“The art of survival is a story that never ends,” notes the charismatic con artist Irving Rosenfeld (Christian Bale) late in David O. Russell’s American Hustle—a sentiment as applicable to Seventies-era grafters as to present-day Hollywood filmmakers, especially those, like Russell, intent on marching to the beat of their own drums. In Russell’s case, make that the beat of his own symphony orchestra. And yet, at a moment when franchises dominate the release schedule and ambitious indie filmmakers struggle to secure financing, Russell has managed the remarkable feat of directing three mid-sized, character-driven movies in the span of four years. These films have earned 25 Oscar nominations, five of those his own, and exalted their ensemble casts, with Silver Linings Playbook and American Hustle each receiving four acting nominations and The Fighter before them picking up three (Silver Linings went on to win one, The Fighter two). They have connected with audiences and critics alike, and rehabilitated a career that, in the director’s own, Joseph Campbell–like telling of things, had become bogged down in the belly of the beast.

Twenty-four hours before American Hustle received its 10 Academy Award nominations—including that rare achievement of securing acting nods for all four of its principal stars (Bale, Amy Adams, Bradley Cooper, and Jennifer Lawrence)—Russell settled into a booth at the Early World Café, a pointedly unfashionable West L.A. diner that could easily have served as one of Hustle’s shooting locations. Russell, who lives nearby in Santa Monica, has been coming here for 15 years, ever since his older son attended a pre-school down the street, and he’s on a first-name basis with the entire staff. “We had a place that was just like this when we lived in New York—it was called the Metro, at 100th and Broadway,” he says. “And when I found this place, I felt I was oriented.”

Russell has found his bearings in other respects, too. He is making the movies of a director in full command of his craft and in full possession of a particular vision of the world. It is a less cynical vision, perhaps, than the one that fueled his early Spanking the Monkey, Flirting with Disaster, and Three Kings, but euphoric in its love of people, our major failings, and our personal victories. Over two hours, Russell, who’s as much of a live wire as any of his characters, spoke at length about his collaborative creative process, the song in his heart, and the art of surviving Hollywood.

You’ve talked about your last three movies as being a kind of loose trilogy on the subject of reinvention, about characters who are unhappy with themselves. But whereas the characters in Silver Linings Playbook and The Fighter are psychologically and emotionally damaged people trying to heal themselves, the ones in American Hustle are trying to become other people entirely, either to con someone, or to feel better inside their own skin, or both.

I don’t think the characters are all that different—it’s the same thing, they’re humans who have genuine love for other people and life and are reckoning with mistakes they’ve made and charting their course. I always need to feel the heartbeat of people trying to love. It was essential that I felt that about each character in this movie as well.

Can you talk a bit about the evolution of American Hustle from what was on the page to what ended up on the screen?

[Co-screenwriter] Eric Singer had been thinking about this story for a long time, and had done a lot of the work in terms of meeting some of the historical characters and researching it. When I got the script to read, I felt that these were characters—I couldn’t find them anywhere else. I said to Eric, “With your permission, I would like to come in and go in a different direction. I’d like you to be my corner man—you know who all the characters are—but I want it to be about romance and I want to create a love triangle and I want the wife to be a remarkable character, not merely a depressed character.” I don’t have an appetite for that now, to make something that’s relentlessly dark. I said, “I want people to be enchanting and they must have a lot of enchantment and love in their world.” There’s a horror to bipolarity or a horror to trying to survive Lowell, Massachusetts, but to me there’s also the wonder and the love and the magic that some people wouldn’t even see if you said, “Look at what you have.” But if you tried to take it away from them, they’d say, “No, no, wait a second. This is important to me.”

How do you put it all together when you write?

I put everything on the table: what are the most interesting things here? You need a doozy of a predicament, which is going to then allow these people to be vastly human, with an operatic range. Then you want to get real intimate and sweaty and emotional with them as they’re living and loving in that. So it’s about them and their music and their food and their loves and their passion, and the predicament’s like a blowtorch that propels you forward. You have the FBI, which turns into this larger plan, which turns into the mayor of Camden and his world, which is a beautiful link to the salt of the earth. I feel as Irving feels when he says, “People just got over Vietnam and Watergate and you’re going to go take down politicians?” I believe in trying to respect things and find dignity in them and in not kicking them when they’re down and saying, “Isn’t everything horrible?”

So, I take all these characters and I say, “I love the guy and his marriage, but he and his partner [the Bale and Adams characters] were truly in love.” Their love affair became the first driving element to me. Then it becomes very complicated. I knew I wanted to start in the middle of the story. I wanted the audience to feel like they just got air-dropped into this room with fascinating people you’d never seen before. It’s almost like the beginning of a play, with each person walking in. Everything has to be played like it’s life or death—that’s the only way I know how to make a picture. Every scene has to be treated like that.  

It has to be like a song that I feel in my head. I have to make sure every single thing happens in that song, from the bass to the treble to this vocal part: Amy, Bradley, Christian, the camera movement—that all has to happen until it feels like the song of the story. In one version of the opening scene, we started on Amy, and that was a debate that went on. You must work from instinct, you must hear the music, but some things you have to keep debating right until they take it out of your hands. That’s the only way I know how to try to make things good.

How much of that song is in your head when you show up on the set?

The whole thing. New things are maybe going to reveal themselves, or things I thought would reveal themselves turn out to be not as strong as I’d hoped. That’s why I say that two-thirds to three-quarters of what’s on the screen was in the script originally. Rewriting can happen either the night before, the week before, or the day of. You show up on the day and you’re like, “This isn’t what it should be. Let me rejigger this.” I’ll say to the actors, “It’s OK, it’s going to go like this,” and then we go over any changes together either in their trailer or the van in the morning.

There certainly is a musical quality to the film—the sound of the dialogue, and the way one scene flows into the next.

I think the rhythm of each person speaking is the micro level, and then there’s the rhythm of them together, and the movement of the scene and the movement of the camera and the music. Those are all rhythms inside rhythms inside rhythms. If I’m ever insistent to actors that they do something, it’s about that—a certain language, a certain rhythm—and Dustin Hoffman taught me that it was a legitimate way to direct. Until then, I thought I was cheating or not legit.

How do you talk to actors on the set?

From the get-go, I’ll say to any actor, “If we have differing opinions, I’m going to ask you to do it both ways.” And there are a lot of times I end up in the editing room saying, “Thank God that actor suggested that,” because my way was wrong. Very often there’s an “our way” that will emerge. To me, that’s the best way to collaborate—rather than debate it, let’s try it both ways.  I don’t believe in over-thinking things. I feel like you have to come from a place of instinct and rhythm and trust. I want to keep the river flowing. That’s part of the beauty of making these movies: welcome to this world where we’re making the movie at a brisk pace, and we’re all in it together. 

You make the morning rounds, like a doctor.

It’s very good to do that. It’s the best way to start the day, instead of on the set with all these people and lights and all this pressure. “What are you thinking about today? What’s going on? Let me tell you what I’m thinking. This is how I want to shoot it. This is how I want it to feel.” It’s very useful. 

Let’s talk about Amy Adams.  Her role is really complicated. 

I think her character opens up many sides of her, and I think that makes for some very alive and chemical, electric cinema. It felt raw to her, because she was vulnerable. She was playing a woman trying to figure out her life. Imagine being in that predicament—that would feel raw. I wanted that for her. For years I’d been promising her: “Let’s make a big part for you, so we can see you in all your range.”

These aren’t big-budget films with very long shooting schedules that you’re doing.  Do you do a lot of takes?

I don’t want it to be too many, but we’re not going to move on until we get what we feel is very special.

There are moments when we carve out time for an important scene and we may do it 10 to 20 times in a mag of film, but we don’t say cut, we just keep rolling. In the big scene where Bradley tells Amy he loves her and she drops her accent and reveals herself, we found that it was coming off, but not as raw and real as we wanted it to be. Amy was having, I think, some emotional logic issues with why she would reveal herself to him. So during the third time around, the camera was still rolling and I pulled Bradley over and said, “Really melt her. Really tell her you love her, but don’t stop until you see it go in.” So he told her he loved her, like Bradley to Amy inside those two characters. He crouches down and repeats it until you see Amy buckle a little bit until she’s leaning forward to kiss him, which was never scripted or asked for, and she kisses him very warmly and tenderly. So she’s melted, and then it makes logical sense that she says, “You really love me? This is who I am. Let’s see if you love this.”

You like to get right into the mix during the take. You’re not standing back somewhere by the monitor.

I’m hidden under a table if the camera is going all around the room, or I’m next to the Steadicam.

You shoot almost everything on the Steadicam, which can feel like a lazy way of shooting in some directors’ hands, but your choreography feels very precise, like in De Palma, Kubrick, Scorsese.

You have to have decisive shots. You’re simultaneously thinking of your coverage and protecting yourself, and getting the performances and the feeling of the scene, and you’re also thinking about some hero shots that you think can really make the cinema go turbo a little bit.

Do you storyboard?

Very often. It’s a combination of storyboarding and shot-listing. I tell everybody the shot list first thing in the morning and then Shelley [assistant director Shelley Ziegler] says to me, “OK, I think you’re going to get eight of those, but I don’t think you’re going to get these three.” And then I bargain with her. I say, “If I get this done by this time, then can I grab these candy shots?” We time out the whole day. We say, “This shot needs to be done by this time.” Why make it a mystery? I can’t work like that. I can say to anybody at any given time, “We need to be done with this in 20 minutes,” and if we break out of that, I want everybody to be aware, and we’re going to have to make up for it somewhere.

You also let a lot of beats play out in long takes, without coverage.

Sometimes we design a shot to be all in one, but that same shot may turn out to favor somebody. You may have matching masters—a master that’s designed around Christian and another that’s designed around Bradley, so we get these performances, but if we really need something to cut to… That’s very often why I tilt down to people’s hands while they’re talking. I also like studying people; when you talk to people, you’re not always just looking at eye level. That gives you a cut if you want to marry two takes. Or you stay on it and it gives you a nice feeling of taking the person in.

You’ve also developed a way of shooting that effectively inverts the usual ratio of time spent lighting the set to time spent actually shooting.

That’s another conversation I have early on with the DP and the gaffer, which is to say, “Listen, we need to light quickly, and make it beautiful.” And the way I try to do that is with natural, soft sources through windows or the ceiling, the way many great cinematographers have. It can be beautiful, it’s modeled, it has shades to it. Soft, natural light—I don’t like hard, slashing light. I love DPs who are artists in their own right, meaning that they think about emotion, they’re listening to the same song I’m listening to. They’re not just thinking of their job; they’re thinking of the whole song, the whole movie.

You shot on 35mm film, which may strike some people as counterintuitive for a director who likes to do long takes and keep the camera running between takes.

The last existing Fuji stock. I’m a little superstitious, and I am told by some experts who handle post that there is some unnamable quality that happens, that you can actually quantify, when you transfer film to digital.  I’m old-fashioned. I like old-fashioned formality, and part of that is shooting film. I’m a little bit of an analog guy in that way. I think the movies we’re making are analog. That’s a banner I’m happy to carry.

You’ve managed to do something that is supposed to be impossible in today’s Hollywood: you’ve done three character-based movies in a row that weren’t sequels or remakes or comic-book adaptations, all of which have been embraced by critics and audiences alike.

You must do every film like it’s your final film, every scene like it’s your last scene, and that’s the only chance you have to land on that very narrow landing strip. It means you’ve really got to hit it hard from the heart. It has to be a very captivating cinematic experience on many levels. The characters have to be very soulful and riveting in a way that’s very satisfying, that makes you love and care and, before you know it, it’s over.

It’s taken me 20 years to learn that if you want to have a shot at making good art, you’ve got to commit, and then things appear to you. It’s a great act of faith.

Every day on a movie set, the movie is just beating your ass, on a micro level and on a macro level. The mountain is beating you, for the first half or two-thirds of the day, and you’re trudging on. You’re like a fighter, to mix all my metaphors, and you’re in the corner covering up like Micky Ward. Then sometime around the middle of the day, you start to land a punch or two, and hopefully by two-thirds through the day, you’re like, “I am schooling this film now.” But every day it’s almost the same thing , which is a wonderful adventure. That’s the wonderful adventure of creation.

Boyhood

It wasn’t until the festival’s penultimate day that the Competition delivered a film truly worth raving about: Richard Linklater’s Boyhood. Shot over a period of almost 12 years, Boyhood charts the life of the protagonist Mason from elementary school to his first day of college. Far from being a whimsical experiment, the gamble fully pays off, allowing Linklater—who won the Silver Bear for Best Director—to paint a portrait of youth every bit as delicate and expansive as the adult relationships he realized in his Before trilogy.

Eschewing a conventional narrative arc, Boyhood maintains a sense of purpose as it moves forward one year at a time, gathering snippets of life that would be largely inconsequential on their own, but cumulatively add up to a thoroughly involving trajectory. The passage of time occurs with perfect fluidity and, as in real life, Mason’s early years are more difficult to distinguish. Once he enters puberty, the jumps become more distinct, not only due to the obvious changes in his appearance but (more interestingly) because of his evolving individuality as an adolescent.

The film is less successful at capturing the specificity of each time period. There are plenty of chronological signposts, such as the release of the sixth Harry Potter book, the first Obama campaign, and the proliferation of social media.  However, unlike in Dazed and Confused, where Linklater so ably integrated the Seventies zeitgeist into his characters’ personalities, here the indicators feel more decorative. While this heightens the story’s universality, it also relinquishes a certain degree of character complexity. By contrast, the evocation of sense of place is superb: the Confederate flag in a Republican neighbor’s garden; the polo shirts tucked into cargo shorts favored by Mason’s stepfather; the grandparents’ gift of a bible and a shotgun for Mason’s 15th birthday; the social significance of playing lacrosse or belonging to a sorority; the shared dorm rooms of college. Every aspect of the film is firmly anchored in American—specifically Texan—culture, marking Boyhood as the latest and richest chapter in the director’s career-long ethnography of his home state.

Black Coal, Thin Ice

Another distinguished latecomer was Dio Yinan’s Black Coal, Thin Ice, which went on to win the Golden Bear at Saturday’s award ceremony. In the film’s first part, set in 1999, police detective Zhang investigates the discovery of severed body parts in various coal factories around a small town in northern China. Things come to a head in a bloody and wonderfully staged showdown at a hair salon in which both suspects and two policemen are killed, resulting in Zhang’s suspension from service. Fast-forward to 2004 and Zhang is a hopeless alcoholic working as a security guard. After an old colleague reveals new evidence regarding the murders, he takes it upon himself to finally close the case, kicking off a serpentine plot fitted with all the trappings of the neo-noir genre.

In its first half, the film is excellent. The unkempt, unorthodox detective, the sudden bursts of violence and acrobatic action, and the dark, incongruous humor, all of which are strongly reminiscent of Bong Joon-ho’s work, move the story along at a brisk, captivating pace. As Zhang sleuths his way to the truth, however, this momentum disappears. The primary reason for this is sloppy storytelling, which makes the increasingly complex chain of events confusing instead of intriguing. When Zhang eventually cracks the case, the drawn-out resolution is deeply unsatisfying. Nevertheless, the film is visually striking throughout, consisting almost entirely of night scenes lit in acid neon colors and maintaining a brooding and ominous atmosphere that goes a long way towards making up for the weak narrative.

Blind Dates

Blind Dates, by Georgian director Levan Koguashvili, was one of the highlights of this year’s Forum sidebar. In the film Sandro, a single schoolteacher in his forties who still lives with his parents, falls for Manana, the mother of one of his students. Although she too is taken with him, it turns out that her husband, a fiercely jealous man incarcerated for crimes of passion, is about to be released. In one of the film’s many delightfully absurd scenarios, Sandro offers to drive Manana to the prison to pick up her husband. The latter, oblivious to their relationship, ends up hiring Sandro as his driver, and the two spend the day together trying to settle the husband’s various scores, including an extramarital affair.

The film offers a heartfelt reflection on middle-age loneliness and nice guys finishing last without ever turning into a wallow. The tactful approach and abundant deadpan humor evokes Aki Kaurismäki’s but without any trace of acerbity. With his hangdog demeanor, Andro Sakhvarelidze excels as Sandro, giving dignity and credibility to a character whose genuine and unwavering kindness could easily have lent itself to pathetic caricature. Rendered in carefully constructed yet unobtrusive shots and a muted color palette well suited to the film’s mood, Blind Dates is slow-burning, unpretentious, and irresistibly charming.

Metro Manila

The genre film is a recombinatory art, experimentally joining disparate well-worn elements. It has made Frankenstein mingle with everyone from Abbott & Costello to Aaron Eckhart’s generously oiled abs. These mutant artifacts are most successful when the stitches are hidden, as in last year’s Riddick, which combined survival horror, a locked-room siege, and a monster movie into one swiftly moving package. International genre products borrow from different thematic gene pools, but still aims for that kind of coherence. This year’s Film Comment Selects series includes a group of genre tests, all hoping to pull together taut thrills from a collection of clichés. They include an Austrian eco-horror monster movie, an American found-footage death cult dirge, a French cannibal art-film, and a Filipino family drama turned Training Day bullet ballet.

In East Antarctica, a river of red, iron-oxide infused water flows out of Taylor Glacier. Known as “Blood Falls”, it was discovered in 1911, but toiled in big screen obscurity until it was made into the subject of an Austrian horror movie in 2013. Blood Glacier is a resourceful riff on John Carpenter’s The Thing and Larry Fessenden’s Last Winter: a group of scientists at a remote arctic outpost are under attack from mutant insects that were born out of microorganisms brewing in the retreating, globally warmed ice. A briskly entertaining, old-fashioned monster movie, it wrings plenty out of its clapboard set, rubber effects, and omnipresent red LED eyes.

Blood Glacier

Director Marvin Kren gained notice from cult-horror types for his 2010 zombie apocalypse foray Rammbock: Berlin Undead (currently streaming on Netflix). Clocking in at just over an hour, it takes place entirely in an apartment complex, as a balding sad-sack and his young plumber pal try to fight off the infected. It’s reminiscent of Shaun of the Dead in its slacker protagonists and self-aware narrative, but Kren takes a more straight-faced approach toward his Romero variation (though he lacks Edgar Wright’s visual panache).

Blood Glacier benefits from this belief in the material, however ludicrous. It begins with lead Gerhard Liebmann, whom Kren had only seen in “supporting roles as a little chubby man.” He plays Janek, a surly depressive who loves only his dog and who barely blinks an eye when a microbiologist reveals that the beetle-like creature they have captured is a “hybrid of a woodlouse and a fox” that gestated in the belly of the latter. Kren tasks his mother Brigitte with siphoning off all the camp energy, as she plays a hard-nosed environmental minister who drills an Ibex-fly mutant in the neck with a power drill. In the chaos somehow Janek’s relationship with his dog registers as genuine, just as the baldy in Rammbock believably yearned for his departed beau. Kren is gifted at the revealing gesture, sketching character in a few striking movements without sacrificing tempo to exposition. With Janek, it lies in a few glances to his dachshund, and, as in Rammbock, the baldy embraces oblivion with a hug.

Flesh of My Flesh

Flesh of My Flesh is built entirely on atmosphere. This devouring instance of mother-love uses smeary, selectively focused frames to depict the tunnel vision of a young woman harvesting young human flesh to feed her growing daughter. Anna (Anna Julianna Jaenner) is always clear and sharp, the world around her a shifting, amorphous haze. The images recall Sokurov in the soft focus of Taurus or the distorting lenses of Stone. A striking pale beauty with sharply angled cheekbones, she lures her male targets with the mere hint of a smile, and they always follow. Julianna Jaenner’s blank, beatific performance has the touch of the supernatural, both angelic and vampiric, appropriate for the Grimm’s fairy tales she tells her flesh-imbibing girl at bedtime. The film shatters its mystical hold with an unnecessary (and telegraphed) plot twist, but it remains an unusual, opaque object held together by Julianna Jaenner’s hypnotic performance.

