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?

Cinematically Inclined: on Michael Haneke’s “Amour”

“Dance me to the end of love” – Madeleine Peyroux

What happens when happily ever after ends? Michael Haneke, the distinguished Austrian filmmaker whose credits include realist horror stories such as Funny Games, Caché and the 2009 Cannes Palme d’Or winner The White Ribbon, makes a radical departure from his usual oeuvre to answer the question.

Right off the bat, cineastes note that this film’s subject matter is not something expected of the director. His films appear at first blush to have an accessible theme, but are often about something else altogether. His Caché started off with a couple attempting to find out who’s been sending them videotapes of themselves carrying on in their daily lives, but is a meditation on the legacy of the Franco-Algerian War. La Pianiste appears to be about a forbidden sexual affair, but actually explores misanthropy and sexual alienation. And The White Ribbon might seem like a riff on Children of the Corn, but things take a more darkly realistic turn when you realize this was in the years just before WWI and who the young citizens of that small German grew up to be in the 1930s … and into this mix comes Amour.

Set in contemporary Paris, we meet an elegant retired couple in their 80s who were once great piano teachers. They attend recitals, they debate interpretations and they mentor dazzling pianists who still look to them for their opinions on the latest attempt at perfecting Handel’s Sarabande. Georges (Jean-Louis Trintignant) and Anne (Emmanuelle Riva) now live in an elegant Parisian apartment, enjoying their retirement. One day, Anne has a stroke at breakfast, but doesn’t know it. A series of increasingly debilitating strokes weaken her and rob her of her motor coordination, until she is all but confined to her bed and barely able to receive the occasional visitor. Their estranged daughter (Isabelle Huppert) drops by every once in awhile to express her annoyance at their care of treatment plan, and is exasperated by Georges’s measures to prevent her from even seeing her mother in such a state. Georges, suspicious of nursing homes, refuses to let Anne be looked after outside the apartment: soon, we notice that we haven’t left the apartment, either.

If this story sounds familiar, it is thematically similar to Sarah Polley’s acclaimed 2007 film Away From Her, which explores a husband watching helplessly as his wife drifts away into the abyss of Alzheimer’s. Unlike Polley’s film, however, Haneke’s story doesn’t take place in a nursing home, and instead explores the ever-increasing, possibly inescapable indignities that arrive in old age. Anne falls out of bed in an attempt to be mobile. An unfeeling home-care nurse treats her roughly and, when fired by Georges, gives him a terse “go fuck yourself, you dirty old man”. Eventually, pained by her inability to express herself through music any longer, Anne orders Georges to stop playing recordings of their favourite piano pieces. All that is left is the couple, the silence, and the long torturous wait for The End. And in the end, is that all there is? Is this what happens at the end of love? Haneke posits that the title is a bitter test at the end of a long and happy marriage, as if the universe tauntingly asks, “do you love your spouse this much?”

Haneke, with the Palme d'Or, Cannes 2012

I was reminded recently of the beloved American sitcom The Golden Girls, a long-running smash about four senior women living in a shared Miami home, enjoying life to the hilt. The gut-busting laughter in that show was always informed by the ever-present specter of death looming about, and how the women respond to changing times and attitudes with perspective and good humour. The show regularly made fun of Alzheimer’s and did not shy away from jokes about adult diapers. Its insight was informed by the idea of a blended biological and adopted family that kept the demons at bay, even in the face of impending mortality. Georges and Anne, however, have all but locked themselves into their well-appointed home that serves as a de facto sarcophagus. Haneke’s vision is grim and sobering.

This is not, however, a damnation of Amour. On the contrary, it is one of the most penetrating and emotionally devastating films in recent years. Trintignant, the handsome 1960s leading man of A Man and a Woman and the great Kieslowski’s Trois Couleurs: Rouge, came out of retirement to play Georges. His quiet dignity must be enough for two, as he hides his suffering in plain sight of his wife while she is betrayed by the confines of her now-feeble body. Riva, the ravishing star of Resnais’s Hiroshima, Mon Amour, bottles the last of Anne’s great beauty and cages it within the prison of her mind, looking out onto Georges from within. It’s as if she were suffering death by a thousand cuts, all of them bleeding internally and, most poisonously, emotionally. Providing able support is another French acting national treasure, Huppert, packing her brief appearances here memorably with years of untold frustration. She’s long past the point in life where she knows better than her parents, but helplessly finding their situation increasingly untenable. That Haneke’s story was strong enough to draw two top-drawer veterans out of hibernation and one of the country’s preeminent stars proves that it is a worthy project of the highest order. As he gives the story the gravity it deserves, these three inhabit their performances with nuance and skill that could only have been gained through experience, and cannot be taught in acting class.

