Wiener-Dog

Todd Solondz is cinema's architect of miserabilism, but never have his powers been put to such disquieting effect in his latest film, Wiener-Dog, a film that runs through misanthropy in the first ten minutes, and continues at breakneck pace towards sadism, cruelty, and outright nastiness. It really is a piece of work, even more so than "Happiness", his established masterpiece, a film which juggled themes of child sex abuse and the futility of marriage quite deftly.

But whereas the content of that film was objectively more shocking, Solondz imbued his screenplay with enormous empathy, which elevated the material into something great. There is very little empathy here, and the work is all the more dour for it. It's interesting, because the plot is one that could be ultimately heart-warming; it tells the tale of a sausage dog (hence the title) who passes through four different owners over the course of its life. It's sort of like Au Hasard Balthazar directed by a suicidal Aki Kaurismaki.

The first owners are a big tip-off; the dog is bought by two chilly parents (Tracy Letts, Julie Delpy) for their young son (Keaton Nigel Cooke), who has recently (we gather) survived a bout with leukaemia. The conversations between parent and child are not devoid of warmth, but the impression we get is that reproduction definitely was not for them. Delpy botches the explanation of why the dog has to be spayed, and then later has to spin a yarn about how a dog of hers was "raped" (by a stray called Mohammed!), all because it wasn't spayed. It's the only truly hilarious scene in the whole film, and Delpy plays up the white panic to brilliant effect. Letts is much more aggressive, his maxim with the dog being "heel, motherfucker!".

An ill-advised granola bar leads the dog to be put down (leading to a funny musing on the randomness of death, delivered by Delpy to her son), but events transpire and the dog is saved by Dawn Wieners, from Solondz's debut "Welcome To The Dollhouse" (now a vet, here played by Greta Gerwig). Dawn hasn't changed; she thanks ex-bully Kieran Culkin when he says she looks like the dog, and then takes up his invite of a road trip to Ohio.

This is the segment with the most pathos, where Solondz embraces some genuine sincerity, particularly in the scene where Culkin tells his brother Tommy (Connor Long) that their father has passed away from alcoholism.

From here, the dog passes into the arms of Danny DeVito, playing a failing screenwriter, out of place and ignored in his position as faculty member of a film school. The film dabbles with culture shock here (and has the least to do with the dog), and mines effective fodder from having DeVito deal with a young upstart who wants to make a film exploring gender identity, for example, and being told by faculty leader to be more positive.

Finally (after quite the turn of events), it lands with Ellen Burstyn, playing a blind woman on the close to death, receiving pleas for money from her granddaughter and living with a carer/friend.

This is a film with a great eye for detail; take Culkin's order for Gerwig to "wait", in the car, or DeVito's students assuming him to be a homophobic dinosaur, or the way the ending lampoons with remarkable effectiveness the old maxim of achieving immortality through your art. Typically, Solondz is very good at directing the children in the film. It is also composed with an understated formality by cinematographer Edward Lachman, and it's amusingly self-aware, replete with interlude and opening credits.

Ultimately, though, this film is something of a zero-sum game. It piles on cynical observation after cynical observation to the point where, after a time, it just stops landing. There's no denying Solondz's talents, and this is by no means a bad film, it is consistently well-written, but nobody would forgive you for deciding that it's just not worth the effort.

who are you?

i have no conception of my readership so i have no idea who is reading this; forgive my tone, in this case. but if you are a regular reader (i have no idea if i have any of those) i implore you to reach out, to comment, to criticise, to berate, to praise, to say anything.

you may have noticed that my last two posts have not been film reviews, but some shambolic attempt at film theory, as i understand it with my (meagre) powers of intellect. this is because i have a goal to become some kind of film scholar, and i want to test my writing.

i have come a long way on this blog, from listicles of the best horror films ever made to what i would consider genuine analysis of film, to a more personal stream of consciousness angle (with this in mind, i remain most proud of my review of boyhood).

this is the next step. i love reviewing movies as i do, so that won't change. but those reviews will have to share a bed with the more academic style of writing i'm attempting.

if you are reading this, reach out. i long to hear from you.