The police procedural Felony chooses to do one genre and does it well. Director Matthew Saville’s film never surprises, but its version of the cop corruption drama at least gives its actors room to sprawl and transcend its clichés, which Joel Edgerton does as the moody cop who covers up a hit and run. Seemingly holding back tears the entire film, Edgerton is the grand dame of the male weepie (see: Warrior), and his tremblingly sensitive work here is yet further evidence.

Of the genre-splicing movies in this year’s Film Comment Selects, however, Blood Glacier is the most successful mutant, suturing the creature feature, the eco-parable, and the man-and-his-dog love story into one improbably entertaining mutt of a movie.

On Valentine’s Day we asked our Twitter followers that all-important question: what movie do you show a potential romantic partner to impress them, or gauge their tastes? The prize was the chance to win a signed magazine:

Christopher Nolan	Claire Denis	Joel and Ethan Coen
Guy Maddin	David Cronenberg	Wes Anderson

The response was unprecedented, a testament to the breadth of film knowledge and tastes of our readership. Even the smart-asses were pretty creative:

@FilmComment Guinea Pig: Mermaid in a Manhole.

— Nick Pinkerton (@NickPinkerton) February 14, 2014

@FilmComment PUMP UP THE VOLUME, as you do.

— Jorge I. Castillo (@jicastillo) February 14, 2014

@FilmComment The Lemon Grove Kids Meet the Monsters.

— Nick Pinkerton (@NickPinkerton) February 14, 2014

@FilmComment SNOW DOGS.

— The Doug (@douglenox) February 14, 2014

@FilmComment Dead Ringers

— Kate Hagen (@thathagengrrl) February 14, 2014

@FilmComment RoboCop or Eccentricities of a Blonde-Haired Girl

— Mark Garrett (@MarkRGarrett) February 14, 2014

@FilmComment Bad Timing by Nicolas Roeg

— wolfbats (@wolfbats) February 14, 2014

@FilmComment Begotten by Elias E. Merhige

— James McLallen (@ThyJamesMachine) February 14, 2014

@FilmComment ENTRAILS OF A VIRGIN (Komizu, 1986)

— Will Sloan (@WillSloanEsq) February 14, 2014

@FilmComment Irreversible

— Ross Miller (@rosstmiller) February 14, 2014

@filmcomment The Apple Dumpling Gang Rides Again

— A1 Filmmaking Advice (@A1FilmAdvice) February 14, 2014

@FilmComment show your valentine Salo

— lyndsey (@vvangoghs) February 14, 2014

@FilmComment Space Balls

— citizenrobot (@citizenrobot) February 14, 2014

@FilmComment ANTICHRIST

— Jake Pitre (@jake_pitre) February 14, 2014

Audition. RT @FilmComment: What movie do you show a potential romantic partner to impress them or gauge their tastes?

— Scott Beggs (@scottmbeggs) February 14, 2014

@FilmComment a youtube clip of Clint Eastwood talking to a chair.

— brycerichardson (@brycerichardson) February 14, 2014

Of course, some people took the challenge seriously, as evidenced by their willingness to subject their prospective dates to some nontraditional romantic fare:

@FilmComment In the Realm of the Senses. Trial by fire, baby.

— Dana Stevens (@thehighsign) February 14, 2014

@FilmComment three colours red. if it doesn't leave them stunned and speechless, they don't feel.

— Ian Robinson (@eyeswideshut75) February 14, 2014

@FilmComment certified copy, of course.

— Simran Bhalla (@smbhalla) February 14, 2014

@FilmComment In Vanda's Room

— Gonzalo Patricio (@GonzaloPatricio) February 14, 2014

@FilmComment Akerman's News from Home

— G.P.Lockey (@GPLockey) February 14, 2014

@FilmComment SUPERSTAR: THE KAREN CARPENTER STORY. I don't think I'm doing this right.

— Harris Pacey (@HarrisPacey) February 14, 2014

@FilmComment Blow Up

— Jesse Woodcock (@JesseRobertW) February 14, 2014

@FilmComment Jealousy is my middle name, Secret Sunshine, Sassy Girl, Dil Se

— Reini Urban (@Reini_Urban) February 14, 2014

@FilmComment Last Tango in Paris. [No further comment.]

— Violet (flower) (@keepingviolet) February 14, 2014

.@filmcomment i'd double feature TWO FOR THE ROAD & POSSESSION to determine if a guy or girl was my soulmate.

— Christen Valentine (@deadpandolores) February 14, 2014

@FilmComment Stranger Than Paradise then The Mirror, back to back. Then! Backwards/forewards-The Shining. That should cover it.

— Picture Show (@APictureShow) February 14, 2014

@FilmComment Stalker

— Marco Natoli (@natoli_marco) February 14, 2014

@FilmComment THE DEVIL'S CLEAVAGE

— Jesse Furgurson (@JesseFurgurson) February 14, 2014

@FilmComment Been a long time. Nowadays I might show them Scenes from a Marriage so they understand why I won't get married.

— Provolone (@erinprovolone) February 14, 2014

@FilmComment Leos Carax - Mauvais Sang

— Danny Southern (@dannysouthern) February 14, 2014

@FilmComment Stolen Kisses (and the rest of the Antoine Doinel cycle)

— Kenny Suleimanagich (@kennysule) February 14, 2014

@FilmComment THE ACT OF SEEING WITH ONE'S OWN EYES (1971, Brakhage)

— Patrick Brian Smith (@PatrickBrianS) February 14, 2014

@FilmComment first movie I ever showed my first love was Elevator to the Gallows. Then Umberto D. Then W.R. Mysteries of the Organism.

— Ahmed Khawaja (@ahmedkhawaja1) February 14, 2014

@FilmComment Quatre nuits d'un rêveur, Toute une nuit, Blissfully Yours & [the ending of ] City Lights.

— Keefe Murphy (@eyeshakingking_) February 14, 2014

@FilmComment Holy Motors!

— Susan Warmenhoven (@Cinesuus) February 14, 2014

But what’s more serious than not sharing a sense of humor? 

@FilmComment The Jerk. If someone doesn't love that movie, not only would I not date them, I'm pretty sure they'd be my sworn enemy.

— Mitch Anderson (@MitchFAnderson) February 14, 2014

@FilmComment Annie Hall. Every time.

— Jon Pinon (@jonjonmp) February 14, 2014

@FilmComment Bogdanovich's What's Up Doc? If you don't get screwball comedy, I don't get you.

— Tripp Burton (@TrippBurton13) February 14, 2014

@FilmComment #RaisingArizona - deal breaker if you don't love Cohen Brother's style! Plus it keeps things light, and it's about love. :]

— Daniel Gradias (@grrrdias) February 14, 2014

@FilmComment Who Framed Roger Rabbit.

— Andrew Simpson (@Andrew_Simpson_) February 14, 2014

@FilmComment The Room. If she doesn't see why that's funny, not sure it's gonna work out!

— James Smith (@JamesSmithFilm) February 14, 2014

@FilmComment CLUELESS. Duh...

— Tracy Woodley (@TracyWoodley) February 14, 2014

Trading Places, of course. RT @FilmComment: What movie do you show a potential romantic partner to impress them or gauge their tastes?

— 香里園ウォーカー (@SighKingu) February 14, 2014

@FilmComment THE BIG LEBOWSKI - If she can go line for line, or at least not mind me doing it, she's the one. #NotIntotheWholeBrevityThing

— Harless (@HarlesstheTwit) February 14, 2014

@FilmComment Romy and Michelle's High School Reunion (honestly)

— John Oursler (@JMOursler) February 14, 2014

@FilmComment i never done this before but i would probably use kaurismäki's leningrad cowboys go america.

— stevve (@st3vv3) February 14, 2014

@FilmComment Hairspray [original]. If he doesn't laugh or want to dance afterwards, it's over.

— Rick Powell (@GenetsBastard) February 14, 2014

@FilmComment All of Dreyer. If they endure great! If not, you've separated the wheat from the chaff.

— Seth Sherwood (@sksherwos) February 14, 2014

@FilmComment The Princess Bride. Love it. Endlessly quotable.

— Sean Gallagher (@SGLovesMovies) February 14, 2014

@FilmComment Milos Forman's MAN ON THE MOON (1999) w Jim Carrey. Because it's a "hidden gem," so funny, so sweet. Don't like it? We're done.

— Sean Malin (@cinemalins) February 14, 2014

The same goes for gore. So many different kinds are out there, but do you want to share a bed with a Dario Argento, an Asia Argento, an Eli Roth, or a Wes Craven? (Figuratively speaking.)

@FilmComment The last 15 minutes of Kill List

— Justin Lerner (@justinlerner) February 14, 2014

@filmcomment THE SHINING. If they don't like The Shining, we're just not meant to be.

— Adele (@missy__m) February 14, 2014

A Clockwork Orange. MT @FilmComment What movie do you show a potential romantic partner to impress them or gauge their tastes?

— Allison O. (@Sue_DeNym08) February 14, 2014

@FilmComment During one of our first few dates, I showed my boyfriend 'Duel.' He liked it. We've been together for six years.

— Amanzig (@MediaWaltz) February 14, 2014

@FilmComment Peter Jackson's Braindead.

— norman j. bates (@edogawaram) February 14, 2014

@FilmComment SUSPIRIA.

— Fernando Vallejo (@iam_fernando) February 14, 2014

@FilmComment Martyrs then A Serbian Film on the second date. If they survive that combo they will never leave.

— Benjamin Vargas (@bensower) February 14, 2014

Not to be forgotten are the Classical Hollywood and New Hollywood selections—you know, for someone who gets as excited by The American Cinema and Robert Osborne’s introductions as you do. Then when the two of you get old, you can go on the TCM Classic Cruise and debate Further Research candidates together.

@FilmComment L'Atalante

— Bashline (@bashline) February 14, 2014

@FilmComment THE LADY EVE. If they're not down with Sturges (or screwball), we're not likely to make it.

— Daniel Lunsford (@peachfish42) February 14, 2014

@FilmComment Night of the Hunter

— JMOYNS (@JesseMoynihan) February 14, 2014

@FilmComment MANHATTAN or SINGIN' IN THE RAIN

— Kyle Turner (@TyleKurner) February 14, 2014

@FilmComment Trouble in Paradise!

— Algunas Chicas (@AlgunasChicas) February 14, 2014

@FilmComment New York, New York. 1977. DeNiro. Liza. Scorsese.

— €ric Morgan (@MorganXIII) February 14, 2014

@FilmComment Touch of Evil, I think. Or On the Waterfront. If you don't like either, you're gone.

— Christina (@christinalefou) February 14, 2014

@FilmComment THE END OF THE AFFAIR ... which curiously never seems to work

— Victor Morton (@vjmfilms) February 14, 2014

@FilmComment The Champ, no tears no human.

— Thomas Alicante (@TomAlicante) February 14, 2014

@FilmComment Definitely CITY LIGHTS. If they can appreciate a silent film, they're good in my book.

— Zoë Eckman (@hedgerows) February 14, 2014

@FilmComment The Philadelphia Story. #ckdexterhaven

— Fulmer (@Fulmer) February 14, 2014

@FilmComment The Man Who Came to Dinner, for the most delightful insults ever.

— Ms. Vazquez (@tiffbump) February 14, 2014

@FilmComment Little Fugitive, if they don't find it a tearjerker, it's a no no.

— Eavan Mckay (@EavanMckay) February 14, 2014

@FilmComment Original Night and the city.

— Margot and the nukes (@MargotNuclear) February 14, 2014

@FilmComment Me and My Gal (Raoul Walsh, 1932)

— Thomas Prieto (@Tommy_Prieto) February 14, 2014

@FilmComment JOHNNY GUITAR.

— Fernando F. Croce (@FernandoFCroce) February 14, 2014

@FilmComment REAR WINDOW. You don't have to love it as much as I do but if you don't at least like it there is something wrong with you.

— Phil Garcia (@atoep) February 14, 2014

@FilmComment GONE WITH THE WIND, if they make it through the whole 4 hours without pee or snack breaks, I know they're "the one".

— Jose Solís (@josekicksass) February 14, 2014

@FilmComment Billy Wilder's THE APARTMENT. If they don't cry, they better shut up & deal.

— Martha (@earlyova) February 14, 2014

Or you could trawl other cinephilic waters with the copy/paste aesthetics of a Quentin Tarantino movie. Notably, QT has said that when it’s getting serious with a woman, he’ll show them Rio Bravo. (I guess “Spiderbaby” passed the test.)

@FilmComment Natural Born Killers

— Aaron Lazenby (@alazenby) February 14, 2014

PULP FICTION, of course. RT @FilmComment What movie do you show a potential romantic partner to impress them or gauge their tastes?

— Brynn Beardsley (@brynnbeard) February 14, 2014

And for the comprehensive romantic, there is Richard Linklater’s Before trilogy. You can more or less run predictive models about a prospective relationship based on how your partner reacts to these:

@FilmComment Before Sunset

— Michel (@michelsimoes) February 14, 2014

@mattyaustin @FilmComment i will go with before sunrise/sunset

— filmi chokara (@duggu101) February 14, 2014

Even if you’re alone on Valentine’s Day, remember: the best part about being single is getting to watch whatever you want, whenever you want!

Congratulations to our winners Adriana Floridia (@adrifloridia), James McLallen (@ThyJamesMachine), and Mitch Anderson (@MitchFAnderson). We love you! Cinema loves you.

“For flowers do not age honestly like leaves, which lose nothing of their beauty after they have died; flowers wither like old and overly made-up dowagers, and they die ridiculously on stems that seemed to carry them to the clouds. It is impossible to exaggerate the tragicomic oppositions indicated in the course of this death-drama, endlessly played out between earth and sky, and it is evident that one can only paraphrase this laughable duel by introducing, not as a sentence, but more precisely as an ink stain, this nauseating banality: love smells like death.”

—Georges Bataille, The Language of Flowers (1929)

Alain Resnais’s psychologically bruising film maudit is a sci-fi romance that charts a long-term relationship’s evolution from an atypically sullen meet-cute to the bitter resentment only the profound understanding of another human being can breed. It’s also an empathetic, if cool, portrait of the solipsistic tendencies and dithering that a depressive mindset allows for, and the ways two similarly afflicted people accommodate and temporarily alleviate each other’s pain.

After a suicide attempt following the end of his seven-year relationship with live-in girlfriend Catrine (Olga Georges-Picot), Claude Ridder (Claude Rich) is recruited by scientists from the Crespel Research Center to participate in their first time-travel experiment using a human subject. Claude is supposed to be sent back exactly one year into his past for exactly one minute, but the procedure goes haywire and he gets stuck in an endless loop from which only death can free him.

Resnais has been a lifelong enthusiast of the fantastic and macabre (and would collaborate on two unrealized projects with Stan Lee). In Je t’aime, je t’aime he and  screenwriter Jacques Sternberg, a well-regarded science-fiction novelist, use time travel as a device for exploring the obstacles life poses to receiving or displaying affection and for probing the pleasures of solitude (even, or especially, in the company of a lover, with all the tension it creates). Scenes end or begin right as a lull in the conversation threatens to become a quarrel; sometimes, in a typically mysterious and elastic use of time, a scene will depict a mere few seconds at the tail end of a fight. In one such moment, Claude’s hand lingers on Catrine’s arm, and they both stare straight ahead, exhausted, with their backs to the wall. The astringent performances and Resnais’s deep-focus two-shots are infused with the depth of the characters’ emotional fragility, so that we feel as though the entirety of their argument has played out before our eyes.

Resnais’s interest lies in how this steady drip of quotidian moments can be individually parsed and how the steadiness endows the material with dimension and weight. The narrative hard-cuts abruptly from one scene to the next, jumping days, months, even years, doubling back again and again to certain events. Resnais finds visual and tactile correlations with the couple’s abrupt emotional shifts, with their insomnia, boredom, spite, the sensation of their warm bodies together in bed. (“Visual and tactile” are two words we even hear spoken by Claude as he reads in his office while the lights are switched off around him.) Claude, for his part, can’t effect any change in the events as they unfold, or else is too numb and disgusted with himself to maintain the willpower necessary to bring about that change. His constitution, pre- and post–suicide attempt, is best suited to daydreams and neuroses-induced petulance, while the time travel amounts to a kind of eternal return.

The time-travel machine itself is organic: a potato-colored and tumor-shaped structure, the interior made of a thin, skin-like canvas and outfitted with a chair that fits snugly to Claude’s form, a comfortable launching pad from which he is sent into a turbulent past. The notion of an inanimate object that appears sentient and offers an entry point to the past has its thematic precedent in Resnais’s short documentary Toute la mémoire du monde (56), which depicts the Bibliothèque nationale de France as a space for adventure amid dark shadows and lurking figures, a complex hive mind composed of knowledge and history, with an indexing system, overseen by marble statues and busts, that appears to organize itself intuitively.

Resnais’s work generally evinces a sensitivity both to contemporary modes of alienation and to the beauty of industrial processes that might otherwise be seen as merely ugly or disastrous. His documentary on plastics manufacturing, Le Chant de Styrène (58, written by Raymond Queneau), features bright colors, geometrically precise CinemaScope compositions, and technology money-shots. Yet Je t’aime, Je t’aime eschews this kind of celebration of the modern, and the more traditional sci-fi trappings are all but absent here. The absolute focus on Claude and Catrine’s relationship instead underlines the subjectivity of historical time, suggesting that it is perhaps impossible to understand as it is being lived. While this may not seem an overtly controversial stance, it certainly didn’t do the film any favors when it was released in 1968.

Rich and Georges-Picot make a handsome couple, and they begin to wear each other’s features, sharing mannerisms and facial expressions. Both actors look pensive, trapped under harsh lighting, their fine jawlines and cheekbones made severe, even animalistic. Their default look, however, is one of pleased indifference. When they bicker, tease, or moon over each other, the anger, playfulness, or joy is overt, with a purity of expression that gives both actors a childlike quality, which in turn makes even familiar relationship milestones register with the power of a first encounter. In a movie with numerous motifs juxtaposing the cosmic with the mundane, it’s the rhythm that Rich and Georges-Picot find with one another that becomes most moving. Their jabs at each other’s weaknesses and the quiet moments when they both stare into the middle distance create a separate, untouchable space outside of time, and perhaps even memory.

As with the protagonists of Last Year at Marienbad, Mon oncle d’Amérique, and You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet, the journey through Claude’s life and interiority, past and present, also supplies a metaphor for cinema as being more than the sum of celluloid, projectors, and a screen. It’s a medium that re-frames and gives new shape to the trauma and complexity of being alive, allowing us to re-conceptualize where we’ve been and what we’ve done there. The time-travel premise evokes the habit of replaying one’s personal failures, the need to supply some sort of narrative to heartache and true love alike. But it is still impossible to pinpoint the exact moment when Claude and Catrine began to drift apart, where the resentment sprouted from, and just as impossible, time travel be damned, to nail down that moment and examine it: as with scanning back and forth through the same few seconds of film, you can only find that moment in stillness, in retrospect.

Claude is buffeted on this sea of time so convulsively that some scenes last for only a single line of dialogue or a glance. Watching him sit in a waiting room reading a magazine, leave his apartment to buy cigarettes, or play with a kitten on his bed, viewers are granted space to scrutinize and re-scrutinize this map of a relationship—and construct their own individual “Choose Your Own Adventures” of interrelated personal memories, to explore that collection of sensations provoked by being with another person who can propel you forward and give you a sense of purpose and belonging.

Desire—especially in the 19th-century novel—is never simple. Complicated by rigid social mores, relationships are rarely bilateral, and passion is frequently paired with deceit. Emile Zola’s scandal-rich 1867 novel Thérèse Raquin is no exception. Adapted for the theater by Zola himself in 1873, the story has seen many reincarnations on both stage and screen, the latest of which is Charlie Stratton’s debut feature, In Secret. In spite of the rather trite title and a hazy poster image that resembles a harlequin romance cover, In Secret imbues Zola’s dark tale of love, lust, and murder in the lower echelons of Paris with modern-day appeal in large part thanks to its stellar principal cast: Elizabeth Olsen, Jessica Lange, and Oscar Isaac.

