Modern Film Classics: “2046”

All memories are traces of tears. 

If you were to dance to the end of love, what would it look like? 

Wong Kar-Wai’s 2046 is the sequel to his celebrated 2000 masterpiece In the Mood for Love. In that classic, two neighbours in 1960s Hong Kong discover that their spouses are cuckolding them with each other. The man (Chow Mo-wan, played by Tony Leung) and woman (Su Li-Zhen, played by Maggie Cheung) confide in one another and form an unusual bond. Against their better judgment, they fall in love, their sorrow tethering their wasted souls to one another. In the end they part, never to reunite.

2046 picks up on the action a few yeaas later, in the late 1960s. The film takes on multiple stories within the space of just two hours, but they are all intertwined with one another on an emotional, if not necessarily logical narrative, level. Chow has become a successful science fiction writer, fulfilling the potential Li-Zhen saw in him during their time in the summer of 1962. Chow’s also become a bon vivant and career lothario, living in room #2047. In a coincidence, he and Li-zhen went to discuss their marital troubles (although they never consummated their love) in room #2046 in a different hotel. It's enough for him to take up residence there. The emotional damage has scarred him, as he acts out of character contrary to how he was in the previous film by bedding a series of women (played by an outstanding cast of Chinese stars such as Carina Lau, Gong Li, Faye Wong and Zhang Ziyi in her career performance) who occupy room #2046. The key is that each of these women reminds him of aspects of Li-zhen’s personality, but their totality never recreates or conjures the memory of the woman he loves. Nat King Cole invades the soundtrack, singing of happy memories but lacing them with a slight melancholy, for Chow cannot find joy despite going through the motions of lovemaking. 

At another narrative level is the dramatization of Tak (Tayuka Kimura), a lonely Japanese man who travels in the figment of Chow’s imagination to a destination called 2046. It’s never made clear if it’s the year before Hong Kong returns to China, or if it’s a fictional destination, or perhaps a secular Asian version of a Judeo-Christian purgatory. They say in 2046 that those who venture there find their happiest memories, never to return. Only Tak attempts to, but why? Tak falls in love with a female android, but which does not leave with him. Why?

It’s clear that Tak’s narrative is an extension of Chow’s misery and mourning for Li-zhen (who only appears in one flashback in 2046). Chow inhabits the film, occupying psychic and physical space, never registering emotionally to those around him. In the aftermath of the loss of his great love, he engaged in love only on a superficial level, disengaging himself from the proceedings and disregarding the emotional needs of his lovers while never dropping the veneer of his charm (is he a sociopath in disguise?). Zhang’s character is a high-class escort whose persona may be closest to his, as she understands his love in transactional terms. They share the same detachment, but because neither will let the other see what’s behind the mask, the connection remains shallow and functional.

While critics understood the more emotionally accessible In the Mood for Love as a denial of passion and the heart’s deepest desire, 2046 left audiences and critics cold upon its opening at Cannes 2004. There’s a common perception that the sequel is a misbegotten venture. However, if we understand Chow’s journey in 2046 as an elongated mourning period, a cinematic treatment of Albinoni’s Adagio in G, then we can view the film as the long numbing and dulling of the senses in the aftermath of lost love. Chow isn’t sad or angry that he lost Li-zhen, but he’s caught somewhere in between in a long-term (if impermanent) emotional holding station, and Tak’s journey represents his exploration of what never was and will be. If room 2046 stood for all of the memories he remembers he holds most dear, but can no longer have, his approximated habituation of 2047 is the closest thing to it, but he could never return. It’s small comfort that he will one day cease mortality with memories, and not dreams.

(As a side note, it’s no accident that the years 2046 and 2047 also correspond with the events of Hong Kong, and pure coincidence that pro-democracy protests are taking place in Hong Kong as I write this, with the handover taking place exactly 33 years into the future. There’s an entire treatise waiting to be written on the themes of China-Hong Kong politics with this film, but that is best left as the subject of another essay.)