declan x

The Cinema of the Literal and the Cinema of the Obfuscated

The cinema of the literal and the cinema of the obfuscated. Both have their charms, and methods, and we have moved from the former to the latter as our capability for understanding cinema has evolved. We can probably trace the origins of the obfuscation method back to Godard, with his immortal experiment in cutting out the middle to cut to the chase. Yet his contemporaries were big fans of the literal. Truffaut, for example, is the most obvious example of the literal. Everything in the frame is everything we need to do. When it is concealed from us in Le Dernier Metro that Deneuve’s husband is hidden underneath the theatre, this is not obfuscation, it is simply allowing us to observe her actions before we come to know her. The same can be said of Le Fils, where the exact reasons for Gourmet’s pursuit of the young boy, despite the audience presuming some malicious intent, are actually poignant and heartbreaking. Nothing is obfuscated here. There is no mannerism so to speak; all is revealed in good time, and it is simply the requirements of the narrative framework that have been conjured up that mean all the necessary information is not revealed at the exact point we need it.

The cinema of the obfuscation is somewhat trickier to pin down, and it has its roots in excessive stylisation; no bad thing at all. Take the shot, for example, in The Silent Storm where Lewis’s hand reaches across the table to grab the young lad. The focus of the scene is three-pronged; symbolically, it could tell us a lot, with the young man in the centre, trying to depart to follow the woman he is interested in, and the husband reaching out, and restricting him from doing so. A fine shot. But an artist working in the cinema of the literal would have instead framed it as flitting between the three faces, and focussed on the anger of Lewis, the lust of the young man, and the conflict of the woman in some kind of order, as opposed to containing each in one shot.

Steve McQueen, in particular his work Shame, is a master of obfuscation. Inasmuch as he focusses on movement and action with his central actor, a lot is also held from us and we are led to fill in the gaps by ourselves. The true extent of his addiction is never spelled out to us. In the scene where he runs across New York to escape his sister having sex with his boss, the literal moment is him running; it is never spelled out, for example, just why he is running. He is escaping, yes, but is it because he is made uncomfortable? Because he is scared of becoming aroused? Scared of trying to join them? Does this show contempt or desire for his sister? Or both, one feeding into the other.

Only a fool would deny Shame to be a great film. But its greatness arises from its atempts to let the viewer decide what is going on, in the face of the deliberate obfuscation of the director. The dictum of “show don’t tell” comes to mind.

A similar tactic was used in PTA’s There Will Be Blood and the Master. Both fine films; both films where we have to fill in some gaps ourselves, because information is deliberately obfuscated.

It must be said that this is not borne out of a contempt for the audience; rather, a trusting optimism that the viewer will be content enough with the work and patient enough, to engage with it on the level of trying to read what is being obfuscated. Here it must be said that the cinema of the obfuscation is more penetrative because it delineates a direct engagement with the text on the level of guesswork, perhaps, or maybe a better term than guesswork is simply engagement.

Yet the cinema of the literal can itself yield deep rewards, when the literal is engaging enough. The best example of this is in the silent films, particularly Jeanne D’Arc, or Potemkin, where the information is fed to us bit by bit.

In this sense, the cinema of the literal will always bear more of a resemblance to the theatre (do not forget “Metro”’s theatrical setting!) because theatre, often, is literal, because theatre lacks the ability to do what film can do, which is show us one thing but depict another. That is to say; a filmmaker can have one thing in the frame, but can frame that shot in such a way, with such calibrated mis-en-scene, that the crying is not the thing being conveyed. This is harder to do in theatre because the open nature of the theatre means it is harder to police what is being seen by the audience, and so it has to tend to the literal. But a filmmaker has absolute control of the frame, and so can use it to any ends he desires.

This is not meant to decry or decamp one method as being better than the other; there are also other methods, multitudinous methods. But I hope this describes them adequately. No doubt this is a topic to which I will come back to at a later date.

The Death of Cinema?

For as long as people have been writing about cinema, people have been writing about the death of cinema, something I have always put down to the fact that as multi-faceted a thing as the cinema invites so many personal readings of what the cinema must do that when someone invariably makes a film against that grain, it seems antithetical to you as a person. A case in point; Godard views film, largely, as a propaganda tool, and as an extension of his expression. Notions of entertainment in the traditional sense mean little to him, he is more experimental, and interested in what film can do to further the form of film.