Left in the care of her domineering aunt, Madame Raquin (Lange), when she’s a mere child, Thérèse (Olsen) is married off to her sickly cousin Camille (Tom Felton) the minute she comes of age. As Madame reminds her, Thérèse is an “illegitimate”: having no fortune or traceable maternal bloodline, she’s a social leper who should be grateful Camille is willing to take her. A severe asthmatic with peaked green complexion, Camille offers little stimulation between the sheets, so when the family moves from the countryside to Paris, Thérèse is easily tempted into a torrid affair with her husband’s co-worker, Laurent (Isaac). Oozing pheromones from his every pore, Laurent is pure machismo in muttonchops: his scent alone is enough to drive Thérèse into a dizzy spell.

Laurent awakens a passion in Thérèse she was hitherto unaware she was capable of. From the first time he instructs her to unbutton her blouse, waistcoats and petticoats are shed with impressive rapidity and frequency as the two can scarcely keep their hands off each other. For the first time in her life, Thérèse feels free, but her temporary bliss quickly gives way to the realization that Laurent has come to her rescue too late: she will forever be imprisoned by her marriage.

This theme of captivity is paralleled—perhaps a little too neatly—by a caged black bear Camille regularly visits at the Paris zoo. When a visitor throws bread and honey into its cage, the food gets stuck to the fur on its back; driven to madness, the bear tears away at its own flesh. “She could smell the honey, but she couldn’t reach it,” Camille explains to Laurent one day. It’s the kind of device that works well on the page but feels a bit heavy-handed on screen. Still, the point is well taken: the only viable solution Laurent can see to save Thérèse from the bear’s fate is to rid their love of its primary obstacle.

With that, the film steps out of Madame Bovary territory and into the darker neighborhood of Crime and Punishment, as the story’s second half explores the many ways passion can be poisoned by guilt. Portrayed through a color palette that evokes Picasso’s Blue Period, the drama fittingly unfolds in the shadows of dank interiors—dark bedrooms, dimly lit corridors, and the claustrophobic parlor in the back of the fabric shop where Madame hosts her weekly domino games.

Like any adaptation, the film glosses over some of the finer details of the novel, but it preserves the author’s moral ambiguity towards his characters. All of them come across as reprehensible in some way, as each can be blamed for the other’s misfortune. It’s precisely this shifting of allegiances that propels the film forward: like matter itself, the love triangle at the film’s center cannot be created nor destroyed, but only change forms.

The film’s strength depends more on the A-list cast than on the workings of the script. Olsen has no trouble carrying the film with her captivating presence, her big green eyes showcasing an impressive range of emotion as Thérèse undergoes a complete metamorphosis. Lange eludes the element of caricature written into her character, maintaining a looming presence that shifts from despicable to sympathetic and back again, while Isaac’s base charisma gives his character a deft shove from Dr. Jekyll to Mr. Hyde. As the one-dimensional Camille, Felton is given the least to work with—he’s more of a foil than a full character. But he moves past his sneering Draco Malfoy in The Harry Potter franchise to portray Camille’s irritating naiveté with great efficacy. 

The leads are backed up by an impeccably cast foursome of domino players, to whom the film keeps returning: Shirley Henderson, John Kavanagh, Mackenzie Crook, and a toned-down Matt Lucas. Intended by the director as a “misguided Greek chorus,” Madame’s gossipy group provide one of the film’s chief delights. Oscillating between suspicion and cluelessness, they imbue the drama with both added tension and a much-needed dose of black humor—even if their morbid conversations occasionally foreshadow the film’s plot to within an inch of its life.

Although the film dips its toe in a number of themes—the social inequities of class and gender, attraction, mortality, money—they all feed into the story’s exploration of our most primitive drives. Desire, as it turns out, can be nasty, brutish, and short.

The Carey Treatment screens on 35mm on Tuesday, February 25 as part of Film Comment Selects.

To get to 1972’s The Carey Treatment, Blake Edwards’s bitter goodbye to American studio filmmaking, we’ll begin with his even more bitter comeback. At the beginning of Edwards’s 1981 film-à-clef S.O.B., set “once upon a time in a wonderful land called Hollywood,” producer Felix Farmer (Richard Mulligan) has been reduced to catatonia by the failure of his latest film, Night Wind, a saccharine musical starring his wife, Sally Miles (Julie Andrews, whom Edwards had married in 1969). After a string of botched suicide attempts, Farmer is resurrected by a bolt of inspiration: “We sold ’em schmaltz,” he bellows. “They want sadomasochism!” Using his own money, Farmer buys Night Wind back from Capitol Studios and proceeds to overhaul it into a kind of psychological softcore smut epic. But Capitol president David Blackman (Robert Vaughn) pulls off a backroom deal that gives him control of the negative and final cut, and this sends Farmer permanently off the deep end. The title stands for, among other things, Standard Operational Bullshit: show business as usual.

Distorted by the fun-house mirror of farce, the events in S.O.B. directly reflect on events in Edwards and Andrews’s own parallel careers. While both had had more than their share of astronomical successes in the 1960s, nobody was buying Edwards’s brand of slapstick comedy in the latter half of the decade, and he was experiencing an identity crisis. He and Andrews’s 1970 burlesque musical Darling Lili, for Paramount, had been an ill-starred shoot and box-office catastrophe. In the wake of its belly flop, Paramount head of production Robert Evans practically accused Edwards of sedition, and so Edwards mounted his next project at MGM, a nostalgic Western called Wild Rovers starring William Holden and Ryan O’Neal. At MGM, however, Edwards acquired a new professional bête noire in the person of incoming president James Aubrey, a bottom-line-minded former CBS executive who’d been invited to the financially foundering company in 1969 to plug leaks in the hull. (At CBS, early Beverly Hillbillies champion Aubrey was known for his all-purpose prescription of “broads, bosoms, and fun,” called “The Aubrey Dictum.”) With Aubrey’s arrival, two Andrews projects, She Loves Me and Edwards’s adaptation of Irving Berlin’s Say It with Music, were dropped from the slate, and when Wild Rovers was released in summer of 1971, what Edwards called his “best movie” was missing either 20 or 40 minutes from his final cut. Isn’t the best movie always the one that gets away?

Not necessarily. Edwards made no such grand claims for The Carey Treatment—which plays next week as part of Film Comments Selects in a “Healthcare Mayhem” double-bill with 1971’s The Hospital—whose editing he likewise lost control of. But though the film has widely been regarded as collateral damage in the clash between Edwards and Aubrey, there’s still plenty of material worth salvaging from the wreckage. The story of the production began when Aubrey offered Edwards a property based on a thriller called A Case of Need, published in 1968 and credited to one “Jeffery Hudson”—a pseudonym for then–Harvard Medical School doctoral student Michael Crichton. Presumably it was during Crichton’s clinical rotations at Boston City Hospital that he found his inspiration for the book, which concerns one Dr. John Berry, a pathologist at a Boston hospital investigating the circumstances surrounding what appears at first to be a fatal botched abortion. Edwards, who had dealt with suspense material successfully before—see 1962’s Experiment in Terror, released to Blu-ray last year by Twilight Time—went for it.

The screenplay, written in a hardboiled patois, was credited to James P. Bonner—a pseudonym employed occasionally by husband-wife team Irving Ravetch and Harriet Frank Jr., though given that they’d kept their real names on acclaimed works like Hud and Norma Rae, one can assume that they also thought they were working beneath their talents here. Dr. Berry has become Dr. Peter Carey in the film, and is played by James Coburn, who’d previously starred for Edwards in What Did You Do in the War, Daddy? (66), a movie which began the run of box-office bad luck that The Carey Treatment would extend. Dr. Carey is a Californian transplant newly arrived to work at an unnamed Boston hospital. The victim of the clumsy abortion is 15-year-old Karen Randall (Melissa Torme-March), the daughter of Carey’s new boss, the hospital’s chief surgeon and a leading citizen, Dr. J.D. Randall (Dan O’Herlihy). The fall guy is Carey’s friend from his intern days, Dr. David Tao (The hard-gigging Chinese-American actor James Hong, in a substantial role.) An alleged deathbed confession from Karen is all that it takes to land Tao in jail, but Carey, convinced of Tao’s innocence, decides to launch his own investigation into the matter.

When Carey first pulls into the hospital, a cop shoos him out of a doctor’s-only parking space—presumably nobody with those aviator sunglasses and swinging brown suede jacket could be an institutional square. Carey’s plays-by-his-own-rules investigative methods owe more to Hammett’s Continental Op than Jack Klugman’s Quincy, M.E. The poster for the film, which shows Coburn delivering a sweeping backhand blow to a silhouetted figure, asserts that Dr. Carey “has a unique way of operating.” He sure does: in order to extract information from Karen’s slatternly boarding-school roommate, Carey essentially kidnaps the teenaged girl and drops a righteous slut-shaming on her while recklessly weaving his station wagon along precarious coastal roads and suicidally jumping a rising drawbridge. Later, Carey will storm into his boss’s office with a blown-up, poster-size photograph of himself caught in flagrante delicto to prove a point, and wring a confession out of a junkie by convincing her she’s going into withdrawal.

To say the absolute least, Dr. Carey is a bit of a loose cannon—though other than a lingering scene where he sits in on Karen’s autopsy, it’s hard to say where the vehemence with which he pursues the mystery of her death is coming from. How much of the protagonist’s erratic character is attributable to ham-handed studio interference? With some movies, foreknowledge of their mutilation prejudices the viewer, but in the case of The Carey Treatment, you’d have to be pretty dopey not to notice the surgical scarring. The courtship between Carey and a pretty dietician at the hospital named “Georgia Hightower” (Jennifer O’Neill, terrible in a terrible part) is taken completely for granted. One minute Carey’s asking her out to dinner, the next he’s giving her a key to his new pad and she’s talking about bringing her waffle iron over, with no hint as to how we got from Point A to Point D. Loose ends dangle askew everywhere. The sleazy photographer played by Sol Schwade who snaps Carey and Hightower in bed together—who is he working for, and what leverage could anyone hope to gain by proving a relationship between two consenting adults? Why would Karen Randall—or her stepmother, the only witness to her stepdaughter’s alleged accusation—want to put Dr. Tao in jail for a crime he didn’t commit in the first place?

In Sam Wasson’s critical biography A Splurch in the Kisser: The Movies of Blake Edwards, Edwards is quoted as saying that The Carey Treatment was a trap laid out by Aubrey, intended for failure from the get-go, and that the thrift-obsessed exec “was actually out to crucify [him]” when he cut two weeks off of the shoot. While I don’t doubt that there was a real enmity between the two men, it’s worth noting that Aubrey’s own daughter, Skye Aubrey, appears in the substantial role of a nurse with a morphine habit in The Carey Treatment, and it’s giving him credit for an unusual amount of malice to suggest he would throw his own flesh-and-blood under the bus just to spite an uppity director. (Incidentally, Melissa Torme-March, in her only film role here, is the offspring of the Velvet Fog, Mel Torme.)

The cut-rate production history of The Carey Treatment is an incontrovertible fact, but so is Coburn’s cocky charisma and flippant flirtatiousness. With his grinning donkey choppers, lean prowl, and those long hands that wander about with a mind of their own, the 43-year-old Coburn is in fine form, and the P.I. trappings suit him. (See for further reference his starring role in the 1978 TV miniseries made from Hammett’s The Dain Curse.) Structured as a string of interrogative vignettes, the film makes room for some memorable supporting bits, including a wry Pat Hingle as a menacing basset hound of a police captain; Elizabeth Allen as the accusing stepmother, “shanty Irish” who married rich and has stayed Scotch-drunk since; and plummy voiceover actor Alex Dreier as the deceased’s rotund gourmand uncle with a rep for performing abortions for the high-born Brahmin set, who absently stirs a Danish rum sauce while Carey cross-examines him.

It’s in such odd touches that Edwards raises expository scenes above the routine, and his disillusion with this project didn’t diminish his genius in composing for the anamorphic frame, developing an overarching visual motif of entrapment that renders the city as a honeycomb of cells. The Carey Treatment is a solid specimen of the Boston movie, settled chronologically and in quality somewhere between the high peaks of Richard Fleischer’s The Boston Strangler in 1968 and Peter Yates’s The Friends of Eddie Coyle in 1973. All of the above are investigation movies—and as in the better films of their type, this means not only an investigation into a particular crime but an excavation of the various strata of the society which produced that crime. Carey’s investigation will take him to the finest homes on Commonwealth Avenue, as well as to seedy steam baths on Washington Ave. in the shadow of the since-demolished elevated Orange Line.

The Carey Treatment manifests an anger towards the city of its setting that’s fierce, if somewhat unfocused. Dr. Carey righteously rails against the blue bloods who failed Karen, though rooting through Beacon Hill’s skeletons in the closet turns out to be an unnecessary detour, as no one in that crowd turns out to be directly culpable for Karen’s situation. What this does establish is the sense of Boston as a city of calcified social orders in which things are done a certain way—a place that is quick to scapegoat outsiders who don’t know and follow the rules, or who just don’t look right. Carey, who comes from Palo Alto, is one such outsider. Another is Hong’s Dr. Tao, who says of born-to-the-manor J.D.: “If you’re under 60 and white you call him ‘Sir.’ If you’re black, yellow, or somewhere in between, you evaporate.” (An accusation against Tao is as good as a conviction. Says one character: “In Boston, with a jury half-Catholic, they’ll convict him on general principles.”)

It’s interesting to see Edwards touching on the matter of racial prejudice against Asians, for this after all is the man who gave Mickey Rooney his buckteeth in Breakfast at Tiffany’s (61), and assigned Peter Sellers’s Inspector Clouseau Burt Kwouk’s Cato as a valet, sparring partner, and “little yellow friend.” Even S.O.B. has Stuart Margolin mocking Benson Fong’s Chinese cook with a pidgin R’s-for-L’s voice. It should be noted that in the latter two examples, the caricatured attitudes are hardly being held up as exemplary, and I don’t want to imply that Edwards—according to the standards of his time and possibly according to the standards of ours—was a racist. Take for example Edwards’s 1968 The Party, the nearest thing to Playtime ever to be released by a Hollywood studio and arguably his masterpiece. In The Party, Sellers smears on brownface to play an Indian actor named Hrundi V. Bakshi, stranger in the strange land of a Hollywood shindig and unquestionably the film’s identification character. I’m not sure how attaching words like “racist” or “enlightened” to such a multivalent work begins to cover the complicated feelings that it evokes. (An irresistible, tangentially related fact: both Edwards and Coburn studied Jeet Kune Do under Bruce Lee.)

Crichton’s novel added yet another layer of racial tension to the drama: Karen’s boyfriend, played in the film by a depraved, bouffant-blond Ken doll called Michael Blodgett, was a black man. Apparently two topical controversies were deemed quite enough for The Carey Treatment. At the time that the film was being made, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts had what were then considered relatively lenient abortion laws: the procedure was available in case of danger to a woman’s health. A year later, the Supreme Court had ruled 7-2 in favor of the plaintiff in Roe v. Wade and, in somewhat less monumental news, James Aubrey was also out as president of MGM.

Edwards and Andrews were already gone themselves, decamped to their chalet in Gstaad, Switzerland. The Carey Treatment had been the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back. Edwards sued to have his name taken off of it, and lost. He and his wife spent most of the Seventies in self-imposed European exile. There Edwards produced ever more deliriously surreal Pink Panther films featuring an ever more scenery-hungry Herbert Lom, and wrote the screenplays that would, at the end of the decade, facilitate his triumphant return to box-office viability and allow him to air his grievances against the industry that he felt had scapegoated him and made him as much an outsider as Hrundi V. Bakshi or Dr. Tao. Edwards’s 10 (79) would earn 10 times its budget, while Vaughn’s Blackman in S.O.B. was a slanderous combination of Evans and Aubrey, who Lucille Ball would only refer to as “that S.O.B.” Edwards’s Hollywood kiss-off is a sourly funny, totally iconoclastic movie, a classic overloaded with succulent one-liners, many belonging to Robert Preston’s prescription-happy tinseltown doctor. “I could sue you for calling me that!” he merrily burbles at one point. “A ‘shyster’ is a disreputable lawyer. I'm a quack!” As for The Carey Treatment, it belongs to its period more than to all time, but its ineffaceable qualities prove that Edwards could never be reduced to quack or hack.

Child’s Pose, last year’s winner of the Golden Bear in Berlin, begins with two elegantly dressed middle-aged women sitting smoking, as one of them complains about being mistreated by the rebellious man in her life. We think she’s talking about a lover: he’s behaving brutishly and neglecting her for some other woman, who’s exerting undue control over him. But it soon emerges that the woman is talking about her son.

Throughout the film, protagonist Cornelia (Luminita Gheorghiu) displays a quasi-incestuous jealousy over her adult son Barbu (Bogdan Dumitrache). It shows when she leans over his naked back as she massages his bruises just a touch too tenderly. In another scene, no less creepy but quietly comic, Cornelia has let herself into the flat that Barbu shares with girlfriend Carmen (Ilinca Goia) to pick up some of his things. Carmen is outside, trying to get her key to work, but Cornelia is damned if she’s going to let her in. There’s a lovely, sly touch in this scene: Cornelia scours the bookshelves and finds two books which she packs for Barbu. Thanks to an earlier discussion, we know what they are: novels which Cornelia has given her boy. She knows he’s never touched them, but now, with Barbu pretty decisively at her mercy, he’ll be lucky to get out of it.

A couple of the names involved in Child’s Pose will be familiar: prominent Romanian actress Gheorghiu, who had roles in The Death of Mr. Lazarescu and 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, and writer Razvan Radulescu, known for Lazarescu and Radu Muntean’s Tuesday, After Christmas, who co-scripted Child’s Pose with director Calin Peter Netzer. The story might have been treated purely as a family melodrama—there’s certainly enough material in the triangle between Cornelia, Barbu, and Carmen, with Cornelia’s husband Aurelian (Florin Zamfirescu) watching wearily from the sidelines. In fact, there’s a more heated line of drama at work, which gives the film a social dimension. Cornelia comes from a privileged, wealthy background: she’s seen early on at her birthday party, champagne flowing, then attending an opera rehearsal; she drives a BMW, and she and her friend Olga (Natasa Raab) like furs as daily casual-wear. One day, the news comes that Barbu has been involved in a traffic accident: he has run over and killed a teenage boy and now faces manslaughter charges. Seemingly bypassing the stages of grief and horror, Cornelia’s instinct to deal with her son’s problem promptly kicks in. She walks into the police station where Barbu has been giving a statement and takes control, announcing that she’s “well-informed” and telling the police to wait their turn to talk. Striding in while still talking on her cell-phone, she doesn’t even greet the unprepossessing bearded man sitting sullenly at the desk; it’s only apparent to us after a while that this is the apple of her eye, the one all the fuss is about.

Child’s Pose is about entitlement, in various forms. Not only does Cornelia, as Barbu’s mother, feel that she essentially owns him and has the right to control his life, she also believes that it’s the prerogative of privileged, well-connected people to manipulate the law as they see fit. Quite brazenly, in front of the police officers, Cornelia tells Barbu to lower the speed that he’s admitted to driving at in his statement. Later, she tries to persuade the other driver in the case to amend his own statement in Barbu’s favor. The man is played by the most recognizable face in Romanian cinema—Vlad Ivanov, the abortionist in 4 Months and the commander in Corneliu Porumboiu’s Police, Adjective—and it’s a wonderfully slimy cameo, as he counters Cornelia with his own bargaining tactics.

The suggestion is that people like Cornelia always get their way, because they know their power, and they’re convinced that they cannot be anything other than good people—cannot possibly be responsible for the harm they cause. There’s talk early on about a doctor messing up a operation on a man’s penis, but it wasn’t really his fault—he didn’t mean to do any harm. That refrain recurs throughout: if you don’t see yourself as meaning harm, then that’s surely good enough. It’s certainly good enough in a corrupt system. The policeman presiding over Barbu’s case wastes no time in suggesting that Cornelia use her connections to help out some friends of his who are having house problems—pro bono, is the insinuation.  