Although initially misunderstood as a jumbled, frantic work with a famously ill-fated shooting schedule that included a complete overhaul and re-draft of the script over three years, 2046 remains the great divisive work of Wong’s career. It is not meant to be a self-contained film, but as part of a greater work on lost love. Whereas its companion piece In the Mood for Love is a meditation on denial of physical passion and the nature of great love, 2046 is an examination of the grieving process. In the end, Chow may be ready to move on, but where shall he go?

Master Class: Demy’s “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg”

I live in a rainy city. Even today, after a week of perfect sun that seemed to serve as a prelude to summer, the skies opened and I found myself digging out my rain coat again. That’s what happens when you live in a port city. And with the closure of this year’s Cannes Film Festival on my mind, with a French film victorious, there was no better time to see Jacques Demy’s classic 1964 film The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.

On the surface, this seemed like a simple love story when I first saw it years ago. The young man, Guy (Nino Castelnuovo) is in love with 17-year-old Genevieve (the luminous living legend Catherine Deneuve, in her breakthrough role). He’s a mechanic who dreams of opening his own garage. She works for her mother in the town’s only umbrella boutique, which is on the verge of financial ruin. They talk of marriage, although her mother disapproves (he has only a sickly godmother, thus completing the familial economics of the story). Figurative dark clouds appear overhead in addition to the rains: the Algerian War is raging several hundred miles away, and he must serve. “I will wait for you”, she sings to him, repeating “je t’aimes, je t’aime, je t’aimes” repeatedly as his train takes him away. While Guy’s away, a wealthy jeweler has his eye on Catherine, and the separation and other circumstances conspire to keep the young lovers away for good. I haven’t even mentioned that the whole has nary a line of spoken dialogue, as everything is sung beginning to end, and it finishes in a lightning-fast 90 minutes.

Few films dared, even musical ones, to become full-scale operettas where every word was expressed in song. Even the most famous of musicals had great dialogue and witty exchanges. Not so in Demy’s enduring love story. Demy had the incredulous notion that the whole thing would be sung, and he was fortunate to find a supportive producer who saw his vision completed. The film was a smash in Paris, claimed the Palme d’Or at the 1964 Cannes Film Festival, and proceeded to storm the world, culminating in global success, a Grammy nomination for the soundtrack, several Academy Award nominations and an invitation for Demy to live and work in the United States, which he happily accepted. And yet Cherbourg remains his most revered masterwork. Why is this?

The secret lies in the film’s simple structure: a boy and a girl in love, torn apart by life circumstances and choices, but not by plot machinations or something as convenient as deus ex machina. When Demy collaborated with Michel Legrand for the film’s now-famed score, they stuck so faithfully to the idea of a three-hanky-weeper that they wrote at which points in the film each of the three figurative hankies should actually be taken out. The operetta format elevates how we see and experience young love for the first time, when everything in life tastes, smells, feels and sounds that much better. There is nothing else in the world but love. Emotions are heightened and never stop, even when the emotions swell and contract, for better or for worse, and Demy understands this. The music, while constant, doesn’t come at your relentlessly. Instead, it is as gentle as the tide, ebbing and flowing, but it never stops. It may have a sweeping orchestral suite throughout, but it’s also heavily jazz-influenced. Regardless, the two genres make compliment each other seamlessly. This is a seemingly small charmer of a film that grows into a grand masterpiece and reminds you of how you felt in that first brush of true love, and how heartbreaking it is when it doesn’t work out. The film’s coda, which I won’t give away, gives closure, is almost unbearably cruel, but also accepting of the hard choices we make in life, without judgment.

Cherbourg was filmed in eye-popping gorgeous colour schemes. The town feels just a bit more lived-in than most film musicals of the era. You could sense that people actually lived there and that it wasn’t just a film set. Demy knows that such a simple touch made the film connect that much more to the audience: this could happen to even the most uncomplicated people you know, and it’s a complete heartbreaker when life intrudes. There’s an expression that God likes having a laugh when people make plans for the future. While religion doesn’t figure heavily in Cherbourg, one is reminded that compromise and making do are what shapes our experiences and makes us into the people we are. The film’s final scene, when Guy and Genevieve meet under circumstances more complicated than they are, is a coup de grace of such delicate balance that if the emotions were glass, they’d be smashed to smithereens.