While I have painted a story about mortality and decay, I must emphasize that this is a film that fully embodies its title. Haneke’s film says that love reaches beyond platitudes, song and passion, well into the unknown and emphasizes “for worse”, whatever that might be. It is at times unbearably painful. Those who only fathom true cinematic romance in vampire movies and that “notebook” will not be prepared for what lies beyond fantasy and the promise of eternal youth, and posits that only the eternal aspect of love survives, long after the point of no return.

Amour won the coveted Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. It has been a sensation at film festivals the world over and is the Austrian entry for Best Foreign Language Film at this year’s Academy Awards (which I predict it will likely win, or be at least nominated). I would argue that all three performers – Trintignant, Riva and Huppert – also deserve nominations for their challenging work. Amour has been opening slowly throughout Europe, and is set for limited release in North America on December 19, 2012. It will be one of the most haunting films on pure, unadulterated love you will ever see.

VIFF 2012: “A Royal Affair”

I love palace intrigue. If the naughty goings-on of Prince Harry this summer in Las Vegas were any indication, so does the rest of the free world. We enthrall ourselves to the naughty happenings of royalty, going back to the age of the Roman Empire. Even as print is a dying medium, it still makes great copy in our era, especially if we can screen-cap, Tweet, Facebook-update (is this a verb now?) eyewitness accounts in real time. Into this state of affairs comes an excellent new film at the Vancouver International Film Festival, Nikolaj Arcel’s Danish costume drama A Royal Affair (original title: En kongelig affære). 

This Affair is set in Copenhagen and continental Europe during the 1760s and 1770s. Young Princess Caroline of England (luminous newcomer Alicia Vikander, who also plays Kitty in the much-anticipated new version of Anna Karenina) is married off for political reasons to King Christian VII of Denmark (Mikkel Følsgaard). Christian is a poorly educated, foppish dilettante who the entire court believes to be mad. He has frequent outbursts that include announcements at dinner to the entire court of when he intends to sleep with his wife. Once he has tired of her and she has produced an heir, he gives himself over to every vice possible and frequents brothels, oblivious to public opinion and the scandal sheets. It is believed in a number of historical biographies, as well as in this film, that he suffered from an undiagnosed medical condition that may have been schizophrenia. (One doctor’s prognosis is that his condition was brought about by excessive masturbation.) In any event, the ruling powers make the disinterested king sign off laws, orders and decrees that are to their advantage. It suits them that the king is perceived to be a madman.

Into this unhappy royal marriage comes Dr. Johann Struensee (a quietly smoldering Mads Mikkelsen). Despite being the son of a prominent conservative minister, Struensee is a man of reason and science, not of faith. Appointed royal physician, he is also the secret author of some “subversive” writings proposing such radical ideas as abolishment of serfdom and peasantry, enforced inoculation, and other reforms that were counterintuitive to the nobility’s interest. Struensee and Caroline bond over their mutual frustration with Christian’s infidelity, their belief that nobility abuse of the masses should end, and an attraction borne out of loneliness and a meeting of the minds. Caroline’s discovery of Rousseau’s dangerous philosophical treatises on the new social contract in Struensee’s library appears to seal the deal.

Struensee soon proves himself to be an able and astute observer of what Denmark needs to reform. Eventually, and much to the consternation of vengeful nobles, he persuades Christian to dissolve the state council and together they form a ruling class of two. This true story takes place in the Age of Enlightenment, which is the real catalyst of progress. Struensee and Christian introduce ideas radical to the age, such as lifting the ban on state censorship, greater access to health care, the abolition of serfdom, and additional reforms that promise to deliver Denmark into an Enlightened and progressive state. The nobility are put out by these changes and quietly sharpen their knives, waiting for some salacious piece of innuendo with which to remove Struensee. In one hilarious example of reform, Christian descries the lack of proper sanitation in the city and declares a “war on shit” in which he triples the number of waste collectors. There’s a line from Hamlet that is brilliantly used here. (You know which one it is.)