The film is a panorama of social and emotional inappropriateness. Barbu, a pampered brat through and through, throws a fit when Cornelia doesn’t bring him exactly the nasal drops he’s told her to get, and later seems to forget about the car accident entirely, instead sitting Cornelia down to give her a sort of lover’s ultimatum about the state of their relationship. And she forges a spiky temporary truce with his girlfriend, during which Carmen spills out more about her sexual relationship with Barbu than a mother should ever expect to hear.

In the final sequence, Cornelia, Barbu, and Carmen drive to the dead boy’s house, but Barbu refuses to come in because he can’t face it. As usual, he expects his mother to take charge of everything, and she’s in her element doing just that. Cornelia sits down with the grief-stricken parents—villagers without money or contacts, who therefore can’t possibly count. She begins by paying lip service to their tragedy, but it’s not long before she launches into a monologue about how it feels for her, hymning Babu’s achievements, the beautiful body he had as a boy, the French poetry he learned by heart, not forgetting “two years of figure skating.” It’s as if she’s mourning the golden boy who would be lost if the other parents insist on legal retribution, but she’s also boasting of her prize possession, implicitly daring the others to admit that their own dead son could never compete.

Child’s Pose treads a delicate line between social horror and comedy—so much so that, as with Lazarescu, it’s not always immediately apparent that the comedy is present. It shows us an aspect of Romanian society that we haven’t much seen before—concentrating on the wealthy and powerful, and showing how they edge the rest of the population out of the picture. This comes across quite literally when Cornelia goes to see the bereaved couple: they barely get a look in before Andrei Butica’s anxiously darting handheld camera comes back to hold on their visitor.

Gheorghiu is altogether a disturbing presence playing someone who seems to have no emotional self-awareness yet is entirely conscious of her powers as a social performer, someone who can always play the right part in the right key to get what she wants. Even when Cornelia’s armor is off while sitting down with the other parents—she’s without makeup, and has ditched the furs in which she usually goes into battle—her haggard, tear-streaked features are another theatrical disguise. This is the tragedienne playing it “real.”

The film’s title seems utterly mysterious, and doesn’t really work in English. But Netzer has explained that it refers to a fetal position in yoga, relating to a scene that was dropped; it also implies the position of the dead child found in the road (there’s some wordplay involved, apparently) as well as the infantile stance that Barbu adopts throughout. In the very last shot, however, he seems to face up to adulthood, getting out of the car and speaking to the grieving father; in a stroke of understatement that’s very characteristic of Romanian cinema, we don’t hear a word that’s said. But to get out of the car, of course, Barbu must first ask his mother to release the child lock.

The corporate overlords in Resident Evil: Retribution constructed CGI simulacra of major cities to test the death rate of their viruses. Pompeii could be another room in the Umbrella Corporation’s virtual killing grounds. Director Paul W.S. Anderson’s latest act of creative destruction is effectively a meticulous, CGI-powered incinerator for consuming the ancient metropolis. Ever the technology wonk, he uses the setting to play with 3-D textures (the foreground sheets of ash are the most enveloping particulates since the windswept desert sand in Roy Ward Baker’s 1953 Inferno) and to pursue his fetish for the detailed mapping out of his settings, turning Pompeii into a roiling tabletop game board.

While committed to the ongoing Resident Evil series, Anderson has also shown a desire to expand into historical spectacle—a safe way to explore different genres while still turning a profit for his longtime production company, Constantin Films. As with The Three Musketeers, selecting an event from European cultural history guarantees a healthy international gross, insuring against a tepid U.S. response. The former, a thudding bomb stateside, made over $100 million worldwide. A similar pattern is likely to recur for Pompeii.

Anderson’s plots have grown more intricately engineered over the years, peaking in the nesting-doll unrealities of Retribution (2012) But with his wife and muse Milla Jovovich absent this go-round (for the first time since 2008’s Death Race), he opts for an intensely melodramatic love story. Previously, the deepest sentiments in Anderson’s films were reserved for the camera’s regard of Jovovich; in Pompeii that emotion is transplanted into the Titanic-romantic narrative.

The screenplay follows the Titanic playbook: high-born Cassia (Emily Browning), the daughter of Pompeii’s business elite (Jared Harris and Carrie-Anne Moss), falls for Milo (Kit Harrington), a slave whose family was slaughtered by the Romans. To prove his strong and sensitive side, Milo mercy-kills a dying horse, she swoons, Vesuvius goes boom. As in all of Anderson’s films, an omniscient malevolent power destabilizes any chance of freedom. This time it’s the multinational Romans, represented with sneering swagger by Kiefer Sutherland, as Senator Corvus. A colonialist gentrifier, he’s keen on razing Pompeii’s ancient edifices and raising bigger and shinier auditoriums and temples. In return for his investment he demands Cassia’s hand in marriage. So Milo and his warrior cell-mate Atticus (the gruffly intimidating Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje) have to hopscotch past lava flows and Roman thugs to try and save Cassia and flee the burning city.

The courtship scenes are stilted, though the attraction is presented through Cassia’s POV, a rare case of Hollywood recognizing female desire. Kit Harrington is literally put on display, forced to stand half-naked on a pedestal, on sale for one night’s roll in the Pompeiian hay. Once all the exposition is dealt with, Anderson unleashes his visual gifts. Working with the same tech team since his first 3-D feature, Resident Evil: Afterlife, Anderson and DP Glen MacPherson have mastered this reviled art form, enough to play around now with offhand grace notes. The aforementioned ash acts as an undulating curtain over the action, while stabbing shafts of light cut through and offer false promises of escape.

Anderson is obsessed with fully imagining and rendering the topographical layout of his film’s spaces. The Resident Evil series layers 3-D blueprints of the Umbrella Corporation’s underground redoubt, while in The Three Musketeers Cardinal Richelieu has a giant battleground map etched into the floor of his castle. Pompeii uses frequent god’s-eye views of the city, through which Milo and Cassia’s daring flight on horseback is shrunk to the size of Dungeons and Dragons pieces. Anderson uses these mapping techniques not only to orient the viewer in space but to emphasize the ironclad control the Mabuse-like villains of these films have over the heroes, whom they move around like chess pieces. The nigh-omnipotent “Red Queen” artificial intelligence in the Resident Evil series had no match in the W.S. canon until the absent gods of Pompeii, who invisibly watch their subjects incinerate from afar. As the Umbrella Corporation re-created the oubreak of the T-Virus in Tokyo in their underground lab, so does Senator Corvus force the slaves to re-enact the slaughter of Milo’s Celtic tribe, the opening attraction in the evening’s games.

The relationship between Milo and Cassia gains force as the disaster narrative takes over,  the earlier doe eyes and sensitive-horseman claptrap disappearing as they cling to each other just to survive. Simple pantomime gestures exhibit greater force than anything in the cliched script by Janet Scott Batchler, Lee Batchler, and Michael Robert Johnson (with an uncredited rewrite by Downton Abbey’s Julian Fellowes). A dying married couple embrace in the ruins, Atticus defiantly raises his fist before certain death, and Milo and Cassia sanctify their love in the inferno. It’s high melodrama, what many might describe as camp. Yet the grandiose power of the closing images—of a self-annihilating, all-consuming passion that will be preserved for centuries—obliterates the line between the ridiculous and the sublime.

For a complete lineup as well as showtimes and tickets, go here.

We're nearing the halfway mark of Film Comment Selects, our annual roundup—hosted by the Film Society of Lincoln Center—of festival finds, sneak previews, genre discoveries, and overlooked classics. Over the next week, we’ll be offering up a trio of striking new horror movies, from slow-burn psychological studies to gonzo, old-school creature features; a rare chance to see Jane Campion’s acclaimed Sundance miniseries Top of the Lake on the big screen in its six-hour entirety; a sneak peek at We Are the Best!, Lukas Moodysson’s wild, unruly ode to teenage rebellion; a “healthcare mayhem” double feature featuring two underseen hospital-set dramas of malpractice and medical intrigue; and a spotlight on the German filmmaker Christian Petzold, including Wolfsburg, his first collaboration with Nina Hoss, and Ghosts, his haunting portrait of loss and displacement in post-reunification Berlin. And that’s not the half of it—here’s what our writers and editors had to say about five more of the festival’s selections, which range from a breezy French family drama to Bertolucci's latest to a tough, utterly original Iranian whatsit.

Metro Manila

Laura Kern, reporting from Sundance 2013, called Metro Manila “the most estimable [film] among all I saw [at the festival] this year. Ellis’s “small yet diverse body of film work . . . also includes the ambitious romantic comedy Cashback (06) and the existential chiller The Broken (08). His latest is a harrowing domestic/crime drama set in the Philippines. Despite the fact that he doesn’t know a word of Tagalog, Ellis managed to draw expert performances from Jake Macapagal and Althea Vega as Oscar and Mai Ramirez, poor rice farmers who, with their two young children, travel from the desolate mountains to the bustling city in the hopes of making some money, only to discover that the exploitation they faced at home is nothing compared to what greets them in Manila. From the moment they arrive everything goes into a downward spiral: Oscar takes a hazardous job as an armored truck driver, and is assigned a loose cannon (an explosive John Arcilla) for a partner; Mai is forced to dance at a sleazy strip joint, not an ideal line of work for any woman, much less an expectant mother. Viewers, at least those with a heartbeat, will not rest easy for a single moment while this family’s safety is at stake. Throughout the festival, Metro Manila seemed to fly frustratingly just under the radar. When it won the Audience Award (World Cinema Dramatic), it was finally clear that people were paying attention.”

Me and You

“Bernardo Bertolucci is back,” wrote Marco Grosoli back at Cannes 2012 on the Italian master’s new film Me and You. “It’s a clear variation on Besieged, the 1998 film (likewise set in Rome) that inaugurated a minimalist phase for the director after a series of huge international co-productions. Continuing on from The Dreamers (03), Me and You is Bertolucci’s third in a string of films mostly set in claustrophobic, very bourgeois interiors, and like Besieged, it concerns the solipsistic self-confinement of a obsessive narcissist who is “saved” and led out into the world by a woman—who may well be nothing more than a projection of his insecurities . . . Within the narrative vacuum produced by this drastic reduction of [his] source material, Bertolucci has plenty of room to indulge in the main thing that interests him: beauty. Movement is no longer at the core of his aesthetic inquiry and approach, as it was in his previous films (this may or may not be related to the incapacitating medical condition that left him confined to a wheelchair). Rather it’s cinematography: thanks to inventive and chiefly chromatic variations of lighting, the basement becomes ingeniously fragmented, labyrinth-like, as if it were brighter and more diverse and full of surprises than the so-called outside world—which is filmed in a disarmingly dull fashion. Like the Francis Bacon–inspired rooms of Last Tango in Paris, once again interior and exterior keep switching places, as do the words 'Me' and 'You' during the film’s credit sequence.”

City of Pirates

Me and You isn’t the only “labyrinth-like” FCS highlight to work in an aesthetically heightened narrative vacuum. In the May/June 1984 issue of the magazine, Jonathan Rosenbaum called Raul Ruiz’s City of Pirates—which gets a rare 35mm screening at the festival next week—“a bombshell of formal, surrealist, and narrative assault . . . This Gothic fantasy, shot in riotous color and set on a Portuguese island, runs an affective gamut from Peter Pan and Disney to Anne of the Indies (and from Poe and Lautréamont to Fritz Lang's Moonfleet and Jacques Rivette's Noroît) without ever seeming derivative—only inspired, singular, perpetually unpredictable, and terrifyingly beautiful. The film is decked out with astonishing lab effects (painterly long shots of the island, brimming with magical light), unsettling fantasy conceits (a man's face casually discovered under a pile of vegetables in a trunk), and uncanny spatial displacements. Pirates evokes some of the recollected splendors and sudden transitions of gruesome fairy tales, while enacting a maniacally inventive mise en scène around them.”

Cherchez Hortense

Speaking of Ruiz: Pascal Bonitzer’s “light and unapologetically mainstream comedy-dramas couldn’t be more removed from his credentials as a Rivette and Ruiz collaborator,” wrote Gavin Smith from last year’s Rotterdam Film Festival. But Bonitzer, Smith continues, “delivered his most satisfying film to date with Cherchez Hortense. Jean-Pierre Bacri plays a conflicted and ineffectual sinologist who reluctantly agrees to ask his father, a senior judge with whom he has a complicated relationship, to pull some strings on behalf of a Polish woman facing deportation (bringing us back once again to the terrain of the post-globalization genre). His marriage to a celebrated stage director (Kristin Scott Thomas) is on the skids, his son is going through growing pains, a cranky old friend is suicidal, and amidst all this he’s befriended by a girl half his age. It’s the kind of relationship movie that would now have to be termed an old-fashioned, one that just about gets away with its whopper of a plot contrivance. But Cherchez Hortense is more than carried by Bacri, who remains one of the best actors in French cinema today.”

Fat Shaker

One of Smith’s other Rotterdam highlights was “a more difficult and ambiguous object.” The action of Fat Shaker “centers on an obese con man who uses his cute deaf-mute adult son as bait to extort money from predatory young women looking for a boy toy—until the pair’s sketchy life on the social margins is (inexplicably) upended by the arrival of a mysterious woman who makes herself at home, with unexpected consequences. While the film would seem to be an allegorical attack on patriarchy, its hallucinatory interludes, its emphasis on the grotesque and the absurd, its off-kilter, unstable style (the camerawork is virtually motion-sickness-inducing), and its enigmatic refusal to completely define itself in narrative terms signal the emergence of a talent looking to break fresh ground.” It’s far from the only film in the series to signal the emergence of a new, restless, inquisitive voice.

The 1924 Austrian silent film The City Without Jews begins with stark, documentary-like scenes of crowds picketing in the streets. Their signs protest their lack of jobs and the rising value of the dollar. The city’s elites celebrate at decadent all-night parties until the cries of the masses force them to do something. One leader suggests that the Jews are to blame for current troubles, and when the power brokers gather inside an enormous hall to debate, anti-Semitism swells until a decision is reached to expel them. “The rose beetle is an altogether beautiful creature,” declares a politician, “but even so, the gardener destroys it because he cares more for his roses.”

The socially progressive Austrian journalist and fiction writer Hugo Bettauer—a Jew by birth who had converted to Evangelism at age 18 in order to advance in the military—had forecast the effects of European anti-Semitism in 1922 with his wildly popular literary satire The City Without Jews: A Novel of Our Time. At the time, Vienna contained prominent anti-Semites who used print materials and public demonstrations to blame the Jews for disease, economic stagnation, and other social problems. Their sentiments, though stoked by their country’s troubles in the wake of the First World War, were far from new. Nearly three decades earlier, the Jewish journalist and political thinker Theodore Herzl, who spent much of his life in Vienna, had reacted to what he was seeing in Europe with his 1896 book The Jewish State, which argued that Jews needed to leave the continent for Zion in order to survive.

In the film adaptation of The City Without Jews, the members of a city’s once-comfortably settled Jewish minority are seen praying urgently, the men wrapped in tallit with the hope that God will keep them safe. These and other colorfully tinted scenes of the city in turmoil depict a teeming fictional metropolis very closely based upon reality. In the early 1920s Vienna had over 200,000 Jews, the third-largest Jewish population of any European city. Many were recent immigrants hailing from countries whose place in the Austro-Hungarian Empire had been recently dissolved by war; many actively contributed to Vienna’s cultural life, including prominent writers such as Arthur Schnitzler and Stefan Zweig, musicians like Gustav Mahler and Arnold Schoenberg, and scientists and doctors whose ranks included Sigmund Freud.

Directed by a busy Austrian filmmaker named Hans Karl Breslauer (who shortly afterward switched to writing journalistic articles and fiction full-time), The City Without Jews accurately predicted that Vienna would suffer following its Jewish population’s expulsion. The film adaptation was shelved after the Nazi Party came to power in 1933 and essentially vanished from sight until the early 1990s, when the Filmarchiv Austria did a near-complete restoration. (Its last scene is still missing.) This Thursday it opens the Museum of Modern Art’s remarkable and extensive two-month film series “Vienna Unveiled: A City in Cinema,” a survey of historical representations of Vienna made by Austrian as well as by foreign filmmakers whose settings range from the Hapsburg Monarchy through the two World Wars and up to the present day.

The City Without Jews screens with the 1919 farce Sammy Scratches Himself, which features members of a Jewish cabaret group called the Budapest Orpheum Society in a story about mix-ups between working-class Viennese couples. MoMA’s Josh Siegel, associate curator in MoMA’s Department of Film, co-curated the “Vienna Unveiled” series with the Austrian Film Museum’s director, Alexander Horwath, and describes the double bill as portraying “a contrast between the times before and after the actual exile, deportation, and extermination of Vienna’s Jews, which The City Without Jews anticipated.” Yet both films are comedies, with some members of the Budapest Orpheum Society even appearing in both as actors. The City Without Jews, too, approaches farce. Its frightening premise becomes the backdrop to a theatrically staged and framed romance between a liberal politician’s daughter named Lotte Lindner (played by Breslauer’s frequent lead actress, Anny Milety) and her Jewish fiancé, Leo Strakosch (Johannes Rieman), whom the deportation laws tear apart.

Leo eventually sneaks back into town under an elaborate false mustache and the alias of a French painter named “Henri Dufresne,” and plots with his beloved over when to reveal his ruse to her father while hatching schemes to change people’s minds about bringing the Jews back. These include posting leaflets by a fictitious group called the Union of True Christians advocating for the Jews’ return and getting the anti-Semitic politician Councillor Bernart (Hans Moser) drunk so that he misses a crucial vote. Happiness follows as families reunite and people of different ages and faiths embrace.

The film does not end there, however, as Breslauer and co-screenwriter Ida Jenbach had made a few key preemptive changes from their source text, most likely in order to please the censors. While the novel identifies its setting as present-day Vienna, the film takes place in “the legendary republic of Utopia,” and though Bettauer’s book ends with its anti-Jewish laws rescinded and Leo’s identity restored, the film goes on to reveal the whole tale as having taken place entirely in a nightmare of Councillor Bernart, who awakens a changed man and declares that people should live at peace with each other. These changes were enough for Bettauer to disavow any connection with the film, which he believed had altered his book’s meaning. For him, rather than positing anti-Semitism as a real problem to be fought in a real place, the film version of The City Without Jews placed it in an imaginary realm and called it the stuff of dreams.

Indeed, the friction between the fantasy that the film The City Without Jews presents and the reality of the fate of Vienna’s Jewish citizens is what potentially gives the work its greatest interest today. While all of Utopia’s Jews are simply deported (on borrowed trains) to other European countries and to Zion, to be later returned to their homes, the Nazis sent 65,000 of Vienna’s Jews away to be murdered. (An additional 130,000 fled and did not return.) Breslauer joined the Nazi Party in 1940. Bettauer had been murdered in 1925, the year after the film’s release, by a Hitler partisan; his son Helmut was deported in 1942 to Auschwitz and thereafter vanished from public records.

The City Without Jews and Sammy Scratches Himself screens February 27 at the Museum of Modern Art, accompanied by an original score performed by the Austria-born co-founder of the New York Theremin Society, Dorit Chrysler. “Vienna Unveiled: A City in Cinema” runs February 27 through April 20 at MoMA and takes place in association with Carnegie Hall’s “Vienna: City of Dreams” festival and in celebration of the Austrian Film Museum’s 50th anniversary.

It’s been over a decade since the filmmaker Hany Abu-Assad shifted from documentary to fiction with Rana’s Wedding (02) and then tested the boundaries between the two with Ford Transit (03), early in the wave of such hybrid treatments. The suicide bomber tale of Paradise Now (05) was next, igniting its own controversies, though some silence followed until Abu-Assad tried his hand at a mainstream thriller with The Courier (12). But with Omar (the subject of a previous Hot Property and now distributed by Adopt Films), the director is thankfully back in action, hitching the physical, emotional, and moral turmoil of Palestinian resistance to the tension of a sure-handed thriller, as a headstrong young man gets reeled in by Israeli intelligence and struggles to keep his loved ones out of it.

FILM COMMENT spoke with Abu-Assad about Omar last October at the New York Film Festival, but the conversation began with the intriguing news of another forthcoming project...

Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance

I read you have another movie lined up. Is that Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance?

