something noble in this accent.

Benicio asked during prep to meet with someone from the Blackfoot tribe that he could work with. He met a lot of guys there. He met this wonderful guy, Marvin Weatherwax, a teacher of Piikani at the University of Browning—“university” is a big word for what it is, it’s on a reservation so it’s a small school. But the guy was raised in Piikani, and he’s a Vietnam War vet. The meeting between the two men was incredible. After that, Benicio was doing his job with Marvin Weatherwax, and I was excluded from that, and that was their business. The elocution and last changes in the dialogue were done with Marvin Weatherwax.

The character of Jimmy is a lot bigger, physically, than the character of Dr. Devereux. Is that from the book, or is that what happens when you cast?

In the book, it’s the reverse. Devereux was tall, and Jim was short and chubby. We exchanged the relationship. We had to have a difference between the two characters. It was quite useful in the storytelling—Jimmy’s nice, and the savage is Devereux. I love the scenes where he’s concerned with the health of his doctor. I love when he’s shaking the hand of his doctor after the doctor has had the flu, asking if he’s feeling better. He’s really concerned. But at one point in the story, he’ll be really pissed at his doctor. With Benicio, there’s this wonderful threat on Devereux because you think as a spectator that if Jimmy slaps Devereux on the face, Devereux will stick on the wall because Benicio is so powerful and Mathieu is so humble. This difference became a possible violence between the two of them and made it quite cinematic.

Both Jimmy and Dr. Devereux are displaced people trying to fit in, but you leave it at the level of subtext.

I guess that is because it’s a theme that breaks my heart, and I had to be very humble about it. It’s a thing that matters to me so much that I don’t dare to speak about it loudly. Obviously there is something in their meeting which is heartbreaking: the fact that Devereux just survived the Holocaust and Jimmy just survived an ethnocide. But they’re never saying it. Devereux was always trying to escape any identity, even if he was paying a lot of attention to others’ identities. He was disgusted by his own identity: he was baptized as soon as he arrived in France. He was saying: “I don’t want to be Jewish, I don’t want to be Hungarian, I don’t want to be Romanian, actually I don’t want to be French, either. I don’t want to be anything.” So there was this idea of refusing any assimilation into an identity, but the idea of paying attention and respect to others’ identity. Almost as if it was a definition of friendship on the deepest level. 

Through films such as Jim Sheridan’s In the Name of the Father, James Marsh’s Shadow Dancer, and, especially, Paul Greengrass’s Golden Bear winner Bloody Sunday, the conflict in Northern Ireland has been well represented in the Berlinale’s Competition section over the years. The latest, Yann Demange’s Belfast-set ’71, which premiered on the second day of this year’s festival, is an assured debut with riveting action sequences, but it fails to live up to its predecessors owing to a problematic approach to the politically charged material.

Young English recruit Gary Hook (Jack O’Connell), fresh out of training, has just been dispatched to Belfast. On his first day, his unit is sent to search a house for weapons, a mission that quickly spirals out of control as a riot erupts outside. Outnumbered and unprepared, the soldiers are forced to flee and in the commotion Hook gets left behind, finding himself stranded in a de facto war zone where everyone is intent on killing him. The house search and ensuing riot, which culminates in Hook’s breakneck escape through back alleys and bombed-out buildings, are extraordinary. Heavily indebted to Greengrass’s handheld, in-the-moment aesthetic, these sequences throw the viewer into the middle of the action, masterfully conveying the soldiers’ complete disorientation and escalating panic as the tension rises to an almost unbearable pitch before exploding into full-blown terror. Once night falls and Hook tries to find his way back to base, however, the film makes an infelicitous switch of register from realism to genre piece.

The tonal shift is made visible in the switch from grainy, period-evoking 16mm to digital, giving a cool and contemporary urban sheen to Belfast’s nighttime streets with a moody yellow glow more lush and pervasive than any streetlamp might produce. As in a Walter Hill cat-and-mouse game, no matter where in the city the hero decides to hide, his pursuers will inevitably find him, the net steadily tightening as the story heads toward a showdown. Demange’s direction remains proficient throughout, but as the role of the civil conflict is increasingly relegated to that of exotic backdrop, the film tends to favor shock as its mode of commentary: children ripped apart in explosions, adolescents brutally murdered. These deaths and the violently sobering ordeal inflicted on the angel-faced naïf Hook are supposed to underline the senselessness of war and the victimization of the youth in its service, but the message is compromised by the thrilling delivery.

By contrast, a film that was in desperate need of excitement was Rachid Bouchareb’s Competition entry Two Men in Town, a redundant remake of the 1973 film starring Alain Delon and Jean Gabin. A man is released from prison after an 18-year stint for murder and his ambition to start a new and honest life is thwarted by his inability to escape from his past. The bland and uneventful script does nothing to update or revitalize this overly familiar premise and the story crawls to its foregone conclusion while the one-dimensional characters do little besides spout dialogue too trite even for the stellar cast—Forest Whitaker, Harvey Keitel, Luis Guzmán, Brenda Blethyn, and Ellen Burstyn—to deliver with conviction.

Monotony and wasted acting talent were certainly not issues for one of this year’s most highly anticipated films: Bong Joon-ho’s Snowpiercer, screened in its original, uncut version. One can only hope that the fully realized film—a glorious achievement—will eventually be seen as widely as possible. (Reports are that it might.) Adapted from a French graphic novel, the film is set in a dystopian near-future in which the entire Earth has succumbed to a new ice age and the last surviving humans have taken refuge in a train forever circling the planet (powered by a perpetual motion machine). The lower classes, forcibly segregated in the disgusting, slum-like back end of the train, start an uprising and fight their way to the front to seize control of the train from their tyrannical elite.

