The Big Empty

Air Doll (2009) - Kore-eda Hirokazu Kore-eda's Air Doll appears to be tackling the modern society's illness - urban loneliness and soullessness, the themes explored by by other prominent Japanese auteurs of its time, namely, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Sion Sono and Shinji Aoyama, with Korean actress Bae Doona (Linda, Linda, Linda, Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, Host). The result is a mixed bag.

Adapted from a manga, about a blow-up sex doll, Air Doll is an odd choice for Kore-eda in his mid-career, because he had always been regarded as a Ozu's heir apparent with his gentle, life affirming, if not death obsessed films. It concerns a middle-aged man living alone with his sex doll (Bae), named after his ex-girlfriend Nozomi, as a companion. He talks to her and bathes her and has sex with her. While he is out working as a waiter at a restaurant, Nozomi comes to life and walks around the town. She even gets a job at a video rental store. People around her are unbothered by her demeanor or she has seam lines around her body. With her big eyes and blank expression, Bae approaches the role with pure wonder and innocence of a new born child.

Nozomi's accented Japanese narration serves well as an inanimate object which came to life and just gained a heart. Walking around and meeting people, observing and experiencing human conditions, she learns that there are others out there that compliment you and complete you to have a full life, that people need one another. She has an accident at the job and punctures her arm and deflates and her colleague Junichi (Arata) puts a plastic tape on her arm and blows air back into her navel. The romance begins. He says she and he are not unlike. He feels empty inside as well. He says many feel that way. She then experiences heartbreak, realizing that she is someone else's mere substitution.

She even tracks down her maker (Joe Odagiri). He philosophically explains that human life is both sad and beautiful. But when all is said and done, we are either burnable (humans) or unburnable (sex dolls, because of environmental restrictions) garbage. Yes, once it gets dark, it never lets up.

The film is closer to Spielberg's A.I- Dark yet saccharine. There are secondary stories of other characters we get only glimpses of, and don't quite resonate as it should. Air Doll is not quite the right fit for genteel filmmaker.

Flight of Fancy

Perdues dans New York/Lost in New York (1989) - Rollin Jean Rollin, the master of sodden poetic (and often sleazy) vampire films of the 70s, tries to make an art film in his late period in his little girl fantasy variety with Lost in New York. This almost wordless time and space jumping tale involves Michelle and Marie, two little French girls from the desolate coast of Brittany, finding an wooden African moon goddess sculpture which has a magic power of transporting them into their fantasy world in books they read. Obviously they choose New York and in their twenties. Then BAM! they are in New York, donning a tutu skirt and black suit pants with suspenders respectively, roaming the streets and rooftops of the greatest city on earth.

The magic is not exact science and they are transported to other parts of the town, always running and missing each other by the seconds. There's danger everywhere - a knife wielding (but pretty) street urchin in Chinatown, a see-through white dress wearing vampire haunt the pair in the streets and their dreams. As usual, there are cheap Rollin symbolism everywhere - roses, masks, etc. Don't matter, as many of his better regarded gothic films - Iron Rose, Nude Vampire, Two Little Orphans, Lost in New York retains that melancholic mood. Short and sweet. Just the way I like.

Interview: Form Follows Function: Christian Petzold on Undine

It is always a delight to listen to Christian Petzold, German director of such films as Barbara, Phoenix and Transit, because he is a master storyteller. I could listen to him for hours on end as he enthusiastically talks about his filmmaking process.

His new film Undine is his take on the fantasy genre - about a water creature which takes a human form and takes revenge on humans when her love is not reciprocated. Melding this fantasy with the tumultuous history of the city of Berlin, Petzold concocts another beautifully written and gorgeously realized film that is at once seductive and thought provoking.

Even though we were conducting our interview over a Zoom session due to Covid, his enthusiasm and exquisite storytelling abilities were not diminished in any way. Below is the result of our conversation that took place in May.

Undine hits theaters and VOD platforms via IFC Films on 6/4.

Where are you now at the moment?

I am in Brooklyn. Are you in Berlin?

Yes. Berlin in the chilly spring afternoon. Waiting for the summer, waiting for the end of the pandemic.