I am developing three projects. I will not make the same mistake as Paradise Now... In Europe, you work on one project, then you develop it and make it. Here, you have to have several projects in development and see which one is going to come first. Otherwise, you’ll be waiting years to see what will happen. Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance really fits in the trilogy that I’m trying to make. Paradise Now was “live in shame or die” and Omar “live in guilt or die” and then Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance “live in agony or die.” Revenge is a very complicated and interesting issue. [Park Chan-wook] had done it in several movies, amazingly uncompromised, and now it’s going to be a challenge to keep it that uncompromised.

Park’s movies are unreal, the way the violence is intensified, operatic. Is that something you want to try?

No, first of all, it’s been done. Why should you remake it? And second, I don’t like to expose violence in a way that its operatic, as if it’s so clean to see. I mean, it’s been done. It’s fascinating to watch it, but I don’t want to make it. What’s interesting to me is the whole theme of vengeance—that you’re doomed. You need it but you know it’s not good. It’s like a drug you need, but you know you won’t be a better man for it.

It’s also an interesting subject in the American cinema, which glorifies it without any redemption. Revenge in our modern society is big, but we can’t do anything about it except for in the movies. In real life, if we did it, it would have huge consequences in our lives. It’s interesting to look at it like in a fantasy, in stories.

Omar

This brings us back to Omar, because there you see how the violence is part of a larger cycle. How did you come up with the scenario? Had you heard about people caught in these situations?

Actually, [it was through] myself. When we were shooting Paradise Now, I thought there was a traitor inside the crew giving the army information. Maybe it was true, maybe wasn’t, but I started to suspect people in my own crew. Because wherever we went, whatever plan we had, the army was there. Maybe by accident, maybe it’s the army’s job to be there! But you start to suspect people, and it’s a very horrible feeling—a nightmare. I started to sleep somewhere else, because I thought maybe they had tapped my hotel room. I started to put my phone somewhere else, because they might use your phone.

When you become paranoid, you start to believe the unbelievable.

Later, the head of the secret service in Israel gave an interview, and said it’s very important to give this paranoia to society, because they restrain themselves. Because if you think they are everywhere, you do nothing. He said: “You don’t need to do a lot sometimes.” And I felt like, this is important! Trust and paranoia, and losing trust in yourself and society and others—it is a state of mind that I lived with, and I know exactly what it is. I was somebody raised whose parents said: “Be careful. You can’t trust anybody because their parents might work for the secret service.” This is how we grew up. You need just one traitor in society, and he will create panic, because you don’t know who it is.

Second, a friend of mine was once approached by the secret service, and they said: “We know your secrets. If you don’t work with us, you’ll be damned by your own society.” And I thought immediately, this is a good drama. What is good drama exactly? It is when somebody has to act when he’s trapped, and whatever he will do, he is fucked. If he will not betray, he is fucked, and if he betrays, he’s fucked. And actually the choice between your own interests and the interests of others is a very important issue in our society—all over, not just in Palestine. When you betray society to save yourself, and what is the prize for that?

This is why I decided to make this movie. Personally because I know paranoia, and second, the real stories from life are so full of drama, without being artificial. Because sometimes you want a drama, and you make an artificial conflict. This is not an artificial conflict! The ending, for example, I read it in the newspaper.

How have people in Palestine reacted to the film?

They know the stories—everything was believable, which is very difficult, because the most difficult place to make the people believe in your own story, is the place where you made the film. Because they can see: “Oh, this building is very far from the other building.” Especially when films are made about cops—and most of the cops will tell you, “Oh, the crap on television.” Almost everybody came to me—people who were in jail, people who lived these stories, normal people who just heard about these stories—they came to me and they said: “Wow, I was so happy with it.” This is the test, if you made a movie that comes from life or not: it’s in the place itself. It was surprising, because all the parties there, even parties that are an enemy, felt like it’s a realistic movie.

The Israeli interrogator is a fascinating character. He can be sympathetic, even trusting, and that becomes a way for an audience to connect. How did people react to that depiction?

Some Palestinians felt that I humanized him too much. But see, I don’t care.  Most of those people said: “You are too soft. Reality is harsher.” This is the critique that I get: the reality of the jail, the reality of the torture.

That it’s worse in real life?

Yes.

Because it seemed pretty bad.

I explain to them that it’s not the job of the movie. It’s very important to be believable, but it’s not the job of the movie to make a copy of the reality. On the other hand, I felt like the Palestinians are traumatized. They can’t see that the people who torture them have kids, and they care about their kids. Which makes their actions even more horrible! I think by humanizing them, their actions become more horrible. It’s like: “How can you do this to someone else when you have a daughter in kindergarten?”

But this is all politics after the movie. When you do the movie, you don’t calculate it this way. You do it according to how you can make your character, first, believable, second, conflicted, and third, with an arc. All the characters in your movie should learn something about themselves. And this is why I do it! Not because my job is to humanize or not humanize them. They are humans, whether you like it or not, but my job is to look beyond this—what they learn from this.

Omar is an interesting character in that respect. He does have an arc, but at the same time he is very stubborn, and sticks to his principles.

Yes, this is his tragic flaw, actually. That he doesn’t want to admit that he’s weak. The more you want to show your strength, the more you go out in the shit, actually. [Laughs] The more you want to show you are bigger than the problem, the more you are not handling the problem well. But this is also a classic way of making characters. From Citizen Kane to Michael Corleone. These characters, they don’t want to admit to themselves that they are weaker than they thought they are. They think: “One more time, and I’m out.” Stubborn.

You have a compelling actor in Adam Bakri as Omar. Can you talk about casting him?

He comes from a family of actors. His father, his brother. He never did a movie before, but he had experience in stage acting. He studied at [Lee Strasberg Theatre & Film Institute]. But he went through a very tough screen test. He came once, and did another call, and third, and the fourth with all characters. A lot of coming back until he proved that he could handle every aspect of his character—mentally, physically, emotionally.

Physically is key, given the chase scenes. The action is really effectively staged, and reminded me of the chase scenes in Point Break.

I think the most important thing in any action scene is that it has to be part of the character development. If it’s just for excitement, then it’s like “I’ve seen this before.” But it’s really about Omar trying to understand what’s going on, and you can feel his feeling of being trapped. In the first chase, you can understand that he’s not as strong as he thought he was. And the second one, he understands that he can’t rely on his own physicality—he can jump and run, but he needs to be smart.  

It’s also in his home area. It’s familiar to him, so that’s why he can hide.

Yeah, it’s true. The second one was deliberately around his area. And you can feel it. He’s more confident.

Was this filmed in Nazareth, mostly?

The second chase is home in Nazareth. The first one is in a refugee camp al-Far’a in the middle of the West Bank. Five locations: Jerusalem, Nablus, the refugee camp al-Far’a, Nazareth, and Bisan where we built the jail.

What was it like shooting the climbing scenes at the wall?

We were allowed to shoot to a certain height. We weren’t allowed to go to the other side of the actual wall: we had permission just to climb to a certain point. We built the last two meters somewhere else, in Nazareth, and shot that there. The wider shot is the real one.

They didn’t want people to know that you could climb it?

Actually, it’s because they are wired. First of all, you have to understand that the wall is not between the West Bank and Israel. It is really between Palestinian villages in the West Bank. For a lot of people it’s confusing because they think—and Israel sold this idea—that it’s between the West Bank and Israel. But it’s not. It’s really surrounding the Palestinians and controlling them in ghettoes. This is the reality, and go and watch if you don’t believe me. It’s unbelievable! Second, when people started to climb—not everybody, not me, for example, I’m too old—but when young people started to climb, they started to shoot at them. Then they had to patrol all the time. The solution was to put up wires. We did it in a way that you can’t see the wires. We faked it—because one time in history, you could climb. Now? Not anymore.

You’re based out of Nazareth, right?

I live now in Nazareth. I used to live in Holland, I lived in L.A. for a while. Now I’m back in Nazareth. I am more busy with my family. With my mother and brothers—I don’t have kids. You know, I’m busy with friends. You are inspired by real people, in order to make good writing. You need to be surrounded by real characters, not people who are connected to the movie business.

What does your family think of your movies?

They love it. And I’m happy for that. Paradise Now created a huge controversy, and a discussion, and this is very good and healthy. People appreciate that, when you start a discussion. Whether it is good, bad. Is it just an act of terrorism, is it just an act of resistance. Omar is in contrast, they feel very proud [because] they feel like this is a unique thriller. They didn’t see this before.

It’s actually a mixture between two genres: a love story and a thriller. But also, the thriller in itself is unique because it’s a mixture of the American dynamic, like The Firm, and the French aesthetic of thrillers like Le Cercle rouge. The American thrillers of Sydney Pollack, like The Firm, have a dynamic feeling in the mise en scène. But sometimes in the same scene I’m also doing the French [style], where there are extreme close-ups, and they are all static, and there is this tension between close-ups and wide shots. It’s how I felt. It’s not a rational thinking. What I felt I should do, I did

And there’s the Egyptian humor in the thriller, which is very unique. The Egyptians made Al karnak, or A Strange Man in Our House, with Omar Sharif. The Egyptians and their thrillers, there is humanity in it—characters can still be banal and make jokes. Which is amazing. I learned from them how you relieve the tension and get back to it immediately, with a new energy. An amazing thriller. You should see it.

The people [back home] felt there is a unique thriller here. You know, they all live in a state of suspicion—who’s the traitor in our society—because we are all busy with that. We don’t speak about it, but we are starting to speak about it now. It’s a good reaction when you start to realize that suspecting people are traitors because of your paranoia is very damaging to the people and to yourself, to the relationships. This movie started to create a debate about paranoia and betrayal. The reaction in Palestine is much better even than Paradise Now.

I wanted to ask about one more actor, Leem Lubany, who plays Omar’s love interest. She’s terrific, a newcomer. How did you find her?

Casting director Juna Suleiman found her. We tested endless girls, but Leem was terrific.

What were you looking for in that character?

Innocence. It was important for this character to be an innocent, very virginal. Because if you have some experience in life, you might not react the same way I wanted her to react. I wanted Omar and Nadia to be very vulnerable. Because the current generation, they are really lost, for a very simple reason. The previous generation, the revolutionary generation, in the Sixties, even the people in the West, all promised us revolution, justice. We’re going to free ourselves from consumer society, we’re going to become socialist. All these big things—they all failed.

And even in the West, what do they do now, the parents? Most of the parents left their kids to be prey to the consumer society. All the slogans, anti-consuming, flower power—all these parents were there. And they are in shame, I think, of themselves. Now, our society is even worse, because our parents – I am in the middle – they all shouted, “We’re going to free Palestine.” This is why it’s really about a vulnerable people, the new kids—their parents feel ashamed, there is no connection between the two generations, and they are being left alone. I felt it’s my duty to expose their vulnerabilities, because young people don’t have the experience at making decisions. That could become fatal, destructive. One decision of theirs could become a huge disaster for their future. This is why I chose young people.

While many critics have emphasized the thematic maturity of Hayao Miyazaki’s wartime drama The Wind Rises by noting the absence of Studio Ghibli’s trademark mythic creatures, the film can’t help but draw us back into the same state of reverie as his previous work. Seamlessly transitioning from the lush surfaces of the real world to an equally tactile, emotionally fraught realm of imagination, this new film—reportedly Miyazaki’s last—joins aesthetic ruminations with moments of gravity-defying fantasy, which often prove to be more compelling than the realist narrative surrounding it.

A fictionalized tribute to Jiro Horikoshi, the brilliant engineer responsible for many of Japan’s World War II fighter planes (including the Zero, which was used in the attack on Pearl Harbor), The Wind Rises paints a portrait of a man preternaturally attuned to the principles of beautiful design as they manifest in the world around him. Fascinated with flight since childhood, but prevented from becoming an aviator by his poor eyesight, Jiro decides to focus his talents on aeronautics. As Miyazaki introduces us to Jiro’s profession, he lingers lovingly over details of ingenuity and craftsmanship, finding lyricism in the most mundane nuts and bolts of machinery. In an early scene, the hero admires the curvature of a mackerel bone, and you can feel the wheels in his head spinning as he imagines applying it to his own designs.

As Japan plunges into a period of poverty, natural disasters, and war, the chasm between truth and beauty becomes ever wider. While a handful of characters serve as harbingers of the devastation facilitated by Jiro’s inventions, Miyazaki brings greater resonance to a series of dream sequences in which the hero finds comfort in the spirit of Italian aircraft manufacturer Caproni. In his conversations with this imagined mentor, the film reveals the question at the heart of its story: when the expression of one’s talent is dependent on a destructive system, how can an artist realize his full potential and stay true to his passions?

For the most part, Jiro answers this troubling question with his head in the clouds, keeping an all-too-convenient separation between his artistic ideals and the lethal industry he works in. Many great filmmakers have found ways to weave genuine drama out of blank, cipher-like protagonists, but such a feat requires the hand of an artist more contemplative than Miyazaki has ever pretended to be. Apart from its handcrafted visuals, which are as lovely and painstakingly precise as anything in the Ghibli canon, the film feels sapped of conflict and energy—a flaw that becomes even more apparent when Miyazaki tries to amp up the melodrama in the second hour with a doomed love story. Ultimately, The Wind Rises’s even-temperedness feels less like a principled aesthetic choice and more like a shrug in the face of history.

Ghosts

Money—who has it, who lacks it, and what those who need it are willing to do to get it—is a constant, corrosive presence in the work of German filmmaker Christian Petzold. In the three movies that make up his “Ghosts” trilogy, it’s the fuel that keeps the engine of the narrative running and the obstruction that makes it stall, an object that corrupts those who have it and cripples those who don’t. It’s what drives a married pair of former West German terrorists to endanger their teenage daughter’s future by committing a desperate, irrevocable deed in the last act of The State I Am In (2002), what brings together—then tears apart—a struggling, marginalized girl and an emotionally shattered businessman’s wife in Ghosts (2005), and what determines every step of a young accountant’s uncertain future in Yella (2007). It’s the hurdle that Petzold’s characters have to jump before they can arrive at any kind of intimacy with one another, and the sudden, pressing interruption that cuts their moments of tenderness short. And it’s bound up closely with a subject that haunts every frame of Petzold’s trilogy: the fault lines created, widened, and exposed in Germany’s national identity in the wake of the country’s 1990 re-unification.

Petzold, who was born in West Germany in 1960, graduated from the Deutsche Film- und Fernsehakademie in 1994—five years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and four after the re-unification of East and West Germany. In the following decades, the trilogy suggests, Germany would be united in name only. Nearly half a century earlier, the country had been parceled out Länder by Länder among the Allied powers; in the following five years, as the Soviet Union’s relationship with its former allies cooled, both sides moved to consolidate their German holdings. By 1949, West Germany had become its own independent, fully functioning republic, and its relationship to its British and American occupiers had taken on a strange double meaning. For all their resolve to keep the new state’s government on a tight leash, the Western powers knew that creating strong links between West Germany and the rest of Europe would give them a bulwark against their rivals to the East. It was the same thought on the Soviets’ part that led to the formation of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), which would spend the length of its existence under socialist rule. Over the subsequent decades, each half of Germany was steadily, decisively absorbed into its respective bloc, while still retaining traces of its prewar history that kept it tied to its closed-off neighbor.

The State I Am In

The story of the collapse of the GDR is similar to that of the collapse of several Soviet satellite states in the late Eighties: a progression of violently suppressed uprisings, bursts of mass dissent, and refusals on the part of the ruling powers to bend to their subjects’ demands. It’s important to keep in mind that, when East and West Germany were eventually, officially united, the former state had little to bring to the table and even less traction to make demands. With the collapse of the USSR, the West had won, and it was accordingly West Germany that called the shots when it came to forming a new nation. In 1990, the two states were widely separated culturally, politically, ideologically, and—perhaps most fundamentally—economically. Midway through The State I Am In, the heroine’s penny-pinched parents dig up a parcel of East German money they’d buried under a bridge years before. Pulling out a fistful of long-defunct pre-unification bills stamped with the face of Albrecht Dürer, the father passes the stacks disdainfully on to his daughter as a “history lesson.” (“Nobody wants old Dürer anymore.”) East Germany, in short, paid a price for its increased freedom—once-secure jobs were thrown up for grabs, education stuttered, crime and unemployment rose—and if liberty was, in the end, worth the ticket, the cost still stung.

The State I Am In, Petzold’s first feature made for theatrical release, is the entry in the trilogy that deals most directly with Germany’s post-unification discontent. It’s a softer, tenderer variation on the setup of Oshima’s Boy: two West German parents, leftist radicals wanted for unspecified, decades-old crimes, drift rootlessly from state to state with their teenage daughter in tow. As the film goes on, she grows increasingly torn between her attachment to her family and her need—catalyzed by a budding romance with a young, Brian Wilson-loving surfer—for a stable life. One of the trio’s pit stops is at a coastal pier where they linger in the shadow a German flag, just as, in Oshima’s film, a fugitive family of con artists lingered at the snow-covered tip of Japan. “I wish Japan was bigger,” the older boy said in that scene—and Petzold’s characters, one senses, likewise wish that Germany would grow, or shrink, to accommodate them.

The first two minutes of The State I Am In go a long way towards explaining Petzold’s methods and intentions in the trilogy. A young girl with blonde, wind-tossed hair—eyes downcast, lips set in a natural frown—gets change at a seaside bar, strolls over to the jukebox, and puts on an American pop song (“How Can We Hang On to a Dream?” by Tim Hardin). The camera hovers on her shoulder, lingering over the curve of her neck, then pulls back slightly to follow her as she saunters with studied casualness towards an empty table. (“What can I say,” the singer asks plaintively: “she’s walking away…”) She glances off-camera, casts her eyes back down, lights a cigarette, and sits silently for another twenty seconds, lost in thought. Her eyes barely move; her mind is busy turning over invisible possibilities, considering options, and reflecting on a past to which we don’t yet have access. When she looks back up, Petzold cuts to a shot from her eyeline of a handful of surfers chatting at the other end of the dock, and her desire finally connects, in our mind, with an object. But it’s in those previous twenty seconds, I would argue, that she comes alive to us. For a moment, her desire seems to exist outside of, or prior to, the narrative that is about to be constructed around it. It would be hard to count the number of times over the course of the trilogy that Petzold films a young woman sitting alone like this, planning what kind of movie she wants to inhabit.  

What kind of movie does she want to be in? One, presumably, in which her parents don’t force her to wear baggy, secondhand clothes so as “not to attract attention,” in which she isn’t forbidden from seeing boys because “lovers have no secrets,” in which she doesn’t stiffen up when she passes a cop in the street, and in which she never has to choose, as she now does, between her family’s commitments and her own. The world Petzold gives her to inhabit is smaller, tighter, and more restrictive in nearly every way than the one she imagines for herself before the movie begins—and it’s this contrast, further developed in Ghosts and Yella, that gives the trilogy much of its moral thrust. Petzold’s characters are more often than not condemned to be drifters, loners, and ghosts, but they each carry around some image of a brighter world. It’s when those images brush up against one another that we get scenes like Jeanne (Julia Hummer)—the heroine of The State I Am In—suddenly, desperately embracing her estranged surfer beau when they encounter each other again in a fast-food restaurant bathroom, or the two young female lovers in Ghosts drawing closer to one another after the sleazy businessman who’s been watching them dance gets called away by his jealous wife, or Yella’s financier partner tenderly kissing her shoulder after their first night together. That said, it’s never long in these films before the economic realities of post-reunification German life intrude back on the characters’ lives, forcing them to act in a movie—directed variably by history, commerce, and human biology—rather than make their own.

Ghosts

The heroine of Ghosts, too, enters the film alone. We first encounter Nina (Hummer, five years older, her forehead now hidden behind a row of dark bangs) standing in an empty field wearing a bright orange Park Maintenance jacket, collecting trash. She hears a muffled scream, looks up, and sees a young woman being pulled forcibly away by a pair of anonymous men—which prompts her to stride haltingly towards us. The camera, just as it advanced to follow Jeanne at the start of The State I Am In, retreats back. When the woman and her assailants vanish into the brush, Nina stops to pick up an earring left lying on the park’s graveled path. Like Alice chasing after the white rabbit, or Jeffrey in Blue Velvet—who finds an equally portentous object lying in a field—she is stepping from the public world, with its civil duties and economic obligations, into a private one of fairy tales, erotic fantasies, and waking dreams.  