While pacing has not always been Bong’s strong suit, Snowpiercer’s two-hour running time has nary a dull moment. The exhilarating action is coupled to an intricate and involving narrative peppered with both mordant humor and affecting pathos. Bong, whose 2006 film The Host remains the highest-grossing film in his country’s history, expertly juggles beautifully executed, truly breathtaking fighting sequences, and detailed yet elegantly deployed exposition. The large array of characters, each one finely drawn and highly original, is incarnated with much panache and visible enjoyment by the outstanding international cast, which in addition to a remarkably subtle Chris Evans in the lead includes Tilda Swinton, John Hurt, Jamie Bell, Ewen Bremner, Octavia Spencer alongside Bong regular Song Kang-ho and Ko Ah-sung (Song's on-screen daughter in The Host).

The train itself is a marvel of production design, and as the characters press on, it’s a thrill to discover the entirely different, fantastically conceived, and gorgeously realized world within each new wagon. Beyond the miserable austerity of the slum cars lie locales as varied as a candy-colored classroom worthy of Wes Anderson; an aquarium car filled with exotic fish; a wood-paneled, Old World carriage reminiscent of the Orient Express; and a futuristic nightclub with a drug-fueled rave in full swing. Far from presenting a challenge for audiences in Iowa and Oklahoma (as Weinstein put it), Snowpiercer, properly handled, would provide a much-needed reminder of the rich potential of the action thriller in the right hands.

An integral part of Rotterdam’s mission has always been to bring attention to films that might have otherwise gone unnoticed, but the sheer size of the past few years’ programs makes such a task increasingly difficult. In tune with the dominant modes of consumption, in and outside cinema, quantity seems to be preferred over quality. Of course, the festival is very much worth attending if only for its informal, celebrity-free atmosphere where a genuine passion for the moving image is the reason why people make the effort. And through its adventuresome offerings, the emotional geography of cinema—its maps of desire and mutinous journeys into the untapped—can still illuminate the darkness of our times.

R100

Very dark indeed is the featureless existence that the protagonist of R100 by Hitoshi Matsumoto leads in quiet desperation, so much so that he decides to give his life a masochistic twist by enrolling in a peculiar S&M club. As part of his membership, Takafumi Katayama (Nao Ohmori) gets a year of unannounced visits by dominatrices who will satisfy his sexual urges. A subservient salesman in the interior-design department of a big store, Takafumi spends his days advising customers on how to keep up appearances and make their isolation cozier. Deprived of love and human affection, despite having a small son, he harbors debasement within; warmth and care are just not part of the equation. Thankfully, the tone of Matsumoto’s film verges more on the comical than the dramatic, relieving the audience from what would otherwise be an unbearably cheerless story. A thoughtful balance between wacky provocations and sociological precision, between outrageous invention and rational observation, is maintained. But R100 is a color film that initially looks as if it’s in black and white: a morbid pallor has swallowed up the different tonalities of life.

Piccola Patria

While the Foreign-Language Academy Award nomination for The Great Beauty has been getting headlines in Italy, Rotterdam offered the chance to view its economic decline from the perspective of those who don’t lounge around on luxurious Roman terraces. Alessandro Rossetto’s Piccola Patria (“Small Homeland”) is an imperfect but highly promising first feature set in the Italy’s northeast region, a once-prosperous area known for small entrepreneurs and big xenophobia. The film follows two young women who are both desperate to abandon the provincial squalor they come from but who are unable to truly escape. Money and sex—and money for sex—are the only way the two girls can escape their surroundings, but they head towards an uncertain future that’s probably worse than the one their parents had planned. Scarred by small-scale industrialization and poisoned by greed, the land is explored through soaring bird’s-eye views set to the mournful music of a regional choir singing “the water is dead.” Sustained by incisive and controlled performances, Piccola Patria renders in unflattering details the moral corruption of a nation netted in its own failures and terrified by foreigners.

EU 013, The Last Frontier

The cruel treatment of immigrants by Italian authorities (with the complacent collaboration of the vast majority of the population) is the subject of Alessio Genovese’s EU 013, The Last Frontier. Genovese is the first filmmaker to be granted permission to film inside the country’s Identification & Deportation Centers, which are more akin to detention centers for those whose only crime is emigrating from war-torn countries. Victims of a cruel bureaucracy whereby you cannot find a job without a visa and you cannot get a visa without having a job, these foreigners are welcomed at the gates of “civilized” Europe by the same intolerance that forced many of them to leave their countries in the first place. Genovese’s documentary succeeds in showing an inhuman reality without ever succumbing to cheap sentimentalism, treating its subjects with dignity. It’s a concise and morally upright work that deserves the audiences of prime-time television rather than the select few that make it to film festivals, given how the issue is often distorted by jingoistic politicians and the media.

On Music or the Dance of Joy

Finally, it’s difficult to put into words the thoughts and carnal feelings the music and images of On Music or the Dance of Joy, directed by Jean-Charles Fitoussi, evoke. A potentially lethal prospect on paper—two philosophers discuss the mysterious pleasures that music affords the body and the mind—Fitoussi’s film is an immediate, lively work that uses images to elucidate thought and sound to animate words. While the majority of films that elect philosophy as their muse are usually unbearable bricks of verbosity, On Music is very much in tune with its poetic intent, and it excites the senses. Fitoussi works to harmonize the thoughts of its featured philosopher, the loquacious Clément Rossett, with images that are never simply illustrative but integral parts of the philosopher’s elaborations. According to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in their book What is Philosophy?, philosophy is the thinking outcome of experience and never an abstracted conceptual exercise. And so it is in this film which avails itself of the multidisciplinary and poly-sensorial possibilities only cinema can offer.

