The Thin Red Line

Two films released by the Criterion Collection this week focus on men at war.  We'll discuss Terrence Malick's 'The Thin Red Line' on the next episode of The Film Talk, and below; later in the week I'll post a piece on 'Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence'.  These are two of the most compelling films released on DVD this year.

When I first saw Terrence Malick's 'The Thin Red Line', it was the turn of the century, Bill Clinton was still in office, the Twin Towers were intact, and the film seemed to be about the past.  The distant past, to be sure: a film that begins with a reptile submerging and ends with a plant growing on a beach seems to exist a long time before we did.  The nearer past, ostensibly: it takes place in 1942 during the early Guadalcanal Campaign (although you'll look in vain for the caption that appeared on the print I saw over a decade ago to indicate it; Malick, it seems, has had that removed from the new Criterion Collection Blu-ray and DVD release: he wants the movie to exist outside time). This is only appropriate, as it aims to be a poem about the primitive roots of violence, the lack of maturity among men who see the world only as a fight, the power of love to sustain even when it is broken, the tragedy of human beings caught in a web that they think dictates that only violence can be the path to power in this life.

Voices of men mingle over images of nature, John Travolta pulls rank on Nick Nolte, ironically mirroring the tragic missing-the-point skirmishes between some blogospheric film critics, Jim Caviezel auditions for Jesus' last day by playing out some of his early life, prayers are sung and sound like food.  Watching it now, after what may be the defining decade of our generation has passed, it's impossible not to think of 'The Thin Red Line' as a film about the here and now.  Jared Leto sends men to their deaths not knowing why or what he's doing, and perhaps not even caring; how was I to know, in 1998, that this was a prophecy about the man about to steal the White House?  Bodies are on fire and I hear the voice of Max von Sydow in 'The Exorcist' invoking the notion that evil is allowed to happen to make us believe we are unlovable.  Youth is wasted as guys accidentally blow themselves up; identity is formed through 'having your own war'; loss is made flesh as its stewards are 'mocked with the sight of what we might have known'.  Terror rules the world.  And then, there's light.  And trees.  And a new, untouched space, underwater, unaware.  A place where poetry underwrites the state of things.  The paradox of 'The Thin Red Line' is that it makes you feel at peace even as it confronts you with horror. It opens up a space of wonder amidst decay, serving as an awe-striking religious shibboleth.  It's not a war film.  It's a warning: of what we are like when we make the economic and political purposes of life depend on an avoidance of the transcendent.

Slow-Burning Americana Report: 'Mystery Train'

Small town America may rightly fear that it has been overfilmed; certainly after watching Jim Jarmusch’s ‘Mystery Train’, one imagines that it would be difficult to show anything new that isn’t already telegraphed from or curled up inside this vision of Memphis.

What a gorgeous, beguiling film - beginning with the incongruous image of a young Japanese couple traveling through Tennessee industrial wasteland. We are in a space that is at once familiar and alienating; and inviting - for in about fourteen seconds at the beginning of ‘Mystery Train’, Jarmusch reels us in to ask the only question that really matters at the start of a movie: ‘What’s going to happen next?’

Where is this train going? Well, we know from the title that Jarmusch isn’t going to tell us. Deeper than that, we know from his other films that he doesn’t really care about the future.

What matters is now.

Where we are. Why we’re here. No matter how far we travel we’re going to face the same inner conflicts that we had before. So it goes for the characters in Jarmusch-land; who, while they may not immediately seem to remind us of ourselves, become familiar through the repetition of their ordinary extraordinary actions.

A debate between lovers over what music to listen to; a slightly unhinged barber struggling with his red and white pole; a woman unnerved by a strange encounter at a diner. ‘Mystery Train’ is an ally of Scorsese’s ‘After Hours’, which itself takes place in a heightened vision of New York City as hell; Memphis here is a kind of magical hybrid of sacred and profane, as if an old Western saloon town was built around the hotel in ‘Barton Fink’.

Jarmusch creates worlds in which people are humane to each other; or when they’re not, we feel it. His characters are stuck in their ways, and noticeably more like real people because of it. His vision of the American micro-urban landscape is as evocative as the way Ansel Adams saw mountains. His exploration of the weirdness of American mythology represents a dimension of the culture that doesn’t easily fit into red and purple state schismatics; his characters are authentically American (or American dreamers), but they are neither wearing ten gallon hats, nor would they read the Huffington Post.