Later in the film, in fact, she reveals that it was the memory of a recurring dream which led her to follow the screaming girl; it occurs to us that, again like Jeanne in The State I Am In, she must have been silently replaying the dream in her head as she advanced. “I walked towards the music, and there was a little wood, a birch wood. There was a car there. The roof was open, and the music was coming out of it. And then I heard someone screaming. I followed the screams into the wood, and in the wood was a little pond. There I saw a girl.” What comes next is an account of sexual violence that, like the car, the music, and the pond, doesn’t correspond to the film’s first scene. (The two men turn out to be robbers.) But it explains the sense of erotic possibility that hangs between the two women throughout the film, occasionally crystalizing in a kiss, a dance, and—in the end—a one night stand, but always being superseded by the pair’s need for work, food, shelter, money, and clothes. After a second chance meeting, the two girls team up and start drifting through Berlin’s Potsdamer Plaz—once bisected by the Berlin wall, now a prime urban renewal site. Nina spends the rest of the film moving between the external world and her private, internal Wonderland, alternating between the movie given to her by her status as a young, unemployed, rootless Berliner and the seduction drama playing in her head. She’s fated for defeat as soon as she gives Toni (Sabine Timoteo) the central role in the latter movie, since Toni herself, tougher and more pragmatic, is willing to surrender anything—and anyone—to meet the former movie’s demands.

Ghosts, then, is always threatening to turn into a kind of dark fairy tale: a parentless, penniless girl, drawn in by a talismanic earring and a prophetic dream, meets an older, worldlier young woman who takes her on a threatening adventure, with all the sexual consequences that description implies. What’s fascinating about the film is that it keeps briefly becoming the fairy tale its heroine wants it to be, then returning, somewhat cruelly, to its real subject: the way that individuals have their identities slowly effaced when their society fails to give them either a share in the past or a place in the present. Germany, as depicted here, is suffering from a sort of collective amnesia, unable to bear the guilt of its crimes in the first half of the 20th century and equally unable to come to terms with the legacy of those crimes in the second half: the GDR’s long history of violence and repression, or the traces of Nazism and anti-Semitism that pervaded West Germany and persist in the country today. (Memorably, in The State I Am In, Jeanne sneaks into a high school class on the day they’re scheduled to watch a documentary on the concentration camps. When the lights come up, the teacher’s first line is to scold the kids for their poor attendance: “When it’s movie time, suddenly everybody shows up!”) But because the country is also unable to guarantee its citizens economic security in the present, it forces them to stake their identities and their lives on the future—which is, perhaps, why Petzold’s heroines are so quick to lose themselves in thought, and so susceptible to falling, ghost-like, between institutional cracks.

Petzold is fascinated by people who fall through the cracks, drift towards the margins, or—in the case of the subplot that makes for Ghosts’ central enigma—simply disappear. The film’s third heroine is Françoise (Marianne Basler), an upper class, middle-aged French woman scouring Europe for her daughter, who was abducted nearly two decades earlier outside a German supermarket at age three. She fixates on Nina as a possible match, but outside interventions cut their two brief interviews short. (Tina swipes her purse at their first encounter, and the woman’s husband—who suspects Nina of manipulating her for cash—breaks up their second meeting.) Here is the missing link in Nina’s fairy tale: the mysterious, regal woman who arrives from a faraway land to tell her that she isn’t like the others, that her heart-shaped birthmark and scarred ankle are, in fact, marks of a higher birth. The irony is that Françoise, who seems at first to come from a different movie in which she’s reserved Nina a new and better role, turns out to be one more victim of modern Germany’s refusal to remember its missing and its dead. All three films in the trilogy include jolting inserts of security camera footage, but the most devastating of these comes late in Ghosts: a brief, slowed-down clip of Françoise’s toddler daughter, momentarily left unattended in a shopping cart, being pulled by an unseen man out of the frame—and away from the state’s narrow jurisdiction. Is Nina the missing girl? The question lingers in the movie’s final frames like an unfinished sentence at the end of a dream, but it won’t, we sense, have a chance to linger for long. There are clothes to steal, shows to audition for and money to make, somehow or another.

Yella

Yella is the coldest, grimmest, and most aggressively materialistic film in the trilogy. It is also, to an extent that only becomes apparent in the movie’s final minutes, the entry in which Petzold moves deepest inside the consciousness of one of his heroines. The great Nina Hoss, in her second of four performances for Petzold—a fifth is on the way—plays a young professional under pressure. Her estranged husband, desperate to win back her love by reviving the failing business they once ran together, is stalking her; near the start of the film, after insisting on taking her to the train station, he drives their car off a bridge.  Soaked and alone, she arrives in a new town for an accounting job that, as it turns out, doesn't exist. In the bar of her hotel, she meets a young, ambitious businessman; they bond over balance sheets and form a partnership that, by the end of the film, has spilled over into an affair. The movie’s dialogue is a tangle of charts and figures, net values and selling prices, offers and counter-offers, audits, deductions, and percentages. From time to time, Yella drifts off into her own private world, where the rustling of the leaves outside and the music of birds in the distance take on sudden, overwhelming intensity. Another movie is peeking through, but—unlike in Ghosts—it never appears in more than flashes, glimmers, and pinpricks. Petzold’s movie, in contrast, eventually evolves into a kind of corporate thriller-cum-morality play, complete with a Macbeth-like touch: in the film’s last ten minutes, Yella becomes the first of the trilogy’s heroines to see a ghost.  

Yella is a hard, opaque object shaped by unresolved tensions and contradictions; it underlines rather than answers the questions posed by the first two films in the trilogy. Are these movies about the state of post-reunification Germany, or the state of their heroines’ inner lives? Are they tough, sharpened studies in the uses and abuses of power, like the films of Petzold’s first two cinematic influences—Hitchcock and Lang—or are they defined more by their brief-but-central moments of tenderness and mutual understanding? Are they rigidly deterministic, or open to the intrusion of outside possibilities? Are the relationships they depict cold and businesslike, or charged with erotic potential? Is human life, in these movies, given inherent or only instrumental value? What extent of imaginative freedom does Petzold allow his heroines? And is that freedom a blessing or a curse? They’re the kinds of questions that the trilogy’s heroines might ask themselves, before turning back to their bank notes or balance sheets.

Christian Petzold's Ghosts screens  Wednesday, February 26 as part of Film Comment Selects.

Sneak-previewing as part of the closing night of Film Comment Selects, Denis Villeneuve’s new film Enemy stars Jake Gyllenhaal as a man confronted by existential conundrums and deep-seated inner-fears when he discovers his doppelgänger. Gyllenhaal plays both roles: Adam, a bored and constantly perturbed history professor, and Anthony, a tense and cocksure bit-part actor who catches the academic’s eye on screen due to his alarming resemblance to him. Adapted from José Saramago’s novel The Double, this psychosexual thriller co-stars Mélanie Laurent as Adam’s girlfriend, Isabelle Rossellini as his mother, and Sarah Gadon as Anthony’s wife. FILM COMMENT spoke with Villeneuve (whose last film was Prisoners, also with Gyllenhaal) to get under the skin of the doubled character.

Maelstrom

Your second feature, Maelstrom, a dark comedy from 2000 about guilt and bodily alienation, meant a lot to me at the time, and still does. It feels more similar to Enemy than any of your other films.

You’re totally right. There’s a symmetry [to them]. They are brothers in some ways. I thought of them together when I was writing and shooting Enemy. My challenge was not to fall into the same traps. [Laughs] But I knew I was in the same area. I think that I needed to go back there because after Polytechnique and Incendies, both of which were more realistic and word-oriented and about cycles of violence, I felt that I had to go back to something more intimate, something more personal. I think Enemy’s my most personal movie.

What is it that makes the film so personal for you?

It’s a fear of failure, of a threat, the threat of not being able to evolve as a human being. The threat of the power of the subconscious, why it’s so powerful and how it tells us to get rid of certain pieces inside ourselves. Whenever I have to make a decision that’s connected to a feeling inside myself, I’m always afraid of not being in control. I question a lot whether we’re really in control of ourselves. This film is, for me, an exploration of a worry.

One of the things that also connects Maelstrom and Enemy is that they both key into this anxiety, this generalized unease that seems so central to contemporary life.

This is true, what you’re saying. Nowadays there is that feeling. The other thing is—not having been there in the Sixties, I can’t say what it was like—but at that time they were dealing with the stress of nuclear bombs. There are always different kinds of anxieties throughout history. But right now there’s something more definite about it. There’s a possibility, a real possibility, that we are facing a wall. This is something that I see in children, how they look at the future in a very bleak way. And we have always, in the past, relied on technology to save us, and there comes a time when it’s very oppressive. It’s an anxiety that is here on a daily basis.

Enemy

The use of color in Enemy is very striking. The images have an overall yellow-and-green-ish tint, but you also break from that uniformity with a subtle use of blue and red—Helen’s cellphone has that amazing red glow, and there’s that deep blue light coming from Adam’s computer. Something about that scene, when Adam is woken up by the computer, feels quite familiar to me. This glowing electronic device in a dark room whose presence won’t allow you to rest, and which seems part of another world.

It’s very interesting what you’re saying. The colors, first of all, are based on what I had in mind as I was reading the book. The book is set in a metropolis that feels like its somewhere in the south, and there was a description of this yellow-ish atmosphere. We added the smog, which came from the idea of pressure—the paranoid feeling and the pressure of the city and the density of the population. It felt like there was this yellow color coming from my mind, coming from pollution. It’s something that we wanted to add with VFX, but as we were shooting in Toronto in the summer there was so much pollution that we didn’t have to add anything. It was like a natural apocalyptic landscape. We did work with specific filters in order to create that feeling.

The idea was to shoot the city as it is but bring in the atmosphere of the book, the pressure that was inside the book. In the book, there are no computers. It’s set in the Eighties. But I felt it was more relevant to bring in the technology of today because of its relationship to narcissism, which is very present with the Internet today, the way people are using the Internet as a mirror. It’s something that I felt was interesting to incorporate in the screenplay.

Given the film’s subject matter, the color palette reminded me of amniotic fluid, or like looking at a medical specimen inside a jar of formaldehyde.

Yes, I know what you mean.

If I’m not mistaken, the image of the spider hovering over the city is a reference to the Louise Bourgeois sculpture, which is, appropriately enough, called Maman.

It’s just that for months I was thinking about spiders and I brought this idea to the screenplay because it was, for me, the perfect image that would translate some ideas from the book. Something that wasn’t overused. I needed this one image, and I said: “I have to find the right one.” When I thought about the spider, there was something specific I was looking for, the feeling from this beast, and that main thing was intelligence. I wanted to see that the spider was a beast that has the characteristic of a strong intelligence, and elegance. The best example that I found was this Louise Bourgeois sculpture. We tried tons of different designs, but it always came back to this one. So, yes, it’s inspired by Louise Bourgeois.

One of the things that comes to mind in using that sculpture as the basis for your imagery is that Adam’s mother is an artist herself, and the spider hovering over the city appears right after the only scene with her. I was wondering if you could talk about this way of constructing the movie, the various elements at play and their complex relationships.

It’s something that we worked a long time on. We had to make it more dynamic at one point, but this idea of the spider and the mother was a link that was a bit more obvious in the screenplay which we had to remove. Because I think it was too obvious. The way we approached this movie was very pretentious [laughs] because we were trying to do it on a concrete level and on the subconscious level at the same time. So it affects the audience on both levels.

I think that an audience can understand concepts or ideas that are poetic and strange from an emotional point of view but from an intellectual point of view it would be trying for the audience to have to process. And it’s something that I love about a lot of filmmakers, like Kubrick. He’s one of my favorite filmmakers because he’s one of the masters of this. As a filmmaker it’s my dream to be able to try to create those connections between the two levels. In some ways, I think all movies are trying to do that.

There’s this notion of subterranean ideas in your work. For instance, Polytechnique is about someone who possesses a warped ideology, these awful ideas that lead him to these violent actions, but we only see the violent actions. That kind of stuffing intellectual content underneath a movie, if you will—not making it the explicit focus—is something you keep returning to. Is that something you’re trying for?

Yes... To be honest, I’m aware [of this]. When I finished Polytechnique, I decided to take a break because I realized that I was not able to continue the kind of cinema that I was trying to make. I felt like—not a failure, but I was not ready to make another movie right away because I needed to explore more screenwriting to understand how to bring ideas through subtext, to underline things, that stuff, more precisely, without talking about them. Do you understand what I mean? I’m trying to express in my own words what you just said. [Laughs]

Enemy is really a movie entirely about discomfort, and even though it’s this fantastic premise, it’s presented in such a way that it can be related to daily life. The way that Gyllenhaal comports himself, and the way you’re able to compare the two versions of his character, it becomes this miniature epic of discomfort—feeling like an imposter in your own life, for reasons that both are absurd and make sense. It’s also about the way that body language speaks to who you are.

In a way, they are two souls that have the same body, but they don’t need it in the same ways. I was able to know which character Jake was playing just by the way he was moving his shoulder or the way his eyes would relax playing one versus the discomfort of the other one. How you see the world has an impact on the way you inhabit your body. It was something that Jake was able to portray very subtly. In fact, my job very often was to try to bring the two characters closer together, to not make them too different. I wanted the characters to be, in some ways, very far away from one another but also have very subtle similarities, and my work was to focus on those aspects.

Adam Bell behaves more like Anthony Clair when he gets excited and also when he’s having sex.

Yeah, there’s something about their sexuality—it’s a movie about discomfort with intimacy. Both characters are linked by their sexuality.

For me, the movie was about infidelity, the disastrous effects of infidelity, fear of intimacy, also a fear of the opposite gender, and the way this can damage relationships and how one can become obsessed with these things much to the detriment of everything else in life.

When somebody asked me recently to explain the movie I said: “You know what, this movie is a very simple story, it’s a man who decides to leave his mistress and go back to his wife, and we see this story from his subconscious point of view.” This is the way I read the book, and this is what I tried to do in making the movie. It’s the simplest story but told in a very complex way.

The first three shots of the film even suggest this idea. You have the panning shot across the city with his mother’s voice leaving him a message on his answering machine; then a shot of Gyllenhaal sitting in his car; and then a shot of his wife on their bed looking back toward the camera. And I got the sense that these three—the mother, himself, and the mother-to-be, his wife—are the three elements that cause him to fracture. Then at the end, as soon as Adam and his wife begin to have sex on the couch, they finally embrace each other again, that’s when Adam’s girlfriend and Anthony Clair have the car crash.

I love it because I feel that you really get all the keys and it’s very exciting for me. A lot of people are disoriented and they are like, “What the fuck is that,” and are lost when they see the movie. I think it’s a movie that is very playful, and unfortunately you have to see it more than one time to get all the elements.

The movie deals with aspects of the relationship a person has to their own individuality, in a way that feels unique to me. Hitchcock has come up a number of times in discussions of the film, and of all the Hitchcockian elements, the one that feels most profound is that the character’s fears appear absurd and at the same turn out to be well-placed.

It’s true that this project, in the beginning, was influenced by Hitchcock and a little by Polanski. When you make a movie in the 21st century, you are always being influenced by tons of masters. This one is really an exploration of suspense, and for me it was like a neurotic spy movie. And in order to do that, it was a pleasure to revisit some of Hitchcock’s movies, but I do that with a lot of humility, trying to be playful. So many masterpieces have been made in the past, so that today when you make a movie I think you have to be humble.

I think that comes across. For instance, it’s such a tight movie; it’s less than 90 minutes. That’s another thing I reacted to: as much as it has the tone of a thriller, to the point of being a horror movie, there’s something low-key about it, extraordinary but everyday. Which makes it relatable.

I understand. That was the kind of tension that I was trying to create between the fantastique elements and everyday life, so that you would feel the pressure of the horror of someone meeting himself for real. There was something about trying to explore the fantastique elements and put them in reality. The movie’s very stylized but at the same time we tried to keep the feeling of reality always there so that the tension would be stronger.

Traditional wisdom has it that the more culturally specific a story, the more likely it is to attain universal resonance. Ritesh Batra’s The Lunchbox could be used as Exhibit A to support that proposition—and the phenomenon on which the film is built is very specific indeed. Set in the everyday working world of Mumbai, Batra’s feature is built on the Indian custom of lunchbox deliveries. In Mumbai particularly, armies of food delivery men, known as dabbawallahs, bring lunchboxes to the workplace: these are round, stacking metal boxes filled with hot food usually prepared by an office worker’s family or meal suppliers; at the end of the day, they collect the boxes and take them back home. According to a possibly apocryphal Harvard study invoked in the film, only one such box in a million ever reaches the wrong destination, and The Lunchbox weaves a delicious scenario of what might happen in such a case.

At the start, we see a young Mumbai woman, Ila (Nimrat Kaur), preparing a box for her husband Rajeev (Nakul Vaid). As she cooks, she takes guidance from her “Auntie,” an elderly upstairs neighbor who advises her in shouted instructions on how much of which ingredient to include in each dish. The lunchbox is placed in a turquoise fabric bag, collected by a dabbawallah and transported with thousands of other boxes, all in different wrappers. We follow the box all the way to its destination, from a short bicycle journey to transportation on a rack perched on a man’s head, then on a train—and in this part of the film, we’re watching Mumbai’s real-life dabbawallahs at work, who are included en masse in the end credits’ cast list.

Then the turquoise bag lands on a man’s desk in a crowded office. We don’t know it at first, but the man is not Ila’s husband. For reasons never clarified—in this sort of fable, you can only blame fate—it ends up on the desk of accountant Saajan Fernandes (Irrfan Khan). The short sequence in which (in wide shot, in the vastness of the open-plan office) he looks suspiciously at the box, then (in close-up) unfolds its contents, concisely tells us that his daily routine hangs on this moment, and that through this sudden change in his menu, his life will be transformed.

The lunchbox returns to Ila not only empty but practically licked clean—which tells her she has a very appreciative customer. But when she learns that her customer is not the casually neglectful Rajeev, she sends a note in the next lunch, then gets a message back from Saajan. The food itself becomes a sort of correspondence: Ila replies to a terse note about the food being too salty by making the next meal super-spicy, and Saajan writes to acknowledge that she has won this round. To offset the spiciness, he tells her, he ate two bananas; “I think it’ll also be good for the motions,” he adds, a sign of their growing intimacy, as if he’s really writing to his own late wife. Describing the other banana eaters that he sees around him, Saajan brings the city to Ila, who spends much of her time at home; telling him about Auntie’s husband, Ila brings domestic intimacy to Saajan, who as a solitary widower has lost touch with such a thing.

What we have here, then, is an old-fashioned paper-based epistolary film (“in the era of e-mail,” as someone points out) and moreover, an epistolary foodie film—although The Lunchbox doesn’t make too big a deal of stimulating our taste buds. Most of the time, we’re not really aware what Saajan is eating, still less licking our lips over it; we’re simply aware of what it means, and of the rarity of food really meaning something rather than simply being functional. When Saajan compliments his usual catering service on its aloo gobi, the man behind the counter looks amazed. Ila’s food is made con amore, and it’s the love that Saajan tastes, although it’s only after a while that that love is directed at him as confidant and potential partner; the film plays delicately with the idea that preparing food for someone might itself be a form of infidelity, or liberation.

The Lunchbox plays differently on the separate lives of the two lovers-at-a-distance. Ila’s existence is pictured pretty much in a realist register: her home with Rajeev and their young daughter, and a visit to her mother and seriously ill father, his face obscured by a doorway: another touch, like Auntie, of Batra’s elegant use of off-screen space.