Stations of the Cross

Two-thirds of the films competing for the Golden Bear have screened and the critical favorite thus far is Dietrich Brüggemann’s Stations of the Cross. The Stations of the Cross (episodic representations of Christ’s crucifixion that adorn the walls of most Catholic churches) provide the structural and aesthetic template for the film, which is split into 14 chapters, each shot in a single take and, in all but three cases, without any camera movement. Standing in for Jesus is the protagonist Maria, a 14-year-old whose family belongs to the Society of St. Paul, an fictional traditionalist Catholic sect transparently modeled on the Society of St. Pius X. In the first chapter, which corresponds to the station “Jesus is condemned to death,” Maria is told that she must make sacrifices to receive a reward from God. Deeply pious and seriously confused (two states that the film treats as one and the same), she decides to sacrifice herself so that her 4-year-old brother may be healed of his inability to speak, thus initiating her own Passion.

By emphasizing the irrationality inherent to religious dogma, particularly in the context of contemporary society, Stations of the Cross aspires to biting satire. This is only successful in the deliciously scripted opening, in which a priest holds forth in a lengthy, farcical lecture to his Sunday school students about faith and duty, and then requests that they all sacrifice things that give them pleasure. The glaring absurdities in the priest’s counsel are effortlessly conveyed to great comic effect, but this subtlety is lost in the subsequent chapters. The digs at religion become increasingly facile and repetitive, such as an unoriginal joke about all modern music being Satanic that becomes downright grating as it is reiterated in almost every chapter. Another major problem is the excessive caricature of the two central characters, Maria and her odious, scripture-bashing harpy of a mother. The latter is so overdrawn and schematic, she is impossible to take seriously. As a result, it is equally hard to believe in the psychological damage she has inflicted on her daughter, who in any case is such a passive victim that her complete inability to exercise any independent thought whatsoever eventually erodes all sympathy towards her martyrdom.

Life of Riley

Expectations were very high for Alain Resnais’s new film, Life of Riley, which disappointingly turned out to be a significantly less interesting theater/film hybrid than You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet (12). Adapted from Alan Ayckbourn’s play, the film is essentially a filmed theater piece with six actors performing a linear script on a handful of minimalist sets and the camera never breaking the axis of action. The only significant cinematic elements are the clips of street footage or hand-drawn pictures that separate set changes, and mesh-like drawings (unappealingly rendered in green screen) that appear behind the actors when they deliver a monologue in close-up.

At the outset, three couples discover that their mutual friend has been diagnosed with terminal cancer. Godot-like, this man never actually appears but catalyzes the action, his diagnosis injecting new and sorely needed vitality in his friends’ romantic lives. Although Resnais’s actors are very good, the play itself is not particularly engaging and only sporadically funny, and, in the absence of the experimentation that marked the filmmaker’s previous feature, it’s difficult to remain invested. At one point, one of the characters states that he prefers films to theater and another promises: “Next time, we’ll go to the cinema.” Let’s hope that wasn’t just meta-jesting.

Journey to the West

An auteur that didn’t disappoint was Tsai Ming-liang. Journey to the West, which premiered in the Panorama section, is the latest installment of his Walker series, which follows his usual star Lee Kang-sheng as he dons the robes of a Buddhist monk and walks the streets of various cities at a snail’s pace, impervious to the world around him. Here he is in Marseilles, joined by the actor Denis Lavant, who is initially seen lying down and later following the monk, their gaits in perfect synchronicity. The camera almost never moves (and when it does, the motion is virtually imperceptible) and shots are held for up to 15 minutes at a time with only ambient sounds as accompaniment: the bustling noise of traffic and pedestrians; the crashing of waves; Lavant’s deep, steady breathing.

It is truly amazing how much Tsai is able to accomplish with such a minimal premise. The film is utterly mesmerizing for every one of its 56 minutes and manages to elicit an extraordinary range of emotions. It is impossible not to be overcome by spiritual reflections as the monk descends a staircase, the glaring sun behind him turning his body into a dark silhouette outlined by a radiant halo while the dust particles in the foreground whiz around like ethereal fireflies. In a shot late in the film, the mirrored ceiling of the Vieux Port pavilion reflects the square below and, in the inverted crowd, the otherwise ever-present monk is nowhere to be seen. One scours the frame, growing increasingly anxious at failing to find the familiar red-robed fixture, and when after several minutes he finally does appear, the sense of relief is astonishing. Journey to the West is a wonderfully hypnotic achievement, offering temporary respite from the perpetual acceleration of modern life and an invitation to unwind and rediscover pleasures of watching and contemplating in their purest form.

Severity at festivals is one thing, but if that’s what you’re really after, you hope for something a little sterner than the mere dourness that dominated the Berlinale this year. There were, as always, plenty of those worthily modest films that make you admire a filmmaker’s sincerity but that you forget almost instantly. And then there were a few of those stolid clunkers that all too often clog the Competition lineup. Suffice to mention 2009 Golden Bear winner Claudia Llosa’s turgid English-language follow-up Aloft, in which an anguished Jennifer Connelly raged, “Why? WHY!!??” and the audience raged along with her.