The film doesn’t hesitate to put the king, his queen and his doctor on morally ambiguous ground. Struensee helps alleviate the king’s condition as best he can and encourages him to become a truly groundbreaking, fair-minded ruler, but he also sleeps with his wife and is a political radical (at least he was for the times). Morality and ethics aren’t applied in broad unambiguous stripes here, making even the exemplary Struensee an antihero at best. Not even King Christian is a devil, he’s simply so overwhelmed at his lot in life that he holds himself captive to his most base desires at the sake of his own dignity.

It is a testament to Følsgaard’s work that what could have been a caricature is instead a measured study of a man trapped by the confines of his mental and emotional issues, trapped within his body without a prognosis for his various maladies. They say comedy is harder to play than drama, but arguably the greatest challenge is doing both in the same performance to develop narrative arc and character, subtly and without exaggeration. It is possibly the best interpretation of mad royalty since Nigel Hawthorne’s master class in The Madness of King George. The delicate balance of humour and pathos earned Følsgaard Best Actor honours at this year’s Berlin Film Festival. He should look forward to receiving further recognition.

Recognition should also be given to Vikander for her portrait of a queen desperately locked in a life of unhappiness, knowing she is a laughingstock for marrying a madman. She exudes intellect that thinly veils a repressed sensuality. She successfully makes you believe that the Queen never fell in love until after her marriage. Mikkelson, as Struensee, is on a roll this year. He pairs quietly intense work here with his soul-destroying performance in The Hunt, for which he won one of the other major film festival acting prizes (Cannes). Mikkelson will soon star as the new Dr. Lecter in the forthcoming television series Hannibal. The trio constitute a locked-and-loaded triangle in which there’s no one to root for entirely, but you just wish them all well despite the cruelty of time and circumstance.

A Royal Affair is the Danish official entry for this year’s Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. It is currently playing at the Vancouver International Film Festival and is scheduled for limited release in North American beginning on November 9, 2012.

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.

Cinematically Inclined: “Jiro Dreams of Sushi”

Judging from the poster and title, Jiro Dreams of Sushi sounds and looks like a postmodern comedy directed by Michel Gondry. I immediately thought of Gondry’s 2006 film The Science of Sleep as a possible kindred spirit to Jiro, at least in theory. How wrong I was.

Jiro Dreams of Sushi is a snappy Japanese-language documentary about an 85-year-old sushi chef who runs a ten-seat restaurant hidden in the basement of a business building. It is close enough to access by metro and around the corner from the famed Printemps location in Tokyo’s high-end Ginza district. The documentary is a paean to work and the love of it. We learn that Jiro was abandoned as a child and, having no formal education or means to access it, started working for survival at a young age. He has become a master sushi chef, evidenced by the fact that his little shop is the only one awarded three stars by the prestigious Michelin rankings. In case you’re wondering, a Michelin-rated three-star rating means that it is worth traveling to that country for the sole purpose of eating at that particular restaurant. And this tiny sushi bar – literally, it is just the bar with ten chairs – was chosen out of the literally millions of sushi restaurants in Japan.

Jiro is a workhorse, to put it mildly. He rises at 5 am and arrives at the famed Tsukiji fish market to ensure he gets the very best catch of the day for his customers. We are let in on some of the secrets to preparing and serving the best sushi (rice should be served at room temperature not cold; massaging the octopus for a good 45 minutes will ensure that your tako will have the perfect texture). The intense dedication comes at a hefty price, as menus are often chosen by the chefs based on the catch of the day and start at 30,000 yen a head (that’s $300 US), and reservations are taken a month in advance.

We learn that his sons have gone into the business as well, with the elder working directly for him and the younger having opened a chain in the upscale Roppongi Hills neighbourhood. We also learn that there are sacrifices to hard work, as Jiro often works from 5 am until well past 10 pm and admits that he missed most of his children’s formative years.

It’s a little odd that I’ve never seen a movie about sushi (I’m not counting Oldboy: fans will know why) and that, together with Sushi: the Global Catch, I’ve seen two of them in the space of six months. But such is the appetite for the food and its place in the global discussion on sustainability that Jiro and his sons worry about overfishing and overconsumption of seafood. The two films together would make a very informative double bill.