Saajan’s life is played more as fable. Depict a character as a taciturn, detached clock-watcher, and you’re immediately invoking a modern tradition of stylized narratives about alienated individuals lost in bureaucracy, going back to Gogol’s The Overcoat and Melville’s Bartleby. Irrfan Khan is best known in the West for Life of Pi, Slumdog Millionaire, and Asif Kapadia’s The Warrior. As Saajan, he excels as a laconic, sour, sometimes cautiously amused man, nursing a widower’s loss, and telling off some children almost half-heartedly, by rote, as if he regards it as a regrettable but necessary part of his role to play the neighborhood grouch.

There’s a nice subplot: due for retirement after 35 years (at the same desk, we assume), Saajan is meant to be training his pushy, eager-to-impress younger replacement, Aslam Sheikh (Nawazuddin Siddiqui). We think we see where this is going—a callous tyro who can’t wait to shove aside his predecessor, right? Not at all. The bond between the two men develops surprisingly and charmingly, and tells us something about the change in work pressure since Saajan started out: we become aware of the struggle that Aslam will face to earn his keep, especially because he’s not terribly competent. In one scene, the two men return from work by train, and there and then Aslam starts chopping vegetables for his wife’s dinner: a revelation of his marital devotion, but also a sign that in hectic, crowded Mumbai, every available space and moment must be seized.

The realism and the fable blend nicely. Ila asks Auntie to play a song from the film that shares her new friend’s name, “Saajan,” and Batra cuts to Saajan on a train, with the same song chanted by a group of young boys—a nice suggestion of telepathy, or everyday magic. The film in question (Lawrence d’Souza) is also about an exchange of texts, poetry in this case, and is based on Cyrano de Bergerac, another story of courtship at a distance.

Batra’s script mixes Hindi and English cleverly—as far as a non-Hindi speaker can tell—sometimes using English for pithy, deadpan punch lines. In one scene, Saajan responds to a question about his reputation as a surly, even brutish loner; his reply is designed to signal that yes, it’s true, in fact, even worse than you could imagine, and he ends with a quiet, priceless “You’d better be careful.” The meaning of words is paramount. The thought of love makes Saajan look younger as the film goes on, at least in his own mind (he’s supposedly much older than Khan, 47), but the poignant moment on which the plot turns involves a man offering him his seat on the train and calling him “Uncle”—almost equivalent to “Old-Timer” or “Gramps.”

Kaur, best known as a theater actress, and Khan perform beautifully opposite each other, all the more so in that they act apart (do the characters meet? I’m not telling). Kaur’s Ila is mature, thoughtful, with a somewhat cerebral-seeming beauty that suggests Emma Bovary with a degree, or something like Julianne Moore’s character in Far from Heaven. She does the composed but provocative on-paper flirtation deliciously, and it’s notable that it’s Ila who makes all the decisive moves in this courtship.

As for Khan, few actors do world-weariness as beautifully—he has the baggy eyes for it, and a muted solemnity in his voice, perfect for keeping Saajan’s dour irony on the most delicate knife-edge. Siddiqui bounces off him nicely too, turning his Aslam, ostensibly an irritant, into someone you’d almost want to hug, if this film were any more overtly feel-good. Thankfully, it’s not: first-time writer-director Batra nearly overplays his hand at a couple of moments, but all in all this is a film of finely judged reserve, and acutely anti-sentimental. There’s an utterly satisfying literary construction to the narrative logic, the tight fable structure proving a wonderful way to contain the chaos of the city’s everyday—and Michael Simmond’s photography navigates elegantly between the composed, interior-bound fiction and the quasi-documentary energy of the street and train footage.

Liam Neeson continues to pistol-whip his way across the globe in Non-Stop, this time on a flight from New York to London. The lantern-jawed Irish actor has unexpectedly become a modern-day Charles Bronson, a strong, silent type seeking vengeance in creatively violent variations. Though no stranger to pulp—he was Darkman after all—it was producer Luc Besson who cemented Neeson’s late-career persona in Taken with his “particular set of skills.”

Director Jaume Collet-Serra has taken the weaponized Neeson and deployed him in two sleek wrong-man thrillers that reintroduce vulnerability into his character (Collet-Serra and Neeson will collaborate a third time for Run All Night, set to be released in February 2015). In Unknown (11) Neeson was an amnesiac scientist whose identity is stolen as part of a conspiracy plot, and he spends most of the film stumbling around Berlin piecing the remnants of his life together. In Non-Stop he plays Bill Marks, an alcoholic Air Marshal framed as a flight hijacker by an unidentified passenger. As in Unknown, Neeson’s character is on the defensive, innumerable steps behind his nemesis.

With Non-Stop, Collet-Serra confirms his status of one of Hollywood’s most inventive genre artists (and one of the last to shoot on film). Born in Barcelona, he moved to Los Angeles at the age of 18, and got his start making music videos and commercials. The great American huckster Joel Silver hired him to direct the 2005 remake of House of Wax, a shockingly good slasher movie that runs on class resentment, embodied in the plasticine grin of Paris Hilton.

After a detour in England for the soccer sequel Goal II: Living the Dream (07), he returned stateside for Orphan (09), a variation of the evil-child subgenre that doubles as a critique of a bourgeois marriage—Peter Sarsgaard and Vera Farmiga’s modernist wood and glass home slices them up in Collet-Serra’s lacerating compositions. (The satanic Estonian midget masquerading as a sweet little girl is just a bonus.) Add in Unknown and Non-Stop, and it’s becoming clear that Collet-Serra is interested in the fungibility of identity, and how easily our sense of self can be manipulated. In Non-Stop, after Marks is framed as the hijacker he acts schizophrenically, rapidly alternating between torture tactics and the-customer-is-always-right sweet talk, promising free international flights if everyone will shut up.

Neeson is suitably bedraggled, sporting an oily five o’clock shadow while adding some gravel to his tenor delivery. Introduced stirring his morning whiskey with a toothbrush, he’s the jangled nerve inverse to Taken’s impassive death machine. What he still retains is his keen observational skills, and Collet-Serra turns Non-Stop into a symphony of stares. This begins in the opening shot, a rack focus from condensation in a windshield to Marks hungrily eyeing his hair of the dog. Once at work in JFK (shot on location), Marks scans the passengers for red flags. Collet-Serra indicates his POV with tilt-shift lenses that localize focus on individual actors, the rest of the frame lost in a gauzy haze. This indicates both his ability to narrow his locus of attention as well as the fact that he’s got a buzz on.

Once on the plane, the visual field becomes overwhelmed with faces. As the killer could be any of the passengers or crew, Marks has to widen his field of vision. His eyes pass over a cast of talented supporting actors. Collet-Serra has a gift for attracting thespians slumming in genre pictures (see Frank Langella and Bruno Ganz in Unknown), and this time he nets Julianne Moore as Neeson’s acid-tongued seatmate and investigative ally, plus Corey Stoll (House of Cards) as a stubborn NYC cop and Michelle Dockery (Downton Abbey) as a cool-headed stewardess. Lupita Nyong’o is Dockery’s co-stewardess, though in nothing more than a bit part.

Collet-Serra ditches the tilt-shift lenses to get deeper focus as Neeson is constantly scanning the aircraft at large, tapping civilians to help him keep eyes on everyone, establishing a mini-surveillance state on board. The film pulls from all manner of post-9/11 anxieties, but especially the state’s sacrifice of privacy for security. Marks gives himself NSA-level capabilities, forcing passengers to hand over their phones so he can read their texts and ogle their photos for the greater good. It’s this kind of state overreach that motivates the killer’s plot, though his reasons are rushed through in the hectic finale. (Although the plot begs comparison to Murder on the Orient Express, it’s not Agatha Christie-tight.)

Despite being an action-movie star, Neeson is not a physically agile performer, intimidating more with his voice and presence. This limits the options for fight-scene choreography, as the 61-year-old can’t be expected to take the physical punishment of long-take brawls. Instead he’s given short, precise movements that are joined together in rapidly edited succession. It’s a style that was pushed to incoherency in the Taken series, but is tailor-made for the tight spaces of Non-Stop, such as the setpiece fight inside the airplane’s bathroom. Air marshals are trained to utilize close-quarters fighting styles that attack pressure points (mainly to subdue drunks), and this is emphasized in a grappling bout between Marks and one of the killer’s hired goons. Shot mainly in close-up, it’s a thrilling brawl made up of minute motions, and is decided by a thumb.

Though Marks’s moves keep him alive, it’s his constant, invasive surveillance of the passengers that solves the mystery. Neeson’s eyes, which Collet-Serra focuses on in the first shot, are what unravel the nefarious plot—except now he’s staring into a cell-phone video of the killer  commandeered from a snap-happy teen instead of a cup of whiskey. It seems the ends justify the police-state means, at least if Liam Neeson is doing the justifying.

Darkman
Sam Raimi, 1990, USA
Scream Factory

The Shadow
Russell Mulcahy, 1994, USA
Shout! Factory

The Fantastic Four

Last week, the Internet was rocked by shockwaves on a magnitude not seen since Thanos rocked the earth in The Infinity Gauntlet #2. The cast for the forthcoming Fantastic Four movie was revealed! Based on Marvel Comics’s cornerstone franchise, the movie is being billed as a “reboot” of 20th Century Fox’s last Fantastic Four movie, which will be all of 10 years old in 2015, when the new, improved model hits theaters. This is par for the course with the established timeline for introducing a franchise, riding it for as many sequels as continue to return dividends, and then rebooting after a suitable period has passed for cultural amnesia to set in. For example: 2012’s The Amazing Spider-Man came along almost exactly a decade after the Sam Raimi–directed Spider-Man, which, if it wasn’t the first hit based on a Marvel property—1998’s Blade and 2000’s X-Men both got there first—did establish the Marvel brand as a box-office powerhouse. (Oh, and did you see the captures of the new Green Goblin from The Amazing Spider-Man 2, coming to theaters on May 2, 2014?)

This is, perhaps, the world our children and grandchildren will know: the same franchises, being revived and refitted for each coming generation with the latest F/X technology, fresh actor meat, and currently fashionable attitudes. But it wasn’t always like this. From that last Fantastic Four, jump back another decade to arrive at 1994’s The Fantastic Four, co-produced by Roger Corman with a budget equal to the catering bill on The Avengers. Unreleased and buried by a shamefaced Marvel, the 1994 TFF typifies a period when comic book adaptations and superhero fare were considered dubious box-office prospects at best, the notable exceptions being the Salkind-produced Supermans and the Batman cycle begun by Tim Burton, phenomena that were separated by over a decade which had failed to produce any dependable, repeatable formula. 

Darkman

In the course of a single week, Los Angeles-based Shout Factory has released two prime specimens of the Nineties superhero movie to Blu-ray: Sam Raimi’s Darkman (90) and Russell Mulcahy’s The Shadow (94). Darkman is unquestionably the better movie of the two, and of additional interest given the central role that its director would later have in putting over the superhero genre with the American public. This was still some time in the future, however. While Darkman performed respectably at the box office, dominating on its opening weekend against such summer season heavy hitters as Estevez-Sheen (Men at Work), Jim Henson (The Witches), Chuck Norris (Delta Force II), and Christian Slater (Pump Up the Volume), its modest success wasn’t taken to signify a trend, and its sequels were direct to video. (The final of these was called Darkman III: Die, Darkman, Die, which deserves a place in the pantheon of funny sequel subtitles next to The Quickening and The Secret of the Ooze.)

Darkman was prescient in more ways than one, for it gave star Liam Neeson, then 37 years old, his first really meaty action role of the sort that now constitute his entire career. It was also one of the first films to fully exploit Neeson’s particular ability to convey bewildered hurt—an ability put to good use this week in Jaume Collet-Serra’s thriller Non-Stop. In Darkman, the actor, peering out from behind a mask of soiled bandages, is frequently forced to emote with only his ragged voice and eyes. This handicap proves a boon.

“Who is Darkman?” to quote the memorable ad campaign? Well, Darkman—who doesn’t identify himself as such until the ending of the movie—is the alter ego of one Peyton Westlake. When we first encounter Westlake, he’s a scientist who’s tirelessly working at his home laboratory to perfect a new technology that will generate synthetic skin for the benefit of burn victims, technology that involves a scanner and one of those pinpoint needle impression desk toys that you buy at Sharper Image. Westlake’s work is interrupted when his girlfriend, Julie (Frances McDormand), accidentally comes into possession of a document that shows collusion between a local developer and mob figures, very bad men who soon come a-calling, horribly disfiguring the doctor and detonating his lab in the course of retrieving evidence. You know that Darkman belongs to a less self-serious era of “comic book” movies the moment that the explosion sends Westlake a hundred feet in the air, a tail of fire behind him, screaming an “AAAAAAHHHHH” that’s practically written in orange block letters, and altogether recalling nothing so much as Wile E. Coyote after a run-in with some ACME dynamite.

Westlake survives to wake up in a hospital, swathed with gauze and clamped down by restraints. The least sympathetic M.D. in film history is explaining to an audience of med students that the subject, fished out of the river as an unidentified “John Doe,” has been subjected to something called the “Rangeveritz Procedure,” which renders him unable to feel physical pain, while leaving him “prone to extreme feelings of alienation, loneliness, and uncontrolled rage” that are accompanied by lowland gorilla-level bursts of strength. (And Ren Russell–esque bursts of tawdry psychedelia.) One of these attacks allows Westlake to break his fetters and return to the world, which is less than ecstatic to receive him. Once a rather good-looking guy despite the requisite weedwhacker Liam Neeson haircut, Westlake now sports a mixed complexion that’s a combination of charcoal briquette and stringy mozzarella. Picking up the charred ruins of his lab, he sets up shop in an abandoned factory and gets to work churning out synthetic meat masks of the thugs who put him in this bind, using these perfect likenesses to go among them and sow dissent and distrust.

Like Neeson, Raimi was also at something of a career crossroads here: at this point he was primarily known for his two Evil Dead films, his lone departure from horror having been 1986’s widely loathed Crimewave. He still has one foot in creature features. Neeson’s psychopathic trickster-hero has more in common with Claude Rains’s Invisible Man or the Universal Studios Mummy than he does with Peter Parker, and the film’s opening credits emerge from a Bava-like swirl of colorful mist. Touches of the macabre are in evidence right from the opening scene, a shootout between two crime syndicate bosses that ends with the victor and Westlake’s eventual nemesis, Robert Durant (Larry Drake), clipping his helpless rival’s fingers off with a cigar cutter. This is not the film’s last instance of violence being visited on vulnerable digits. Peyton creates a mask of his unburned face so that he can visit Julie while keeping her oblivious to his condition, and during an outing at a beachfront amusement park, he gets into an altercation with a carny and bends the man’s fingers back until they break.

It’s a funny scene, and the carnival setting suits Raimi, who is possessed of one of the most leering and unsubtle camera styles in cinema. Darkman is full of breakneck POVs, canted angles, and a camera anticipatorily placed in, say, a medicine cabinet or a vat of acid moments before a characters face is smashed or splashed into it. The film’s predominant visual pattern is a spiral, curling around a staring eyeball in close-up à la Psycho, or offering the view from the upright wheel that Westlake is mounted upon in hospital. It’s a vertiginous motif, anticipating the dizzy climax on the perilous gridwork of an under-construction skyscraper that’s rising over the city.

The Shadow

The Shadow shares more with Darkman than a distributor (Universal) and a predilection for showing people falling from buildings at a very great height. In fact, the creation of Darkman was a direct result of Raimi losing out in the bidding wars for two dream projects, Batman and The Shadow, with Darkman’s broad-brimmed hat and mask of gauze an obvious cop of The Shadow’s cowl and fedora. First appearing in 1931, The Shadow was adventuring before Superman, Captain Marvel, Captain America, or the Bat-Man—whose backstory owes everything to The Shadow, alter ego of playboy Lamont Cranston—ever came on the scene. He was a radio hero first, then a pulp-fiction staple, and for a time was voiced by 22-year-old Orson Welles. He inspired a number of serial and B-pictures, as well as a knock-off radio series, The Whistler, which got its own series of films. (The first was the feature debut of one William Castle.) And in 1994, The Shadow was the subject of $40 million would-be summer blockbuster.

I’m not sure how to explain why a movie of The Shadow might’ve seemed like a good idea at the time, other than to say that this was the period of Dick Tracy (90), The Rocketeer (91), and The Phantom (96). There was some kind of neo-serial chic thing in the air, as well as a particularly Nineties fetishization of Thirties Art Deco that can be viewed in its purest form in the sets for Frasier. I saw The Shadow as an adolescent, when it was in theaters, and I remember precisely two things about it: a nifty bit involving a pneumatic tube communications network, and a Mexican standoff-type scene in which two people discharge guns at one another at the same time and their bullets collide in midair. It struck me as a bad movie when I was 13, and it has not grown on me in the intervening 20 years. Australian-born director Russell Mulcahy’s career hasn’t gone on to much greater distinction in the same period; his big break was the video for “Video Killed the Radio Star,” and despite having early career high points Highlander and, yes, Highlander II: The Quickening on his résumé, he was mostly resigned to TV and direct-to-video movies after The Shadow. (He was not entrusted with any of the Darkman sequels.)

The Shadow opens in Tibet, where Cranston has set himself up as a merciless warlord. A local mystic sees something better in Cranston, however, and teaches the corrupt man to harness his own inner darkness, tutoring him in the mysterious Oriental Arts—this after siccing a truly horrible piece of computer graphics on him, in the form of a sentient flying dagger. Now equipped with “the power to cloud men’s minds” that allows him to turn invisible save for his shadow, Cranston returns to New York City to dispense vigilante justice, just in time to clash with a distant descendant of Genghis Khan (John Lone) who is preparing to hold the city hostage with a prototype atomic bomb.

Baldwin lends his signature baritone to the disembodied Shadow, but otherwise seems bemusedly miscast. “Year after year, American movies act as if Alec Baldwin were a proper lead player,” begins David Thomson’s entry on Baldwin in his A Biographical Dictionary of Film, written around the same time that American movies were still making precisely that mistake, over and over again. “I wonder if he isn’t better suited to comedy?” Thomson continues a couple of paragraphs later, a question that anyone who’d seen Baldwin’s Saturday Night Live appearances or his turn as the grinning sociopath in George Armitage’s 1990 Miami Blues already knew the answer to.

There are some indications that Mulcahy was aware of Baldwin’s comic abilities and trying to tap into them. When Cranston’s ladyfriend Margo Lane awakens to recount a sexy dream, he brusquely responds with his own dream, not missing a beat: “I tore all the skin off my face and was somebody else underneath.” The part of Margo is played by Penelope Ann Miller, fresh off being the worst thing in Carlito’s Way, also written by The Shadow screenwriter David Koepp. She’s also the worst thing in The Shadow, which is a significantly greater achievement.

Most of the film’s attempts at levity are totally wrongheaded; after The Shadow uses a henchman that he’s grappling with to cushion a fall, at fatal cost to the henchman, he quips: “Next time, you get to be on top,” which is presumably meant to be a sex joke and which, given the context, is just weird. Mulcahy has no grip whatsoever on his movie’s vacillating tone, and squanders an interesting supporting cast whose number includes Peter Boyle, Jonathan Winters, and the future Magneto himself, Sir Ian McKellen.

Though set in New York, The Shadow was shot in Los Angeles—Mulcahy doesn’t even bother to grab an exterior of the real and very recognizable New York Museum of Natural History. There is some nifty model work used to create the cityscape, however, particularly in the aforementioned pneumatic tube scene, which is far and away the best minute of footage in the film. The particular developmental stage of the CGI on display throughout as good as carbon dates The Shadow, and put me in mind of other contemporary attempts to capture period that will probably be unfamiliar to anyone who wasn’t in thrall to the pop culture of the period: The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles and the computer game The Dagger of Amon Ra.

The Shadow wasn’t a box-office success, but another superhero movie released some six weeks before was, and pointed the way to the future of the genre. Alex Proyas’s 1994 The Crow set down the grim, po-faced tone that in years to come would give ballast and intellectual respectability to Brooding, Dark™ reboots of intellectual properties involving spandex-clad crime fighters, a trend that continues to this day. Meanwhile, rumors of a Raimi Shadow movie continue to surface with some regularity, and if the regular pendulum-swing of cultural trends is any indication, we should be due for a new round of bright, unabashedly cartoonish comic-book films sometime around 2020. 