Life of Riley

In short, what was at a premium this year was simple fun. Or, as Alain Resnais puts it in the payoff of his latest film Life of Riley: “le fun.” The joke here is that the dramatis personae in Resnais’s latest adaptation of playwright Alan Ayckbourn are all English, living in Yorkshire, but played by French actors (regulars Sabine Azéma and André Dussollier, along with new recruits including Michel Vuillermoz from Wild Grass, and Caroline Sihol), who can’t even pronounce their own characters’ names plausibly, and no doubt were never intended to. So the mention of le fun, coming at the end of a film in which characters are seen drinking le Rose’s Lime Juice and eating les Carr’s Table Waters, is all part of the eccentric exoticism of this franglais hybrid.

It came as a huge surprise to learn, 20 years ago, that the revered director of Marienbad and Muriel was a huge Ayckbourn fan, and had been taking holiday trips to the comic playwright’s Stephen Joseph Theatre in Scarborough for years before Ayckbourn was ever aware of his presence. Eyebrows were raised, certainly in the U.K., over Resnais’s enthusiasm for a writer that many thought of as a purveyor of fluffy bourgeois comedies, but it took Resnais to remind the Brits of what theater critics had been saying for a long time—that Ayckbourn was a master of formal innovation not to be dismissed lightly. Resnais began his association with Ayckbourn in the 1993 diptych Smoking/No Smoking, in which two actors played a whole range of characters whose fates were decided by, as it were, the toss of a dice (or rather, the acceptance or refusal of a cigarette).

Resnais returned to Ayckbourn in the elegantly staged Private Fears in Public Places (06), and now he completes a trilogy with Life of Riley (Aimer, boire et chanter). The opening shots, which take us up and down assorted country roads and recur throughout, echo some of the eerie exteriors in the director’s delirious Wild Grass (09), but this film is differently odd. Ostensibly, it’s simply a staged performance of Ayckbourn’s play about a group of friends preparing an amateur dramatics performance of, as it happens, Ayckbourn’s own Relatively Speaking. The group learn that their friend George Riley has only a few months to live, and offer him a part to cheer him up and give him something to focus on. After a while, they’re the ones who need cheering up, as the cracks begin to show in their own relationships, and the past begins to resurface—notably because Riley has at one time or another been involved with all three female characters (played by Azéma, Sihol, and Sandrine Kiberlain).

Life of Riley isn’t, as far as one can tell from the film, one of Ayckbourn’s most interesting or most formally inventive plays—the key conceit is that Riley himself is never seen but hovers in the background like a convivial Godot. But what’s fascinating is the amount of formal mischief that Resnais whips up. One running joke is the excess of establishing shots, of a singularly artificial variety: every time the scene shifts to one of the characters’ houses, Resnais shows us a cartoon of the place (by French artist Blutch), which then is replaced by a stylized stage-set version of the same locale, designed in dizzyingly distinctive color schemes by Jacques Saulnier, with gorgeously painted curtains standing in for trees, houses, background lawns alike—the offbeat [rep] acidic palette made for one of the few truly luxurious visual experiences at this year’s Berlinale.

The same distanciation is present in the language, with the characters’ French accents and very French théâtre de boulevard heightened performance style clashing strangely with the specifically English references and the knowing inconsequentiality of the dialogue. (All throughout I kept hearing a phantom version of the script as it might have been delivered, more lightly and conversationally, by such Brits as Michael Gambon or the late, impeccably casual Richard Briers.) There are other touches of more outright strangeness: an animatronic mole as surprise chorus, and deliberate (or so I can only assume) incongruities, like the sound of chirping crickets at night, in Yorkshire, or the idea of people there ever drinking London Pride beer.

Life of Riley isn’t for everyone, and I have to admit that it wasn’t entirely for me. Where Resnais consistently pulled surprise twists on the multilayering of film, life, and cinema in Wild Grass and the hyper-autoreflexive You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet (12), here he’s doing something simpler, lighter, and in many ways, more academic and safe. Yet the sweet memento mori of the coda is rather moving (it’s the third consecutive film from this veteran in his nineties to offer a comic contemplation of death and of the best ways to live fully). The cast are visibly having a great time, and what’s lovely is how the mise en scène plays up the actors’ own cartoonish qualities: Kiberlain’s woe-stricken elongated features, Vuillermoz with his big-nosed resemblance to a Hergé figure, the huge-eyed Sihol with her resemblance to a marionette of Giulietta Masina. But I still have a problem with Resnais’s long-time muse Sabine Azéma. Her archness fits the picture here because the setting allows it to become, as it were, meta-theatrical. Even so, her fretting and fluttering is abrasively distracting.

The Kidnapping of Michel Houellebecq

The artificial acting style of Life of Riley is dry, whimsical, and, well, charmant, I suppose... but I constantly yearned for some of the almost contemptuously relaxed wit of the other French comedy that stood out here. The Kidnapping of Michel Houellebecq, by the versatile Guillaume Nicloux (who made last year’s adaptation of Diderot’s The Nun) is based on a strange episode in 2011, in which the controversial Goncourt-winning author Michel Houellebecq disappeared during a tour to promote his novel The Map and the Territory. The new film—devised, I suppose, rather than strictly scripted by Nicloux—imagines what might have happened, and Houellebecq himself joins in the mystification. In the film, he plays himself as a testy, vacant version of the sour figure who appears in The Map (in which he describes his own gruesome murder). Houellebecq is kidnapped by three hulking figures who whisk him off to a country house where they chain him, but also treat him to affable dinners in the company of one abductor’s elderly parents.