Who says life is simple? It’s not, and you must be prepared for any circumstance. That’s what life in Cherbourg is like, just as it is in my city. In both cases, carry an umbrella, just in case. The Umbrellas of Cherbourg is available in glorious DVD and Blu-Ray. Watch it with a box of Kleenex. This is one weeper that earns its tears honestly.

Modern Film Classics: The Diving-Bell and the Butterfly

So much can happen in the blink of an eye. But what can you actually do with it?

If you’re Jean-Dominique “Jean-Do” Bauby, you dictate the contents of your life story. 

In December 1995, Jean-Do was the editor-in-chief of Elle magazine. He was not a nice man. Fabulously well-connected, he had a wife he treated poorly and regularly humiliated by his affairs with models, children he ignored, and a mistress he actually loathed and suffered. Jean-Do was successful but wretched. One fine day, he was felled by a debilitating stroke and lost complete control over his entire body, becoming a human vegetable with the extremely rare condition of “locked-in syndrome”. He could not speak, feed or relieve himself, or move, but he could take in his entire surroundings and he could do just one thing … blink his left eyelid. The best analogy was that of a diver, locked in an old-fashioned diving-bell suit, unable to communicate to home base, breathing, but doing nothing else while caged in that physical constraint.

A speech therapist designed a method of communicating with Jean-Do. She developed a chart displaying all of the letters in their order of frequency of use, and not alphabetically. Using this chart, Jean-Do could “spell out words”. All he had to do was to blink at the letter he wanted when it was presented, the therapist or attending nurse would stop, and they start at the beginning of the chart again until he got to the next letter. With this unorthodox methodology, Jean-Do “spelled” out commands and his wishes and “dictated” stories and memories into what became his autobiography, The Diving-Bell and the Butterfly. The slim memoir was an instant best-seller and adapted into Julian Schnabel’s award-winning French-language film in 2007.

Schnabel’s project, like its source material, had a difficult birth. Schnabel spoke little to no French when he first embarked on production but insisted on filming the entire film in its original language (which he had to learn). To further maintain verisimilitude, Schnabel shot it in the very same hospital where Jean-Do was treated before the latter’s death in 1997. The film was shot almost entirely from Jean-Do’s point of view and the camerawork was difficult and often laborious. Much of the screenplay had to be written outside of its original source material to incorporate additional biographical details that didn’t appear in the original memoir. 

Nevertheless, although the film was not a major box office success, it received very high reviews and such accolades as BAFTA, Golden Globe and Cesar Awards, Best Director honours at the Cannes Film Festival, and four Academy Award nominations. It is consistently ranked amongst the top 250 highest-rated films on the Internet Movie Database.

Cinematically Inclined: The Tree of Life

The Blogger had a near-religious experience this morning. He attended an advanced screening of Terrence Malick’s long-awaited new film, The Tree of Life. Shrouded and filmed in secrecy, very little of the film’s story has been given away during filming and even the reviews from Cannes, mostly glowing and a few dissenting, were cryptic in their relations of details.

The Tree of Life centres on a childhood, a family, a specific time and place. There is a disciplinarian father (Brad Pitt, in unquestionably his most vanity-free and accomplished performance), who is continually frustrated by life and tries to warn his children of the evils in the world, without fostering premature bitterness in them. Despite the fact that he is no superman, he can see the beauty of life in such things as his faith and classical music. This is a film where the sounds of Berlioz and Toscanini caress the aural senses. The mother (embodied by a masterful Jessica Chastain) exudes forgiveness and compassion, but doesn’t indulge her brood. There is no conventional “plot”, as everything is told in a non-linear fashion. Where Pitt’s performance is filled with words, hers is full of feeling, as Chastain interprets the role like a silent-film actress. Sean Penn plays the now-aging middle child, who is our narrative guide and tie to the present. There are no heroes or villains here, only some damaged, everyday people.