Our ever-vigilant readers would like to make a correction: swapping the first and second slots of our Critics’ Poll, the final tally found 12 Years a Slave on top instead of Inside Llewyn Davis. Close behind was Her, newly installed at #3, while the big gambles of The Wolf of Wall Street (#8) and Captain Philips (#19) also saw significant gains. Note: Numbers in parentheses refer to the film’s ranking in the Critics’ Poll (Jan/Feb 2014). For each ballot, a first-place choice was allotted 20 points, 19 for second, an so on. Congratulations to the winners selected randomly from this year’s poll participants to receive Criterion Collection DVDs of their choice: Donald Sjoerdsma of Chicago, IL (First Prize); Anne-Marie Miller of Berkeley, CA (Second Prize); and Eileen Flynn of Arlington, VA, and Darren Tripiciano of Auburn, NY (Third and Fourth Prizes). And many thanks to Criterion Collection for its generous donation of DVDs.

1. 12 Years a Slave Steve McQueen, U.S. (2)

2. Inside Llewyn Davis Joel & Ethan Coen, U.S. (1)

3. Her Spike Jonze, U.S. (17)

4. Gravity Alfonso Cuarón, U.S. (7)

5. Before Midnight Richard Linklater, U.S. (3)

6. Frances Ha Noah Baumbach, U.S. (9)

7. The Act of Killing Joshua Oppenheimer, Denmark/Norway/U.K. (4)

8. The Wolf of Wall Street Martin Scorsese, U.S. (37)

9. Nebraska Alexander Payne, U.S. (18)

10. American Hustle David O. Russell, U.S. (19)

11. Blue Jasmine Woody Allen, U.S. (25)

12. Upstream Color Shane Carruth, U.S. (10)

13. Spring Breakers Harmony Korine, U.S. (14)

14. Blue Is the Warmest Color Abdellatif Kechiche, France/Belgium/Spain (12)

15. Computer Chess Andrew Bujalski, U.S. (8)

16. Stories We Tell Sarah Polley, Canada (16)

17. The Great Beauty Paolo Sorrentino, Italy/France (24)

18. A Touch of Sin Jia Zhang-ke, China (5)

19. Captain Phillips Paul Greengrass, U.S. (50)

20. Bastards Claire Denis, France/Germany (13)

21. The World’s End Edgar Wright, U.K.

22. Museum Hours Jem Cohen, Austria/U.S. (11)

23. To the Wonder Terrence Malick, U.S. (31)

24. The Grandmaster Wong Kar Wai, Hong Kong/China (20)

25. Leviathan Lucien Castaing-Taylor & Véréna Paravel, France/U.K./U.S. (6)

26. All Is Lost J.C. Chandor, U.S. (26)

27. Prisoners Denis Villeneuve, U.S.

28. Dallas Buyers Club Jean-Marc Vallee, U.S. (48)

29. Something in the Air Olivier Assayas, France (28)

30. Like Someone in Love Abbas Kiarostami, Japan/France (15)

31. Short Term 12 Destin Daniel Cretton, U.S. (47)

32. Post Tenebras Lux Carlos Reygadas, Mexico/France/Germany/Netherlands (27)

33. Mud Jeff Nichols, U.S.

34. Fruitvale Station Ryan Coogler, U.S. (30)

35. Beyond the Hills Cristian Mungiu, Romania/France/Belgium (22)

36. No Pablo Larraín, Chile/U.S./France (23)

37. The Place Beyond the Pines Derek Cianfrance, U.S.

38. Room 237 Rodney Ascher, U.S. (33)

39. Philomena Stephen Frears, U.K.

40. The Past Asghar Farhadi, France/Italy (40)

41. Drug War Johnnie To, Hong Kong/China (43)

42. The Spectacular Now James Ponsoldt, U.S.

43. The Wind Rises Hayao Miyazaki, Japan (42)

44. The Bling Ring Sofia Coppola, U.S.

45. Much Ado About Nothing Joss Whedon, U.S. (45)

46. The Hunt Thomas Vinterberg, Denmark/Sweden

47. This Is the End Seth Rogen & Evan Goldberg, U.S.

48. At Berkeley Frederick Wiseman, U.S. (21)

49. Wadjda Haifaa Al Mansour, Saudi Arabia/Germany

50. Pacific Rim Guillermo del Toro, U.S.

This is a transcript of "An Evening with Alfonso Cuarón," which took place on February 13th and was moderated by Gavin Smith.

Gravity

With the advent of CGI, people become used to the idea that anything is possible—if you can imagine it, you can make it happen. When I first saw Gravity, I assumed this was just another particularly spectacular use of digital effects and green screen. Later I discovered that I was completely wrong. There’s no use of green screen and the CGI was created before you filmed the actors—the inverse of how things are usually done. And you and your team had to invent a completely new way of making a film and new technology to realize it, putting you in the company of people like Spielberg, Cameron, and Kubrick. Can you take us through the process of how you went about this?

CG is like any other tool in cinema. What you do with those tools depends on the creative side. When I wrote the screenplay with Jonás Cuarón, who’s my son, I thought it was going to be a very small movie. When I sent the script to Chivo [Emmanuel Lubezki, the director of photography], I told him that it was just an intimate story of a woman dealing with her grief, and that it would take a year or so with some visual effects. At that time, I was thinking more as a writer than a director. Once we started trying to ground what we were trying to do with conventional tools, it turned out that those tools were not going to work. We had to start figuring out how to make the movie work, but always from the standpoint of the source material, of the thematic and cinematic journey that we wanted to convey. So all the time it was thematics and the cinematic that dictated the technological process. I am not a technological person. I got my first computer five years ago, I barely know how to send e-mail, and I can Google to look for a movie theater, but that’s as far as I go in terms of technology. But you surround yourself with people who do know. I’m not a technological person, but I have movie common sense. I understand the principles of cinema, and so I worked with Chivo and Tim Webber, who’s the visual effects supervisor, to figure out the best way of doing this. We tried different routes and it was a process of trial and error. We started doing previsualizations, rough animations, which, in a conventional movie, are usually used as guides, a moving storyboard. It soon became clear that those previz animations were going to dictate and program what was going to happen on the set in terms of the camera positions and the lights. It became this search for how to make that possible. Chris DeFaria, the visual effects executive at Warner Bros., insisted he had done this before in an ambitious film called Cats & Dogs. In that film, he said he put one person in an office chair, and there was a dude running around with a light, and he said that we could achieve this that way. So we did a test and it sucked. But it was the right principle—to move the actor as little as possible, and move the universe around them. So that was the point of departure.

Now the problem was how to move the lights and cameras at that rate, and interfere as little as possible with the performances. But with conventional rigs and technologies, gravity was ever-present in the actors’ bodies. If you hang actors down, you can immediately see the strain in their faces and you could see the discomfort in the performance. So we wanted to keep the body relaxed. In microgravity, you can be upright or upside down and there’s no rush of blood to your head. Everything works normally in that respect, you’re actually more relaxed. So we keep our characters most of the time in a vertical position and move everything around them.

We started inquiring about new technologies, robotics for instance, and we adapted the robots used to build cars with a camera head. Chivo was at a Peter Gabriel concert and he saw the effects of LED lights on the audience. And that’s where he got this idea of combining the robots with the LED lights. So then it was about developing that technology, but it was always from the standpoint of the emotional, the thematic, and cinematic language.

What proportion of time was spent on the three phases—pre-production and the pre-visualization, then actual production, shooting with the actors, and finally post-production?

It was two-and-a-half years to develop the technology. Then it was another two years to shoot and complete the film. And because of the complication of the pipeline of this technology, we had to split the shoot into separate summers. So we shot 11 weeks or so one summer, then we went back the following summer to shoot another couple of weeks.

There’s been a great deal of emphasis on the special effects. But the film also has to have a visual style and an aesthetic. Could you talk about what you envisioned the visual style of the film to be?

I don’t really worry about style or aesthetics when I’m making a film. I’ve become very distrustful of style and aesthetics. I’m focused on cinematic language. With my collaborations, the conversations are always about theme and the cinematic language to convey that theme. Part of what I have been doing consistently with Chivo since Y tu mamá también is exploration of the environment, which is as important as the characters. One informs the other, or one clashes with the other. For us, it’s about registering that in real time. So a byproduct of that is the use of long, extended takes. The camera tends to be loose, going into close-up at very specific moments. If not, the camera keeps everything at a distance. Part of the goal was to create a film where the thematics were conveyed not through the cinematic rhetoric, but through more abstract means or metaphors. It’s about an astronaut who is a victim of her own inertia, getting farther away from human communication, drifting between the void and the possibility of life on the other side, which is the Earth. We were clear that this was a story about rebirth, about gaining new knowledge of yourself. So there’s a lot of imagery that’s around that idea of birth. So these thematics start informing what we were going to see, and how we were going to see it.

What I found particularly remarkable in the film’s prolonged first take is that, at a certain moment, the camera—although this is a cameraless film to a large extent—travels inside Sandra Bullock’s helmet, and then suddenly we’re Sandra Bullock’s point of view. We’re seeing from inside her helmet outward at what’s going on. And that’s a completely seamless shift from objective to subjective camera—and then back out of the helmet to an objective view again. To me that’s an aesthetic and stylistic choice.

It was something that was already described in the screenplay. In the screenplay, by the way, we don’t describe camera movement but we try to convey that sense. When the film starts, it’s as you’re saying “objective,” in the third person, and you’re observing this mission from the standpoint of a witness. When disaster strikes, and she starts spinning, the camera keeps on following her objectively until it locks into her and starts spinning with her. And then the camera gets closer and closer until, as you say, it goes into her POV and switches the film’s POV from third person to first person. But the goal of that is that once the camera comes back out of the helmet visor it doesn’t go back to being third-person objective, it becomes the POV of the audience, floating in space. From that point on, the camera starts following the same rules of physics as the characters in microgravity, and the idea is for the audience to be taken into the journey. That’s also the reason we tried to strip as much as possible from the backstory or exposition. We wanted to know just enough about the character that audiences coudld invest their own emotional experiences into the journey. The journey in the end is about adversities, and that’s something that’s a fundamental aspect of human experience.

Audience Member: Did you feel that the technology got in the way of working with the actors, and if it did, how did you overcome it?

I was absolutely blessed to be working with these two amazing actors. They embraced the challenge. Sandra prepared herself for five months physically. On one hand we talked a lot about the body language and how she wanted to be really trim and almost androgynous throughout the first part of the film. But she also had to prepare herself so that she would be able to handle the strain of those rigs and also give the appearance that everything is fluid and floating when in reality it was filled with tension. She went through physically working out, working with the stunt and special effects people, working with the animators and myself trying to figure out the best way, because in many cases we were blocking in the animation, so she had to be involved in the blocking of some of these scenes. And then she had to become really familiar with those rigs, and all through this process the luxury that we had was that it was such an extended process that it allowed us to just keep on digging further and further into the emotional core of each scene. Sandra had to be prepared to be performing in relation to camera and light positions and timings that were pre-programmed. So there was very little room for error or movement. On top of that, she had very specific cues and positions that she had to reach with very specific timings. I guess that her approach was more of one of a dancer who prepares a choreography so that when we were rolling cameras it was just like second-nature.

There were other technologies… She had to be locked inside this light box, a 10 x 10 cube with LED lights mounted on the walls. She actually started using that in her process because the scenes we were shooting when she was in that cube were the scenes when she was insulated and she chose to keep that insulation. In between setups she chose to stay inside. She was in the cube for four or five weeks. She had to have this amazing sense of abstraction because there were no sets. All of the sets are virtual. She worked closely with the art department, mapping in her head every single inch of that set, so that she would be clear on—if she were reaching something—where that thing would be specifically. With all this technology, the real miracle of this film is Sandra’s performance.

The scenes in the Soyuz capsule when she’s out of her space suit seemed like they could have been filmed as live action.

The Soyuz was one of the only real sets. We thought that going into a practical set was going to be easy. She’s alone and there’s one scene where she’s talking to someone on Earth but they don’t understand each other. Then it goes into this hallucination or dream of Clooney coming back, and then it goes back into the moment in which she gets her new resolve. That’s all one take, one shot. Everybody talks about the opening shot because it’s flashier, but that is one single shot where everything falls on the shoulders of Sandra’s performance, and it’s a big arc. It goes from despair to resignation to trying to kill herself to the moment of epiphany and a new resolve. Everything is in one single take because of the nature of shooting in a small space and the camera moving around, pieces of the set moving in and out of position all the time or moments where suddenly she had to duck because the camera was passing, or the whole ship would have to rotate to allow Clooney to come in and then rotate back to allow him to sit back down. With all of those cues and stuff she would never miss one single emotional beat.

Audience Member: When you started, what was the original concept and how did that evolve into the final project? And when you were working with your son to write it, how did you bounce ideas off each other?

The whole process was very fast. It was maybe one whole day where we were just bouncing ideas of each other. We were prepping a film that we had written together and it had just fallen apart. It was a small movie, a road movie, between the south of France and the north of Scotland. We had Charlotte Gainsbourg and Daniel Auteuil and our locations set. It was 2008 and it fell apart because of the financial crises of that year. What is called the indie market or the art-house market collapsed so it was clear we were not going to be able to do something like that at that point. So we were trying to figure out what to do and we talked about what could be more mainstream-friendly. Then we talked about how to do that in the way that we would have done the other film and we started talking about the theme. Because my life was filled with adversities at that point, we said, “Let’s just explore the theme of adversity.” Then we started talking about references and we had two: on one end of the spectrum was Duel by Spielberg, you could say a mainstream choice, and on the other end of the spectrum was A Man Escaped by Bresson. What both films have in common is that they have one single character going through a journey that starts to have existential overtones. So we started to discuss where to set that story. We had this image of one astronaut spinning into the void, and the metaphor was very obvious immediately, and we decided to follow that line. So pretty much, at the end of that day, we had a rough map of what we wanted to do, and we developed that map in the next five days or so, to get a blueprint. Then we parted ways: I went to Mexico, he went to Spain, and we would Skype everyday for the next two or three weeks until we completed a draft, a draft which is very close, actually, to the film.

Audience Member: How much science research did you have to do?

When we finished the first draft it was pretty much what you saw, but because we had been doing a lot of research on the Internet, we finished that draft feeling that we were space and science experts. We got the advice of a consultant, a scientist who works closely with NASA, and he proved that we’re just morons. It was inaccurate in every single way. So we started working very closely with several people and having conversations with astronauts to try to really make everything be as plausible and realistic as we could. We went to the length of writing a draft where every single scientific fact was addressed, but it was like a 300-page script filled with technicalities and stuff and it was really boring. So we decided that we’d just be as plausible as we could within the frame of our fiction. What we tried to be millimetric about the behavior of objects in microgravity and with no resistance. We did a lot of computer simulations because it’s very counterintuitive, it’s so difficult for our brains to understand the behavior of objects in that environment. We tried to be as accurate as possible but it’s full of holes—look, it’s a movie, not a documentary. For example, when she takes off her space suit and goes into the fetal position, she would have been wearing an adult diaper. And I don’t think it would have been very cool to have that!

GS: That’s what I was thinking for the rest of the movie—what about that diaper?

Audience Member: The music carries the story just as much as the technology and everything else. Obviously there’s no sound in space, but you can’t have a silent movie.

We worked with Steven Price for a long time, very closely. And actually we did an experiment. My movies tend to have very little music. Some, like Y tu mamá también don’t have any—it’s only source music coming from radios. In this one, I said, “What if we just go all the way?” So we did a version without music, using just the sound effects when astronauts are interacting with the environment—we learned in our research that if you’re on a spacewalk, you can hear things through vibration. So on the Blu-ray, we’re going to have that as an extra—the option for you to see the film without music. And it was interesting—and absolutely boring. So we started playing with the music, trying to respect the concept of the silence. In the beginning everything is sparse, and very textural. And it is not until later that the melodic elements start to spring. That stuff has to do with the emotional journey of the character. But as much we wanted to convey the emotional and psychological state of character through the music, we also wanted to convey the immersive sense of the film, this idea that you are there with these characters. So since in space there is no up or down, the music was not going to have a center either. The music constantly moves around. And what Steven did beautifully is create these compositions for Surround Sound, in which some harmonies travel in one direction and some move in the opposite direction, and eventually they collide, and when they collide they create new harmonies or sometimes melody. That is something that Stockhausen used to do in some of his pieces. He would have instruments all around the concert hall, and as the pieces started, the musicians would start walking around, changing the dynamics. And Steven also worked very closely with the sound-effects people, because there was a point where everything blurred, sometimes the radio signals would transform, and start having a musical quality. The departments were very promiscuous [laughs] because all of them collaborated with each other, and every department had its hands in the others.

GS: At the very end, when the capsule was filling with water, whenever the camera went below the surface of the water, the music became muted and had a different kind of texture to it, as if the camera were a person hearing the music.

Yeah, we tried to use absolute silence, and what happened is that silence lost its value. After a while you lose awareness of the silence. Not only do you lose awareness of that silence but when you’re in a screening room you hear people shuffling around and eating popcorn. So there’s not a real sense of silence. We used the music to accentuate the moments in which there was complete silence. Like when she enters the airlock, or Clooney comes back. And at the end, to enhance this concept, now she’s in the atmosphere, now she’s are back on earth. And sound travels, but travels according to density. So when you are in the air or when you are underwater, you can hear but with a completely different texture because sound travels differently when we are underwater.

Audience Member: I understand you actually had to pursue Sandra Bullock to get her for the role. I know it takes a lot of trust for an actor to accept a role and be part of an ambitious project. How did you gain her trust in the moments that it became hardest for her?

I have this theory that she agreed to see me because she thought I was Alejandro González Iñárritu. And so I went to see her in Austin and she realized I was not him. Sandra warned me even before I went to see her that she was busy with her life and didn’t want to work. But I was very intrigued by her, so I said, “Can I come and talk to you?” And she said, “Well, if you want.” What was surprising was that she had read the script, and loved it. We started talking and we didn’t talk for one second about space or even the story. We talked about the theme of adversity. And we were so in sync, for three hours we just talked about adversities in life. We didn’t talk about anything else. So I left, and I called my producing partner David Hayman, and I said, “She’s Ryan, but she doesn’t want to work.” And we had a couple of phone calls and she said she was intrigued by our conversation. And so immediately I took a plane again and kept on talking. And so, you know, I guess that we conned her into the whole thing. Because next thing, she was involved in the process. She said, “I’m very clear about what I have done. And I’m clear, also, on what has worked in the past. But I don’t want to go there. I want to go out of my comfort zone. I want to going into places I’ve never gone before.” And so she was really fearless about it. And as with any relationship, the first few weeks it was a little tense. But when we were clear that we were working for the same goals, it just became this relentless collaboration, in which she was millimetric about the screenplay, trying to explore every single second of the emotional value, and understanding that it has to be sparse and we have to cut down dialogue. And she was there working with the animators. It was really an amazing collaboration. She was collaborating hand-in-hand with Lynn Weber, the special-effects supervisor. There was a core of people: the DP, the visual-effects supervisor, the writer, and myself, with the actors. That was a very intimate thing, and very collaborative. And the thing is, when you are clear about the theme, and you have a thematic agreement, and you know the emotional goal you are trying to reach, everything becomes very simple.

Audience Member: I saw Gravity with a friend who was enraged about it. She said it was supremely sexist, because Sandra Bullock couldn’t do a single thing without George Clooney.

Look, I’m not going to defend anything. I don’t agree, you know, I think that it’s about situations of adversity. We needed another character to demonstrate her incompetence in space. The whole point was that she’s a fish out of water. So your friend would have been less offended maybe if the George Clooney character had been a woman. Probably, but I mean, that seemed too much. At the end I think it is very clear that she is the one that completes the journey. It is her journey of rebirth. Maybe your friend was confused about the dream. It’s a dream. He was not a ghost who comes to save her. It was her own consciousness. In her consciousness, what appears in the form of George Clooney, telling her things that she already knows, is just buried in her own consciousness. But in the end it’s herself, coming to terms with all of that stuff.