The guy knows how to do atmosphere; how to pace his whole world to within an inch of its life. He does incredibly sexy incredibly well; and utterly normal utterly right. He can put a skinny guy from Yokohama in a hotel window and make him look like James Dean. He can get Screamin’ Jay Hawkins to wear a red suit as if no one else on earth has the right. He can make you feel nostalgic for trains, aware of the absence of peace and quiet in your own life, amused at the mistakes of others, because they are your mistakes too; and he’s not afraid to make you wait til you remember.

‘Mystery Train’ looks like it was made tomorrow, in a world where computers had not replaced heartbeats as the cinema's focus, so clean and crisp is the transfer on Criterion’s Blu-Ray; and Jarmusch’s welcome habit of avoiding audio commentary in exchange for recording answers to questions submitted by thoughtful fans is a genuinely enriching addition to this disc’s splendid special features. Extras aside, ‘Mystery Train’ is so good I’m going to watch it again tonight.

'Revanche': The Film I've Been Waiting For

I knew nothing about 'Revanche', other than it was the kind of film people tell you you’re supposed to like, but they say it so often, and the acclaim is so overwhelming that it makes you wonder if it’s going to be a rehearsal of the time you didn’t get to see ‘Pan’s Labyrinth’ on its first release but it seemed as if every four paces you took in town or every third hyperlink you clicked on you’d bump into someone telling you that ‘Pan’s Labyrinth’ was not only the Greatest Film Ever Made™ but would make a supermodel fall in love with you and have you develop a six-pack within a matter of days after watching and so by the time you finally did go to see ‘Pan’s Labyrinth’ it couldn’t possibly measure up to the standard that had been set for it and anyway the cinema you saw it in was forced to LEAVE ITS LIGHTS ON DURING THE MOVIE because of an absurd local government health and safety injunction ordering it to get new dimmer switches despite the fact that in thirty-five years of operating NO ONE had ever fallen over and sued or lost their soul or even stubbed a toe so it was difficult to engage with ‘Pan’s Labyrinth’ cos it’s kinda hard at the best of times to suspend disbelief when watching a fantasy film even moreso WHEN THE LIGHTS IN THE CINEMA HAVE BEEN LEFT ON but it didn’t really matter because...

Pan's Labyrinth: Not as Good as 'Revanche', even with the lights off

‘Pan’s Labyrinth’ turned out a) to be less imaginative or engaging than Guillermo del Toro’s previous films (check out ‘The Devil’s Backbone’ – perhaps the most moving horror film I’ve ever seen); b) to not really have much of a labyrinth anyway and c) to remind me why it’s a good idea, in the words of a wiser man than I, to, shall we say, not pay much attention to the propaganda.

So, I try, perhaps not as hard as my genial co-host, but nonetheless with sincere intent, to not believe the hype.  And so, if you are like me, then don’t pay any attention to what you’re about to read.

I knew nothing about ‘Revanche’.  But, and I mean every word of this: it’s the film I’ve been waiting for.  The Austrian film by Gotz Spielman, released this week on DVD by Criterion opens like a Tarkovsky film, with a near-static image of trees reflected in water, setting a mood of something sinister happening amidst the beauty of nature.  It takes its time, the opening lines left untranslated, the location revealing itself as one of the all-time awful cinematic brothels, in Vienna, where women trafficked from Eastern Europe are abused, fat men in silver suits make themselves comfortable off the backs of the people they are breaking, and an ex-con slops out the building, trying to assert some dignity for himself in a profession that could not be said to have benefits.

Johannes Krisch and Joanna Strauss in 'Revanche'

And so, there we are.  What happens next is so compelling that I’ll leave it spoiler-free.  It might suffice to say that ‘Revanche’ becomes something like ‘Heat’ remade by Krzysztof Kieslowski.  It’s about men loving women and women loving men; the dehumanization of certain kinds of work; the meaning of the human body; sex as both an expression of need and a commodity too.  The lead actor Johannes Krisch has more than a touch of Colin Farrell’s older brother about him; and the connection with one Michael Mann’s recent films doesn’t end with ‘Miami Vice’ and ‘Heat’;

Jamie Foxx’s character in ‘Collateral’ is the better dressed, less grumpy corollary to Krisch’s in ‘Revanche’, a re-imagining of the cinematic archetype we know and love as the ‘guy who just wants to get out of where he is if only he could find the cash’.  But there’s nothing clichéd about it’s telling here.  Sure, there’s a couple of shots of a crucifix, and some elegant cuts – from a firing range to a forest, to suggest just one example, sure there’s intimations of power and its corruption, and the existential crisis of being out of place is evoked not least by Ukrainian accents in Austrian locations and a character telling another literally ‘You don’t really belong.  That is your problem.’  But the language – verbal and visual – seem entirely in keeping with a vision of the real world.  You wouldn’t want to belong in the place where this guy is at home – a place where men are actualized only through violence.