The film opens with a quote from the Book of Job. Malick structures his film like a symphony, with several movements, and each “section” identified not by title cards but by visual cues, all part of a larger thematic work. The family sustains a devastating loss at the beginning of the film, and shows how the memory of that pain has never fully gone away, echoing across the decades. At one point, in a telephone conversation with his elderly father, the son says “no, I haven’t forgotten. I think of him every day.” There has never been a release of the paralyzing grief and shattering pain that has mortally wounded each and every family member. 

Malick juxtaposes the human suffering with images from nature and geography. There is a long section taking us through a long series of natural phenomenon that is achingly beautiful to behold, and even goes as far back as the age of the dinosaurs (the visual effects here are magnificent). Although it may sound absurd on paper, Malick intends us to understand the scope of the family’s grief against the grander scale of the cosmos. He also throws the film’s Biblical overtones into sharp relief, with both Creationist and Evolutionist theories sharing the same film. Yes, there’s also a gargantuan tree, one that anchors the film thematically and visually. Perhaps no other film in the last decade has dared to set human suffering against the cosmos, with the exception of Darren Aronofsky’s underrated masterpiece The Fountain. You could show this drama in 3-D Imax and it would look just as spectacular as Avatar or the next Pirates sequel.

Modern Film Classics: Moulin Rouge!

There’s a famous anecdote of the first-ever performance of Ravel’s Bolero. This classical piece is comprised of the same syncopated rhythms, played over and over again, with increased ferocity and with gradually more instruments, before culminating in a fiery climax, after which the audience had heard the same few bars of music played repeatedly for fifteen minutes. At the end of the performance, an outraged audience member furiously told the composer, Ravel himself, “Sir, you are mad!” To this, the composer responded, “Madam, you have understood the piece!”

Today marks the tenth anniversary of the release of The Blogger’s all-time favourite film, Baz Luhrmann’s mercurial Moulin Rouge!

 

When it premiered at the Cannes Film Festival as the opening night film at a pull-out-all-the-stops premiere, the film was like no other film on the market. Boasting dizzying, hyperkinetic editing and soaring camerawork applied to the then-defunct musical film genre, Moulin Rouge! expanded Luhrmann’s dazzling aesthetic vision from previous works and applied it to a big-budget, go-for-broke artistic extravaganza. It was such a bold directorial statement that even its title was so emphatic that it required an exclamation point. Luhrmann didn’t set out to create a landmark, influential film when he embarked on the lengthy twelve-month shoot. Given that it was the third entry in his “Red Curtain” trilogy of films, based on the aesthetic of heightened theatricality applied to film, one should have expected that this film was loaded to excess. In other words, since it’s his magnum opus and signature piece, people were not prepared for their immediate reaction after they saw the film. I still have knock-down, angry debates with people who truly, madly, passionately despise this movie.

This is not to say that Luhrmann was self-indulgent for the sake of getting off on his own artistic fetishes. He knew that he had to obtain funding for the work and drew no less than Nicole Kidman, in one of her most luminous performances, to show off her heretofore unknown musical skills. In the central role, Ewan McGregor is all over this film, almost never off-screen and narrating it. With no original film score for his musical, Luhrmann decided to deconstruct some of the most popular songs of the previous three decades, stuff them into a soundboard, and remixed the hell out of them all. From Madonna’s “Like a Virgin” to Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and the film’s smash “Lady Marmalade” cover, nothing is too good to ravish and put into the mix. The overall visceral reaction was nothing less than a period piece set in 1900 transported to 2000. One end of the millennium meets the other. The dates are not accidental.