This seems to be the opposite of his contemporary, Francois Truffaut, a much more commercially successful director who made films that were intensely personal, but also made with the wider audience in mind. They are all accessible, fun, funny, and so on. Godard himself attacked one of Truffaut's most popular films, "Day For Night", for being "dishonest", but what Godard really meant was that it was dishonest to him, and dishonest when measured up to his own personal subjective criterion for what qualifies as worthwhile cinema.

Here we have two directors, both rightfully considered great by critics and the public, at odds with one another, because of their different ideas as to what films should do. Ignoring the fact that the idea of film having a should highly contentious in itself, what can this tell us about film? It tells us, or it tells me, or I feel, that it means that any arguments for the death of cinema, or the evolution of cinema, should be taken with a pinch of salt, because the death of cinema for one critic or viewer could be the evolution for another. Truffaut, for example, didn't live to see the films of Harmony Korine, say, but we can infer from Truffaut's tendency to espouse moralism and fill his pictures with a moralistic bent, that he would likely have disapproved of the doe-eyed nihilism inherent in "Kids", a film which presents a tableaux of domestic and street-level cruelty in as plain a way as possible.

On the other hand, Godard later in his career came round to argue that Spielberg was dishonest, and that American cinema in general was a false use of the medium. The irony here, of course, is that it was American cinema in the first place which gave him the rules to break, and the standards to deviate from, when he and his contemporaries pioneered the French New Wave. But this is a criticism that has been lobbied at him often, that he seems to pay little attention to. From Godard's perspective, it is American cinema that has changed, not him, and his criticisms are valid; this is because Godard did not evolve along the lines of the American cinema, he carved his own path, and at some point his path diverged greatly from American cinema.

Godard and Truffaut, favourites though they are of mine, are not the only two to have strong opinions on this topic. Famously, Michael Haneke, another great director, has a great distaste for the Hollywood tendency to relish on depictions of violence, particularly of the Tarantino generation. He does not state that violence has no place in the cinema (Funny Games aside, "Amour" and "Caché contain scenes of startling violence), but that it has no place being depicted as it does. Both versions of Funny Games are horribly, horribly violent, but this is Haneke's aim; to make us hate the depiction of violence, as opposed to enjoy it.

Haneke, as far as I know, has never claimed that cinema died with the introduction of extreme violence in popular films, but he certainly holds in extreme disregard that tendency. There is nothing to say that this opinion is any more valid or invalid than that of the person who howls with laughter when Marvin gets shot in the face by John Travolta in Pulp Fiction, although it could be said that his argument is more coherent and comes from a place of care, whereas the Tarantino defence comes from a place of sneering, postmodern irony.

When Theodor Adorno famously announced the dictum of "no poetry after Auschwitz", even those who disagreed with the idea could not disagree with the underlying sentiment, because the post-war, post-Holocaust worldview was so bleak and hopeless that it is impossible to conceive of now. It is likely that the moralism of Truffaut, and the disdain of Haneke (an Austrian), come from living in the more immediate shadow of that most barbaric event (Godard is trickier, given the accusations of anti-Semitism levelled at him, but to me there is no evidence to suggest that he views the Holocaust as anything other than what is is; an atrocity).

And yet as the years have gone by, the shadow has faded, and just as it is not unreasonable to suggest that those directors were informed by those worldviews, it is also reasonable to suggest that Harmony Korine himself could not have had matters of the Holocaust and Adorno's assertions further from his mind; indeed, the main drive in his art is the squalor and torpor he encountered as a young man amongst the heroin junkies of New York (I am, myself, begrudgingly fond of Kids, by the way, but I am still saddened that a film that horrible could also be that true to life, if that makes sense).

What this means is that there are as many perspectives on the cinema as there are films, and that any proclamations on what the cinema can do and should do should (and I mean should) be measured and weighted equally against all of the other proclamations. Films are made by people, critics are people, and people are influenced by their immediate worldly experiences. Sometimes those experiences are good; more often than not, those experiences are bad, be it the Holocaust, the events of 9/11, or Korine's experiences in the squalor of New York.