While Jiro Dreams of Sushi is not as whimsical as its subject sounds, it is also sincere and honest about the nature and love of work. Being a sushi chef is more than cutting up raw fish and putting them on plates served ice-cold. To master it, there lies a philosophy that whatever you serve, the next one will be better. This is an intimate documentary that is straightforward and, like last year’s masterful Bill Cunningham New York, shows the dignity and fun in working with something you love. (Take note that both Jiro and Bill Cunningham are working well into their 80s and show no signs of slowing down.)

Jiro Dreams of Sushi is currently playing in limited theatres, and you can find out more about the restaurant here. 

Cinematically Inclined: “Madeo” (Mother)

[Ed. N.: Obviously this has nothing to do with the titular mother in Albert Brooks’s amazing comedy Mother, which you can read all about here.]

In the opening shot of the Korean thriller Madeo (that’s “mother” in English”), an elderly woman appears in a field. She comes slowly to the camera. There is a mountain range behind her, but nothing else indicates signs of life around her. The soundtrack cues a soft Spanish guitar and, after she faces the camera with a blank stare that betrays nothing, the woman sways gently to the music. Where is the music coming from, if this were not a music video? This is the first sign that this is not the typical “revenge” epic that we can expect from South Korea, and even then, the famed revenge trilogy by Park Chan-Wook is like nothing else you’ve ever expected and there is nothing typical about it.

Do-Joon is not the brightest young man. He’s 27 years old and lives in a small seaside village in South Korea, miles away from the bright lights of Seoul. Here, everyone knows each other. His mother is some sort of apothecary, dispensing homemade herbal remedies and performing at-home acupuncture for village residents. He doesn’t appear to have a job and personifies the apt descriptor “a few bricks short of a load”. Obsessed with losing his virginity, it doesn’t help that he and his mother sleep in the same bed. She makes dishes that are designed to boost his virility. One night, he unsuccessfully chases a teenage girl in a desperate attempt to woo her. Because he is of less than average intelligence, he cannot recall what happened that night and is quite surprised to find himself arrested for the young girl’s murder. No thanks to inept local police forces and a worthless attorney, he lands in prison for 15 years. His distraught mother sets about finding out what truly happened, because she believes in the innate goodness of her son and doesn’t believe that he has the capacity to harm another human being.

Director Bong Joon-Ho, who made the stunning 2006 sci-fi horror thrilled The Host, removes the sci-fi element and places the horrors of people’s actions into the most unassuming setting. The trespasses and transgressions committed here are only between one another. Despite the penchant for Korean films to seamlessly incorporate elements of Christian theology into such cinematic masterpieces like 2006’s Sympathy For Lady Vengeance, this is a town that seems untouched by the Divine, a remote outpost in a godless universe where we are responsible for our own actions and inflict unspeakable horrors of the more mundane but no less horrific kind unto one another. Bong’s settings are drab, awash in shades of grey, whites and blacks. This is the kind of town where you can see lifers spending their entire existence without ever leaving.

There are extraordinary revelations in the latter half of the film. In a more conventional (I am trying not to say “American”) film, this would have been a straight-up revenge epic, with bloody retribution in the end. Madeo is structured more like a mystery, and as we find out more about the murder, we are slowly fed information about the poisonous relationship between mother and son, the dead girl’s life, the way minor players figure into the mystery, and it all ends in a whopping half-hour where everything becomes unambiguously clear. The effect is stunningly unsettling, if not downright upsetting. There is no cheap emotional payoff. Let’s just say that if this were remade in Hollywood, the go-to actress to play the mother wouldn’t be Ashley Judd, but Tilda Swinton.

Cinematically Inclined: “Pina”

“Dance, dance, otherwise we are lost.” – Pina Bausch

Not everyone communicates in the same way. I have the gift of gab, and therefore talk and write for a living. Others convey meaning using numbers. Still others do it through a combination of speech and body language, often in a different role that requires them to do so. And there are still others who can only express themselves wordlessly, through the art of dance.