Houellebecq of course turns out to be a total pain, demanding that the gang constantly replenish his cigarettes and reading material (all they can find him is The Nun, in a tie-in edition promoting Nicloux’s film). He’s endlessly up for an argument—but then, so are the kidnappers. Two prize moments have Houellebecq losing his cool in a disagreement about The Lord of the Rings, and being quizzed about his essay on H.P. Lovecraft—or, as the bulky Luc (Luc Schwarz) keeps calling him, “Lord Warcraft.” And the film got a huge laugh when Houellebecq casually quashes the gang’s delusion that President François Hollande will care enough to cough up his ransom.

The cast of this seemingly part-improvised comedy—all, apart from Houellebecq, previously unknown to me—rise to the conceit with relaxed verve. But the star of the show so perfectly lives up to his myth as a sour, disdainful, prematurely wizened shambler that you find yourself wondering whether Nicloux has simply wheeled him on or whether the novelist is really pulling his own strings with sublime finesse. He oscillates between Andy Warhol blankness, a dandyish sullenness that Louis Garrel might envy, and the peppery universal contempt of Mark E. Smith. But what he resembles most of all—in his ironic self-portrayal—is a kind of Left Bank literary Larry David. Imagine Curb Your Enthusiasm, with Gauloises smoked right down to the nub, and that’s the sort of pleasure provided here. It’ll certainly get me looking at the man’s novels again—I suspect they may be much funnier than I realized.

Film criticism online, like any sort of cultural discourse online, has been swept up by the demands of a perpetual present. The dominant business model mandates that controversies—the more individual takes the better—must always be brewing, that young filmmakers must always be emerging, and that world cinema hotspots must be bubbling up like the Ring of Fire. And so perhaps they are! But here in this shady grotto, away from the hullabaloo, we will be dealing exclusively in events that have already happened. 

Once a week, I will use this space to address a new DVD release or arrival at a streaming site, or a single film from a forthcoming or underway repertory series. (The last are likely to stay New York City-area exclusive, but who knows—I may get ambitious.) Like all previous such weekly columns that I’ve undertaken, the name of this one—because I am almost completely barren of imagination—is cribbed from the songbook of The Fall. I chose it because it sounds cool. I hope that it also says something about the subject matter at hand: Namely, that the future of “film”—already well on its way to becoming a quaint, convenient metonym like “album” or “Hollywood”—is inextricably linked to its past.

I won’t be celebrating arbitrary release date anniversaries here—5th or 10th or 25th and so on ad infinitum—because that strikes me as a rather obvious ploy to scrape up coal to keep the content fires burning. I will try also to save Forgotten Masterpiece hyperbole for deserving occasions, if at all. The fact is that most old movies aren’t Forgotten Masterpieces, but this doesn’t mean that they don’t have pleasures to give, that we can’t learn from their flaws and accomplishments, or that they don’t deserve to be talked about and written about.

And so, in the interest of hopelessly muddling things right from the get-go, we will begin with the work of a writer-cum-filmmaker who insisted on a present unencumbered with precedent, Alain Robbe-Grillet.

Trans-Europ-Express
Alain Robbe-Grillet, 1967, France-Belgium
Redemption/ Kino Classics/ Kino Lorber

“Movies go along like trains in the night” says the director character in François Truffaut’s movie-about-moviemaking Day for Night, played, of course, by Truffaut himself. “Like the best cinema, S & M is about mise-en-scène,” wrote the late critic Elliott Stein, who knew quite a bit about both. Perhaps then Alain Robbe-Grillet’s Trans-Europ-Express, dealing expressly as it does with both trains and S & M, has a shot at being the most movie-movie of all time.

Robbe-Grillet, who died in 2008, is best known among movie-movie cinephiles for having written the screenplay to Alain Resnais’s 1961 Last Year at Marienbad. Robbe-Grillet had already achieved literary fame in France at the time of this collaboration, scoring his first great success with 1955’s Le Voyeur. Thereafter he was recognized as one of the premier theorists and practitioners of the nouveau roman (New Novel), along with the likes of Michel Butor, Nathalie Sarraute, and Marguerite Duras, later a formidable filmmaker in her own right, who had written the screenplay for Resnais’s 1959 Hiroshima mon amour.

The New Novelists saw themselves as inheritors of the modernist tradition in literature, and were concerned with making the basic materials of the novel the subjects of the novel, in much the same way that the Abstract Expressionists, say, were concerned with making paint and canvas the subject of painting. Chief among the tenets of Robbe-Grillet’s literary theory was an abandonment of humanizing language as applied to objects, leveling the surface of prose to provide an equal and indifferent assignation of weight or relevance between subjects and objects, all towards effacing the presence of the author as completely as possible.

Robbe-Grillet’s vision of the New Novel’s mission was nothing less than the creation of a new man, and so it was no great surprise that his ambitions would lead him to the most prominent staging ground for his theories, the cinema. He directed ten feature films beginning with 1963’s L’immortelle, the last in 2006. The nearest thing to a popular success among them was 1967’s Trans-Europ-Express, which was released on DVD last Tuesday by Kino Lorber and Redemption, alongside Robbe-Grillet’s 1974 Successive Slidings of Pleasure. (Kino/ Redemption have also announced plans to release four more Robbe-Grillet films later this year: L’immortelle, 1968’s The Man Who Lies, 1970’s Eden and After, and Eden’s “alternate cut,” 1971’s N. Throws the Dice. All six films have never been released in the United States.)