Yeah, I was wondering. I heard that it's still pretty bad in Berlin and in Germany in general.



No, I think the peek is behind us. I hope that the cinemas will open in coming weeks. I can't stand looking at my TV set anymore. I miss going to movie theaters and the loneliness of being in the big crowd.



I hear you. Everything's okay with you and your family?



Yes, thank you. You know, I had Covid one year ago around this time.

Oh no!

It was not too serious, but for a full week, I had to stay in bed. I changed my whole plans for the future and put my dystopia script away. It was based on this book that I have bought the rights to, but I'm not interested in dystopia anymore. I don't want to see walking dead in a desert world. I really can’t say I want to do that anymore.

During my time in bed, I read many books including many novellas of Chekov and saw many films. My distributor in France sent me the Eric Rohmer box set as a gift. I said, my god, I haven’t seen Rohmer since back in the school days! What is it called, La Collectioneuse! I was impressed how well it holds up. It’s been such a long time. We had a teacher at the film academy who told us that we have to make movies, so 20, 30 years from now people will know how we had kissed, how we had touched, how we had walked through the streets and how our social life was. I was so impressed by Rohmer’s films so I started writing a new story and I am now finished with the script. It's about a group of young people, in the summer at the Baltic sea, surrounded by forests and the forest are burning and their desire and their hearts are also burning, and the fire in the end is out of control. So this is what I wrote during Covid and I’d love to make it. Paula Beer will play the main female role. But I have to wait for the next summer because it's a summer story and I need the sun. I need a world where we can touch each other without being tested!



Christian, I love to see your summer movie. That sounds amazing! I watched Undine last year at the New York film festival. It's such a beautiful film and it's visually really stunning. I really, really enjoyed it. And I'm glad it's coming out in theaters. 

You always dealt with genre cinema to tell your stories - you’ve done noir, horror, pollcier, sci-fi even, with your last film Transit. Now you are taking on the fantasy genre. It’s really interesting to see you melding it with the history of Berlin. And I'm just wondering how that came about, in terms of the story.



Yeah. You know, I grew up in, near the river Rhine in west Germany and this part of Germany it's filled with myths and songs and old tales. And when I was 20, I leave for Berlin for school. West Berlin was a big laboratory of politics, acting, theater and all that. But you know, this is a very modern city without tales, without myths, without songs, it doesn't have anything. The only myth we have is Adolf Hitler. Maybe it’s an oversimplification but the point is it's a very modern city. And the people in Berlin, they know so much about tales and myths because they are people like me, coming from other parts of the world, because it's a city where people are connected with their stories and with their backgrounds and so on.

The place I was born (West German city of Haan) was between two rivers and also Berlin is a city of the two rivers, Havel and Spree. Yeah. But these rivers are very boring: they are small and very narrow. Nobody's really interested in these and there are no songs. I grew up in this part of Germany between, the river Rhine and the Wupper. The Rhine is a very, very big river. And it's filled with songs about myths and sirens. And also it's that river where you, as a child, would be standing in front of, and you are thinking about going away- to take a boat and go to the sea and perhaps go to America, for instance. We have that sentimental-journey feeling associated with the river Rhine. The Wupper, there are no boats on the water because it's a wild river. And there's a saying in German, “geh über die Wupper”/to go over the Wupper means you know, this is the river Styx, the river of death. Someone's going over the Wupper means he's going into the land of the dead.


So we have the Rhine, which means you are going far away and the Wupper you're going into the end of your life. I'm thinking that living between those two rivers also had something to do with cinema. There's a cinema, which says to you it’s a road movie. And there's also a breaking through a wall, to go over border, to go into another life or could be the death, could be a bank robbery, with a head shot at the end. And so, I thought about my rivers from my youth and my work on Undine started.



That’s amazing! Also, there are a lot of talks about architecture in the movie and how Berlin was built in such a way. And there is obviously a division of the east and west. Paula Beer’s lecture monologue was very interesting. What struck me was when she says, “form follows function.” Can you tell me about that?