Hannes Thanheiser with Krisch and Strauss

Where ‘Revanche’ ultimately takes us to is the notion that belonging accrues through relationships whose parties devote enough time to allow a shared history to develop – the 'regular-type life' that de Niro/Pacino in ‘Heat’ refer to as ‘barbecues and ballgames’, a binding practice explicitly referenced in ‘Revanche’.

Barbecues and Ballgames

Such belonging is better placed, as far as Spielman is concerned, with a view to the outside – otherwise we become members of cliques or cults or private armies, serving only to perpetuate their self-perception and exclusivity.  Spielman often frames his characters just inside or on the edge of doors, looking out; ‘Revanche’ is about the groans of a world that bears the costs of selfishness, but doesn’t quite know how to renew the bonds of community.  It’s a film that grips you and twists you and breaks your heart; and yet for all the cinematic depth it plumbs and archetypes it references, it never feels less than realistic: when a character does something ridiculous that characters in thrillers always do, you believe that this is nothing less than exactly how he would behave in the real world.

I’ve seen a lot of movie depictions of violence against the backdrop of a recognizably ‘ordinary’ world lately; and I’ve got tired of self-consciously ‘knowing’ attempts at saying something about the fragility of life/the human capacity for evil/the sins of colonialism (delete as appropriate).  But ‘Revanche’ is something else: ethically, it’s like a miniaturized ‘Macbeth’ or Greek myth; philosophically it can stand comparison to Kieslowski and the recent work of Michael Haneke (and, for that matter, Sean Penn’s extraordinary ‘The Crossing Guard’); psychologically, if you’re like me, it will speak to your sense that the fear of death must be transcended if you want to be happy in this life, and allow for the hope that you might not harm others in this pursuit.

'The Crossing Guard' and the Pursuit of Happiness

An eye for an eye leaves everyone blind; the taste of a piece of fruit from your grandfather equates to humankindness; and one extra piece of information can change everything.  ‘Revanche’ is made to remind us that easy violence and sentimental redemption narratives cost too much, because they reinforce the dehumanization that characterizes The Way Things Are.  This film wants to take people seriously; to take our struggle to get by, to do right, to live gracefully within the limits of what we can control.  Spielman says in the interview on the Criterion Blu-Ray, which looks gorgeous as usual, that he didn’t so much set out to make a film, but to get to know a world, and the people who inhabit it.  After watching ‘Revanche’ I felt like I knew myself better.

Summer Hours

Jeremie Renier, Juliette Binoche, and Charles Berling,

looking happier than they often feel in 'Summer Hours'

The premise that underlines Olivier Assayas’ film ‘Summer Hours’ couldn’t be more unfamiliar: elderly matriarch dies, her three adult children have to decide how to split up her estate, the Musee D’Orsay gets involved because said estate includes a lot of art and objets d’art, and some teenagers have a party in the rambling French country pile that has given the family shape for a generation. The end.

Given that I don’t have a) any objets d’art, b) a rambling French country pile, or c) contacts at the Musee D’Orsay, ‘Summer Hours’ nails what my old sociological colleagues would call ‘the condition of postmodernity’, and in that sense, ‘the condition of my life’ as if it were written about me. You might feel that way too, especially if you’re a middle class Westerner (in an ironic example of the limits of globalisation, that particular marker of non-diversity probably accounts for most of the readers of this blog, as well as the writer). ‘Summer Hours’ manages to make me think about be utterly compelling, to entertain and provoke, to suggest the contours of the world in which we currently live, and to suggest that its characters have existed before the film started, and will go on once it’s done.  A film of moments, because it knows life's biggest gravities often look tiny or even invisible when they're happening.  Trust me - as I look back over the past five years of my life, it seems to me entirely true that the most important thing I did was to spend fifteen minutes picking raspberries in New Zealand with my best friend.  All the external 'success', money, 'spectaculars' that may have happened are easily filed away into 'do not resuscitate' - they won't sustain me.  To sustain me in a sense of well-being, peace, and the possibility that I might do less harm to those around me?  Picking raspberries in a field in New Zealand.  That'll do.

(As for 'Summer Hours' moment of moments?: It's a close call between the protagonist (who dies in the first quarter of an hour - and that's not a spoiler) unpacking a new telephone, a 75th birthday gift that becomes something like the most heartbreaking metaphor you could imagine; or the way the camera lures itself up to Juliette Binoche’s face, and the sound rises as the camera closes in, and she weeps as her boyfriend leans toward her offering the relational closeness that the film is grieving.)

It’s a film about what drives the world, what family is, the role of art in living well, what the past means, the interconnection and fragmentation of the things; it creates a fully realised setting that I felt I could watch forever, partly because the way of life it is describing is itself becoming a museum piece.

Criterion releases ‘Summer Hours’ on DVD and Blu-Ray next week - gorgeous transfers as usual, and a pretty decent long interview with Assayas accompanies an essay by Kent Jones and making of documentary. It’s a magnificent film - one of the best of the past few years.

'The End of the Line'

'I think that man is not going to change, and the sea going to be dead, because man is crazy'. - 'The End of the Line' (That's not a photo of the 'end' - it's actually a picture of Ira Levin, but that'll make sense if you read on.)

(Re-posted from The Film Talk): The first time I had a tuna sandwich I was eleven years old. It was October 1986, and my mum had cast me in a staged reading of Ira Levin's play 'Critic's Choice', in which, if memory serves, I played the 12 year old son of an unpleasant theatre reviewer, who advises his dad on how to respond to a play written by his wife that he doesn't like. I was terrified, having neither developed a sense of being comfortable on stage, nor having had more than an hour or two to peruse Mr Levin's script. Well, he went on to write 'Rosemary's Baby' and 'The Stepford Wives', and I went on to eat more tuna. I never really thought about where my food came from until the fair trade movement of the late 1990s convinced me to change coffee brands in a neat inverse colonisation move; and since then it seems that every five minutes there's a new documentary about what's wrong with the world's supply-and-demand chains, and what to do about it. Thus far, Al Gore has made me switch off lights that I'm not using, Michael Moore has made me avoid certain banks, the Francis Brother's 'Black Gold' has reinforced what I'd already become convinced of where coffee's concerned. Now it's Nemo's turn.

What marks out 'The End of the Line' (just out on DVD and at I-Tunes) from other recent campaigning films is the fact that it has wedded astonishing visual imagery to an intelligent unfolding narrative.  Images that present the sheer enormity of some fish are married to a narration (by Ted Danson, serious, eminently listenable) that tells us, among other things, that some sea creatures are so over-fished it's the equivalent of ploughing a field seven times a year.  There's an overhead shot of a flotilla of boats that looks better than the CGI pre-battle sequence in 'Troy'; there are knowing jabs at the 'fashion-conscious diners' of Nobu, whose spokesperson helpfully acknowledges his apparent belief that telling people the fish they're eating is on the verge of extinction will preserve it, rather than simply not selling it; there are critical scientists who issue portents such as 'It's negotiating with biology; you can't do that an expect the biology to survive.'

So far, so educational.  And it's as education that 'The End of the Line' most succeeds; as a work of cinema its contribution may be limited to the extraordinary visual imagery (and the fact that it's only as long as it needs to be; there's no padding here).  The worry is that, after 'An Inconvenient Truth', people may either not be willing to sit through campaigning non-fiction films, or the climate crisis as presented in mainstream media - dominated, rightly, by Al Gore - has so overwhelmed the public consciousness that there is little room left to discuss or explore related issues such as the death of the sea.  Yet I learned in watching 'The End of the Line' that it takes 5kg of other sealife to produce 1kg of farmed fish.  The seafood industry as currently framed kills more fish than it produces for humans to eat.  The system of regulation, as someone in the film says, simply does not work.  But it was difficult to avoid the conclusion that, thus far, the delivery of educational/campaigning films has not been enough to address the concerns presented therein.  These films scratch the surface of what needs to change; but, to my mind, they avoid the issue at the heart of why our culture reverts to the mean, puts up with the postponement of living the way we know we should, if we are to maintain even the possibility of life: that is our fear, collective and individual, of death.  And in one of the almost too good to be true segues for which The Film Talk has more recently become unable to extricate ourselves from, that's exactly what Jett and I will be talking about in Episode 113, on its way to you soon.