Trans-Europ-Express opens with a dark, tousled, mustachioed man walking through Paris’s Gare du Nord train station. Coming to a newsstand, the man flips through a pin-up girlie magazine called Europ, then hastens to board a train. (Here I recalled Godard’s dismissive description of Alberto Moravia’s Contempt, which he called “a nice, vulgar read for a train journey.”) Once aboard, the mustachioed man joins two others in a compartment, a balding middle-aged man and a small, sharp-featured woman flipping through an issue of ELLE. “We should set a film on a train like this,” says the bald man, “We could call it Trans-Europ-Express.”

The bald man, who suggests that they write “Something exciting, with fights, violence, rape, you know,” is Paul Louyet, a figure with a few producer credits to his name. The mustachioed man—identified as “Jean”—is none other than Robbe-Grillet, and the script girl, who produces a tape recorder to capture their improvised narrative, is the author’s real wife, Catherine. The nice, vulgar story which the three cook up concerns a drug trafficker whom they eventually name Elias, and as Elias’s inventors describe his story, we see it played out. (A confounding variation on this formula appears in Duras’s 1977 Le camion, in which scenes of Duras reciting the plot of a proposed film about a truck driver to her lead actor, played by Gerard Depardieu, are intercut with scenes of a truck lugubriously moving along a country highway, suggesting but never delivering the promised segue into the narrative being described.) 

Elias is played by Jean-Louis Trintignant, in the first of an eventual four performances for Robbe-Grillet. He enters the Gare du Nord, visits the same newsstand that Jean had, and flips through the same girlie magazine, looking at the same models—though Elias has a fondness for the rough stuff, and so he sees the girls restrained with chains. Meeting the same pinch-faced man whom Jean had passed, Elias drops the password “Father Petitjean” and picks up contraband, then boards an Antwerp-bound train.

The title says Express, but the film makes local stops. While we’re principally with Elias from here, there are regular interruptions that return us to the three in their train compartment. (Elias even walks in on them briefly. “It’s Trintignant,” the script-girl says after he leaves. “What about using him for your film?” says the bald man.) They float ideas for what should happen next, and we see Trintignant/Elias act those ideas out. Sometimes they’re discarded, sometimes accepted and built on. The script girl is the only one who takes care to maintain the narrative’s structural integrity, and her voiced questions, aided by indisputable playback, force the others to hastily backpedal, plugging up holes in the plot, which is more than once reiterated. In an early “recap,” we briefly cut to Jean/Robbe-Grillet filming back in the Gare du Nord, seen walking alongside the tracking camera. Later, laying low in the flat of a young friend, Elias himself takes on the role of storyteller, narrating the events thus far in third person. (He’s brought his young friend some comic books from Paris, in which one of the glimpsed panels illustrates a scene from the movie.)

What is Robbe-Grillet up to? Let’s turn to Gore Vidal, who critically quotes Robbe-Grillet’s comments on Last Year at Marienbad in his1967 essay French Letters: Theories of the New Novel: “‘The only important ‘character’ is the spectator. In his mind unfolds the whole story which is precisely imagined by him.’ The verb ‘imagine’ is of course incorrect, while the adverb means nothing. The spectator is not imagining the film; he is watching a creation which was made in a precise historic past by a writer, a director, actors, cameramen, etc. Yet to have the spectator or reader involve himself directly in the act of creation continues to be Robbe-Grillet’s goal.”

And this is certainly the goal of Trans-Europ-Express, a film in which even expressly invented characters, with their talk of the nonexistent “Father Petitjean,” have invented their own fiction to enact. In Antwerp to get his first trafficking assignment, Elias finds himself playing out further variations of that first clandestine meeting at the Gare du Nord: More furtive contacts with strangers, more whispered “Petitjeans,” more cryptic instructions, all amounting to an elaborate game that sends Elias scrambling all over the city. Being tested for his reliability as a drug mule, Elias is made to perform a number of dry-run errands which begin to try his patience. Subjected to a mock ambush in a kind-of graveyard for discarded boxcars, Elias finally lashes out at his employer. The subtitle reads “Why all these games?”, while the actual line is “Pourquoi tout cette mise-en-scene?”

Robbe-Grillet filmed on location in Paris and, mostly, Antwerp—his producer, Samy Halfon, who’d made his name with Hiroshima mon amour, had arranged for a co-production with Du ministère belge de l’Education nationale et de la culture. (This arrangement came to be a matter of some controversy given the nature of the movie that Robbe-Grillet produced.) The film was shot in black-and-white by cinematographer Willy Kurant, whose contemporary works included Godard’s Masculin Féminin, Varda’s Les creatures and, shortly afterwards, the expatriate American Hubert Cornfield’s underseen, glumly atmospheric The Night of the Following Day. Kurant captured an underpopulated, grayly mizzling Antwerp in which postcard splendors exist cheek-and-jowl with industrial drabness, cathedrals and public statuary alongside barrooms, railyards, drawbridges, docks, and rain-lashed quays. These images are fitted to a soundtrack that veers, often quite abruptly, between Verdi’s La Traviata (sung in Russian!) and the musique concrete of ambient construction sounds.

There is some sightseeing worth doing here, as available beauties display themselves in seemingly every one of the city’s vitrines. Elias is picked up on the street by a woman named Eva (Celine and Julie Go Boating’s Marie-France Pisier), and they strike up an affair, based on his particular peccadillos—he is interested, he tells her, in “Rape. Only rape,” and when she proves pliable, on his next visit he brings chains and ropes.

