24 Frames

24 Frames: Stories We Tell

Chris Kriofske1 Comment

Like songs, poems, books and the live stage, films are another medium for storytelling. Even the most simplistic (Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat, The Lumiere Brothers, 1896) or experimental (Wavelength, Michael Snow, 1967) cinema communicates something to its audience, no matter how straightforward (the former a 50-second shot of exactly what its title promises) or abstract (the latter a 45-minute zoom shot directed towards a window in a room.) Arguably the best films either relay a story like none other or do so in ways few (if any) other films have tried. One might regard this as a challenge given the sheer amount of work this relatively young medium has already produced; even accounting for the small fraction of it that’s truly great (on Letterboxd, for example, I’ve given only about 250 out of 4500 movies (6%) a five-star rating), it’s easy to be critical/skeptical of finding new films that surpass or at least measure up to one’s favorites.

Still, I’d argue the notion that “it’s all been done” actually sustains an interest in filmgoing: one rarely knows when you will find something new to enter into your own canon of great movies. To develop a critical eye is to recognize when something is a rare gem, a work presenting a world clearly distinguishing itself from others while also meaningful in how it accomplishes this. Consider the titles I’ve included in this project so far: An irreverent, satirical take on the Arthurian legend that resolves itself via anarchy? A transgressive, phantasmagorical autobiographical sketch that contains as much razzle-dazzle as it does sober self-actualization? A revisionist Western, an idiosyncratic, kinetic extrapolation of a Herman Melville novel, a near tone-poem sculpted from the textures of an urban environment, even a war-tinged romance turned fantasy pondering the afterlife—all of these have singular narratives presented in equally original ways, even if they occasionally allow one to spot allusions to other works. All That Jazz, for instance, might not have existed without the influence of Fellini’s 8 ½, though most viewers would likely find more differences than similarities between the two; casual ones might not even pick up on them at all.

Through the years, I’ve shifted stances between whether form or content carries more weight in determining a film’s greatness. In film school, after taking a class on Avant Garde cinema and another called “Ways of Seeing”, I edged towards valuing the shape of a film rather than its story (no matter how conventional or nonlinear.) I’d chalk that up to my exposure to many different ways of making a film over a short period of time. When asked by family or friends if I ever thought I’d direct any films of my own, my stock response was usually, “If I do, they’ll be experimental ones”; obviously, I perceived myself as somehow beneath becoming a more conventional filmmaker, not realizing how difficult it is to craft anything on either side of the commercial spectrum (at least in this time before anyone could make a movie with their smartphone.) 

Of course, while studying film, I was exposed to just as wide a variety of narratives as I were stylistic approaches. It’s easy to focus on the plot but also let it dictate how you feel about the imagery, sound, editing, production design, etc. For instance, I was so sickened by some of the content in Darren Aronofsky’s bold, numbing Hubert Selby Jr. adaptation Requiem For A Dream that I couldn’t appreciate its style one whit. In turn, the deliberately unpleasant way it often presented said content (my god, the unflattering lighting!) altered my perception of the material and may have influenced why I had such a negative reaction to it. For better and worse, form and content are equally crucial for a film to register and connect with me—as one should expect of all great art, it constitutes a delicate balance, a confluence of all of its parts coming together to somehow form a satisfying whole.

At one point in this project, I was going to include an entry on The Sweet Hereafter, Atom Egoyan’s 1997 adaptation of a Russell Banks novel about a remote community ravaged by the aftermath of a fatal school bus accident. Seen when it was first released during the holiday break between my first two semesters of film school, it had a substantial impact in how it played with time and perspective, its narrative generally nonlinear, certain information intentionally missing until strategically revealed as if sifting through puzzle pieces and attempting to piece them all together. It was the Toronto-based Egoyan’s seventh feature; I’d end up renting the previous six from various video stores over the next six months.

Sarah Polley in The Sweet Hereafter

Perhaps I’ll will write more about The Sweet Hereafter one day (it’s far from the only title I considered for this project but ultimately passed over); I mention it here because of its central performance from then 18-year-old Sarah Polley, a Canadian child actress who had appeared in such projects as The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, TV series Ramona (based on Beverly Cleary’s beloved children’s novels) and Road to Avonlea and Egoyan’s sixth feature Exotica. Nicole, her character in The Sweet Hereafter, however, was a turning point. With a naturalness and steel-eyed reserve, Polley had undeniable presence—magnetic without coming off as showy, thoughtful but not opaque. As the lone survivor of the crash, she’s thrust into a situation where she holds a rare power. As her backstory comes to light, she mesmerizes in how she wields such power while not letting us forget, heroine or anti-heroine, she’s still just a teenager, flaws and all.

The film raised Polley’s profile considerably outside her home country. Over the next few years she starred in a number of pictures from big Hollywood productions (Go, The Weight of Water, Zack Snyder’s Dawn of The Dead remake) to indieplex staples (Guinevere, David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ) and smaller, more intimate pictures like My Life Without Me and Hal Hartley’s No Such Thing. During this period, Polley began writing and directing her own short films, which led to an impressive feature debut with 2006’s Away From Her, an Alice Munro adaptation that earned its star, Julie Christie an Academy Award nomination. Along with its follow-up Take This Waltz (2011), Polley suggested that her skills as a filmmaker were up there with her acting, approaching material with a tangible point of view and a nuanced understanding of human behavior.

One can apply the same attributes to her third feature and first documentary, 2012’s Stories We Tell. It’s a personal essay film about her family and although accurate, such a simplistic description doesn’t do it justice. At least on the surface, it’s a template for Polley to interview her father, Michael, her older siblings and stepsiblings and an extended network of people who all knew her mother, Diane, who died of cancer in 1990 when Sarah was eleven. She accompanies these interviews with silent home movie footage and Michael (himself an actor) reading his account of the family’s story; in doing so, she explores in-depth the various ways of telling a story, considering multiple points of view, the abundance or absence of found documentation, and how all that information is shaped into a narrative, bearing in mind what’s emphasized and also what’s left out.

Polley commences by asking her subjects variations of the following directive: “Tell me the whole story (of our family) as if I don’t know the whole story.” To pose this instruction is a neutral way of building a story drawing from various perspectives, to see what details reoccur in each person’s version of the story and, more significantly, which ones conflict and contrast with each other. From there, the viewer can piece together a throughline narrative: Diane (also a Toronto-based actor) met Michael in 1965. They married, had kids and both mostly left their chosen professions behind to raise their family. In 1978, craving a return to acting, Diane relocated to Montreal for a few weeks to be in a stage play (called Toronto (!)); not long after her return, she found out she was pregnant with Sarah. After Diane’s early death, child actress Sarah, significantly younger than her siblings would become even closer to her father.

It seems a fairly straightforward trajectory until one hears numerous people talk about how, leading up to her time in Montreal, Diane and Michael had grown apart—she was frustrated with having given up her career to become a housewife and not fully getting the love and attention she needed from him. However, it’s not the whole story. 45 minutes in, the viewer learns that before meeting Michael, Diane was previously married to another man. Two of Sarah’s four siblings are actually step-siblings from that marriage; one of them describes their birth father as “controlling”. Deeply unhappy, Diane leaves him for Michael and as a result, loses custody of her two children.

Michael Polley

In the course of their interviews, multiple siblings and friends of the family remind Sarah that they used to tease her as a child because she didn’t much resemble her father, physically, stoking speculation that Diane might have slept with another man during her time in Montreal. After some detective work as an adult, Sarah discovers her biological father is actually Harry, a filmmaker Diane met while acting in Montreal. A DNA test proves it, enabling Sarah to forge a relationship with Harry while also figuring out how to break the news to the rest of the family, and in particular, Michael. Us knowing that Diane lost custody of her two eldest children also illuminates why she didn’t leave Michael and her two kids with him after meeting, falling for and becoming pregnant by Harry.

In unspooling this ever-more complex trajectory and keeping it afloat, Stories We Tell is a marvel of editing. Often, the film stitches together phrases from numerous interviewees with a swift fluidity where one could almost believe they came about as a mass conversation, like all the subjects were sitting together in the same room. Even if this were the case, however, it would sound more disjointed, like a Robert Altman film where words overlap due to the natural messiness of most conversations. Again, deciding what to include and where to put it is a conscious decision made by Sarah and her editor, Mike Munn. That it doesn’t come off as stilted but remains engrossing is the key to effective storytelling.

Regarding home movie footage of Diane and Michael, much of it is concentrated from their first few years together and the time immediately before and after Sarah’s birth; we also see scenes from Diane’s funeral and the years following it when young Sarah most closely bonded with Michael. They’re meant to accompany the story told by all the narrators and they often correspond neatly with what’s being said. It’s a seemingly excessive amount of footage and all reasonably convincing until, more than three-quarters of the way through, there’s some vintage footage of Diane and Michael where the camera tracks to the left to reveal a modern-day Sarah filming and directing them (as played by actors Rebecca Jenkins and Peter Evans.) At that moment, her voiceover notes, “I’m interested in the way we tell stories about our lives; the past is often ephemeral and hard to pin down.”

This late-in-the game reveal to exactly how Sarah’s been telling the story audaciously transforms the film. Suddenly, we’re encouraged to question whether any of the non-interview footage is real or a reenactment. Sarah’s initial correspondence and meetings with Harry, shot in the same fuzzy, silent, super-8 grain are surely the latter as are the Montreal rehearsal scenes of Toronto or the footage Diane’s funeral (who shoots home movies of those?), about which one sibling reminisces, “It was some kind of production; I felt like I was at a big play.”  The stuff of Michael as a young child or time he spent with Sarah after Diane’s death, however, are more likely the genuine articles. Then again, we now no longer know for sure, and here’s the thing—it doesn’t entirely matter. Even beyond the “home movies”, Sarah infuses the film with deliberate artifice, whether it’s still shots and scenes of her acting (in caveperson garb!) in the film Mr. Nobody at the time of her first contact with Harry, or footage from the 1964 Sophia Loren film Marriage, Italian Style whose plot about questionable paternity provides an analogue to this film’s narrative or, most notably, all the scenes of Sarah directing her father in a studio as he records his own written narration/side of the story (multiple times we see her ask him, “Dad, could you go back over that one line?”, looking for the best “take” of his performance.) As Michael notes earlier in the film, “It’s all done with mirrors, mate,” a seemingly tossed-off comment suddenly more resonant after the reveal.

Rebecca Jenkins as “Diane” (or is it?)

Stories We Tell is the third film in this project that blurs fiction and non-fiction to a fine point. The other two, Close-Up and My Winnipeg arguably do so as narrative films exceedingly resembling documentaries to different ends: the former is a feature-length recreation of real-life events, while the latter is ostensibly a documentary suffused with fantastical elements to the point where the “My” in its title is crucial to understanding its idiosyncratic approach. Polley’s film is more explicitly a documentary in that it relays events that all purportedly happened, even if its subjects have varying accounts of such (for instance, Harry remembers attending Diane’s funeral, but Michael is nearly adamant that his wife’s lover was not there.) It’s no docu-fantasia such as My Winnipeg, but it does feature a slew of recreations that, like the events of Close-Up are presented as apparently factual (if in the end, unprovable.)

Films muddling this real/fake line fascinate me. After all, how can art connect if it doesn’t draw from some semblance of real-life experience? In my master’s thesis on Derek Jarman, I concluded that his art’s greatness depended on its inseparableness from his own life; such ambiguity has provided fodder for many films, from the deliberate, recontexualized performances in The Act of Killing and the more subtle, intentionally convincing ones of Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets to a prankster delving deep into the meta-ness of constructing what may (or may not) be one resounding prank in the guise of an entire documentary in Banksy’s Exit Through The Gift Shop. Reenactments often get a bad rap for their failure to convince or the level of artifice their mere presence suggests. Still, are they less pure than any other decisions Polley makes in telling this story? What’s left out or kept in or de-emphasized or brought to the fore can be just as calculating and indicative, documentary or not.

Midway through the film, Sarah recalls an argument with Harry where he wanted to write his own version of this story but she did not want him to publish it, hoping to give “equal weight to everyone’s version” (a lodestar for many documentarians.) Harry counters this by saying, “The crucial function of art is… to find out the truth of a situation.” Despite the facetiousness inherently unavoidable in any documentary (no matter how intentionally applied, like the “home movies”), to Sarah’s credit, Stories We Tell arrives at an unerring truth about the situation—one of its main participants, the long-deceased Diane, is unable to tell her version of this story. After Harry notes this, a montage follows of nearly all of the film’s interviewees one by one, each person silent, their faces consumed with grief, presumably thinking of Diane as a wistful, melancholic folk-pop song plays on the soundtrack. It’s deeply affecting for it reminds us not what the story is or necessarily how it was relayed, but why it was told.

Stories We Tell would end up Sarah’s last film for a decade as she struggled with a brain injury, eloquently outlined in her 2022 memoir Run Towards The Danger. She’d recuperate and make a triumphant return that year with Women Talking, an adaptation of a Miriam Toews novel that won her an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. It retains some of the thoughtfulness and innovation of her past work; hopefully, its success will enable Sarah to continuing making exactly the projects she wants to; preferably, they will look back to her third feature for a sense of inspiration and purpose.

Essay #20 of 24 Frames

Go back to #19: A Matter of Life and Death.

24 Frames: A Matter of Life and Death

Chris KriofskeLeave a comment

Since finishing my Film Studies graduate degree, I’ve tried to keep up with current cinema, averaging about 100 brand new movies seen each year. I’ve cultivated spreadsheets of upcoming release dates, attended film festivals both local and international and in the past decade, habituated myself to what’s available for streaming on various platforms from The Criterion Channel to Kanopy. When I prepare annual lists of my favorite films of each year, I feel I’ve seen enough to do so with a particular authority and thorough knowledge (even if it’s impossible to see everything that comes out.)

