william-t-archer

A terrific short film, with a lot of inspired imagery: the woman drawing the hair around her face, the final shot of the man in profile in the foreground with the woman out of focus behind him, the nicely framed moment when the woman first walks into the room and goes to the window. The images flow together with a smooth, dreamy logic -- I'm thinking of moments like the one where the man steps out of bed and the film cuts to the woman's foot coming down onto the floor, a transition that is both arresting and seamless. The influences of Lynch and Kubrick are obvious, but it's one thing to be influenced and another thing to carry off the influences as well as they're done here. I also thought that the Zulawski film Possession was behind a lot of Smoke's tone, and the storyline here follows Zulawski's method of shifting a troubled relationship into a paranoid fantasy version of itself. Definitely worth watching.

I have a sense that losing Anna Karina changed Godard as a director, and that Week End is the fullest and most fascinating expression of this change -- a shift into a fury against the world so intense that it blights many of the humane qualities which dominate his earlier movies. Week End, along with La Chinoise, definitely marks the end of the manic, youthful, bursting-with-energy early phase of Godard's work, a period that was dominated by Karina's performances. I have no idea what the circumstances were that led to the end of their marriage, but for whatever reason the Godard films after Karina's departure have a decisively different tone. They are deliberately and often brilliantly alienating, filled with a cold, harsh, endless outrage, and a contempt so blistering that its targets seem almost incidental. Many of the films after Week End are even better than the ones before, but their spite and coldness and bitterness (perfectly justifiable and even brave things for an artist as gifted as Godard to explore) make it hard to believe that they'll ever be as popular with audiences as, say, Breathless or Masculine/Feminine or Band of Outsiders are. Week End is my favorite Godard film precisely because I feel it's the one where his harsher, less compromising approach succeeds in taking him far beyond conventional movies. The film shows a married couple on a disastrous road trip that moves farther and deeper into absurd violence and destruction, and ends with them joining a group of what seem to be cannibal revolutionaries. I think the critics who analyze the film politically or in Brechtian terms are right to stress these sides of the movie, but I also think it's no accident that this is Godard's strongest, most insightful look at a collapsing marriage. The husband and wife are viewed with total disgust, but I've always felt that the disgust is highly personal and intimate -- that Godard isn't looking at them from the outside with a superior sneer but is instead exposing his own secret fury at his private weaknesses. That might not be true in strict biographical terms, but it's definitely true for anyone watching the film: you know you're not seeing a satire, you're seeing something more like a confession of everything that most of us try desperately not to let others know about ourselves.

I just saw the terrific documentary Hearts of Darkness, all about the making of Apocalypse Now, and it made me curious to go back and watch the movie again. It's a great film, and it plays better now than it did when I first saw it. The virtuoso Wagner scene with the helicopter attack has actually improved over time, in part because it's so startling to see a complicated, beautifully organized battle sequence that's not done with any CGI. And a lot of the things that bored me or annoyed me the first time I watched the movie now add interesting depths and detours to the film. The storyline is about as straightforward as possible: an assassin goes upriver on a mission to kill a renegade colonel. But the film keeps veering off from the mission to asides that are much more enjoyable on a second viewing: the weird interlude with the Playboy bunny performance (a great satire on all those old sugary USO shows from the past), the jungle conversation about sauces, the search of the local boat that ends in a bloodbath, the walk along the trenches around the bridge that "keeps getting built back up every night, just so the VC can tear it down again." I also found myself enjoying the Brando scenes much more than I did before. They actually follow Conrad pretty closely, both in spirit and in action, and a lot of thought has gone into them -- enough to make you realize how little thought goes into most war movies nowadays, how satisfied they are with not even bothering to ask any troubling or difficult questions. Apocalypse Now doesn't have any answers to those questions, but neither did Conrad, and the movie is actually better than the novel in one sense: Conrad, because of the era he was writing in, couldn't really show us what Kurtz meant at the end when he talked about "the horror, the horror." Apocalypse Now shows us, and does it so well that Kurtz's last words hold more meaning for us at the end of the film than they do at the end of the book.