That's a very good question, because Paula loved the sentence. I think she loved the sentence more than when she says, “If you leave me, I will have to kill you.” I think of Berlin as a raped city architecturally. Every 3 years someone is coming with new architecture plans. The concept is making money with very cheap buildings with retro style buildings and no form follows function. The idea is totally out. They just want to make money.  

Right.

Before you have a fascist architecture. That was a form following function. Now it’s for tourism. Nothing can grow here. There's no organic life here. But Berlin has always tried to defend itself. So we have these idealist and we have the defenders. I'm so disappointed because in 1989, Berlin had the chance: we had a whole city being united, which was now in the hands of the government, it was not a private property. It was our property. We could’ve made something beautiful. In five, six years, they sold it to people who are only interested in making money. And so Berlin is now raped by money, by the banks in the US. I must say that. 

And so this, someone like Undine who's been living here for centuries, with all these changes, she is like a sad witness of our changing times. So this was our idea.

I remember when we were shooting the (guide tour) scenes and Paula was very very anxious, I must say. It was a bit of a stage fright she had, because it was 18 pages of monologue in the script. I told her that all the extras in that architectural model room were intellectuals: I don't hire dumb extras for an hour. They were university students and professors. So she had to give a very convincing presentation and I liked this as a director, capturing her nervousness. 

The situation in that scene is that the city we are living in, we don't even know so much about it. But now at that moment, we understand what’s happening: it’s the Humbolt Forum. It's a museum in the form of a castle. And Paula is in there surrounded by intellectuals stating that form follows function. I am also commenting on the state of cinema: we haven't got this form follows function anymore. It’s a little disappointing.

Interesting. 

I have to say that the Paula and Franz (Rogowski) have amazing chemistry together. I enjoyed them immensely in Transit before, but there is really something to them in Undine. I’d like to know how it was working with them.

Yeah. I had the idea for Undine during filming Transit because of these two actors. I've never seen a couple like this before. Neither have the German stage theater education. They never worked for the stage as an actor in their careers. They are quite different in their movement and speech, there is certain innocence about them in that way that I like. Interesting thing is they both are dancers. Franz is a professional dancer. He is from a dance background. 

My experience in Transit, when we did rehearsals in the morning, the first two or three hours, they didn’t talk about their lines or talked with me about the script or psychology of the characters. For example when they enter the hotel room, they walk around and touch things - windows, bed and they danced around. It was more like Pina Bausch: their concerns were more like, what is the distance and when can we touch each other? For me it was a fantastic experience working with these two very physical actors. It was more like two young actors dancing their lines.

So when I was thinking about making Undine, I couldn’t think of anyone else but those two for the part. So when three of us were doing rehearsals, especially in the apartment scene, it was like the same rehearsals in Transit: Who is in the terrace? Who is going out of the terrace? Who is going to the window? It was more like they were swing dancing!

So the first six or seven days of shooting, we filmed scenes without any dialogue. This is in their bodies. It’s the movement of their bodies that tells the story - how she puts her head on his shoulder. I always had a feeling that their movements were as if they were filmed underwater.

Forgive me saying this: not that your previous films are not visually beautiful, but I find Undine absolutely gorgeous. Especially underwater sequences with the Big Günter, the catfish and everything. Did you have those scenes in mind when you were writing the script?

I have never done storyboards before. I do rehearsals and make the storyboard afterward. But for those underwater scenes, I needed to do storyboards. It was like doing a graphic novel. All the things I drew for the movie, they were from other films: The catfish comes in like the scene from Jaws where they go under water to investigate the broken ship and find the decapitated head coming out of the hole. I wanted to have the catfish appear like that. Or the scene from 20,000 Miles Under the Sea and Creature from Black Lagoon by Jack Arnold, where the creature almost touches the legs of the girl…. Underwater scenes in cinema are like a liquid memory room. You don’t invent new things but the images are lodged in your subconsciousness. That’s why I like them so much.

It’s really beautifully done.

I think my time is up but I wanted to tell you that the ‘Staying Alive’ scene was hilarious as well as very romantic.

They really use it in Germany. It is in the lessons for the lifeguards. My producers were begging me not to use it because it’s Bee Gees and it was in another movie, the rights to it cost 17,000 dollars. But I had to have it in the film. It was just too good!