Keeping current, however, does not mean I shy away from seeking out older titles I haven’t seen before. When I began studying film in my early 20s, what struck me most about the medium was that for being a relatively young one, the sheer volume of great, important movies to see was remarkably vast. Books, reviews, articles and recommendations from friends frequently revealed another title to add to my watchlist; when I discovered a new old film that I loved, I often wanted to see other work from its director or actors or even in some cases its screenwriter or cinematographer. Upon its 1996 release, Fargo made an immediate impact— over the next few years, I felt moved to consume everything else Joel and Ethan Coen made including past titles I’d missed (Blood Simple, Barton Fink) while keeping up with their subsequent work. I recall seeing the trailer for The Big Lebowski a few months ahead of that film’s release and thinking, a bit dumbfounded, “Well, it appears to be about bowling.”

Settling into a lengthy tenure working for a movie theater, I’d stay and watch the occasional repertory screening of something I hadn’t seen before. For instance, Billy Wilder’s The Apartment, the VHS of which I turned off after twenty minutes at home years earlier. Now, it either proved revelatory on a big screen, or perhaps I was just at a better age to grasp its unique blend of melodrama and dark humor. Likewise, I loved revisiting titles previously seen at home on the big screen, from A Thousand Clowns (with Click and Clack, the Car Talk guys introducing one of their favorite films in person!) to a front-row nosebleed seat to take in Persona at a much larger and more frightening scale than ever before (star Liv Ullman was present for that one, too.) With such an awesome resource (alongside a few other Boston-area cinemas with dazzling repertory offerings), I was watching less films at home (which would change radically during the pandemic, but that’s for a later entry.)

Reviewing a record of my movie viewing for 2009, my trusty spreadsheet reveals I watched 146 films that year including three titles seen twice (500 Days of Summer, Precious and Still Walking.) 84 were cinema screenings (all but seven of them brand new films); 32 of the remaining 62 watched at home were also relatively new titles (from XXY to Scott Walker: 30th Century Man) with twelve rewatches and eighteen older films seen for the first time. (Incidentally, I also saw Michael Clayton around this time but recently determined that I failed to record exactly when, so maybe these numbers aren’t entirely exact.) This list of older titles is unquestionably eclectic: Samuel Fuller’s art/exploitation hybrid White Dog; Chris Marker’s three-hour dissection of Marxism, A Grin Without a Cat; two unconventional comedies from the late 80s (Whitnail and I, Bagdad Café). There are efforts to fill in gaps by some of my favorite directors (Robert Altman’s Buffalo Bill and The Indians, Michelangelo Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point), a documentary about another beloved auteur (Waiting For Twilight: Guy Maddin), a pair of Douglas Sirk melodramas (Magnificent Obsession, Imitation of Life) and random stuff like, um, Troll 2 (more entertaining than The Room, also seen for the first time that year.)

Also on this list are another pair of films from the British team of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. Powell generally directed while Pressburger mostly wrote the screenplays but they always insisted on a dual directorial credit (similar to Joel and Ethan Coen, come to think of it.) Also referred to as “The Archers” (their production company), Powell and Pressburger and their nineteen features together were generally forgotten by the public at large decades after their 1940s heyday. Not by Martin Scorsese, however, who cited them as a major influence and fervently worked to rehabilitate their reputations and restore their work once he himself became a renowned filmmaker in the 1970s. Thelma Schoonmaker, Scorsese’s longtime editor, even married Powell in 1984; they stayed together until his death in 1990 at age 84.

I don’t believe I saw anything by the Archers in film school; I was likely first aware of them when, gathering research for my master’s thesis on Derek Jarman, I saw that the writer Michael O’Pray cited Powell and Pressburger as primary influences on Jarman’s work (along with more obvious antecedents such as Kenneth Anger and Ken Russell.) I may have first watched The Red Shoes around this time, probably the most seen and discussed of their works among cineastes and classic film lovers. A Technicolor take on the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale of the same name, it’s both the Archers’ biggest hit and innovative for how it incorporates a lengthy, impressionistic ballet sequence in the middle of its 134-minute running time, a clear influence on what Best Picture Academy Award Winner An American In Paris would attempt (albeit at that film’s end) three years later.

The Red Shoes

I appreciated The Red Shoes but did not rush out to consume the rest of the Archers’ oeuvre. A few years on, I caught Black Narcissus, a gloriously deranged picture about repressed nuns in the Himalayas that culminates in a shocking-for-its-era depiction of raw female desire when a troubled sister defrocks and removes her makeup. Later came I Know Where I’m Going!, set on a remote, otherworldly Scottish isle, its black-and-white cinematography and heavily-layered fog rather hallucinatory for what was essentially a screwball comedy rather than any sort of dreamlike fantasy. Thanks to Criterion Collection reissues, these films became much easier to see. In early 2009, I watched A Canterbury Tale, a work from the Archers’ peak period but also one of their odder efforts. Set in contemporary (i.e. World War II-era) Britain, it’s structured around an American soldier (played somewhat awkwardly by actual American solider, Sgt. John Sweet.) Less romantic and starker than the other Archers films I’d seen, it seemed an anomaly in their catalogue (albeit one I mean to revisit.)

Much later that same year, I saw A Matter of Life and Death. Arriving between I Know Where I’m Going! and Black Narcissus, it would initially seem to have more in common with A Canterbury Tale given its setting: on May 2, 1945, less than a week before Germany’s surrender of World War II (filming took place a mere six months later), Peter Carter (David Niven), a Royal Air Force pilot, is shot down over the English channel while on a bombing raid. He jumps from the burning aircraft, but his parachute malfunctions; he should be dead and when he wakes up near the shore, he assumes this is the afterlife. However, he is very much still alive, for Conductor 71 (Marius Goring), a guide in guise of an 18thCentury French dandy sent to escort him to what the film refers to as the “Other World”, misses him in the fog. In no time, Peter runs into June (Kim Hunter), a US Air Force radio operator whom he initially communicated with from his plane after it was hit. They immediately fall in love (this is the movies, after all), which creates a problem for Conductor 71 who is tasked to rectify his mistake and bring Peter to his rightful place for “it was his time”. Peter refuses to abide, matter-of-factly telling the guide, “I’ve fallen in love because of your mistake.”

David Niven as Peter

It’s not that simple, of course. Through the observation of June’s friend Dr. Frank Reeves (Roger Livesey, an Archers regular), we learn that Peter is likely experiencing hallucinations and that his fall may have caused some brain damage. Whenever Conductor 71 visits him, time and space seem to suddenly stop. For instance, while convalescing at Dr Reeves’ home, Peter calls out for help when this occurs, but June and Dr. Reeves, playing ping pong in an adjacent room, can’t hear him—they’re perfectly still, the ball in mid-bounce over the table between them. As the hallucinations become more frequent, is it determined only brain surgery can help Peter live fully in the Real World; for him, however, this plays out as a court trial in the Other World where he must make a sound case to a jury to go on living because he’s found true love. His defense lawyer ends up being good old Dr. Reeves, who is suddenly killed in the motorcycle accident and finds himself in the Other World (or at least Peter’s hallucination.)

The contrast between the two worlds is the film’s most striking construct. Set up as sort of a reverse The Wizard of Oz, the Real World scenes are in eye-popping Technicolor while the Other World is shot in black-and-white. It was the first of three consecutive Archers films to be helmed by cinematographer Jack Cardiff; he’d win an Oscar for Black Narcissus the following year and go on to film The African Queen and The Barefoot Contessa, among others. The Real World is as scintillating and rich-hued as any film of the period, often highlighting fiery reds, feather-soft pinks and infinite blues along with dramatic close-up shots and ornately-detailed frames (Dr. Reeves’ home gives off a convincing illusion of an actual, lived-in space rather than a set.) The Other World draws more heavily on abstraction and German Expressionism: cathedral-sized sets (the court sort of resembles the Roman Coliseum), severely tilted angles and fantasy set pieces such as the ginormous escalator serving as a conduit between the two realms (in America, the film was originally released with the title Stairway to Heaven.) Although each world is clearly delineated from the other, they still give off the impression of existing simultaneously (hallucination or not)—one motif occurring in both realms is the appearance of oval-like shapes: giant, ceiling spheres peering into a seemingly endless Department of Records in the Other World are later recalled by Dr. Reeves’ unusual, mirrored telescope, its oval-shaped lens gifting him a view of his entire village in the Real World (along with the near-oval of the mirror above an operating table later in the film.)

The Real World

Although occasionally rendered via a simple cut, transitions between the two realms are often slow dissolves. They effectively personify the off-kilter, damaged mind state Peter experiences—at one point, while moving from the Other World back into the real one, the color literally returns to his face via a gradual dissolve. While succumbing to anesthesia for his surgery not long after, his eyes slowly close and the camera pans down (rather than up!) to the Other World. From there, the surrealness of his situation is made more explicit. During surgery, he has a literal out-of-body experience, his persona splitting in two as one version of him sits up awake in his own body, the other version of which lies still in freeze-frame courtesy of a visit from Conductor 71 and the now-deceased Dr. Reeves, rendered with a playfulness Bob Fosse would later reference in All That Jazz.

For all of its technical spectacle and far-seeking invention, however, A Matter Of Life and Death is, like most of the Archers films, a fable full of substance and heart. As much a good old-fashioned romance as it is a fantasy, its ambitions never obscure the humanism continually evident at the picture’s core. Sure, Peter and June meet over a mayday call (one of the more dramatic of circumstances) but it still comes off as a meet-cute (“I’ll be a ghost and come and see you,” he drolly tells her amidst the flaming wreckage), further confirmed upon their unexpected, near-magical reunion on the ground. When Conductor 71 first materializes in the Real World, he notes, referring to where he has come from, “One is starved for Technicolor up there”; he also picks a pink rose which later becomes an item meant to prove Peter’s love for June (via his tears of joy for her collected on the flower) in his trial. Speaking of which, that whole sequence dominates the film’s third act. It may be a huge set piece with a cast of seemingly thousands of the deceased (from presumably every nation and culture in the Real World) and shot as if it were a heightened version of the political rally from Citizen Kane but it’s also laced with an approachable, knowing humor—when the prosecutor, Abraham Farlan (Raymond Massey), an American alive during the Revolutionary War biased against all Brits argues that his culture is more worth preserving and celebrating than Peter’s, Reeves plays a recording that approximates a then-contemporary American swing tune with mostly nonsense lyrics (to which Farlan scoffs, “I don’t understand a word!”)

The Other World – Peter’s trial

The film concludes with the two worlds finally, briefly converging (if only in Peter’s head.) Key members of the trial have literally descended into the Real World via the giant staircase, arriving at Peter on the operating table (who again wakes up as time and space stops.) The tears on the flower are not enough concrete proof for the judge and prosecution. They ask Peter if he would die for June. He says he would, though he’d rather live a life with her. They then call June to the witness stand, awakening her from a Conductor 71-assisted slumber. Dr Reeves asks June if she would take Peter’s place in the Other World to prove her love for him. She would, and as she steps onto the stairway as it begins to move away from the Real World, that clinches it—proof not only that Peter is in love but also loved in return. He’s allowed to live on in the Real World with June; the film ends with him awakening from surgery in his hospital bed to the sight of June’s smiling face. “We won,” he says; “I know, darling,” she responds. It’s a sentimental ending, for sure, but as usual for the Archers, it’s an earned one, with Peter’s words particularly affecting coming just one year after the end of a Real World War.

Although products of a time long past, the Archers’ work endures because their narratives, while often highly fantastical were always built on solid emotional foundations. Powell and Pressburger may have viewed the world a little differently than their homegrown colleagues or Hollywood counterparts, but they usually sought to say something concrete and resonant about the human condition. So much of today’s studio filmmaking values technical innovation over anything relatable from our own Real World. Whenever I watch a film for the first time, I keep in mind how it makes me feel, which can come from its cinematography, special effects, musical score, the brilliance of a performance, etc. In the best films, however, there’s also a deeper connection, one that not only changes our literal view of the world but also our perception of it. A Matter of Life and Death accomplishes this by recognizing the act of love as the driving force its title refers to; what better reason does one need to live?

Essay #19 of 24 Frames

Go back to #18: My Winnipeg

24 Frames: My Winnipeg

Chris Kriofske4 Comments

“Write what you know” is the most basic and profound advice I’ve received as a would-be author. For some, it’s essentially a jumping-off point, an ability to create entirely fictional worlds still informed and inspired by one’s own sensibility and lived experience. For others, the implication is less abstract—an invitation to write directly about yourself and what you’ve experienced without the pretense of hiding behind a pseudonym or a composite. As evidenced by this project and my blog’s pull towards critical writing and memoir, I tend to fall into the latter camp. Nonfiction has just come easier to me even as I’m often influenced by novels as much as autobiographies and books about film and music (among other arts.)

A preference for fiction or nonfiction can also apply to filmmaking. A director may choose to create new worlds aided by an original (or sometimes adapted) screenplay or relay a true story via a documentary or essay film. Some possess the talent or at least the interest and appetite to do both: Jonathan Demme following his iconic Talking Heads concert film Stop Making Sense with the near live-action cartoon fantasy of Something Wild, or Werner Herzog mostly pivoting to documentary in his later career while still making time for the occasional fiction feature such as Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans or Rescue Dawn (the latter a fiction remake of his own doc, Little Dieter Needs To Fly.) As regarding anything offering a binary as recognizable as fiction vs nonfiction, one doesn’t necessarily have to choose sides.