The late German choreographer Philippina “Pina” Bausch is remembered by the members of her dance company as a woman who spoke little, but who observed and conveyed volumes while using a near-extreme economy of words. She was a great ballet director and founder of the Wuppertal Tanztheater, arguably the world’s most innovative contemporary dance company. The great German film director Wim Wenders admired her, and together they were going to make a film about her life’s work. Unfortunately, just days before filming started in the summer of 2009, tragedy struck when she was diagnosed with terminal cancer and died less than a week after her prognosis, mere days before filming began. Wenders and Wuppertal Tanztheater continued with the planned documentary in 2010, reconfiguring it not as a narrative documentary on her life, but as a free-flowing art film comprised of her most famous pieces, staged and re-imagined.

The gamble paid off. Wenders’s stunning, otherworldly Pina (which I previewed here) is amongst the finest documentaries made since the turn of the century. Rather than editing together documentary footage of interviews in a talking-heads format, the company instead staged Bausch’s greatest works for the cinema. We see her famous “Café Müller”, a treatise on the inability of people to communicate in arguably the most social setting, a café. There is also her raw treatment of Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring”, attacked by the dancers on a stage covered in actual dirt and standing in as a feral episode of sexual awakening. Performers pair off or dance solo in glass houses, on the edge of cliffs, in a gymnasium, on the Berlin U-Bahn and even on a water-filled, gloriously rainy stage against a gigantic boulder the size of a small house. Each sequence is dazzling and constitutes a minor masterpiece in and of itself, made complete when viewed collectively.

The purpose is for each dancer to appear as if at a wake for their beloved teacher, each sharing small memories of how they will remember her. The sense of loyalty is strong, as the dancers range in age, body type and ethnicity, and communicate in brief voiceovers in English, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Korean, Slovenian and other languages. No matter how they verbalized, what they communicated through dance requires no translation. Maya Angelou put it best when she said, “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel”. And the dancers convey their feelings for Pina Bausch for us through dance, for that is how she made them feel and how they most freely express themselves. When caught speechless, all that is left is the dance.

A word must be said of the use of 3-D technology in the film. In a crass big-budget Hollywood blockbuster, the effects are used to show you giant robots or monsters laying waste to civilization, or to make your eyeballs singe with hurt while explosions cause seizures. It has been criticized as a cash grab and a vulgar stand-in for the absence of cinematic substance. The use of 3-D for what is essentially a formless dance narrative may seem incongruous at first, but is actually appropriate. The effect is that you see these pieces as if you were from the balcony of the Wuppertal dance theatre itself, watching a live performance. The use of 3-D doesn’t make itself conscious or obvious. It blends itself so subtly into the staging that it feels organic and doesn’t distract. In other words, it is the cleverest, subtlest, most artistically purposeful use of 3-D in the cinema. Perhaps there is hope for the technology after all.

Wenders’s sublime film is subtitled “a film for Pina Bausch”, not about her. That is exactly correct: this is a labour of love, made not for commercial gain, but for someone who has given purpose and breathed real life into people.  

Pina is nominated for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, and is the first time I’ve ever said that the extra money to pay for 3-D was worth every penny, and more. It is one of the very best films released in 2011. I’ll gladly see it again, surcharge be damned, anytime.

Modern Film Classics: Kieślowski’s “Three Colors: Blue”

"Freedom! Horrible, horrible freedom!” – The Simpsons

There is an accident. We see this not from the driver’s or passengers’ point of view. We see this in longshot, as if we were another car passing by it just moments before it happened, and the sight appears in our rear-view mirror. Just a sound; just enough to alarm; just not enough to betray the extent of the damage.

Julie de Courcy (Juliette Binoche) is the lone survivor of the crash that opens Krzysztof Kieślowski’s 1993 film Three Colors: Blue. She is the wife of an accomplished classical music composer, arguably the most important in all of France. The accident kills him and their young daughter. As Julie recovers in the hospital, we find out that the media have been following her husband for months while he has been carrying on an affair, that the marriage was in trouble, and that the accident dealt Julie such a crushing blow that she was still in the hospital recuperating while the lavish public funeral for her family took place. She breaks into the hospital pharmacy, bent on killing herself with a lethal overdose, but is unsuccessful. She is eventually released and is left to deal with her grief while in an emotional stalemate. How paralyzed by grief is she? When Julie sees their faithful housekeeper upon her return, and asks her why she’s crying, the housekeeper replies, “Because you’re not”.

This is merely the first ten minutes or so of Blue. We follow Julie as she sizes up her life, contemplates her surroundings, and slowly builds a new life for herself, one away from the public eye. Julie returns to her maiden name, sells her home and belongings, provides for the housekeeper, and sets up in a small apartment in a nondescript area of Paris to try and live her life peacefully. She is quietly hostile and closed off to reporters asking her invasive questions about her emotional state. Thinking she could leave her past behind, there is but one relic from her past that haunts her: her husband’s final work, a symphony dedicated to the reunification of Europe under the EU banner, and it’s not yet complete. Should Julie carry on with her life, or should she honour her husband’s legacy by letting the piece play? Julie is herself a trained musical composer and could work on it.

To fully understand Kieślowski's film, one must look at the double meanings behind its title. The first of the three films in the celebrated Three Colors Trilogy,  Kieślowski intended the film to explore the colours of the French flag. Blue represents liberty and freedom, and here we see freedom in its cruelest form. Julie has been cruelly severed from everything in her life, but she wasn’t by any means shackled or burdened by her family. She loved her husband and child, and this notion of “freedom”, by  Kieślowski's interpretation, treats it in an abstract form, showing a discomfit between its conceptual manifestation and real, palpable tragedy. What it really connotes is choice and what one can do when there are no longer any responsibilities. Anyone who has lost a loved one, or even a job, can attest that its loss or grief can be frightening and bewildering.

Modern Film Classics: “Goodbye Lenin!”

One of the best things they don’t tell you in German tourist guides are those small shops that sell Soviet-era goods. When the Berlin Wall fell, the flush of capitalism flooded East German shops, washing away goods from that era, including now-defunct brands like Spreewalt brand pickles, Moccafixgold hot chocolate, and Trabant automobiles. These were replaced by more familiar names such as General Mills, Starbucks and Audi. Nevertheless, there remains some fondness for the East German days by the older generation, a nostalgia referred to affectionately as “Ostalgie”. I thought about this while watching Wolfgang Becker’s raucous 2003 German dramedy Good Bye, Lenin!

We first meet the Kerner family in 1978. Young Alex (Daniel Brühl) dreams of becoming an astronaut (called “cosmonauts” back then) some day. His sister Ariane (Maria Simon) has the potential to become a great academic. Their father has gone missing, presumed to have taken up in the West with a woman of ill repute, according to their brittle mother, Christiane (Katrin Saß), who responds by becoming a leading educator in the East German Communist Party. A decade later, Alex and Ariane have become layabouts and Christiane is still going strong. On October 7, 1989, during an anti-government demonstration, Christiane sees Alex being taken by riot police and promptly suffers a heart attack. As she lays in a coma, she has no idea that Communism has collapsed, that the Berlin Wall fell, and that German reunification had been realized. Doctors warn Alex and Ariane that their mother is in such frail health that she cannot be excited or disturbed, and they wonder if she will ever wake up.

By the summer of 1990, Alex ekes out a living by installing satellite dishes and has struck up a relationship with the Russian nurse looking after her mother, Lara (Chulpan Khamatova). Ariane has quit university to work at Burger King and is now in a relationship with her free-wheeling coworker Rainer, who enjoys dancing to Indian trance music in the cramped family apartment when he’s not whiling away in his tanning bed. All seems to carry on well until one day, Christiane awakes. Alex, not wanting to disturb his mother or shock her by revealing the truth – that Communism and the system she had believed in so fiercely and unquestionably had evanesced, leaving her without a legacy for her life’s work – decides to bring Christiane back home into her old room in the apartment, filling the space with now-outdated Communist propaganda and shielding her from the truth about German reunification. The ruse becomes so elaborate that when she craves Spreewalt pickles, Alex finds out that grocery stores no longer sell them and he resorts to buying a Dutch brand that he then puts in old Spreewalt jars. Eventually, he recruits his zany coworker Denis (Florian Lukas) into filming fake newscasts for his mother to watch, confirming that all was alive and well in the DDR (German Democratic Republic). As Denis is an aspiring filmmaker, they stretch the truth by concocting stories on alleged political developments, and create an entirely new reality exclusively for Christiane, who has no idea what’s going on.