Julian Schnabel might have been the most annoying New York artist of the Eighties, but he has really blossomed as a movie director. Concert films don't usually show much visual style, but here Schnabel has worked out a distinctive look for the movie that is entrancing without ever being intrusive or flashy-for-the-sake-of-flashiness. Of course, it helps that he's got a great series of songs to film: the Berlin album is one of those rock masterpieces that has grown over time, and it's almost reassuring to know that it was trashed by critics when it came out, since Lou Reed is so clearly having the last laugh on them now. Reed, as it turns out, has become an even more compelling camera subject than when he was young and a little too pretty for his own good. Here, he looks both ravaged and utterly determined to give every song his absolute best. It's bracing to see an artist who has sometimes thrown his talent away for the sake of looking cool now grab hold of the best he's got with such energy and devotion. There's weariness in his face, but no defeat, and Berlin's relentlessly downbeat lyrics remind us that, at its best, great rock music has always had the ability to take our losses and pain and make something beautiful out of them, without sugar-coating them with sentimentality or fake uplift.

The River is Renoir's India film, and among the many other directors he influenced, you can see here his abiding impact on the great Satyajit Ray. Renoir follows a British family living in India, and brings his usual appreciation of human flaws and desires to bear on the situation. If the movie doesn't really rank as one of his best works (I would put it far below Grand Illusion or Rules of the Game, for instance), this might be because, leaving Europe, Ray seems to lose some of his sureness of touch, particularly in the scenes with the Indian characters. I always think of a Satyajit Ray film like the glorious Devi as brilliantly capturing what Renoir missed -- as simultaneously paying tribute to Renoir and showing the rich complexity of Indian life that Renoir, as an outsider, didn't quite manage to capture. This isn't a put-down of Renoir -- more an appreciation of how far-reaching his influence has been, and how he has opened up a remarkably wide range of possibilities for other directors, who remain fond of him even when they surpass him. Along these lines, it's especially worth noting that Ray worked on The River and scouted locations for the film. He also told Renoir about his plans for his first film, to be based on Pather Panchali, and Renoir encouraged him to go forward and become a director. Really, Renoir is one of those rare directors who, the more you learn about him as a person, the more you like him.

I caught this movie a few weeks ago when I went up to Montreal for the World Film Festival, and I was a little shocked at how terrific it was. It's the story of a woman in a mental institution who seems convinced that she is a princess. As the film goes on, she uses this delusion to create a new world for the other asylum inmates that is fuller, deeper and in many ways far more humane than anything the institution offers them. That makes the film sound like something left over from the Sixties -- one of those insufferable movies that scold us all for not being as child-like and simple as the mentally ill. But one of the many pleasures and surprises of Princess is that the director, Arto Halonen, complicates the situation, and brings a remarkable compassion and complexity to his view of all the characters, even the ones who at first seem least sympathetic. This is filmmaking in the Renoir style, where we're not so much pressured to pass judgment as to enter the ever-deepening humanity of people caught up in a very difficult situation. The conflict between the Princess and one of the institute's leaders, for instance, has many different layers to it, and while Halonen's sympathies are clearly with the Princess, he gives the leader his due as a man who wants to do the right thing but is badly misguided in his devotion to the latest medical advances -- shock treatment and lobotomy. Even more strikingly, the film manages to hold onto this complex, humane approach while being tremendously entertaining. The actors, particularly the one who plays the Princess, all find large reserves of humor in their roles, and the relationship between the Princess and her best friend is both exhilarating and, in the end, deeply moving, as it leads towards a terrible tragedy. Yet the final effect of the film is more inspiring than tragic, as Halonen places the life of the Princess and her impact on the mental institution into their long-term perspective. This is really a stunning movie, and you should definitely watch it when it comes to the U.S.

The Makioka Sisters shows Ichikawa going back to one of the greatest 20th Century Japanese writers, Junichiro Tanizaki. Ichikawa had already directed, in the 1950s, a stunning adaptation of the Tanizaki novel The Key. The Key is an elliptical comedy about erotic fixation, with a lush visual style of saturated colors. The Makioka Sisters is a more subtle and delicate film, attuned as the novel was to the undercurrents running through the highly structured lives of the main characters. In some ways, the novel was Tanizaki's attempt to write a modern version of Murasaki Shikibu's Tale of Genji, and Ichikawa seems to have understood this in his adaptation, which brings a great deal of low-key humor and psychological insight to the proceedings, all very much in the Genji style. Essential viewing.

I thought Inception was a very entertaining, very effective movie that succeeds as a big-budget Hollywood blockbuster. Nolan works everything out nicely in visual terms, and he has a lot of good ideas -- the imaginary world that Leonardo DiCaprio and his wife invent for each other, for instance. It's no small achievement to put together a giant movie like this in a way where all the different elements come together as smoothly and enjoyably as they do here. I think you could compare it to some of Hitchcock's lighter movies, like To Catch a Thief or North by Northwest. Obviously the film can't bear the weight of some of the praise that's being piled on it: to keep up the Hitchcock comparison, you can't really call Inception a masterpiece in the same league as Vertigo. But on its own terms the film is terrific, and deserves to be appreciated as a first-class action movie.