Where this becomes tricky and often more fascinating occurs when one blurs the line between these two approaches. Abbas Kiarostami’s Close-Up, for instance, recounts a true-life story by enabling its participants to reenact the events. The end result was by no means a documentary—technically, it was a work of fiction, for a viewer simply couldn’t know if the film’s events all actually happened, whether Kiarostami says they did or not. Some actual documentaries such as Man On Wire and The Act of Killing take a near-opposite approach by including explicit reenactments that are not fully meant to stand in for the real thing; the latter’s assemblage of former members of Indonesian death squads are asked to recreate their genocidal 1960s murders of the country’s communist citizens as if they were scenes in a movie. Also consider mockumentaries like This Is Spinal Tap, which clearly read as fiction… except to those who don’t know that they are and get swept up in their convincing, deadpan approach.

Guy Maddin is not what one would deem a documentarian in the traditional sense. Nearly all of his output is explicitly fantasy—even his works one could describe most as “realistic” and traditionally narrative-driven such as Keyhole (2011) or The Saddest Music In The World (2004) are not too far off from fever dreams (the latter features Isabella Rossellini as a beer baroness whose prosthetic leg is literally a glass boot full of her product!) Emerging from the ultra-indie Winnipeg film scene with his 1988 debut feature Tales From the Gimli Hospital, he had his peculiar, specific style already in place. Heavily influenced by silent film aesthetics (black-and-white cinematography, intertitles, archaic techniques such as iris-in, iris-out transitions between scenes), Gimli would appear to be a silent cinema pastiche except that there is sound (some occasional dialogue, even!) and an overarching surrealist sensibility that, while not at all modern, is something one would rarely mistake for being just from the silent era—contrarily, it’s more out of time and very much its own thing.

Maddin made three more features and a smattering of shorts over the next decade, but I did not even hear of him until 1998. He was in Boston for a career-to-date retrospective at the Museum of Fine Arts and visited my Avant-Garde Cinema class at Boston University for a Q&A after a screening of Careful (1992), his first color feature and most dialogue-heavy effort to date. Naturally, it was shot in two-strip technicolor (limiting the palette to two hues (and an occasional smidge of yellow) at all times) and the stilted dialogue had been translated from English to Icelandic and back to English again. In the classroom, Maddin came off as an affable (if somewhat bewildered) Canadian, just as my classmates and I festooned him with questions about his bewildering film. The premise? An isolated town that’s continually threatened by avalanches triggered by either loud noises or outwardly expressed emotions!

Careful

Like much of what I saw in that class, I didn’t fully know what to make of Careful, though it was unique without being obscure or off-putting; I duly rented the rest of Maddin’s features from my local VideoSmith. Two years later, his produced-for-TIFF short The Heart of The World won ample acclaim including the Genie Award (Canadian Oscars-equivalent) for Best Live Action Short Film plus accolades at film festivals from San Francisco to Brussels. Relaying a love triangle/end times/cinema-as-savior chronicle in the style of early 20th Century art movement Russian Constructivism (a precursor to Dziga Vertov’s Man With A Movie Camera and the films of Sergei Eisenstein), the short’s exhilarating, rapid-fire editing encompasses a dizzying amount of plot in just six minutes.

From there, Maddin was on a roll. With Dracula: Pages From A Virgin’s Diary (2002) he transformed a filmed ballet adaptation of Bram Stoker’s iconic novel into an experimental tone poem in his phantasmagorical style, while the aforementioned The Saddest Music In The World, featuring such marquee names as Rossellini and Mark McKinney not only received widespread acclaim but became something of an indie “hit”. These features were interspersed with a slew of shorts ranging from My Dad Is 100 Years Old (made with Rossellini about her famous filmmaker father Roberto) to Sissy Boy Slap Party (everything the title says it is and somehow more.) Cowards Bend The Knee (2005) and Brand Upon The Brain! (2006) kept the momentum going while also finding Maddin, perhaps influenced by his short with Rossellini turning inward and ostensibly autobiographical: both films had characters named after himself and took inspiration from his own memories (no matter how distorted.)

My Winnipeg felt like a natural progression from those self-referential works. Commissioned by the Documentary Channel (a now-defunct cable network), Maddin was given one directive for the project from his producer: “Don’t give me the frozen hellhole everyone knows that Winnipeg is.” Maddin gleefully obliged, crafting an unusual hybrid of an essay film that he described as a “docu-fantasia”. Filmed almost entirely in black-and-white, the final product is a mélange of archival footage, re-creations and new material shot to appear like it’s from the past (or some unspecified limbo) continually shepherded by Maddin’s voiceover narration. In other words, he made a Maddin film—a bittersweet love letter to his hometown like past cine-essayists such as Chris Marker or Agnes Varda might’ve conceived but full of potential tall tales and a liberal dose of magical realism. Did “Man Pageants” actually occur at the Paddlewheel Room in The Bay department store? Did “If Day”—a World War II-era demonstration involving a simulated Nazi invasion of the city (covertly serving as a cover to buy Canadian war bonds) really happen? “What if, what if…” ponders Maddin’s narration as a reoccurring refrain throughout; like Kiarostami in Close-Up, he leaves it to the viewer to decide what to believe and/or dismiss.

Brand Upon The Brain! implemented voiceover narration from Rossellini in its theatrical release, though alternate audio tracks featured other narrators, among them oddballs like Crispin Glover, Laurie Anderson, Eli Wallach, Louis Negin (a member of Maddin’s stock players who appears in My Winnipeg as Mayor Cornish) and Maddin himself. For this immediate follow-up, however, Maddin was pretty much the only narrator (even if some screenings purportedly substituted him with live readings from British “Scream Queen” Barbara Steele and the inimitable cult legend Udo Kier(!)) I was lucky to first see the film at one of its premiere screenings at TIFF in 2007 with Maddin himself narrating live on stage at the Winter Garden Theatre. While not as distinct a vocal performer as Rossellini or Glover, it only seemed right to hear these intensely personal words spoken by the man who wrote them, no matter how much “truth” they contained.

Guy/Darcy

“Guy Maddin” also appears onscreen in the guise of actor Darcy Fehr (who played another version of the director in Cowards Bend The Knee.) In the world of My Winnipeg, as a throughline narrative, a drowsy Guy/Darcy, slumped in this seat on a moving train looks to escape his hometown (“What if I film my way out of here?,” asks Maddin’s narrator at one point.) The city as blurred imagery through the train windows emerges as a dreamscape of memories that do not fully coalesce; the whole thing is made further bizarre by a few sausages inexplicably hanging from the train car’s ceiling on strings, gently bobbing back and forth over Guy’s/Darcy’s head. Maddin’s fragmented phrasing provides unsentimental but near-lyrical reverie acknowledging “The Forks (of intersecting rivers)… The Lap (of the land)… The Heart of the Heart of the Continent” that establish geographically-centrally-located-but-still-isolated Manitoba capital Winnipeg, a place where it’s “Always winter, always sleepy.”

Whereas some other filmmakers might confine themselves to Winnipeg lore and landmarks constituting a shared experience (The 1919 General Strike, Happyland amusement park, the saga of the doomed effort to save the Wolseley Elm), for Maddin, his own personal experience is inextricable from the whole (hence the declarative “My” in the film’s title.) Not only does he delve deep into places and events that had a formative effect on his psyche (such as the three-story Sherbrook Pool, one public pool stacked upon another and another with the bottom, subterranean level restricted to boys), he goes so far as to sublet his childhood home, a “white block house” connected to what was once his Aunt Lil’s beauty parlor. As part of a drive to “properly recreate the archetypal episodes” of his family history, he casts actors to portray his three older siblings, circa-1963 (when he would’ve been seven years old); his father is excluded, but not Mother.

For her, Maddin travels further down the rabbit hole in clouding the real with the imagined. The Mother we see on screen is to all intents and purposes for Maddin his mother. However, she’s actually octogenarian Ann Savage, an actress best known for portraying arguably the most frightening film femme fatale of all time in Edgar G. Ulmer’s 1945 poverty row classic Detour. Maddin actually gives the game away at the onset: My Winnipeg opens with footage of an off-camera Maddin directing Savage as she rehearses some dialogue. That he drops the pretense of filming his actual mother vs. casting a professional actress to play her sets an expectation that what follows is a fusion of facts and legends. It’s in line with Maddin’s long-running tendency to present modern day films as if they were remnants from the past or for that matter, casting other people to play versions of himself and his siblings (though he notes of the latter, they do “bear uncanny resemblances to the originals.”)

Ann Savage in Maddin’s homage to Ed Wood.

In Maddin’s accompanying book of the film, he says of Savage, “I knew there was only one person alive, who had ever lived, who could play the role of my mother.” He was fortunate to get her, as she’d retired from acting in the 1950s. The idea of casting the terrifying succubus from Detour as your mom is a twisted, brilliant joke viewers familiar with that film will immediately get, but Maddin doesn’t relegate her to a punchline. In one of the film’s more outrageous and entertaining fabrications, we do see how Mother made a living starring in Ledgeman, “the only TV drama ever produced in Winnipeg,” on the air since 1956 (Maddin’s birth year.) Every day at noon, viewers could watch Mother talking her son out of threatening to jump off a window ledge he had just climbed out on, driven by some sensitive fear or malady (usually instigated by Mother, naturally.) It neatly sums up a perceived dynamic between Maddin and his mother as depicted by an actress playing a mother who is also an actress.

However, the set piece that places Savage’s performance in nearly the same league as her Detour work arrives later with the scene she rehearsed at the beginning—a re-creation of the time after Maddin’s older sister Janet hit a deer on the highway coming back from a trip. As Janet confesses her accident to Mother, the old woman is not buying any of it. She suspects her daughter’s tardiness was due to something more sinister, more sexual. To watch Savage-as-Mother snarl accusations at Janet (“Where did it happen? In the back seat?… Did he pin you down, or did you just lie back and let nature take its course?”) is to see her young, dangerous Detour spirit flicker back to life. No matter how outrageous the exchange may seem, one immediately detects why Maddin cast Savage for the part and how her spitfire and dominance vividly embody his own idea of his mother (if not how the actual person might’ve appeared to us strangers.)

Citizen Girl!

As with many essay films about one’s own past, My Winnipeg is a pining for the way things used to be and what’s been lost. Nostalgia is perhaps unavoidable in such explorations, even if the ambiguity with which Maddin presents what’s real and what’s fabricated is a tonic revealing how layered and complex such thoughts can be. He spends the whole of the film thinking about release and moving on, but he has good reasons as to why he continues to live and work in Winnipeg to this day. One is a modicum of hopefulness, even if it means conjuring up a figure called “Citizen Girl”, a bold, beautiful warrior who with the touch of her wand could triumphantly restore the city to its former glory (including turning on the neon sign at Clifford’s, a defunct ladies’ apparel store that is a well-beloved piece of iconicity for certain generations of Winnipeggers.)

Still, one senses Maddin knows such conceits are just wishful thinking. Some things can never come back, like his teenaged brother Cameron whom we’re told died of some undisclosed cause not long after the period re-created with Savage. My Winnipeg ends rather wistfully with Savage and the actor playing Cameron in a surprisingly intimate, tender mother/son embrace. “What is a city without its ghosts?” Maddin’s narration asks and it’s the film’s central thesis. It lends weight to what simply could have been a kooky look at a quirky childhood. Indeed, the fluidity of ghosts and shifting, occasionally unreliable memories in this “docu-fantasia” hybrid seem to contain (as Maddin notes Sherlock Holmes creator Sir Arthur Conan Doyle once said of Winnipeg) the “greatest psychic possibilities.”

Essay #18 of 24 Frames

Go back to #17: C.R.A.Z.Y.

Go ahead to #19: A Matter of Life and Death

24 Frames: C.R.A.Z.Y.

Chris KriofskeLeave a comment

Film festivals are worlds unto themselves. Whether a weekend’s worth of programming at a local cinema or a multi-venue, week(s)-long event in another state or country, they vary substantially in size and commitment. Given time and proximity, anyone can attend a single screening at, say, the New York Film Festival but it takes a particularly devoted cineaste to spend a week-plus at Sundance or Cannes. In addition to transportation and lodging, one’s left with a spectrum of choices: If a festival’s offering 100+ titles to peruse, which ones do you see, and how many each day? Are you there entirely to watch movies or do you make time for other activities? When (and what) do you eat if you’re attending films from morning until Midnight? How will you adjust to this curious, particular mode of being often dubbed “film festival brain”?

I didn’t have a good reason or the funds to attend an out-of-town film festival until, for a few unseasonably wintry days in early November 2003, I ended up at one in Rochester, New York with a few friends from my film group Chlotrudis. The High Falls Film Festival honored and mostly focused on female directors and screenwriters. We made the six-hour trek west of Boston because one of our members lived there. This was in the days before I kept meticulous records of my viewing activity, but I probably saw seven or eight films at High Falls including the Isabel Coixet-directed, Sarah Polley-starring My Life Without Me, a limpid adaptation of the novel Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, the Pilobolus/Maurice Sendak documentary Last Dance and, on closing night, a preview screening of Robert Altman’s penultimate film The Company (at the time, a letdown following Gosford Park though in retrospect, weird and gutsy enough that I keep meaning to revisit it.)