Modern Film Classics: Vicky Cristina Barcelona

“Lemon, the dating world is a lot like your haircut: sometimes, awkward triangles occur.” – Alec Baldwin to Tina Fey on 30 Rock

 

The good news is that both Woody Allen and Penélope Cruz currently have films at the Cannes Film Festival. The bad news is that they’re not working together. The truly terrible news is that while Allen’s presenting his much-admired Midnight in Paris, Cruz stars in the latest budget-busting, surefire-money-making, soulless Pirates of the Caribbean sequel. While the Blogger respects an Oscar-winning actor’s right to make a film solely for a paycheque as a break from continually stretching artistic boundaries the way Cruz has done in the last five years, why the Pirates franchise refuses to die like World.com is beyond his comprehension.

Allen’s comic romance Vicky Cristina Barcelona premiered to considerable acclaim at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival, became one of his most successful films, and won Cruz numerous prizes including an Academy Award for her inspired comic work. It remains one of the Blogger’s favourite films, and will form one of the first entries in his Modern Film Classics selections (look for the tag on the side for other titles).

The premise is simple: two American college students, Vicky (Rebecca Hall) and Cristina (Scarlett Johansson) spend the summer in the titular Spanish city. The sensible, risk-averse Vicky is engaged to Doug, a stable lawyer in New York who has a suburban life waiting for them to settle into in Connecticut. Cristina is artistic and impulsive, evidenced by her sudden romance with local artist Juan Antonio (Javier Bardem). The two friends are locked in a quintessential Apollonian / Dionysian contrast. Things get complicated as Vicky slept with Juan Antonio while Cristina was convalescing from food poisoning, Doug shows up to surprise Vicky on holiday, and Juan Antonio’s volatile ex-wife Marie Elena (Cruz) shows up, having tried to kill herself and needing care. In probably the strangest twist of all, Cristina, Juan Antonio and Marie Elena take each other as lovers and begin a three-way common-law marriage, and are impossibly happy. Or are they? And can it last?
 

Cannes Film Festival 2011: A Preview

Cannes 2011 Poster

Note: Post has been updated as of 16:00 PDT on Tuesday, May 10, 2011.

In April 2010, the Blogger had the rare opportunity of meeting a true international star. The enigmatic and talented French singer Charlotte Gainsbourg launched her first-ever concert tour in Vancouver at the famed Vogue Theatre to promote her critically-acclaimed second album IRM. She did not disappoint. Thanks to the generosity of local cultural paper The Georgia Straight and Warner Records, I met Charlotte herself after the show. She was effusive and charming, and a bit nervous. I asked her flat-out if, as the reigning Best Actress winner, she would be attending the forthcoming Cannes Film Festival. Gainsbourg looked a bit taken aback and then replied, with a twinkle in her eye, that she was “unsure”. Sure enough, a month later, she was on hand on the Croisette to present the biggest award of the festival, the Palme d’Or.

The annual Cannes Film Festival, now in its 64^th year, is not the biggest such gathering in the world, but it lays claim to being one of the oldest (after Venice) and most prestigious. This is the festival where Bridget Bardot once played in the surf in front of an international cadre of admiring paparazzi. This was where the film that gave rise to the word “paparazzi”, Fellini’s immortal La Dolce Vita, scandalized the Catholic Church and won the top prize, birthing an international sensation and helping popularize European cinematic discourse in North America. This was where notorious Danish director Lars von Trier won prizes year after year but showed his displeasure at not winning the Palme d’Or by first giving the jury the finger one year, and telling them seven years later that they gave him “the wrong award” for another film. Gong Li all but became an unofficial spokeswoman for the festival due to her annual appearance to in support of director Zhang Yimou’s films in the early 90s, every one in which she played a leading role. Sharon Stone never misses the Festival, whether or not she has a film to promote. This is where Catherine Deneuve, Maggie Cheung, Juliette Binoche and, yes, Brangelina come to be seen and to present serious work. To get an idea of the international star power on hand, have a look at this clip.

This year’s festival boasts one of the most exciting lineups in years. In particular, the Blogger is looking forward to the following films in competition for the prestigious Palme d’Or: