A Different Kind of Fairy Tale

Sleeping Beauty (2011) - Breillat



Catherine Breillat spins another well known fairy tale into a feminist sexual intrigue. Anastasia is cursed at her birth by a witch, that she will die after pricked by a spindle at age 16. But three good fairies intervene in time and change her fate: she will sleep for a hundred years instead. But when she is 6, Anastasia hits the road and encounters many strange people. And she is on her way to rescue Peter the prince (a childhood friend, older cousin, brother, uncle?) from the ice queen (stand-in for puberty). Now 16 and a hundred years later, Anastasia wakes up in the modern world and flirts with hunky Johan and experiments with homosexuality.

Breillat's second interpretation of the fairy tale trilogy (first Bluebeard and Beauty and the Beast planned), is much more playful and sumptuous (from production design to cinematography) than her previous efforts I've seen by her. Anastasia's journey is fantastic and candy colored. It ends abruptly with the dark undertones of sexual violence (fantasy or otherwise). It's a very intriguing film.

Reverse Shot

Notre Musique/Our Music (2004) - Godard
Part essay, part narrative, part lecture, this short elegy to Europe is perhaps the most definitive culmination of all Godard's work I've seen so far. Taking cues from Dante's Divine Comedy, the film is in 3 parts: Hell, Purgatory and Paradise (first and last parts are 10 minutes or so and Purgatory is the longest and the meat of the film).

The first ten minutes is rapidly cut reels of horrors of war- both real and imagined (clips from Hollywood movies) and in both black & White and color. Colors are wildly distorted into almost an abstraction.

Set in bullet riddled Sarajevo in winter, Purgatory mainly concerns the Israeli/Palestine conflict. Judith Lerner (Sarah Adler), a journalist from Tel Aviv is in town for a literary conference where Godard (as himself) is set to give a lecture on image/text relationship. Like a tourist in a new city, Judith is constantly visible taking pictures in the war-torn but now reviving city. While interviewing and talking to many people- a Palestinian poet, Spanish architect and so on, who appear as themselves, she is there to be assured/bare witness to, that a reconciliation is possible between bitter enemies somewhere, that the bridge (the famed Mostar bridge, built by the Ottomans in the 15th century and had been standing the test of time until was destroyed in the Bosnian War) can be rebuilt.

Then there is Olga Brodsky (Nade Dieu), a Russian Jew, planning to off herself in a sensational manner in the name of peace. In the Paradise part of the film, Olga walks through the green forest and ends up in water's edge where it is heavily guarded by American GIs.

Godard plays with complex ideas through series of images and sound. The film devotes considerable amount of time to Godard's lecture on misinterpretation of images. There is light then there is dark. There is a shot, then there is a reverse shot. As usual, this dichotomic world view that has been consistent throughout his career is pronounced. Similar images can contrast each other side by side but an image without context can be misleading.


The two women- Judith and Olga (both rather plain looking and not particularly noticeable) are mirroring each other. So are damaged, faded fresco of Saint Mary and Olga. The most devastating/hopeful image in Notre Musique is not of a pile of dead bodies or Mostar but close up of Olga's face at the end.

I have to admit that seeing a Godard film requires a bit of effort and get-used-to (visually, since he is not going to give you traditional looking beauty shots). Sometimes his usual heavy Euro-centric references get in the way of viewing. It also feels like a visual literacy class, albeit an exciting one.


Notre Musique is a serious film. His image association games don't feel like tricks. Gone are his youthful glee and silly satiric humor that has been generally perceived as reductive and contradictory, that alienated many filmgoers over the years. The film doesn't give the audience any easy answers. Godard merely suggests that there are things that need to be investigated further: what you can see is not necessarily the truth. Then I realized that Godard has always been paying the highest respect to the audience- to think for themselves. It's also the most non-combative and relatively easy-to-digest Godard film I've encountered so far. Also it's thrilling.

Only misstep (if I call it that) I consider is the appearance of American Indians. The idea of imperialistic America is pretty well pronounced throughout all JLG films. But I find the inclusion of them in the streets of Sarajevo a little more than distracting. Sure they are underrepresented and their stories seldom told. But it feels like harkening back to his old silly self in otherwise somber film.

MMMM

Martha Marcy May Marlene (2011) - Durkin

First thing you notice in this film is its intentionally underexposed cinematography. It sets the tone and never lets up from beginning to end. The second thing you notice is Elizabeth Olsen's face. The crushed black, shallow depth of field and soft edges accentuate her ethereal beauty. She is in almost every frame of the film. Martha Marcy May Marlene concerns a young woman named Martha who runs away from what seems to be a communal farm house, mainly consists of young men and women, headed by charismatic Patrick (John Hawkes, channeling Charles Manson without the hippie bullshit). She calls her estranged older sister and spends the rest of the film with her and her yuppie husband in their lake front Summer house in Connecticut. Martha seems ok at first but as she remembers what she just left behind, she gets increasingly paranoid and anti-social.

Martha Marcy is not explicitly about a Manson type cult, nor it's about relationship between two sisters. It's all about dread a young woman feels after a traumatic experience. It's slick and accomplished filmmaking and has plenty of good acting and tension. But it fails to have any kind of impact on either emotional or cerebral level.

Wired

Welt am Draht/World on a Wire (1973) - Fassbinder

When Dr. Vollmer, the inventor of the Simulacron, a virtual reality world, dies in the eve of the huge conglomerate taking an interest in the project, they bring in a springy scientist Fred Stiller to take over the research. Fred has some reservations for the job since his predecessor died under mysterious circumstances, but happy to oblige to the given task, as the project is a scientific milestone. Odd things start happening around him though: he suffers from constant headaches, his friend at the company disappears in mid-conversation and nobody notices that he is gone. What's more, no one acknowledges that his friend ever existed. Then there are blackouts and memory lapses. Something is definitely wrong. Fred discovers that the world he sees as real is not at midpoint of the film's 3 hour running time. His existential crisis is similar to that of Hari, Kelvin's dead wife, created by the famed planet in Tarkovsky's Solaris.

Fassbinder tapped into the concept of virtual reality, way before Matrix. Its obvious influences are everywhere- the phone booth, contact/oracle and whatnot. But his approach is not some dumb, action filled, overblown, self-important fantasy, but got a lot more to do with identity crisis in the technologically infused world- our world. It's a talky film filled with fashionable women and colorful plastics. There are hardly any action or special effects. Nonetheless it's very intriguing and entertaining from start to finish.

Highline at Night

Smell of Rice Cooking

Branded to Kill (1967) - Suzuki




A human blowfish Hanada (Jo Shishido) is a contract killer. Despite his irregularities- he has a fetishistic tendency to the smell of cooking rice, he is damn good at his job. But when he fails an assassination job, hired by butterfly collecting femme fatale Masako, he gets hounded by the invisible 'guild' and the ranked No.1 killer (Koji Nanbara).

This is a wild ride. Visually inventive, ultra modern sets and goofy humor, the Seijun Suzuki's gangster flick plays out like the adult, perverted combo version of Michel Gondry and Wong Kar Wai.

Brooklyn Flea at Dusk

OWS in Halloween Parade 2011

Prague Spring

Birds, Orphans and Fools/Vtackovia, Siroty a Blazni (1969) - Jakubisko This allegorical tale of Czechoslovakia, post Prague Spring and following Warsaw Pact invasion, is all colors, beautiful decay, New Wave, Falstaff, concentration camp references, bizarre love triangle a la Jules et Jim, gaggle of children and...birds. Yorick and Andrej are manic fools horsing around war torn Bratislava.They pick up Martha, a Jewish waif who dons a Jean Seberg haircut. Martha goes back and forth between wise-ass Yorick and virginal Andrej until Yorick goes to jail for a year. Then the tragedy ensues as the brief narration in the beginning sequence predicts. There is definitely method in all the chaos. Birds, Ophans... is a maddeningly intoxicating cinematic experience.

The Abyss Gazes Back

Into the Abyss (2011) - Herzog

Herzog continues his Americana with Into the Abyss, a documentary about Death Row. It is perhaps the most somber Herzog film in years. There have been similar death penalty issue films like Errol Morris's Thin Blue Line, and more recently Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky's Paradise Lost docs, which actually helped to exonerate their subjects (or at least to have them out of jail). But Herzog rather concentrates on the impact of violence that is felt on both sides of the crime. He doesn't overtly state the institutional killing is wrong. But he certainly makes us think about it with a skillfully balanced filmmaking.

Stripped away is Herzog's usual droll narration. Mostly comprised of interviews and crime scene videos, the film briskly moves on one scene to another. Michael Perry and Jason Burkett shot and killed three people while stealing a sports car in 2002. A senseless crime committed by a couple of 19 year olds. Perry was sentenced to death, and Burkett life imprisonment. In an interview with Perry, Herzog tells his subject upfront that he respects him as a human being and feels sorry for him that he has to die, but that doesn't mean he has to like him. Youthful and even jovial, 8 days before his execution, Perry tells Herzog his state of mind as a condemned man. "I'm going home or home either way." He cites 'hanging with the wrong crowd' as the root of the problem. It is evident in the interviews with friends and relatives of both perpetrators and victims, that in their lives there was a systematic pattern for unending violence, even in the suburbs of the American South: large numbers of family incarcerated, poverty, drugs, theft and felony. Serving a 40-year sentence for multiple felony charges, Burkett's father tells Herzog that he knew he saved his son's life when he saw two ladies in the jury crying after his tearful "Don't kill my son. He never had a chance," testimony during his son's sentencing. He says his most shameful moment came when he and his two sons (Jason's older brother is also in prison) got a chance to have meals together in the prison yard.

There are definitely Herzogian moments: the red Camaro, the source of the three lives lost, still sits in a police impound. The sheriff explains why they had to move the car to another spot: the tree grew from underneath the car and came through the floorboard. Herzog also gets in some memorable lines, "Describe your encounter with a squirrel," and "Would Jesus be for the capital punishment?" over the course of the film. Then there is Mellyssa who is carrying Jason's baby. They fell in love when she worked as a legal assistant on Jason's case. She is coy about how she has become pregnant.

Executions have an emotional impact on those who have to carry out the sentence as well. Herzog interviews a Texas man who had a breakdown after assisting in his 125th execution. Now, he opposes the capital punishment. A death row chaplain starts sobbing when he is asked about the last rites he performs for the inmates. "I can't stop the process, I wish I could." One must think of the recent execution of Troy Davis, a man whose trial was plagued by racial bias and police manipulation of witnesses. One of the arguments in the attempt to commute his death sentence was the potential psychological impact of forcing officers to perform an execution on a man whose guilt had not been established beyond a reasonable doubt. Lisa Stotler-Balloun, who lost her mother and brother to the crime, went to see the execution of Perry. Even though Perry's death can't bring her family back, she felt somewhat of a relief afterword. But when asked if the life sentence for the murderer would've satisfied her, she says yes.

Its generic title could be applied to any number of Herzog films. But with no traces of cynicism or sly wit, Into the Abyss is a particularly straightforward documentary. Thoroughly inquisitive and contemplative, Herzog seems to be saying enough is enough.


Into the Abyss made its debut at TIFF, Telluride Film Fest in September, it is an opening night film at Doc NYC on Nov.2 and opens in theaters Nov. 11 via IFC Films.