Apart from adhering to a schedule and standing in waitlist lines, High Falls felt a somewhat atypical film festival in retrospect, with lots of downtime to do all the other things a metropolis as grand as Rochester had to offer (well, at least we toured the George Eastman Museum and its film archive.) I’d come closer to experiencing “film festival brain” the following year by attending the Provincetown International Film Festival and volunteering for the Independent Film Festival of Boston. The former, concentrated in the titular coastal resort town provided the desirable closeness between hotel and cinema venues that enhances a festival while the latter lent insight regarding how much of a multi-plate-spinning, three-ring circus such an operation can be.

By 2005, I was ready to tackle the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF for short.) One of the largest and buzziest film fests in the world, TIFF usually runs for eleven days starting on the Thursday after Labor Day. It hosts many North American premieres (at least those not earmarked for Telluride or New York) as well as some world premieres. After bowing at TIFF, the likes of Silver Linings Playbook, If Beale Street Could Talk and The Fabelmans have all instantly become serious awards contenders. Though often feted for its big-ticket gala premieres, TIFF has such a breadth of programming that there’s always something for everyone, whether it’s world cinema by directors as renowned as Werner Herzog or as obscure as Pen-Ek Ratanarung, four-hour-long Frederick Wiseman documentaries and experimental, far-under-the-radar shorts, midnight movies and independent Canadian cinema that rarely makes its way south of the border.

McCaul Street, Toronto, 2005.

My first TIFF (also my first visit to Canada) was a whirlwind of sixteen films over five days and nights. Once again, I was lucky to attend with my Chlotrudis friends, some of whom were TIFF veterans by that point. Without them, navigating the fest, which then sprawled from the prestigious venues along King Street West all the way up to Bloor and over to the University of Toronto might’ve overwhelmed a newbie like me (presently, the festival is concentrated in a six-block radius near the Bell Lightbox cinema.) Actually, my own experience was still perilously close to a sensory overload, particularly concerning ticket buying. With many screenings sold out well in advance, we’d awaken near the crack of dawn every day to wait in line at the Manulife Centre lobby to see what tickets had been released for that day’s showtimes. I often didn’t know what I’d be seeing in advance and had to make snap decisions based on this same-day availability.

For me, TIFF 2005 began uncommonly strong with Wang Xiaoshuai’s coming-of-age Cannes Jury Prize winner Shanghai Dreams (which would never receive North American distribution) and ended with Terry Gilliam’s woefully bizarre Tideland. In between, some of my most-anticipated titles were disappointments: AIDS triptych 3 Needles from The Hanging Garden director Thom Fitzgerald and The Quiet, Jamie Babbit’s leaden follow-up to But I’m A Cheerleader. Other buzzed-about films such as The Squid and The Whale, Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Three Times and the documentary The Devil and Daniel Johnston fared better. Still, the act of seeing something in a full theater for the first time often enhanced the whole experience more than viewing it at a local cinema (or worse, at home) ever could. I’ll never forget watching Michael Haneke’s Cache at a sold-out 2000+ seat Elgin Theatre and loudly gasping along with everyone else at one particularly shocking moment; I walked down Yonge Street with the two friends I’d seen it with afterwards, all three of us baffled and left near-speechless by its cryptic ending.

Earlier, I mentioned that TIFF is an ideal place to discover Canadian indie films since a good portion of them never get a theatrical release (or more likely these days, streaming distribution) in the US. In 2005, at least one-third of what I watched was Canadian content (i.e. “CanCon”.) Unless you’re a Canadaphile, it’s likely you haven’t seen the delightful Eve and The Fire Horse (a Sundance Special Jury Prize winner!), the aforementioned 3 Needles or the tedious thriller Lucid, not to mention Whole New Thing (a quirky queer Rushmore), These Girls (a trifle starring David Boreanaz and Caroline Dhavernas (Wonderfalls forever!)) or the Douglas Coupland doc Souvenir of Canada (probably as CanCon as it gets.)

You likely haven’t seen C.R.A.Z.Y. either, even though its director, Jean-Marc Vallée, would go on to make Dallas Buyer’s Club, Wild and the HBO miniseries Big Little Lies and Sharp Objects. When I arrived at the festival, the curiously-titled film wasn’t on my radar at all as I was neither familiar with the Quebecois director nor the cast; collective buzz (one of my friends might’ve attended an earlier screening) and intriguing subject matter (gay coming-of-age in 1970s suburban Montreal) eventually netted my attention. On the morning of my second-last day in Toronto, I purchased a ticket for it at the now long-gone Cumberland 4. I walked out of the screening thoroughly entertained and also transformed—I declared it my favorite film of the fest (with Cache in second place and, to be seen later that day, The Squid and The Whale in third.)

The Beaulieu Family, 1967

C.R.A.Z.Y. is about Zac Beaulieu, the fourth child of a middle-class family of five boys. Opening with his birth on Christmas, 1960, the film spans the first twenty-odd years of his life, often jumping ahead in time to arrive at another birthday (and by default, Christmas.) Accidentally dropped on his head as a newborn, Zac is believed by his devout Catholic mother Laurianne (Danielle Proulx) to not be only “special” but also “gifted” an ability to heal the sick and afflicted with his mind. This is dubiously confirmed by the middle-aged psychic she takes him to at age six who is only referred to as “Mrs. What’s-Her-Name” (“The good Lord gave it to him!,” she declares.) At that age, Zac idolizes his dad, Gervais (Michel Côté), a masculine, blue collar semi-hipster who takes him out for french fries, blows smoke rings, listens to Patsy Cline (whose signature tune “Crazy” appears throughout) and sings karaoke along with Charles Azvanour’s “Emmenez-moi” at every family gathering. Cool Dad Gervais also obviously sees Zac as his favorite compared to his older brothers Antoine (a jock), Christian (an egghead) and Raymond (a hoodlum.)

The only problem? Zac is perceived as “different” by all the men in his family. His father gives him a table-top hockey game for his birthday/Christmas but what he really desires is a baby stroller he can use to push dolls around in. After Zac’s caught attending to baby brother Yvan in his mom’s housecoat and pearls, Gervais shouts at Laurianne, “What in heaven’s name did you do to him?” When the film jumps ahead to Christmas 1975, teenaged Zac’s (played by Marc-André Grondin from here on) bedroom is now decked out in Pink Floyd and David Bowie insignia. He intensely, loudly sings along to “Space Oddity” in his room, only to attract a crowd of snickering onlookers outside his window. At the annual extended family Christmas gathering, his cousin Brigitte brings along her handsome boyfriend Paul who catches Zac’s eye as the couple tears up the dancefloor to a Pérez Prado mambo. After the three toke up together in Paul’s car, at Paul’s insistence, the two boys share a “shotgun”—Paul puts the lit joint his mouth backwards and blow’s smoke into Zac’s. The next time we see Zac, his formerly longish hair is restyled and glammed up exactly like Paul’s.

Like many teens of his era (and beyond), Zac’s emerging awareness of his homosexuality is a gradual, gestating process rather than a sudden epiphany. In bed at night, he prays to himself, “Please, anything but that,” not even able to name what “that” is. He tries dating his friend Michelle while rejecting the advances of and then beating up Toto, a male classmate somewhat further along in decoding his own sexuality whom is bullied and regarded by Zac’s peers as a “weirdo”. Later, after Gervais witnesses him and Toto suspiciously exiting a car together, he gets sent to see a therapist. Whenever Zac takes a step forward, he ends up two steps back, telling the therapist, “I’m not a faggot” or abruptly leaving a record store when he sees Paul nonchalantly browsing the bins a few feet away. Even when the film jumps ahead to Zac’s 20th birthday, he’s still half-heartedly dating Michelle while shot-gunning another joint in the car with cousin Brigitte’s latest flame at Christian’s wedding reception.

Christmas, 1975.

Given his conservative, suburban and religious environment, it’s no wonder Zac struggles with this; as a gay man raised Catholic, I found it all too relatable despite being some 15 years younger and from the Upper Midwest instead of Montreal. In popular culture and general perception, Catholicism is synonymous with the concept of guilt, with all the atoning for one’s own sins, impure thoughts and so on. As an adult long since lapsed, however, it’s the preponderance of mystery and superstition that has left a lasting impact on my psyche. One of the things C.R.A.Z.Y. gets exactly right about growing up Catholic and queer is this continual push and pull between fulfilling desire and facing consequences. Just as Zac continually reinvents himself through his clothing, his hair, the music he likes and how he decorates his bedroom, there remain little reminders everywhere that God Is Watching via the excess of prominently-placed crucifixes in the Beaulieu home (not to mention the one often hanging around Zac’s neck) or other religious iconography that suffuses the film (a disapproving Gervais appearing in frame next to a painting of Christ on the wall; the mesmerizing male chorale music sung in Latin that often surfaces on the soundtrack whenever Zac is at his most conflicted.)

And if all of that wasn’t enough, he’s being asked repeatedly from a young age to pray for a sick family member or friend, placing an even heavier burden on him. Multiple times, he’s shown to even have a sort of psychic connection to his mother that’s somehow related to this “gift”: as a young boy, he furiously prays at sleepaway camp that no one discovers he wet his bed while Vallée cuts between this and Laurianne, in bed at home, violently awakening and responding to his cry for help—perhaps the one time C.R.A.Z.Y. oversteps a bit unless his mother’s actions are all in Zac’s mind (a real possibility since he daydreams more than any other movie kid since A Christmas Story’s Ralphie.) When shit gets too real (i.e. seeing Paul at the record store), Zac not only goes into panic mode but relies on the superstition informed by his religious upbringing: attempting to walk all the way home in a blizzard, he rationalizes, “I would be cured if I could simply make it through the storm.” He does arrive at home intact (if close to hypothermic), but still hasn’t entirely accepted the notion that one can’t pray the gay away.

Zac eventually gets to a place of self-acceptance, albeit one that’s not without consequences. In possibly the film’s most brutal and honest exchange, his father point-blank states that his sexuality is not something he’ll ever accept. It’s consistent with his attitude throughout: “This shouldn’t be happening to us; it’s all in his head,” Gervais tells Laurianne earlier and it’s revealing, and in a religious background all too common that what prevents Zac from fully coming out is an importance placed on how it affects others in his life rather than himself. Into my early twenties, I denied my own sexuality, being overly concerned with what my family and friends would think of me if they knew the truth. Like Zac, I conformed to a version of myself that was what I perceived the world expected of me, while also often subconsciously making decisions that brought me closer to my true self without giving the game away (in my case, growing out my hair, getting my ears pierced, covertly flirting with other men I secretly found attractive.)

Christmas, 1980.

Interestingly, Vallée himself identified as straight. He co-wrote the screenplay with François Boulay, who based it in part on his own experience growing up gay. I remember reading at the time that what attracted Vallée and informed his own contributions to the story was its focus on a teenage misfit, a boy whom for any number of reasons simply doesn’t fit into his narrowly defined world. While applying homosexuality to this premise sharpens the conflict and heightens the urgency of Zac’s plight, what’s remarkable about C.R.A.Z.Y. is that, in spite of this, it still eloquently brings to life an ultra-specific world one can identify and comprehend. Look past the music, the clothes and the interior design and revel in such rituals as a full-capacity church at Christmas Midnight Mass or family parties brimming with finger foods and the chaotic overlapping interactions between all the relatives. Marvel at such specifically mid-century Quebecois slices-of-life like the Beaulieu boys’ delight for their mother’s ironed toast. For all of Zac’s struggling, this world as remembered from adulthood is so colorful, vibrant and real one could almost step into the frame and feel what’s it like to be an active part of it.

Regardless, C.R.A.Z.Y. indicates that no matter what fondness or nostalgia one retains for their childhood, the most effective way into adulthood is to strike out on one’s own. After Christian’s wedding, Zac has to escape Montreal and travel all the way to Jerusalem, the Holy Land (a trip that would be at the top of Laurianne’s bucket list) to fully confront and accept his sexuality (he ends up finally sleeping with another man who naturally looks a lot like Jesus!) When he returns home, it’s clear he has changed but Montreal hasn’t. Laurianne asks him to pray for Raymond, now a junkie and near death, in order to “heal” him, but of course it doesn’t work. And while Gervais makes his nonacceptance of Zac clear after he returns, he still tears up and hugs him at Raymond’s funeral. In the final scene, we see a present-day Zac and Gervais getting fries together like they did back in the day; Zac’s voiceover mentions that they still don’t discuss his sexuality but in a decade’s time after the funeral, Gervais became more tolerant of it, even allowing one of Zac’s boyfriends into his home.

I haven’t even gone into entire subplots about Zac’s temperamental relationship with Raymond, or the saga of the broken Patsy Cline record, or his Midnight Mass daydreams (the entire congregation woohoo-ing along to “Sympathy For The Devil”) or how little Yvan’s most identifiable trait is his incessant eating. At just over two hours, the film packs in ample plot and character development but rather than feeling overstuffed, it resembles an invitation full of goodwill, all the way to its clever reveal at the end of what the title’s initials mean (think about it.) Winner of Best Canadian Film at TIFF 2005, it became a massive hit in Quebec, earning $6.2 million there (the equivalent of a film grossing over $300 million in the United States today) and won 10 Genie awards (the Canadian Oscars.) I ended my initial review by noting, “It would be crazy if it never received US distribution,” but that’s exactly what happened, mostly due to music rights (in such a large market, Pink Floyd wasn’t going to give away “Shine On You Crazy Diamond”, one of the film’s most essential needle drops, for a pittance.) It did receive a domestic DVD release in 2007 and is streaming on Max at this writing. I screened it for the first time in nearly 15 years after Vallée suddenly died of heart failure in late 2021; for all his subsequent work and acclaim, it remains his best film perhaps because it’s his most personal. As much of it is a feast for the eyes and ears, one simple exchange between Zac at 15 and Mrs. What’s-Her-Name (of all people) gets at the heart of how beautifully C.R.A.Z.Y. acts as (what Roger Ebert once said of film in general) an “empathy machine”:

Zac: “I want to be like everybody else.”

Mrs. What’s-Her-Name: “Thank God, you never will.”

Essay #17 of 24 Frames.

Go back to #16: Me And You And Everyone We Know.

Go ahead to #18: My Winnipeg

24 Frames: Me And You And Everyone We Know

Chris KriofskeLeave a comment

In your twenties, you tend to find your people, especially if it’s in a place other than where you grew up or came of age. In my twenties, life beyond higher education was inconceivable to me until I had no other choice but to confront it. As my grad school colleagues dispersed to other cities and states, I met people through roommates, co-workers and before long, my first serious boyfriend. Most of these connections, however, proved fleeting, born of circumstance and destined to end once irrelevant. With a few exceptions (I met the boyfriend at a club on a night when I was determined to meet someone), I was drifting, waiting for things to happen rather than actively seeking them out.

Literally days before that boyfriend and I broke up two years later, I had (coincidentally or not) taken a crucial first step towards a new, more satisfying chapter of my life when I inquired about volunteering for the Brattle Theatre, a single-screen (with a balcony!), freshly non-for-profit arthouse and repertory cinema in Harvard Square. My first activity was assisting with the folding, labelling and stamping of their film calendar mailers at Ned and Ivy’s (the organization’s co-directors) apartment on a Saturday afternoon. The sort of tedious but necessary grassroots support work not uncommon to struggling non-profits, it was also a kind of social gathering—a dozen volunteers of various ages casually sprawled out around an open concept living/family room on the second floor of a Cambridge triple decker, cooperating to get the task done while a Miyazaki film or an episode of Fishing With John played on TV.

Soon a regular at this every-other-month activity, I also began volunteering a two-hour shift at the Brattle’s shoebox-sized administrative office Monday evenings after work. I assisted Ned and Ivy with any task they had for me, from stuffing envelopes to data entry of old paper box office reports. Eighteen months later, when I mentioned in passing that I had gotten abruptly laid off from my day job, Ivy notified me of an open Office Manager position at the Coolidge Corner Theatre across town in Brookline. A somewhat larger operation than the Brattle (with three screens at time), the Coolidge was/is the Boston area’s other preeminent arthouse non-profit. I got the Coolidge job but likely would not have without the inside information and encouragement I received via my Brattle volunteering. I ended up working at the Coolidge for over sixteen years until Covid put an abrupt end to that (as it did for so many other things.)

Brattle Theatre

Still, my career in film exhibition is not the only opportunity I have to thank the Brattle for. At that first calendar-folding session, one of the other participants, an enthusiastic man named Michael introduced himself, asking me, “Do you see at least twenty-five indie films a year?” I certainly did, so he handed me a business card for the Chlotrudis Society For Independent Film, a local non-profit (of which he is president and co-founder) that holds an annual awards ceremony—sort of an alternative Oscars, like the Independent Spirit Awards—and also met up for weekly screenings at the Brattle, the Coolidge and other nearby cinemas. I had actually heard of the group: two years earlier when I worked part-time for a local film industry magazine, I spotted the Chlotrudis Awards as I copy-edited event listings, having to carefully scan it multiple times to comprehend/correctly spell such an unusual moniker (it’s a portmanteau of the co-founders’ two cats, Chloe and Gertrudis.) I placed the card in my wallet and promptly forgot about it.

After a full year of Brattle volunteering (and a fair amount of personal healing and growth), I finally signed up for a Chlotrudis membership online: “Why not at least check it out?,” I thought to myself. The first meet-up I attended was Catherine Hardwicke’s intense teens-gone-wild drama Thirteen at the Coolidge, followed by a group cocktail party at a member’s apartment weeks later. Within two months, I went to the High Falls Film Festival in Rochester, New York with Michael and a few other members; before long, I joined the organization’s Board of Directors. Chlotrudis provided opportunities to view with other people the independent and foreign films I more often than not had been seeing on my own; in time, I also had a new circle of friends—not only to see movies with but also engage in sometimes feisty, often engrossing discussions with via the group’s email list. Although cinema was the one thing we all had in common, we naturally discovered other shared interests such as books, music, television etc. In time, thanks to all three of these film-centered organizations, I felt part of a community in ways that I really hadn’t previously, at least not as an adult. Just a few years earlier, I was seriously considering moving back to the Midwest, at the time a place I still knew more comfortably (and which had a lower cost of living to boot.) Now, I felt firmly entrenched in Boston with a real support system I wouldn’t have had if I’d made another move and started all over again.

Along with these social benefits, actively participating in Chlotrudis also exposed me to films I might have never otherwise seen or thought to check out. While the organization honored well-known indie hits of the day such as Lost in Translation, The Station Agent and American Splendor, it would just as likely name Lucas Belvaux’s The Trilogy as Best Picture or award Sarah Polley Best Actress for her work in the little-seen My Life Without Me. While Chlotrudis Awards’ categories generally mirror those of other ceremonies, its signature prize, the Buried Treasure, is their centerpiece: bestowed upon a film with a US gross under $250K that also never played wide (i.e., above 1,000 screens), it was purposely created to make people aware of an excellent movie that might’ve flown under the radar for most. At my first Chlotrudis Awards in 2004, this prize was given to Marion Bridge, an adaptation of a Canadian play starring Molly Parker and featuring a teenaged Elliot Page (a big fan of Canadian cinema, Michael’s championing of it over the years has exposed me to far more of it than most people south of the border ever get to see); the following year, it went to Nosey Parker, a whimsical, micro-budgeted Vermont feature. While I would’ve heard of other concurrent Buried Treasure nominees such as Infernal Affairs (later remade as The Departed) or Abbas Kiarostami’s Ten outside of Chlotrudis, it’s unlikely I would’ve thought to watch the documentary Love & Diane or the charming, low-key Uruguayan film Whiskey.

Chlotrudis Awards = cats on sticks!

Me And You And Everyone We Know is not one of those discovered-through-Chlotrudis obscurities—after premiering at the 2005 Sundance Film and winning the Camera d’Or (best first feature) at Cannes, IFC Films released it in June of that year. With a US gross of $8 million on a budget of $800,000, it was unquestionably an indie hit and a critical darling. Writer/director/star Miranda July was already well-known in performance art circles, but this feature debut reestablished her as a filmmaker first and foremost. Chances are I still would’ve seen it had I never joined the group. However, watching it with my Chlotrudis friends at the Coolidge in their 45-seat screening room was a blast. July’s gently quirky demeanor, the handmade feel of its relatively low-budget aesthetics (especially Michael Andrews’ vintage PBS-inspired electronic score), the sharp yet humane screenplay, the presence of a beloved (if unknown to most American audiences) Canadian character actor like Tracy Wright—all of it cinematic catnip as far as Chlotrudis’ sensibilities were concerned. I don’t remember if everyone in our group loved the film that evening but I can’t deny that we bonded over the shared experience which is at least one thing that fortified (and still enhances) the act of moviegoing for me.

The film is essentially a romantic comedy where one hopes the two leads will get together in the end after their meet-cute. They are Christine Jesperson (July), a video performance artist/July alter-ego whose day job is driving for an elder cab service and Richard Swersey (John Hawkes), a department store shoe salesman and recently divorced father of two. The odd (and unusually specific) surnames provide a peek into July’s trademark whimsy while the ways in which she introduces these characters (Christine in the midst of creating one of her let’s-just-say-unique art pieces, Richard when he lights his hand on fire as a desperate gesture to hold on to his marriage) feel too genuine and fully thought out to come off as just quirky for quirk’s sake. After their initial meeting at Richard’s workplace (where Christine takes a client shopping), she returns by herself to purchase a pair of shoes from him that he had previously recommended to her (“You think you deserve this pain, but you don’t,” he says of her current, inferior footwear.) They end up walking to their parked cars together where one can instantly detect their chemistry but also some hesitation. Christine likens the length of their stroll to an entire relationship (speaking of the distance from the store to the cars, “This is our whole life together”) but pushes it too far when, after they separate, she shows up again at Richard’s car and invites herself in for a ride over to her vehicle. Still sore from his recent divorce, Richard reacts negatively, instantly disintegrating Christine’s impulsively constructed rom-com facade.

While Christine and Richard’s will-they-or-won’t-they trajectory is the film’s key narrative thread, it is far from the only one pushing it forward. Me and You… is more of an ensemble piece, almost a micro-scale version of, say, Magnolia where numerous characters intersect in alternately predictable and unexpected ways. Richard’s somewhat oafish co-worker Andrew (Brad William Henke) develops a playful, if caustic relationship with two 14-year-old girls, Heather (Natasha Slayton) and Rebecca (Najarra Townsend). The girls go to school with Richard’s older son Peter (Miles Thompson) who is often seen taking care of his six-year-old brother Robby (Brandon Ratcliff). Both Peter (and, to a lesser extent Robby) befriend Sylvie (Carlie Westerman), a thoughtful, precocious neighbor girl somewhere in age between the brothers. Also figuring in are Richard’s estranged wife (and Peter and Robby’s mom) Pam (JoNell Kennedy), Christine’s elder-cab client Michael (Hector Elias) and Nancy Herrington (Tracy Wright), a stoic gallery curator whom Christine submits her artwork to.

Your average indie ensemble comedy-drama would emphasize and gather momentum on the strength and timing of its connections (and disconnections); Me and You… instead fixates on more personal, idiosyncratic motifs. Set in an unglamorous-verging-on-seedy Los Angeles residential neighborhood, it takes what could be ordinary, everyday situations and swiftly turns them inside out: a father and his young daughter buy a goldfish in a plastic bag filled with water from a pet store, but he accidentally leaves the bag on top of his car and drives off with only Christine and Michael initially witnessing it. Robby hears a mysterious tapping noise every day outside his mom’s house; she dismisses it as the sound the streetlights make when they turn on, but he remains unconvinced and obsessed. Sylvie plays with neighborhood kids Robby’s age as if she were their mother but takes this tendency to obsessive heights when she shows Peter her secret hope chest, lovingly layered with items she’ll use as a wife and mom one day (“It’s my dowry,” she states matter-of-factly.)

As in Magnolia, nearly every character here is lonely to some degree. While depiction of such an emotional state could lead to inertia (or alternately, desperation), July utilizes loneliness as an impetus for a myriad of activities people of varying ages pursue in order to combat it. Often, the impulse is sexually charged: Heather and Rebecca flirt with Andrew but keep their distance (particularly once their playacting threatens to have real consequences); they also attempt to work out their frustration and curiosity by first tormenting, then fooling around with Peter. When someone is too young to fully understand sex, they seek release in less conventional ways, such as Sylvie’s very-real-to-her fantasy world of monogrammed towel sets and fresh crisp shower curtains—itself  momentarily derailed in her mind when she watches Heather and Rebecca’s rendezvous with Peter through her bedroom window.

Meanwhile, Robby regularly spends time in an online chatroom that Peter showed him how to use; the two of them begin chatting with an anonymous, presumed adult engaging in sex talk. Peter laughs it away but young Robby is intrigued and returns to the chat room on his own, his six-year-old ideas of what sex might be both hilariously off-the-mark and touchingly innocent (and scatological!) Conceived in an era directly before smartphones, the film, with its desktop setup and the clunky chime of messages received back-and-forth (forever!) might now feel tame and nostalgic. As with the girls and Andrew, however, Robby’s playing a potentially dangerous game, one whose implications are still years ahead of him. When he eventually meets in real life the other cast member he’s been chatting with, the reveal is both ridiculous and sublime: lovingly scored to Spiritualized’s slow-building, in due course rousing “Any Way That You Want Me”, it’s poignant and bittersweet rather than embarrassed or full of shame. Credit July’s direction of her ensemble and in particular, her child actors: not everyone could coax such an uncommonly natural and believable performance out of someone as young as Ratcliff.

I get that July’s sensibility is not for everyone—the sudden callback of Christine receiving a phone call where the person on the other end of the line says a single word (“Macaroni”) and hangs up, Robby casually drawing on a piece of art on the wall as Richard and Peter sit on the couch in front of it, numbly ignoring him, Pam’s “self-affirming” nightgown, Nancy’s “I’ve Got Cat-itude!” mug—such quirks will easily delight or repulse a viewer depending on one’s taste (though this letter-perfect Onion article from 2012 gets it.) It may be tempting to regard Me and You… as a stereotypically navel-gazing indie, but one shouldn’t ignore the considerable feeling July suffuses her work with. Watch for how Nancy’s face slowly transforms when she’s watching the video Christine has submitted to her gallery at the moment Christine begins talking directly to her. Look at Richard’s growth throughout the film: “I am prepared for amazing things to happen; I can handle it,” he tells Andrew early on only to show how unprepared he is when Christine gets into his car. Midway through, he realizes that when he lit his hand on fire, “I was trying to save my life and it didn’t work.” By the end, he quietly, willingly gives himself over to chance as July illustrates, via him and Christine tenderly embracing the beauty of being open and receptive to making things up as one goes along.

That goldfish-left-on-top-of-a-car scene from earlier plays no crucial part from a narrative perspective but Me and You…wouldn’t be the same without it. As Christine and Michael drive along the highway, following the car as the goldfish unceremoniously slides off its roof, over its windshield and onto the trunk of another car ahead of it, Michael reassures a distraught Christine, perhaps indirectly evoking the film’s title, “At least we’re all together in this.” That sense of camaraderie and support is really what the film is all about; it’s also what I craved and then experienced once I found my people at the movies—on both sides of the screen.

Essay #16 of 24 Frames.

Go back to #15: Before Sunset.

Go ahead to #17: C.R.A.Z.Y.

24 Frames: Before Sunset

Chris KriofskeLeave a comment

Despite their ubiquity, movies sequels rarely match their predecessors and almost never better them. Critics and fans alike may go to bat for The Godfather, Part II as the superior entry in that trilogy (I finally saw it last year—surely the gold standard for what a sequel should be, but I still prefer The Godfather) and The Empire Strikes Back arguably refines and deepens the universe introduced in Star Wars, as does Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man 2 for its previous entry. Still, most sequels fall short if just by a hair (Austin Powers: The Spy That Shagged Me) or more often, a country mile (City Slickers 2: The Legend of Curly’s Gold, anyone?)

Even arthouse cinema is not immune, though its filmmakers may try dressing up their sequels in other guises. Francois Truffaut’s Antoine Doinel series revisits the same character (played by Jean-Pierre Leaud) five times over two decades though The 400 Blows, which introduces him is so widely revered (deservedly so, since it’s more or less ground zero for the French New Wave) one can imagine only the most contrarian critic wasting the effort to extol Stolen Kisses or Love On The Run in favor of it. The most successful sequels are often stumbled upon for artistic rather than commercial reasons, like Abbas Kiarostami’s Life, and Nothing More… where he dramatizes seeking out the child actors from his earlier film Where Is My Friend’s Home following an earthquake ravaging the remote village where it was shot. Rather than feeling forced, it’s a meta-commentary on how life and art intersect more than a continuation of its story.

After The Godfather Part II won six Academy Awards (three more than The Godfather) and Airport 1975 became the seventh highest grossing film of its year, the floodgates opened: now, multiple sequels to such blockbusters as Jaws and Rocky were not only inevitable but also practically expected. If anything, sequel-itis has spread exponentially in the 21stcentury (see the Marvel Cinematic Universe among other mega-franchises) to the point where it’s hardly worth getting worked up at a multiplex sign where a majority of the films screening have a “2”, “3” or an “X” after their titles. Artful or not, they’re here to stay which is why in 2004, that year of Spider-Man 2, Shrek 2 and the more creatively titled Meet The Fockers (the only creative thing about it, really), I was skeptical when I first heard of Before Sunset, a sequel to Before Sunrise from nine years before reuniting director Richard Linklater with actors Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy. In the earlier film, American Jesse (Hawke) and French Celine (Delpy) meet on a train travelling across Austria and impulsively spend 24 hours together walking around Vienna before each of them must return to their native countries. A wistful, short-term romance with the loquaciousness of an Eric Rohmer film (perhaps crossed with one of Billy Wilder’s less satirical efforts), it did what it set out to do fully and enchantingly thanks to its stars’ innate chemistry and Linklater’s characteristic humaneness and nimble, attentive camerawork. With such a perfectly executed film, why try to recapture that seemingly once-in-a-lifetime magic again?

Before Sunrise

What immediately sets Before Sunset apart from other sequels is that it never resembles a cash-grab or a product its creators felt obligated to make, even if Before Sunrise was widely beloved and a modest hit. Linklater, Delpy and Hawke (all of them contributing to the screenplay) began working on a larger-budgeted sequel (with locations in four countries!) shortly after the first film came out but failed to secure funding. They only resumed work on it in 2003 albeit at a much smaller scale. One can easily comprehend the desire to revisit Jesse and Celine a decade (or even a year or two) after their passing meet-cute but to actually make good on that challenge and create something that recaptures the essence and insight of the original is a tall order. Happily, if nearly improbably, Before Sunset not only accomplishes this but ends up one of the rare sequels that arguably improves upon its predecessor, retaining its spirit while also extending its narrative in ways that feel less like a rehash than a reunion gradually revealing itself as a reassessment: what would it be like for Jesse and Celine to meet again and more importantly, what would that mean for them?

As previously noted, Before Sunset picks up nine years after that chance meeting on a train in Austria. The new setting is Paris and Jesse is on the last stop of a European tour for his first novel, This Time, a roman à clef inspired by his whirlwind romance with Celine. During the Q&A portion after his reading at famed English language bookstore Shakespeare and Company, he spots Celine herself standing near the back of the audience. Unlike the earlier film, her presence here is not random; she’s there (in the city where she resides) to purposely see Jesse read from his book about their fling. The moment he and the audience become aware of her presence carries a jolt of recognition which Hawke, often a more subtle actor than he’s given credit for conveys beautifully. As they say hello and embrace, one can detect an instant spark but also the hesitancy one would expect from a situation orchestrated by one participant and unexpected by the other.

Jesse has a plane to catch, leaving him and Celine with barely an hour to spend together. As they did in Before Sunrise’s Vienna, they walk through the streets of Paris, stopping in a café here, a park there, getting caught up and getting to know each other (again) as their dynamic and particular rhythms gradually fall back into place. Celine, however, now has a hometown advantage, directing where the two them will go. As they catch up, they each reveal more about themselves than they might initially mean to. They answer whether either of them made good on their parting pact of showing up at the Vienna train platform six months after their first meeting (Jesse did, Celine didn’t—she was at her grandmother’s funeral.) They also debate on whether they had sex (off camera) in the Vienna park (Jesse argues that they did twice; Celine doesn’t recall it, positing, “Memory is a wonderful thing if you don’t have to deal with the past.”)

All the while, the question “Does anyone change?” lingers in their pauses between conservation; as much as either one would like to deny it, their body language often says otherwise: at different times, one of them tentatively reaches out to touch or comfort the other, only to pull away, sensing the recuperations of such a gesture. They may be recognizable as the Jesse and Celine of the first film, but they’re also noticeably older (especially early on when Linklater silently cuts back to brief shots from the first film) and also perhaps… wiser? Now an environmental activist, Celine’s as impassioned as her younger self, but more caustic, a little angrier and maybe a bit jaded. Jesse, who is married and has a young child is still something of a wanderer/dreamer but he carries with him a newfound pragmatism and stronger sense of maturity compared to his younger self.

Eventually, catching up and small talk gives way to abrupt, messy emotional disclosures. Midway through, Jesse can’t help but moan in resentment and regret at Celine not showing up again in Vienna while she later snaps at him, “I was fine until I read your fucking book!” They each muse on what might have been, realizing that for a small period they both lived in New York City at the same time but never ran into each other (or even sought each other out.) Jesse confesses that his marriage is falling apart (perhaps inspired by Hawke’s then-recent divorce from Uma Thurman) while Celine considers their past, referring to it as “That moment in time that is forever gone.” All the while, tension mounts for the clock is running out—Jesse still has that plane to catch, a fact both of them repeatedly acknowledge, recalculating what diminishing amount of time they have left while also figuring out ways to prolong it. After they hug each other for a presumably final time, Jesse asks his car service to the airport to instead drive him and Celine to her apartment. He then walks her through the building’s vast courtyard to her front door. She invites him inside for a cup of tea; he accepts.

Before Sunset might be one of the most suspenseful romances ever made because it plays out in real time: its eighty minutes covers that exact, unbroken period in the lives of these characters. As much a narrative-driver as the single day was in Before Sunrise, this duration almost feels as if time itself has collapsed since we’re not used to seeing it play out so meticulously. Even more so than the earlier film, this one is composed of long takes as the camera follows and tracks Jesse and Celine’s journey (the late-in-the-day sun-kissed cityscapes add to the overall allure.) Their temporal space, by being fully synced up with our own creates an intense, almost unbearable sense of intimacy, like we’re right there with them accompanying their every move. By the time Jesse and Celine are slowly walking up the stairs to her apartment, the tension is off the charts—it’s exhilarating to watch them take each step wondering how much further they will go together. Actually, how much further can they take this? Jesse still has a plane to catch! (Not to mention a family waiting for him back in America.)

Once inside Celine’s exquisitely bohemian apartment, he asks her to play one tune for him on acoustic guitar (she earlier mentioned that she had been writing songs as a hobby.) She chooses “A Waltz For A Night” which is her side of their story, a three-minute folk/pop song equivalent to Jesse’s novel. Breathily, lovingly, she sings, “I just want another try, I just want another night” before almost coyly adding, “One single night with you, little Jesse / is worth a thousand with anybody,” (the cut to Hawke’s face when she sings “Jesse” is as startled and ebullient as his first view of her at the bookstore.) She makes tea, he puts on a Nina Simone CD. She tells him of when she saw Simone in concert before her death, swaying like her to the music. She says to him, “Baby, you’re going to miss that plane.” He responds, “I know.” No reasonable viewer can wait to see what happens next but wait they must, for the screen fades to black and the end credits roll. When I first saw the film in a theater, the audience let out a reaction that was equal parts relief, bemusement and slight frustration at this ending, but it’s perfection in how it exhibits grace and restraint after all that wish fulfillment tempered by built-up and sustained stimulation and uncertainty. Sure, it could’ve been satisfying to see Jesse and Celine kiss or embrace but here, just the process of their reconnection and how witnessing it playing out in real time makes it feel earned provides what’s needed for their arc to resonate.

I rewatched Before Sunset a year later in a theater as part of a double feature with Before Sunrise but didn’t view it again for another nine years (coincidentally, the same period of time separating the two films.) Now past the age of Celine and Jesse in Before Sunset, the film hit me even harder: that slooow walk up the stairs proved more effective, even when knowing what would happen next. The intimacy established between the two leads was rare in that it seemed to come from a real place rather than a storybook construction. I wanted Jesse and Celine to be together, I saw that they wanted it too but I didn’t know if it would be just for a night or longer than that or even at all. This notion remained true to the spirit of Before Sunrise while enticingly pushing it further—I was offered another mere glimpse into the lives of these two people but this time, the possibilities seemed limitless as the spark was reignited.

Nearly two decades on, as sequels go, Before Sunset remains an anomaly more than a precedent. Some recent film sequels are perfectly respectable: The Incredibles 2, Paddington 2, the John Wick films (haven’t seen any but I suspect many would argue for them.) Once in a blue moon, one will emerge that’s arguably stronger as its predecessor (Cedric Klapisch’s Russian Dolls, which I remember liking more than L’Auberge Espagnole.) However, most sequels still suck or are at the very least an inferior product.

Thus, Linklater, Delpy and Hawke faced a unique challenge when they decided to revisit Jesse and Celine another nine years on in Before Midnight. Without spoiling too much, the film drops in on another specific and brief period of time in the characters’ lives, gradually revealing all that has happened since the ambiguous ending of Before Sunset. It is a thornier film by design, going deep into how time influences perception of self and others and what consequences such familiarity portends. The tone is much different from the first two films without losing sight of who the characters are or obscuring their spirit—there are still lengthy conversations and an exotic setting but also an acknowledgement of early middle-age as a period fully distinct from one’s early thirties or twenties. It also ends on an ambiguous note that could easily serve as an invitation for another sequel or a conclusion.

Although Delpy nixed the idea of a fourth film in 2021 (nine years after the production of Before Midnight), a year later Hawke suggested the potential is still there for the three principals to come together and continue the story. I liked Before Midnight but wouldn’t rate it as highly as Before Sunset—something about the latter’s unexpectedness added so much to its appeal. For a fourth film (maybe After Sunrise?) to work, Linklater, Delpy and Hawke would need to be in sync with an inspired idea that builds on the previous entries, favoring a deepening of the story and not serving as mere fan service. Before Sunset did that brilliantly and as long as sequels aren’t going away, more filmmakers should study it.

Essay #15 of 24 Frames.

Go back to #14: What Time Is It There?

Go ahead to #16: Me And You And Everyone We Know.

24 Frames: What Time Is It There?

Chris Kriofske2 Comments

Once streaming video overtook physical media as the primary way to watch movies at home (or (god forbid) on your smartphone), it was no longer unreasonable to think that everything could be available at the touch of a button whether via paid subscription services like Netflix and The Criterion Channel, free-with-ads platforms such as Tubi or FreeVee or not-entirely-legal uploads to YouTube, Vimeo and a horde of other websites. While finally sounding the death knell for movie rental and retail stores, streaming didn’t entirely solve that availability problem. Sure, one no longer had to rely on whether your local Blockbuster had a DVD (or if you’re of a certain age, a VHS tape) of a particular title in stock but easy access is not the same as having access to everything. Twenty-odd years ago, I kept a mental running list of movies to see that either weren’t ever released on home video, out of print, unavailable in the US (i.e. on a format other than NTSC such as PAL) or extremely difficult to find, hoping they would become available to rent and/or buy one day. Off the top of my head, it included John Cassavetes’ final feature Love Streams, Abbas Kiarostami’s Where Is My Friend’s House (and the rest of the Koker Trilogy) and most of Theo Angelopoulos’ work prior to 1989’s Landscapes In The Mist; I still recall the glee and satisfaction with which I purchased my newly-released Criterion Blu-ray of Love Streams in 2014.

A little accessibility breeds expectations for its continuation and advancement. We’ve progressed from an age where you couldn’t own any movies to one where you could rent and/or buy some of them to another teeming with available content. This ability to watch an increasing number of titles whenever you wanted threw into relief the relatively minor amount that you couldn’t. If I could see movie A for free, why not movie B? If I had to pay to see movie B, why wasn’t movie C available at all, even for a price? No matter how far we’ve come in the rough half-century since the invention of the VCR, we are nowhere near this idea of utopian unlimited access even if what we do have presents enough content and choices that most viewers could never possibly run out of stuff to watch.

The casual viewer, on the other hand, may take for granted the current streaming unavailability of titles from Academy Award Best Picture winners (Rebecca) to cult films (Gummo, the original Dawn of the Dead) and even beloved box office hits (Cocoon, for christ’s sake!) In this project, I’ve already tackled titles that I had to access via my own DVD copy (All That Jazz) or on YouTube (To Live). As for What Time Is It There? (2001) by Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-liang, I’m thankful I held on to the DVD I purchased at a video store’s going-out-of-business sale fifteen years ago since, in addition to currently being unstreamable, the DVD is also long out of print (a better-than-acceptable used copy sells for at least $50 on Amazon), never released on Blu-ray and not uploaded to YouTube (unlike Head or the original version of The Heartbreak Kid, both of which I’ve recently watched on the platform.)

Tsai’s feature debut Rebels Of The Neon God arrived in 1992 but I’d not heard of him (not even in film school) until a decade later. In anticipation of What Time Is It There?, Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, then under the expertise of programmer Bo Smith, ran a retrospective of his work. Not knowing too much about Tsai apart from rave reviews of the new film, I chose to start at the beginning. Rebels Of The Neon God concerns a young Taipei man (Lee Kang-sheng, who serves as the protagonist/muse in nearly all the director’s work) who falls in with two juvenile delinquents—a setup straight out of early Godard or a contemporary like Gregg Araki. Unlike those two auteurs, Tsai is far less interested in narrative than texture and atmosphere. Actually, this first feature has relatively more plot than most of his subsequent efforts, although specific themes and motifs one would see throughout his oeuvre are already in place: urban life, loneliness, food, sex and, perhaps more so than any other auteur, water in all of its forms (and sounds.)

Rebels Of The Neon God

I detected similarity but also a great advance between Rebels Of The Neon God and What Time Is It There? and viewed his other three features to date within the next few months: Vive L’Amour (1994), an advance over its predecessor while further eschewing such elements as “plot” or having a score, even; The River (1997) of which What Time Is It There? might be loosely interpreted as a sequel; and The Hole (1998), something of an outlier in that it interrupts Tsai’s usual urban ennui with the occasional colorful and deliberately campy (and overtly lip-synched) musical number. I’ve revisited most of these in the past few years (save The River, also unstreamable/out of print) and can detect a developmental through line of Tsai becoming progressively more minimal and sparser (save the occasional musical, like 2005’s The Wayward Cloud) with each film.

As a caveat, Tsai’s movies are not for everyone. I once likened his unique and deliberate approach to that of silent-era slapstick only slooooowed all the way down as much as possible before turning into complete stasis or a freeze-frame. While one of the chief devotees of what could be called “slow” cinema (along with Andrei Tarkovsky and Bela Tarr), things do happen in his films, often recognizable activities that we partake of offscreen: eating, sleeping, fucking, selling wares, watching movies, sitting in a public space, etc. And yet, most other filmmakers do not give these ordinary actions such raptly held attention or focus. Stray Dogs (2013), for instance contains an infamous shot of one of its characters in close-up meticulously eating a chicken dinner for what seems like infinity—an extreme example in Tsai’s filmography for sure, but not an atypical one (especially in his later work.)

Revisiting What Time Is It There? for the first time in nearly two decades, even I took some time to fully adjust to its unusual rhythms. It begins with a seemingly endless single shot of Lee’s aged father (Miao Tien) in his apartment. He slowly sits down at a kitchen table, lights a cigarette, stands up, calls out “Kang!”, sits back down, gets up again and walks down a hallway to a laundry room at the far rear of the frame. As usual with Tsai, the camera remains entirely static. It feels almost as unassuming as a Warhol screen test or a piece of stock footage nearly resembling Ed Wood’s silent B-reel of Bela Lugosi leaving his house that was inserted into Plan 9 From Outer Space to make good on the notion that the now-deceased actor “starred” in the film.

In the next scene, Lee rides in the backseat of a car with a veiled object sitting upright in his lap. He says, “Dad, we’re going through the tunnel; you have to follow us, okay?”, although we see no other passengers. Those familiar with Buddhist customs will recognize the object as his father’s urn and the other things he’s holding onto as traditional implements of bereavement. For those who are not (like me), the following scene at a mausoleum clarifies his dad’s death. From that moment, What Time Is It There? establishes itself as a film partially about grief and the different ways its characters process it. Lee’s mother expresses it forthright: per her faith, she fervently believes her husband will return in another form such as one of her pet fish housed in aquarium that Tsai often places towards the front of the frame. She’s increasingly superstitious about his return, laying out food at the dinner table for him to consume and later obsessively covering up all the windows and cutting the electricity because “he prefers the dark” (even though, as her son argues with her, the fish will die in their tank without power.)

Lee’s approach to mourning is more difficult to parse. The persona Tsai crafts for him throughout the director’s oeuvre is that of a stone-faced onlooker, like a more passive Buster Keaton (perhaps without the acrobatic comic timing.) Initially, his grief doesn’t seem outwardly apparent at all except through quirky acts of behavior such as repeatedly urinating into a plastic bag or a water bottle in his bedroom rather than using the bathroom (no concrete reason is given for this as far as I can determine.) He makes his living selling wristwatches, often standing on the street with a giant open suitcase of his merchandise, repeatedly and almost robotically banging a single watch against the metal railing behind him to draw attention. After much haggling with a young woman (Chen Shiang-chyi) over his personal wristwatch (which belonged to his father), he agrees to sell her it after she discloses she’s about to take a trip to Paris.

From there, the film alternates scenes of Lee in Taipei with those of Chen in Paris with the watch serving as a psychic connection between the two. Lee seems to believe his father’s spirit partially remains within the watch and obsesses over it and the country Chen has taken it to. He calls Information to ask the film’s titular question (re: Paris) and buys and repeatedly views a bootleg copy of The 400 Blows, Francois Truffaut’s landmark 1959 French New Wave film. Meanwhile, Chen wanders around Paris alone, an outsider in a land where she doesn’t speak the language. At one point, Tsai frames her on a busy moving walkway as the only figure standing still. Later, at a cemetery, she sits down a bench next to a middle-aged man who happens to be Jean Pierre-Leaud (the child star of The 400 Blows), though this fact is lost on her.

Jean-Pierre Leaud and Chen Shiang-chyi

Time itself becomes a motif. In addition to Lee’s profession as a street watch salesperson and the brick-and-mortar clock store that employs him, various timepieces appear throughout the film. In one sequence, he steals a clock right off the wall of a cinema’s hallway, placing it on the seat next to him inside a theater (what the stocky, bespectacled young man silently pursuing Lee does with that clock after he steals it from him leads to one of the film’s funniest sight gags.) In another scene, he sits in what appears to be a mall at a fountain which contains a giant water wheel forever unhurriedly revolving like a clock. Later, he ends up in some sort of room (maybe a security booth?) with a menagerie of clocks both analog and digital and later still, on the balcony of a tall building manually trying to adjust (with long tongs) the hands of the clock below him on its façade.

Tsai often sidesteps Taipei’s more traditional, tourism-friendly urban landscapes for liminal spaces such as that security booth packed with clocks or the backseat of a parked, possibly abandoned car. Chen’s Parisian vacation is full of these as well: endless subway corridors and platforms, a phonebooth where with futility she attempts a conversation as a man in the adjacent booth keeps yelling obscenities into his receiver, a miniscule, red-tiled bathroom where she vomits up her dinner. Tsai renders worlds as they are (unglamorous, run-down, often grime-encased) but does so within artful, meticulously composed frames. His lengthy, static shots begin to feel like living paintings—for those receptive to such stillness, it can be like sitting on a bench or standing next to a wall, simply observing life play out before one’s own eyes no matter how little (or how much) action occurs.

Combined with a heightened sound design which doesn’t have a musical score but emphasizes such ambience as traffic noise and trickling water, What Time Is It There? invites one to extensively take in an environment rather than lose oneself in a story—which is not to say it’s all just visual and aural wallpaper. The film slowly reaches its climax as all three of its principal characters engage in some sort of sexual activity. Chen attempts a one-night stand with a female traveler from Hong Kong who walked in on her vomiting in the red-tiled bathroom; Lee fucks a female prostitute who stumbles by him as he’s camped out in the abandoned car drinking wine and eating some sort of meat on a stick; Lee’s mother, meanwhile, puts on a fancy dress at home and, for lack of a better term, “gets intimate” with the urn full of her husband’s ashes.

None of these encounters have a particularly happy ending (so to speak.) Chen fails to find much of a connection with the Hong Kong woman and leaves the hotel disappointed. The prostitute absconds with Lee’s suitcase of wristwatches, sneaking away before he awakens. When he arrives home, Lee finds his mother in bed holding the urn, unresponsive. She’s obscured by camera to a degree where it’s indeterminable whether she’s dead or just sleeping—Lee just silently climbs into the bed, embraces her and that’s the last we see of either of them. However, the film concludes in Paris. As Chen falls asleep on a lounge chair in a park next to a lagoon, a familiar suitcase last seen escaping an abandoned vehicle floats by her only to be retrieved from the water with an umbrella handle held by a man whom the camera gradually pans up to reveal as Lee’s father. He walks away from the lagoon with the suitcase in hand; standing and facing the camera, Tsai reveals a giant Ferris wheel behind him: it’s another clock-like figure, perhaps the grandest one so far. Lee’s dad turns around and walks beatifically in its direction. The screen turns to black with the director’s dedication, “To my father and Lee Kang-sheng’s father.”

This is a film not just concerned with time as a concept but also as an experience and how it is fleeting and, for us as individuals, finite. Tidy as its recurring, symmetrical imagery is, its rigor, combined with its minimalist, understated, almost meditative demeanor renders What Time Is It There? one of Tsai’s most accomplished, satisfying and original works. So, twenty years on, why is it difficult to see? One can currently stream his follow-up (and arguably far more challenging) feature Goodbye Dragon Inn (2003), along with later efforts such as Stray Dogs and Days (2020). Quality and critical acclaim, however, are rarely decisive factors in regard to availability. Both the theatrical and home video distributors for What Time Is It There? are long defunct and have been acquired by other corporations. It’s unclear who currently holds the rights to the film which is most likely the reason why one can’t stream, rent or even buy it for a reasonable price. Perhaps in another year or five, a reputable distributor such as Criterion will acquire them (as they did with Love Streams) and audiences will rediscover the film. It happened to What Happened Was… (1994), a long-lost indie hit of its time that received a theatrical re-release a few years ago and eventually made its way to streaming platforms despite never having been released on DVD. For now, What Time Is It There? remains but one of many currently “lost” titles that we can only hope will find a new audience when it can be easily seen again.

Essay #14 of 24 Frames.

Go back to #13: The Royal Tenenbaums.

Go ahead to #15: Before Sunset.

24 Frames: The Royal Tenenbaums

Chris KriofskeLeave a comment

Pauline Kael rarely saw a movie more than once. Even near the end of her life, long after her tenure as film critic at The New Yorker, she remarked, “I still don’t look at movies twice. It’s funny, I just feel I got it the first time.” While Kael’s quirk is a notorious one, it’s to some extent explicable given that she spent most of her career pre-home video. Apart from theatrical releases or even private screenings, she had limited access to rewatching a title, at least compared to today’s wealth of viewing options. Yet even with them, of the thousands of films I’ve seen over the past three decades, there’s at least half, maybe even two-thirds that I’ll likely never rewatch or want to revisit. After all, if I limited myself to first-time watches, I’d never run out of new things to see.

Still, a world where I never again returned to Mulholland Drive, Beau Travail or Young Frankenstein holds little appeal. I acknowledge that films (and, for that matter, books and episodic television series) require a heftier time commitment than a favorite piece of music. I can prepare for an essay on an album by listening to it four or five times over the course of a day; for one on a film like 2001: A Space Odyssey, however, I’d need to put at least 10-15 hours for an equivalent experience. As a visual medium, movies require closer concentration. Unless you literally know one by heart, you arguably can’t put it on in the background and absorb it while attending to other tasks as you could with any piece of music from Abbey Road to ABBA Gold.

I’ll often rewatch a movie for one of three reasons: it’s playing theatrically, available for streaming or just simply one of my favorite films. Accessibility plays a key role here but so do other factors. Is it something I’d love to see on a cinema’s big screen given the opportunity? Do I revisit it because I haven’t watched it in decades and want to see how well it holds up (or not)? Has the film been in my thoughts for whatever reason (for instance, having read a web article or a social media post about it), or is it something I love to rewatch because it gives me joy, no matter how many times I view it? 

Particularly in the pre-streaming age, this last reason was my most common for wanting to see a film again (and in some cases, again and again.) When my family acquired our first VCR in 1985, we soon accumulated a cabinet overflowing with recorded VHS tapes of favorite movies and TV shows I’d watch repeatedly, from childhood favorites like Race For Your Life, Charlie Brown to movies such as Monty Python and The Holy Grail and dozens of episodes of Mystery Science Theater 3000. I replayed some more than others but the novelty and attraction of having a permanent record of something I loved to watch whenever I wanted (often for the price of a blank tape) was considerable. Even later on, when VHS tapes largely became priced-to-own (instead of priced-to-rent), for comparatively little money one could proudly curate a collection of favorite titles akin to having shelves of CDs or stacks of vinyl.