Robbe-Grillet has a way of bringing objects, like those chains, to the fore of scenes, giving them an importance not less than that of the actors. These “co-stars” include: Elias’s pea-shooter pistol, a white handkerchief, tightly-packed paper bundles, a poster of Sean Connery in From Russia with Love, and a book by Sacha Guitry, a polymath of a previous era, which is prominently displayed at the Gare du Nord newsstand. The last is listed among the “evocative, improbable objects... that one neither wants nor expects to lead anywhere” in the film, catalogued by Renata Adler in her May 1968 review for The New York Times. The most alluring artifact of all, though, is the hollowed-out book in which Elias finds that little pistol hidden. Its jacket depicts the classic potboiler image of a scantily-clad woman tied to the tracks of a train. The text within is actually that of Winston Graham’s Marnie, though the cover gives the title as Transes and identifies the author as one “R. Jonestone”—one of the names given to the protagonist of Robbe-Grillet’s 1965 novel La Maison de rendez-vous. According to Robbe-Grillet, Hitchcock’s picture from Graham’s novel was “a particularly bad film, encumbered with pop psychology”—traditional psychological analysis was one of the New Novelists’ big no-nos, while whatever traditional elements of narrative that couldn’t be discarded might at least be undermined. “I believe that stereotypes are a raw material that one cannot avoid,” Robbe-Grillet told Anthony Fragola in the same interview, “only one must manipulate them in such a way as not to be a victim of them.”

A sort of liberation through subservience, then. The appeal of this is obvious, for Elias’s sadistic predilections mirror those of his creator—Robbe-Grillet, that is, not Jean, a distinction that the author takes some pains to make. (The February, 2014 issue of Vanity Fair contains a profile of Catherine, Robbe-Grillet’s now-83-year-old widow describing her as “France’s most famous dominatrix.”) Elias continues to meet with Eva for their bondage sessions until, discovering that she has double-crossed him with the police, he ties her up with the purpose of dispatching her, as on the cover of Transes. Shamelessly theatrical throughout the film, Trintignant follows the murder with one of his most elaborate gestures, splaying his fingers over his broad mouth, then using his raincoat to dab the sweat from his temple.

Elias will finally be ensnared by his fondness for chains, lured to an S & M-themed nightclub floorshow that’s actually a police dragnet. A stereotype to the last, Elias is led to his death outside the theater, just like Dillinger, throwing up one arm and arching his back to strike a Tragic Gangster pirouette as the bullet hits. Robbe-Grillet is “manipulating” the crime film formula here by, among other things, reducing it to farce, not less than when he earlier shows us Elias with a fake “spy” beard, wielding a comic book bomb with a lit fuse, or than he did with the “cliché Orient of L’Immortelle,” to use the phrasing of Roy Armes in his The Films of Alain Robbe-Grillet, which also contains a detailed analysis of Trans-Europ-Express’s mathematical “Structure and Symmetry.”

Armes, across several Tables of the sort that one might expect to find in a math textbook, illustrates the absolute symmetry of Trans-Europ-Express, symmetry being a quality that Robbe-Grillet strove for in his cinematic structure as in his literature. (Eliminating the author, the formula steps in as a passable substitute.) Such schematic rigor hasn’t become any more commonplace today, though self-parodic and self-aware treatment of genre materials—which of course neither began nor ended with the author/ theorist/ filmmaker—is almost de rigeur. Re-viewing Trans-Europ-Express, though, I saw little reason to alter my initial judgment that, of this generation’s French novelists-cum-filmmakers, Duras had etched herself onto film far more sharply than Robbe-Grillet—but the opportunity to flesh out the comparison is still a boon.

“Don’t be exuberant!” a doctor cautions Mathieu Amalric’s character in Jimmy P: Psychotherapy of a Plains Indian—futilely, of course, as Amalric carries on giving, to put it mildly, one of the most exuberant performances of his career. But perhaps the warning is also a note-to-self by Arnaud Desplechin, a director noted for a stylistic exuberance that sometimes verges on mannerism. I must confess that Desplechin is a filmmaker whose voice has somehow eluded me in the past, both in terms of the specifics of his style, and the question of what preoccupies him: yes, relationships, families, people’s indecisiveness, all that sort of thing, but the matter of what Desplechin is really interested in and why somehow has never connected with me. I’ve liked some of his films, particularly the anomalous period piece Esther Kahn (00), and parts of others—My Sex Life... or How I Got Into an Argument (96) feels to me more like an anthology of episodes than an organic film. But we all have blind spots that we can’t explain, and Desplechin has generally been one of mine: on some level, to do with his voice or my taste, I don’t quite get him.

So, in warming quite a lot to Jimmy P, it’s possible that I’ve gravitated to what Desplechin’s long-term admirers might regard as the wrong film. But the simplicity of it, the way that he restrains (some might say: censors) his usual exuberance, is what makes it interesting. This is, in any case, a film about repression and its effects.

The story is drawn from life and based on a case history described by the Hungarian-born anthropologist Georges Devereux (né György Dobó) in his 1951 book Reality and Dream: Psychotherapy of a Plains Indian. Devereux’s patient was James Picard, a Blackfoot Native American from Browning, Montana, who had incurred a fractured skull fighting in France in World War II. He was admitted to the Winter Hospital inTopeka, Kansas for seemingly inexplicable symptoms including dizzy spells and temporary blindness. In Desplechin’s version of the story, Picard (played by Benicio Del Toro) is welcomed with open arms by the Topeka doctors, but it’s clear that they understand neither him nor his case: “Behold our Indian brave!” smiles chief medic Dr. Karl Menninger (Larry Pine) as Picard enters the room—one of the more benign among several instances of casual racism that Picard encounters throughout the story.