The one thing that must be said, however, is that the frequent and persistent concern from various persons that the cinema might in some way be dying shows a care and fascination for its wellbeing, and a consideration that it is in fact alive in the first place. The cinema is immortal, until it isn't; some people might adorn it with tattoos, so to speak, or piercings, or a Savile Row suit, or a pair of Louis Vuitton shoes, but these will not be the things that kill it; what will kill it will be the day where people stop dressing it up in any way at all. As long as people disagree, however passionately, over the cinema and what it does, then the fact that there is something to disagree over stands as a beaming confirmation that the cinema is alive and well, and we're all the more better off for it.

Anomalisa

"And you may find yourself
In another part of the world"

"And you may ask yourself
Well, how did I get here?"

Talking Heads - Once In A Lifetime

Anomalisa, from Charlie Kaufman and Duke Johnson, is one of those films that is simultaneously vague about what its meaning is (if it has one), and yet seems to impress upon the viewer a deep need to be understood (a little like it's protagonist). When I say that I took it principally to be a parable on man's tendency to force his will upon those around him and make everything fit his desires perfectly, this could ring profoundly true for you, or seem like a dire misinterpretation; and that's fine. But no matter how you take the film, nobody can deny its truth, or its power; indeed, it is true and powerful because it has a genuine conception of the intricacies of the human soul. Near the end of the film, the main character David Stone (David Thewlis) announces to an audience that "every human has aches... What does it mean to ache? What does it mean to be human?"

Simply, he doesn't know, the filmmakers don't know, I have no clue, and if you claim to know then I wouldn't believe you. But despite the profound lack of answers, this film is still asking the right questions. It is about the search for meaning in a world that can be scary, mundane, arbitrary, and cruel. Yet "the search for meaning" seems so trite; perhaps it is about realising that the search is futile and the end in itself, because the meaning is hidden from view by virtue of the nature of our existence.

I'm running round in circles, but that's because for 90 minutes I let Kaufman and Johnson run rings around me. Their film, on the surface, is about a middle aged man, British but living in L.A, giving a conference in Cincinnati. In one of the films many little ironies, the talk he is giving is on how to best deliver customer service; on how to best deal with people. This information is withheld for the opening passages, just long enough to observe that David is quite a curt, brusque, arguably rude person. He does not suffer fools lightly. He has a habit of rubbing the bridge of his nose with his thumb and forefinger. Small talk does not come naturally to him. Various people ask him to repeat things he's said, and it's clear that he is not a man who is understood all that well; another of the films ironies.

Once he is in his hotel room, he rings up and old lover, and meets her in the hotel bar. She seems overwhelmed; he seems like he is following an impulse with little thought. We gather that they were very close- perhaps once in a lifetime love- but he walked out, or perhaps ran. He talks about running a lot. She misconstrues an invite to his room for a proposition of sex (or maybe it wasn't misconstrued at all?) and storms out. David's emptiness is made palpable. But curiously, we do not pity him; we simply understand.

Yet the main bulk of the film consists of David speaking to a woman called Lisa, who is voiced by Jennifer Jason Leigh. I say voiced because this film is acted out entirely with stop-motion puppets. I will not say that the animation is seamless, and I forgot I was watching puppets; the viewer is constantly aware of this fact. But the puppets themselves are indescribably human, and it is here that true credit must go to Johnson's animating style; he must be a very adept people watcher, because his eye for the nuances of human movement is breathtaking. Everyone else in the film; David's wife, his son, the bellboy, his taxi driver, his old lover, are all voiced by Tom Noonan. His initial attraction to Lisa is the simple fact that she sounds different. He feels he can love this person; he wants to love her.

And this is where, for me, the film perhaps reveals its true hand, because it seems to be to be about the myth surrounding men that they can somehow be saved by a woman. David immediately puts her on a pedestal. It is arguable that he preys on her insecurities to get her into bed, although she is attracted to him straight away, and is self-aware and capable, even if she pretends not to be. When David tells her that she is extraordinary, her actual qualities could not be further from his mind, and he instead just cares about the fact that he has someone to offload on, that he has found someone who has allowed him to feel.

This could read as criticism, but I do not mean it to be. A critique of masculinity is just one of the many things at play in this film, it was just also the most apparent to me as I was watching it. David is, ultimately, a human, humans contain multitudes, and as such we can scorn, pity, love, and empathise with him all at once, perhaps in the same scene. The fact of his selfishness does not de-legitimise the depth and breadth of his feelings, or his lack of feelings, or both.