Honoré's Metamorphoses is Dirty, Playful Romp

Metamorphoses (2014) - Honoré

Christophe Honoré (Love Songs, The Beautiful Person, Making Plans for Lena)'s interpretation of Roman poet Ovid's Greco-Roman mythic tales of god and demigods starts out with a modern day hunter in the forest, running into a flame haired nude transgender person who graces him with pixie dust and turns him into a deer. The hunter becomes the hunted. From the get-go, Metamorphoses promises to be a very playful, dirty fantasy where anything can happen.

Filled to the brim with young nude bodies (usually full frontal), the film tells a high school girl, Europa (Amira Akili), skipping school and being kidnapped by Jupiter in the form of a charming truck driver. It's a sexual, spiritual awakening for Europa, as she mingles in turn with Jupiter, Bacchus and Orpheus.

Story within a story within a story plays out, some funny, some dark, but all enjoyable, putting emphasis on sexual ambiguity and transformation in human beings. The film is something like a dream of a horny teenager who has fallen asleep in a literature class.

As Honoré told me in an interview before that he is not the type of director who'd want to make nice movies to be remembered fondly by the next generation of film-goers. He's the sort of a filmmaker/dad who'd rather make things which his own daughter would be a little ashamed of. Working with mostly non-actors, he charges on bravely, with lots of nudity, challenging today's ridgid, conservative society and reminds us that, ironically, things were much more transgressive and open, more than two thousand years ago, when Ovid first wrote those poems.

Shot in widescreen and vivid colors by André Chemetoff (Our Day Will Come), featuring many salacious images, Metamorphoses is a great visual feast. It also includes a breathtakingly gorgeous under-water scene where Orpheus attempts to retrieve Eurydice from the underworld.

There are many idyllic nature settings, most of them near the water which is the running theme of the film. These ordinary settings take on a heavenly significance as young gods and demigods christening themselves in the torquois water. Diverse cast of young non-actors engage in tug-and-pull rituals of love and physical, feral courtship. One such dance-like courtship on a river bank involves the rising French star/circus trained actress Vimala Pons and it's a sight to see.

In death of the skateboarding Narcissus (Arthur Jacquin) chapter, you can see the same theme coursing through many of Honoré's films: a love-sick character's self-destructive demise (as the case in Love Songs, Beautiful Person and so on).

Playful, dirty, edgy, organic and beautiful in its micro-budget way, the film has a lot in common with Gomes's Arabian Nights Trilogy which came out a year after. Honoré doesn't bother with elaborate mise-en-scene or special effects. Human to Animal transformations are usually done in simple edits.

Honoré delved into many different genres over the years, working with who's-who in French cinema as well as non-actors, dipping back, from time to time, to his indepedent roots. I saw his adorable new film Sophie's Misfortunes at this year's Rendez-vous with French Cinema. Given that it's a straight up children's film right after Metamorphoses, it shows Honoré's dexterity as a filmmaker.

Metamorphoses works as a dreamy poetry. It's an ode to youth and an abashed celebration of amorphous nature of human sexuality. I am so glad it is getting a theatrical run here in the States. It's an absolute blast!

Storytelling

Three Crowns of the Sailor (1983) - Ruiz







A sailor (Jean-Bernard Guillard) promises his job to a fresh faced student who just murdered his employer for no good reason and needs to escape. All he wants in return is three Dutch crowns (croners?) and have his story listened to. Ruiz's take on Ship of the Dead is a nasty riddle. His play on the nature of narrative 'storytelling' is not meant to be satisfying- episodic stories within stories within stories never pan out. Rather, they go around in circles then change directions at a moment's notice. His typical visual style- wide lens, no depth of field trickery adds to our confusion and its dreamlike imagery and colors are constantly dazzling (Shot by Sacha Vierny of The Last Year at Marienbad and many of Peter Greenaway films). After a while you give in, and have his symbolic images wash over you, wondering how it will all end. Not as mesmerizing as City of Pirates, but Ruiz's filmography is definitely something I can see myself getting into.