The film is structured like a juggling act, with Alex as the juggler adding not only more balls to his act, but also flaming torches, electric saws and knives, struggling to balance everything in the figurative air. They might have created a birthday party for the bedridden Christiane in her room, with “official greetings” from the Party and East German Youth singing songs of loyalty to the DDR, but they can’t conceal the unexpected Coca-Cola ad that is being installed at that exact moment in the building across the street. When Christiane suggests an outing to the family’s summer cottage, Ariane snipes at Alex’s elaborate ruse that he should set about redecorating all of Berlin if he expects to keep up appearances.

While I have just described possibly the zaniest film ever inspired by the fall of the Berlin Wall, this is a film that is informative and has great insight on the immediate fallout. As the Communist system no longer existed, seniority amongst its ranks amounted to nothing, and high-ranking officials that Christiane knew have defected or been made unfit for useful employment, turning to drink and endless hours of television to fill the abrupt void foisted upon their lives. Capitalism resulted in a strange devaluation of the old system, and Becker understands that the new freedom was not for everyone. It reminds me of the old Simpsons episode where an ant colony is destroyed and the made-up subtitles read, as the ants go flying into space (this was on a spaceship), the ants squeak, “Freedom! Horrible, horrible freedom!”

Oscar 2012: Nominations Analysis

Jennifer Lawrence and AMPAS President Tom Sherak
announce this year's nominees

After hours – nay, weeks – of sitting through awards shows, following up on critics groups’ prizes and the likes, here are my thoughts on what went down with this morning’s Academy Award nominations announcements:

Stephen Daldry should be called “the Oscar whisperer”. Why? Because he now has a 100% strike rate of his films being nominated for major Academy Awards. Following Billy Elliott, The Hours and The Reader, his Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close sat on the benches at the Critics Choice Awards and received no citations from other critics or industry groups. The film has also opened to soft box office. Now the biggest group of them all has bestowed surprise nominations for Best Picture and Best Supporting Actor (for Max von Sydow) on the film. This is also a testament to Scott Rudin’s powers as a producer. Together, they got the right people into the seats to watch the film, got the intended reaction, and these two big noms are the reward. Extremely Loud is still a long shot to win any awards, but this was the biggest surprise call of the morning.

The leader, with 11 nominations: Hugo

There is no such thing as a “done deal”. Sometimes this happens, as when Slumdog Millionaire, Schindler’s List and Gandhi marched to victory. Every so often though, a “done deal” was not meant to be: cf. Brokeback Mountain and Saving Private Ryan. However, the fact that there is a large diaspora of nominations to different films means that there are several “camps” of support, so to speak, supporting each of the major nominees. You have the popular consensus with The Help, the Terence Malick fans for The Tree of Life, cineastes for Hugo and The Artist, but with so many different choices for Best Picture and no clear front-runner, the question then becomes: is there a film that is well-liked enough by the many different groups that can produce a consensus winner? While nominees are chosen by a weighted preferential ballot, the winners are selected simply by ticking one name in each category. What will be the one film that everyone chooses? If there are passionate supporters in each group, but a larger number of more indifferent voters, then it’s entirely possible that a film that pleases everyone but isn’t considered “The One to Beat” might scoop up the big prize. This is why I would keep my eye out on Midnightin Paris. Its major noms in writing and directing to back up its Picture citation might indicate stronger support for the film that one might think. Also consider that with nine Best Picture finalists, in theory, all split votes being equal, a film may only need about 11.2% of the electorate to win.

There is no such thing as a “lock” for a nomination. The snub list this year includes some heavily-decorated critical favourites and respected talent. Who didn’t make the list but who was expected to? Try Tilda Swinton, as We Need to Talk About Kevin was completely shut out despite her winning critical prizes, working the talk show circuit and appearing at different awards groups at which she was a nominee. Perhaps the Academy just didn’t want her to show up in a designer frock that no one understands, again, or perhaps they just couldn’t bring themselves to watch such a bleak film? Either way, Swinton already has an Oscar and is one of those types who would laugh off the slight. The same could be applied to Charlize Theron in Diablo Cody’s critically-adored Young Adult. Also missing is Albert Brooks, the main challenger to Christopher Plummer in Supporting Actor, who just might have clinched a win with the absence of his chief rival for the prize. Michael Fassbender, with such an amazing breakthrough year, couldn’t translate one of his revered performances in Shame, Jane Eyre or even X-Men: First Class into a Best Actor nomination. Leonardo DiCaprio proved he wasn’t as popular as everyone thought, as J. Edgar also came up empty despite numerous precursor nominations. And although many had considered her a sure thing as part of The Descendants’ campaign, Shailene Woodley’s excellent work in that film was not recognized.