Is this film optimistic or pessimistic? I think it is both. David is none the wiser at the end of the film, reconciled with his wife, playing with his son. Everyone still sounds the same. He sits on his stairs, looking miserable. He has not learned his lesson, is even perhaps unaware that there is some kind of lesson to be learnt. We do not really hold out much hope for him, and despite his intentions, he still does not feel any deeper than he did before.

Yet Lisa, having taken their encounter to be a brief but sweet break from mundanity, smiles in her car as she writes him a farewell letter. She understands the situation, and allows herself to be hopeful. Her meeting with David may have even taught her a little more about herself, and eventually raised her confidence. This is healthy; after the fact, she has assessed the impact it had on her, and realised that it had one. This is the opposite of David, who attempted to manufacture an evening to somehow teach him to love again; of course it failed.

This is a complex film with complex emotions that I feel I have described incoherently and with little tact or subtlety, which is against the grain of this film and its general spirit. Let me put it more simply for you. It is a better film than I think I have words in my vocabulary to describe it. You will never forget it.

Two English Girls

"Two English Girls" (or "Anne and Muriel") is the fifth Truffaut effort I have seen now, and as I watch more I begin to see the threads and themes that run through his work. As a director he seems predominantly concerned with people whose natures are their ultimate undoing. In Shoot the Pianist I observed that it was an inability to act which led to the protagonists' downfall; in Jules and Jim, famously, it is the central characters love of each other which ends up undoing their relationships; in The Soft Skin, Pierre's enigmatic approach to his own emotions results in tragedy; The Man Who Loved Women loved them too much to maintain his own lifestyle.

And now we have this film, set at the turn of the 20th century, starring Jean Pierre Leaud as Claude, a young man whose slavery to his whims is his undoing romantically. As the film begins he is young, fresh-faced, and hopeful, and he enters into his quasi-tryst with the two sisters of the title cheerfully and without reserve. They are young, English, and Claude is staying in their cottage, at the behest of his mother, to teach them French, and vice versa. Anne (Kika Markham) is the older sister, bold, with dark hair, who worries about her sister, Muriel (Stacy Tendeter); she spends a lot of time in bed, and has problems with her eyes, leaving her preferring the indoors. The two girls are overseen by their mother, Mrs Brown (Sylvia Marriott), a wayward but fair woman who trusts Claude. And Claude's mother (Marie Mansart), arguably the only woman he truly loves, is similarly wayward but also much more permissive of Claude's eventual womanising lifestyle.

These are the five characters in just about all the scenes of the film, and the film explores their different relationships over the many years they know each other. Adapted from the novel by Henri-Pierre Roche, (who wrote "Jules") the screenplay deftly covers a great expanse of time, never feeling busy, but always riding a gentle current of shifting relationships, allegiances, loves. But this is more than a gender-inverted Jules Et Jim; where that film was busier, brisker, playing the wife-swapping like moves in a chess match, this is paced much more glacially, and it benefits from it. The moments in the film where Claude realises he loves someone different, or has fallen out of love with someone, carry genuine weight and heft.

And whilst it does have the typical sprightly Truffaut nature, this is an elegantly and classically composed affair, with the feel of a genuine period piece. The locations are superb; the girls' cottage by the sea is picturesque, a homely den decorated in blue, beset on all sides by comforting greenery and woodland, and vast rolling hills; Claude's flat, filled with art and books, feels like an extension of his character; the various gardens which are dined in feel real. The use of colour is masterfully sustained, and the film has a persistent painterly feel at the same time as indicating the inner states of the characters.

It also contains two scenes of lovemaking which work as a contrast and prop up the film; one frankly erotic, and the other harsh and detached. They define the different relationships that Claude has with the two sisters at various points. When he sleeps with Anne, it is probing and exploratory, he seduces her over a number of days in a cabin, and when the time eventually comes, they fall into each other. When he sleeps with Muriel, it is instead a much more rugged affair, like he is planting a flag inside of her. Her screams could be of pleasure, or pain; it is never spelled out. In both instances Claude makes a reference to "making a woman" of these two. But what of the effect on him?