At first, the doctors think that Picard, who is otherwise in perfect health, may be schizophrenic—but there’s another possibility, that he is “simply an Indian, whose personality and behavior we do not fully understand” (and why should they, given that Picard doesn’t understand them himself?). To treat him, the hospital brings in Devereux, an expert and a man effectively as alien to the American health system as the patient himself. As an anthropologist specializing in Native American culture, Devereux appears to be the man for the job, although he’s not traditionally qualified to administer a course of psychoanalysis—and although it’s not entirely clear from the film that psychoanalysis proper is what Picard undergoes, that’s what seems to be taking place. Oh, and it’s perhaps Desplechin’s boldest move in the film to put the word “psychoanalysis” in his title: you have to admire a filmmaker who can be so cavalier about box-office common sense.

Picard’s arrival at Topeka, and the brief prelude to it, set up the main body of the film, which are a series of dialogues between Picard and Devereux, increasingly opening up to admit flashbacks to Picard’s past and glimpses of his dreams. It’s the formal restraint of the sober, contemplative dialogues that, by contrast, give the dreams their special charge, and some of these sequences are terrifically haunting, little explosions of imagistic strangeness: Picard’s fight with a faceless figure, in his own “struggle with the angel,” as it were; a bear hunt, the bear being manifestly a stuffed one looming out of darkness; and the sudden gorgeous filling of the screen by a field of multicolored flowers.

As well as the images, key to Picard’s analysis is the Mojave language, Devereux’s knowledge of which encourages his patient to trust him and open up. Picard’s Indian name, we learn, means “Everybody Talks About Him” (which is appropriate to Picard’s clinical diagnosis, since he becomes the subject of the discourse of others). And Picard is surprised that Devereux is conversant with a key epithet applied to women, meaning “manly-hearted”: the adjective is used to describe the patient’s mother and sister alike.

What emerges from Picard’s analysis is almost disappointingly simple. He has trouble with women, displaced into symptoms of bodily trouble with himself, all stemming from unresolved family relationships—his mother, the daughter he has barely known, and the child’s mother. The interesting thing is that Picard himself, although it’s never said explicitly, emerges as what you might call a “womanly-hearted man”: a figure of great gentleness, courtesy, and delicacy. It’s notable that he and Devereux—the cultured, physically delicate-seeming man of the mind—are very different in this respect. It’s Devereux who blithely volunteers that he has slapped women in his time (“It clears the air”) to which Picard responds that he could never hit a woman. And while Devereux comes across, in Amalric’s dandyish performance, as something of an Old World Lothario, Picard seems to have a fuller and more tender regard for women, even if they are the root cause of his anxiety. The scenes in which Picard meets and later courts a woman in Topeka suggest a tender, solicitous lover, while Devereux’s scenes with his inamorata Madeleine Steiner (Gina McKee), who comes for an extended visit, present a man somewhat narcissistically soaking up her admiration; in fact, McKee’s character only rarely emerges as more than a sounding board for Devereux’s ideas and effusions.

The film slightly overplays its opposition between the gentle, monolithic Picard and the manic, elfin energy of Devereux—in fact, looking at a still of the two men walking side by side, you can’t help thinking you’re seeing Of Mice and Men in best Sunday suits. The contrast between the two leads is certainly odd, sometimes awkward. Amalric at times wildly overstates Devereux’s Eastern European “nutty professor” side, not without Desplechin’s collusion: he’s first seen in a diner, leaping up to answer a call from Menninger—“Vot’s new in Topeka?”—to a background of jumping jazz. As for Del Toro, he comparably overemphasizes the slow, measured rhythms of Picard’s damaged being. Some suspicions have been aired, since the film’s Cannes premiere last year, concerning Desplechin’s decision to cast a Puerto Rican, rather than a Native American, actor as Picard, and there may well be pragmatic funding reasons for the choice, although Desplechin has discussed his enthusiasm for Del Toro in an interview with FILM COMMENT. In fact, Del Toro is generally very sympathetic and effective here, and appealingly thoughtful, but his strangely inflected halting delivery is distracting; it’s hard to tell whether it’s meant to reflect Picard’s clinical condition or his origins, although none of the film’s other Indian characters—themselves played by Native American actors—speak remotely like this. You wonder whether Desplechin’s French-attuned ear is simply missing the strangeness of Del Toro’s performance.

But in saying this, I’m getting entangled in the web of cultural assumptions that the film undertakes to unpick. The film is, of course, about two men who are both in their own ways outsiders in official American society—in Devereux’s case, doubly so, as he’s a Hungarian who has reinvented himself as French to pursue a career abroad. Desplechin himself similarly does rather well as a “foreign expert” dealing with a difficult American case. Jimmy P is a French production, rather than American: French-funded but with a mixture of U.S. and French crew, including DP Stéphane Fontaine and composer Howard Shore, while Desplechin scripted the film with two co-writers, one French, one American: Julie Peyr and Film Comment’s own deputy editor Kent Jones.

Desplechin adopts an American identity just as Devereux/Dobó adopts a French one: if the film has a certain formal sobriety that at times approaches academicism, that’s because Desplechin seems to be aiming at a certain American cinema, of the simple, formal, somewhat monolithic kind best represented by recent Clint Eastwood films such as Changeling. His aim, in short, which he pulls off pretty honorably, could not be more French—to make un grand film américain.