Truffaut is usually such a high-spirited filmmaker that The Story of Adele H. comes as a great surprise. Isabelle Adjani plays a woman obsessed with a man who has no interest in her. Ultimately she convinces herself that she is in the middle of a great romance and loses touch with reality. By the end of the film she doesn't even recognize her great love anymore, since he exists far more in her mind than he ever has in her experiences. The daughter of Victor Hugo, Adele H. is desperate to create a life apart from her family, and she fixates on her imaginary love affair as her salvation. It's an odd, dark story, and Truffaut takes a determinedly direct approach to it, sacrificing some of the liveliness and cinematic flashiness of his other films but more than making up for it with a sharper focus and intensity. Adjani is brilliant. She makes no effort to win our sympathy or milk us for the pathos inherent in her situation, and the clean, even stark single-mindedness of her acting begins to take on a harsh grandeur as the film goes along. Though far from the most characteristic Truffaut film, this is one of his best.

Storytelling is an interesting film because it's largely a critique of how Solondz approaches his work. As the title says, the movie is all about the way he tells his stories. Most of the negative criticism of Happiness focused on the perceived smugness and harshness of the directorial viewpoint, the sense that Solondz was looking down on his characters and mocking them for not being as smart or as sophisticated as he was. I never thought that criticism was accurate: for one thing, I felt that Solondz brought out the characters' pain and emotional torment, especially the torment of the father, far more than most conventionally "sympathetic" directors do. But Storytelling takes the critiques of Happiness seriously and places them right at the center of the film. In the "Fiction" part of the movie, Solondz shows us the complexities of people trying to understand and exploit each other's motives and desires. If his vision of the Selma Blair character is merciless in exposing her pretensions and hypocrisies, it's also equally unblinking in portraying her moving attempt to find her own viewpoint in a situation that turns her against herself in the cruelest way imaginable -- by making her feel responsible for her own degradation. Just as strikingly, the film's second segment, "Nonfiction," shows an art-house audience laughing smugly at the family on display: a pitch-perfect version of how many audiences reacted to the family in Happiness. At the very least, Storytelling shows that Solondz has thought deeply about his satirical method. While his films will never be for everyone's taste, I think this movie demonstrates that he approaches his subjects in good faith, with an artist's desire to deepen our concern for each other by facing squarely and honestly some of our worst qualities.

It's nice to see Julia Roberts back on the screen in a leading role, but Eat Pray Love isn't a very good vehicle for her. The film is very predictable, and Roberts doesn't make much out of the already mediocre material. Javier Bardem is the only actor who comes off well, but it's disappointing to see his good work wasted in a film where everything all around him is second-rate. I also agree with the people who find the film's attitude towards other countries and other cultures a bit ludicrous: in this movie, the whole world seems to exist merely to feed the main character's narcissism and to help her come to a series of wholly self-absorbed revelations about herself. None of this would matter much if the film was funny or moving or worked on its own terms, but it doesn't, and I came out of it feeling not merely disappointed but a little depressed.

This is really Antonioni's gift to Monica Vitti, who rules the film in a way that no single character really rules any of Antonioni's other work. She gives a great performance, full of emotion under a seemingly blank exterior. This makes her perfect for embodying Antonioni's directing style, which also uses stoicism and the withholding of easy emotion to take us deeper into the characters and their world than most movies go. Another distinctive quality of Eclipse, I think, is the degree to which it's interested in the workings of the practical world, a topic that many Antonioni films avoid completely. There are great scenes set in a stock exchange, and Antonioni goes out of his way to show us how the exchange operates -- a bravura bit of filmmaking, since he sets out this fairly complicated process neatly and cleanly while also paying close attention to a number of the main characters.

After 4 years I still have no real idea what Inland Empire is about. I've read lots of speculations, but none of them seems as convincing as the ones that Mulholland Drive inspired. The main thing that stays with me about the movie now is the digital photography. Before I saw it, I thought Lynch would try to give the digital the same deep colors and inky blacks that his other movies tend to have. But here over and over again he heightens the fact that Inland Empire is being shot on digital rather than film, and indeed makes a point of giving the whole thing a blatantly digital, non-film look. I hated this look the first time I watched it, but now I think it's brilliant. Still wish I knew what's going on with the story, though.