And this question is the central irony of the film, which reveals itself in the very last shot, as Claude, fifteen years later, old and weathered, looks into a mirror and seems to see himself for the first time. It's ironic because he entered this affair with the least to lose, and seemed in control at all points; Muriel was timid, but comes into her own later on. This twist, and juxtaposition, provides the point of the film. We realise that this aloofness on Claude's part hides an inability to move on. We see, finally, that it is his inherent nature that has betrayed him.

The Soft Skin

“I don't think you can be dealing
With the situation very well
You take a lover for a dirty weekend, that's ok
But when it's over
You are looking at the working week through the eyes of a gigolo”

Stuart Murdoch of Belle and Sebastian sang these lyrics on their 1996 album “If You’re Feeling Sinister”, and I thought of them as I watched Francois Truffaut’s 1964 film “The Soft Skin”, which is also about someone, married, who takes up a lover, and even attempts a dirty weekend with said lover, although only the most forgiving of people wouldn’t call it an unmitigated disaster.

But while these lyrics describe the film, they are also a tip-off to its problems, because whilst Murdoch lyrically describes the guilt and shame that can often follow a sordid tryst, when we try and zero in on protagonist Pierre Lechenay (Jean Desailly)’s emotions, we find ourselves drawing a blank. The same, too, can be said for the object of his desires Nicole (Francoise Dorléac), an air hostess whom he spots on a flight to Lisbon to deliver a talk on Balzac. And the less said about his wife Franca (Nelly Belledetti) the better; if Pierre and Nicole can at generously be described as wilfully enigmatic, Franca is a blank slate you can’t even draw anything on.

The central issue is that we cannot genuinely conceive of a single concrete reason why Nicole and Pierre go together. Well, I can on Pierre’s part; Nicole is an exceptionally beautiful woman, with a gentle voice that is at once caring and striking, and yes, she does appear to have exceptionally supple skin, or we must gather as much, from the sequence where she is lying supine in a little bed and breakfast, and Pierre undoes her stockings with all the care and precision of a technician rewiring a motherboard. But Pierre, unfortunately, seems like a stuffy bore, scared, imprecise, and not as though he’d make the most exciting lover.

Perhaps this is unfair speculation on my part, but the film gives us regrettably little to go on. A film like this lives and dies on the strength of the conveyance of the mental states of the central characters, and it seems to fail in that regard. It occasionally felt a little bit like certain scenes were missing or dropped; we just accept that Nicole loves Pierre, after a night where he talks about his work almost non-stop (he’s a literature professor), when I was wondering how she managed to stay awake. I was genuinely expecting the film to reveal her to be a femme fatale, but alas (although you could argue that the final scene of the pair in an apartment is an inversion of that trope). And the ending, perhaps startling for its days, is overwrought nonsense.

The film even gives us clues, to no avail; for example, a fair portion of the film concerns Pierre giving a talk on Andre Gides, which is acting as cover for the aforementioned dirty weekend. I believe this was no accident or random author, since Gides famously wrote “The Immoralist”, about a young man slowly doing away with conventional morality and succumbing to his most base desires; it cleverly frames the regression into incumbent ethical murk as the climactic victory for the protagonist.

If this theme is meant to be a counterpoint to the film, then it is ill-defined; if the book is meant to be a thematic bedfellow, then it is unconvincing because we do not know what Pierre is really thinking, whether he is enjoying his descent into immorality.

I realise now that I have spoken negatively throughout this entire review, and yet if pushed, I would recommend the film without question. Why is that, since it fails at everything it tries to do, and what it is trying to do is questionable? Truffaut, even when his canvas is half-baked, is a master of cinematic form. His innate sense of the frame and what to put in it is second to none. Even when we cannot buy into what is going on under the hood, on a scene by scene basis and from a cinematographic level, the film is compelling enough as it is. The film would work well watched alongside Shoot The Pianist, Truffaut’s unequivocal masterpiece, where emotional content and cinematic form coexist harmoniously, and The Man Who Loved Women, where Truffaut’s thematic motives are questionable, but nowhere near as muddled as here. In all three films, Truffaut shows a preternatural ability for what should be on screen and what shouldn’t, and how to edit in rhythm to a music that the audience just feels as the film goes along.

It’s just a shame he couldn’t conceive of an emotional base to match his stunning filmmaking.