Oscar 2012: BAFTA Nominations

Think that the Oscar campaigning only occurs in L.A. and New York? There’s usually one trans-Atlantic trip required in the season and that’s to London for the annual British Academy of Film and Television, or BAFTA, Awards.

Long thought of as an afterthought to the more prestigious Oscars, the BAFTAs took on new life once they moved their awards ceremony to late February starting in 2001, and with the truncated Oscar schedule in 2004, they moved it up to a scant two weeks before the actual Oscar ceremony. The effect was felt immediately, as the BAFTAs became an important, if not always accurate, indicator of how the Academy might vote and may influence last-minute voters. Most interestingly, the BAFTAs correctly forecast in the last few years some surprise Oscar winners, including Marion Cotillard, Tilda Swinton and Cate Blanchett, and allowed them to pull away from the pack of other frontrunners. This is why the BAFTAs have, in the last decade, proven to be an influential, if not always reliable indicator of who wins the Academy Awards.

The BAFTAs tend to favour homegrown product. This is why films that did not receive much love from the Academy, such as Girl with a Pearl Earring and Cold Mountain, tend to fare better at these awards. Having said that, there is often a strong overlap between what the Academy eventually nominates and the BAFTAs.

You can access the full list of nominees on the BAFTA website and on the Hollywood Reporter’s list.  Here are some of the major nominees:

11 nominations including Best Film

Best Film: The Artist, The Descendants, Drive, The Help, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

Best British Film: My Week with Marilyn, Senna, Shame, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, We Need to Talk About Kevin

Best Director: Michel Hazanavicius (The Artist), Nicholas Winding Refn (Drive), Martin Scorsese (Hugo), Tomas Alfredson (Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy), Lynne Ramsay (We Need to Talk About Kevin)

Best Actor: George Clooney (The Descendants), Jean Dujardin (The Artist), Michael Fassbender (Shame), Gary Oldman (Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy), Brad Pitt (Moneyball)

Best Actress: Berenice Bejo (The Artist), Viola Davis (The Help), Meryl Streep (The Iron Lady), Tilda Swinton (We Need to Talk About Kevin), Michelle Williams (My Week with Marilyn)

Best Supporting Actor: Kenneth Branagh (My Week with Marilyn), Jim Broadbent (The Iron Lady), Jonah Hill (Moneyball), Phillip Seymour Hoffman (The Ides of March), Christopher Plummer (Beginners)

Best Supporting Actress: Jessica Chastain (The Help), Judi Dench (My Week with Marilyn), Melissa McCarthy (Bridesmaids), Carey Mulligan (Drive), Octavia Spencer (The Help)

Best Original Screenplay: The Artist, Bridesmaids, The Guard, The Iron Lady, Midnight in Paris

Best Adapted Screenplay: The Descendants, The Help, The Ides of March, Moneyball, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

The Brits are talking about Kevin

Overall, the nominations haven’t substantively changed the status quo, as the likes of The Artist (with a leading 12 nominations), The Descendants and Moneyball still put them front-and-center in the Oscar race. However, it did give certain British films an opportunity to earn more love than they might have at the Academy. Chief among these are three films starring Best Actress nominees that bagged multiple citations: My Week with Marilyn, We Need to Talk About Kevin, and The Iron Lady. None of these are in the conversation for the Best Picture Oscar, but their presence indicates that these projects are indeed strong female-centered vehicles. It should also be noted that the BAFTAs also tend to honour their own, and each major category often produces a left-field nominee who just happens to be British. This year, they include names that haven’t figured into this year’s Oscar race yet, such as Judi Dench, Lynne Ramsay, and Abi Morgan for her otherwise much-criticized script for The Iron Lady. Similar beneficiaries include Senna, The Guard and Coriolanus.