1999, Left to Right: Cassettes, books, videotapes (and a few records…)

Beyond accessibility or convenience, that “it” factor which draws us repeatedly to a particular work of art is harder to pinpoint. I may as well have watched Trainspotting over a dozen times because I owned it on VHS (and later, DVD) but I didn’t just watch it because it was there. Something in it beckoned me to want to see it again and again because I got something out of it (and in most cases, something different) each time. I’ve revisited films that don’t hold up to subsequent viewings—La La Land is a good recent example. While I appreciated its invention  and audacity the first time through, after rewatching it ten days later with my family, my first thought leaving the cinema was, “Well, I never need to see that again.” In this case, the novelty had worn off, enabling me to see the film’s flaws more clearly. Luckily, most rewatches are worth the time and effort, even if they all can’t be as continuously rewarding as Trainspotting which took me a few run-throughs to fully comprehend the deeper, often ironic implications beneath all the flash and fury of its editing, music and performances.

There’s also comfort in returning to favorite works of art. While as a well-rounded film critic I strive to seek out titles I haven’t seen before (both new and old), I return to specific ones because their familiarity provides solace, often for various reasons. I’ll rewatch some films as a tradition in celebrating a particular season like Christmas or Halloween (for years, the latter wasn’t complete without a viewing of Dario Argento’s Suspiria or the Bela Lugosi Dracula.) Others I’ll put on when I’m in a particular mood: Bringing Up Baby for screwball comedy, Back To The Future for 1980s escapism, Beyond The Valley Of The Dolls for psychedelic, counterculture exploitation. What pleasure I find in these films is, like any work of art, entirely subjective; for instance, Katherine Hepburn and Cary Grant together never fail to make me laugh (which is why I also adore Holiday), the Robert Zemeckis film came out when I was 10 and had a formative impact on me at the time and the Russ Meyers-directed, Roger Ebert-scripted film is so gloriously bonkers that watching it is never less than a blast.

Rarer than isolated titles lending themselves to multiple viewings are those entire oeuvres of a particular filmmaker that do so. Naturally, I’ve revisited many works by some of my favorite directors from Robert Altman to Claire Denis. Over time, Wes Anderson has proven something of an ideal in this regard. Most of his films hold up to additional viewings because, so densely are they packed with insane attention-to-detail production design and such complex, shifting tones that I get more out of them each time. I’ve grown accustomed to giving Wes the benefit of the doubt if I’m initially underwhelmed by one of his pictures—The Grand Budapest Hotel, for example, struck me as nothing more than a solid addition to his canon when it came out in 2014 and became his highest-grossing film to date. Revisiting it seven years later, I found it exceptionally moving to a degree I hadn’t previously, marveling at its tenderness for a lost, presumed world rather than just admiring the intricate fantasy world it had presented.

Like most people my age or older, Anderson’s second feature Rushmore was the first one I saw during its early 1999 theatrical run (his first, 1996’s Bottle Rocket got such a limited release that I hadn’t even heard of it.) The first film of his I revisited, however, was his third. Stoked by my love of Rushmore, I prioritized seeing The Royal Tenenbaums like no other new release in December 2001. After that first screening at the AMC Fenway in Boston, I thought it was… fine. I placed it at #7 on my annual top ten list; in my journal, I praised its set design, soundtrack and some of its cast but also thought that “it made little advance” on the “visionary”(!) Rushmore. So, not a failure or outright disappointment but apparently not as impactful as Waking Life (my #1 film of that year at the time), Memento (#2) or In The Mood For Love(#3).

The Young Tenenbaums

Flash forward seven months to a particularly taxing summer. Just about shellshocked by the rough (if necessary) end of a long-term relationship, I sought comfort wherever I could find it. During a week-long “staycation” from work, on a whim, I rented the newly-released Criterion Collection DVD of The Royal Tenenbaums. After this rewatch, I wrote, “I found it more affecting the second time: once you know to expect the sensory overload and stylistic quirks that threaten to turn too brittle or clever, you’re left with a literary jewel of a film that makes the most of Rushmore’s best qualities.” It wasn’t long before I purchased my own copy—while the Criterion Collection was mostly beyond my price-range at that point, Anderson had made a deal with the distributor to issue the film at a lower price point for consumers.

As autumn beckoned, I kept returning to my The Royal Tenenbaums DVD. My 19”, late 1980s-model TV probably didn’t provide as robust a viewing experience as a big cinema screen would have, but in this case, Anderson’s carefully packed mise-en-scène felt reassuring rather than overwhelming. For instance, take the bravura opening sequence. Accompanied by a swelling, then soaring instrumental version of The Beatles’ “Hey Jude” and wistful voiceover narration (from a rarely better Alec Baldwin), it provided succinct but revealing mini-portraits of each member of the Tenenbaum family as it toured 111 Archer Avenue, their enormous, meticulously designed New York brownstone (as much of a character as its inhabitants), informing us of their rise, decline and subsequent fracture, all in the space of a few minutes.

From there, the story picks up twenty-two years later. Banished and broke patriarch Royal Tenenbaum (Gene Hackman) longs to “make up for lost time” with the family he neglected, only to discover how much everyone has changed. His estranged wife, archaeologist Etheline (Anjelica Huston) is now engaged to Henry Sherman (Danny Glover), a respectable accountant—he’s “everything Royal is not,” (as Royal himself notes late in the film.) Uptight, eldest son Chas (Ben Stiller) is an entrepreneur traumatized over the recent death of his wife. Overprotective of his two pint-sized-versions-of-himself sons, Ari and Uzi, he moves them back into the Tenenbaum home. Adopted, eternally disaffected middle child Margot (Gwyneth Paltrow), a failed playwright, and shattered youngest son Richie (Luke Wilson), a former tennis pro, also return. Margot is stuck in a loveless marriage to psychologist Raleigh St. Clair (a somewhat dour Bill Murray) and is cheating on him with Richie’s childhood friend, novelist Eli Cash (Owen Wilson), while Richie is secretly in love with her. With the aid of butler/sidekick Pagoda (Kumar Pallana), Royal schemes to return to 111 Archer Avenue and win back everyone he’s alienated.

The film weaves together a tapestry exploring familial relations made relatable by Anderson’s quirky but ultimately compassionate sensibility. Structured like a novel (the opening shot imagines the film as a well-worn book being checked out of the library) and divided into chapters, it’s also bursting at the seams with literary references and allusions. For instance, most of the characters have either written books (from Margot’s plays to Henry’s Accounting For Everything) or, in Richie’s case, have appeared on a magazine cover. The film’s design also suggests a comic strip come to life (it’s no coincidence that the Peanuts standard “Christmas Time Is Here” plays in a scene having nothing to do with that holiday.) Virtually every character is cloaked a requisite costume of sorts that rarely changes throughout: Richie’s tennis shirt and headband, Henry’s blue blazer and bow tie, Chas’ red Adidas track suit and the identical, miniature versions his sons wear. The immaculately storyboarded interior sets with their deep pink walls and insane attention to detail (the childhood drawings on Richie’s bedroom walls (created by Anderson’s brother Eric), the walk-in closet overflowing with board games) are also obviously exaggerated. Many shots even feature someone tightly framed through a window, peering at the outside world.

Royal ponders his future.

Although it had a relatively large budget (twice that of Rushmore), a high-profile ensemble cast (supposedly, Hackman’s and Huston’s parts were written with them in mind) and a far wider, more ambitious scope, it was, at that time, still instantly recognizable as a Wes Anderson film.  Like the previous two, it featured credits entirely done in Futura Bold typeface, a whimsical musical score from former Devo member Mark Mothersbaugh, Anderson stock players such as Pallana, Seymour Cassel (as Dusty, the elevator operator-cum-doctor) and Andrew Wilson (Luke and Owen’s older brother), a cameo from the director himself (as the tennis announcer) and a final, reflective shot that’s filmed in slow-motion. Viewers could also look out for various motifs and in-jokes: the number of Tenenbaums wearing a piece of pale pink clothing at any given moment, the particular instrument on the soundtrack most prominent during Margot’s scenes, the cameo appearance (as a paramedic) by one Brian Tenenbaum, a real-life college friend of Anderson’s.

For all its self-aware cleverness, off-the-wall sight gags, and excessive stylization, The Royal Tenenbaums is really a sweet, rather poignant film that resonates more profoundly with each viewing. Once you’ve absorbed such showy (but dazzling) moments as a detective’s clipped rundown to Raleigh and Richie of Margot’s past loves (furiously edited to The Ramones’ “Judy is a Punk”), you’re left with essentially a kindhearted (if occasionally side-splitting) tale of redemption. Marvel at the brilliant long take where Royal tells Etheline he’s dying and note how Huston’s reaction continually shifts from disgust and surprise to concern, grief and rage without missing a beat. Observe how Anderson often tempers melancholy with hilarity without obscuring either tone (e.g., the Gypsy Cab that appears just in time as Margot walks out on Raleigh.) Pay attention to subtle details like how Royal finally refers to Margot not as “my adopted daughter”, but simply, “my daughter” in the ice cream parlor. Take in the “Sparkplug Minuet” scene late in the film, where the camera tracks from one group of characters to another along the street outside 111 Archer Avenue and notice the obvious affection and care Anderson has for each of them. At one point, poor, yearning, forever-the-outsider Eli gently says, “I always wanted to be a Tenenbaum.” Royal replies (mostly to himself), “Me, too,” and you just want to join him in unison.

I pause to think what life would be like had I emulated Kael and never bothered to give The Royal Tenenbaums (or anything else) a second viewing. I might remember it fondly the way I do, say, In The Bedroom or The Man Who Wasn’t There (to name two other films from that time I’ve never rewatched.) If I hadn’t seen it again, perhaps I wouldn’t have given subsequent Anderson films like the aforementioned The Grand Budapest Hotel or Tenenbaums’ even more ambitious and widely misunderstood follow-up The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou (2004) a second chance. With the exception of his most recent work (2020’s The French Dispatch), I’ve seen all of Anderson’s movies more than once and each rewatch has yielded similar results. Tenenbaums remains my favorite, perhaps due to when I saw it and that process of being able to see deeper into it on additional viewings, but he has other works that come close, like Grand Budapest, 2012’s Moonrise Kingdom and of course Rushmore, forever his breakthrough film.

We revisit works for the pleasure they provide. Occasionally, we also have a sixth sense, an inclination that there’s more to glean from them than we can discern from a single viewing. The best films (and books, and albums etc.) are ones that gradually insert themselves into our lives and by extension, our subconsciousness. Their dialogue, visual design, narratives and richly-drawn characters become part of us whether, in this case, we identify more strongly with well-meaning asshole Royal or guilt-ridden, tortured Richie. Revisit them enough and they become touchstones raising the bar for what we expect and hope from every new (and in some cases, old) movie we watch.

Essay #13 of 24 Frames.

Go back to #12: Mulholland Drive.

Go ahead to #14: What Time Is It There?

24 Frames: Mulholland Drive

Chris KriofskeLeave a comment

Why film? As I watch one movie after another, I seldom pause to consider such a question. I suppose this project is an attempt to track my own relationship with film, how it grew from a pastime of simply viewing them for entertainment to a full flower of talking, thinking about and obsessing over them. Rarely does a week pass where I haven’t watched a single film (or more likely four or five.)

What initially drew me to studying film was its invitation to view and partake in cultures and perspectives outside my own. It’s unlikely I’ll ever spend much time in or even visit Russia, but I can glean various perspectives of what Russia is like through the films of Sergei Eisenstein, Andrei Tarkovsky and Andrey Zvyagintsev (to name three great directors from three wholly different eras.) Granted, I’ll never know it as well as the places I’ve lived and spent ample time in, but even just familiarizing myself with Russian movies (and those of other countries from Finland to Burkina Faso), I feel my mindset expanded.

Culture aside, film can be limitless in its approach—just think of all the disparate (and in some cases, intersecting) worlds a film can contain according to genre, tone, style and structure. Over ten days at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic two years ago, I watched a trashy camp classic (Valley Of The Dolls), a pioneering experimental/fake documentary made around the same time (David Holzman’s Diary), a Reagan-era, female-directed French musical (Golden Eighties), the low-budget indie debut from Canadian auteur Atom Egoyan (Next of Kin), a popular “ripped from the tabloids” doc from a decade ago (The Queen of Versailles), peak early 90s New Queer Cinema (The Living End) and, from two years before that, Bertolucci’s adaptation of the Paul Bowles novel The Sheltering Sky—there you have it, seven distinct ways of seeing out of hundreds of thousands available to rent or stream.

The Sheltering Sky

Even the pre-streaming age afforded such possibilities if less access and convenience than we’re now accustomed to. As the 1990s gave way to a new century, I kept at it, practically organizing my own life around what I could see in theatres, and then what I could rent or borrow to watch at home. I continued perceiving film as a virtual global passport of sorts, but something else shifted. The idea that cinema not only offered many things to see around the world but also new ways of seeing the world regardless of location registered back in grad school when I first watched bold, wholly original takes on contemporary life such as Safe. I kept this in mind when picking out new movies to see. Those making the most instant and lasting impressions adhered to this notion of cinema as a lens offering viewpoints that were recognizable (to a degree) but also fresh and illuminating in ways that I’d never devise on my own.

Writing about Beau Travail, I championed 1999 as a consensus-supported banner year for film; in my personal view, 2001 nearly surpasses it, especially in the realms of indie and world cinema. Ghost World, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, In The Bedroom, Memento, Waking Life, Amelie, Gosford Park, Donnie Darko—not too shabby a selection (and I’ve left out some titles I might devote to future entries here.) Adding delayed domestic releases from the previous year like In The Mood For Love and Our Song only enhances this notion of 2001 as another all-timer for cinema.

Naturally, the year carries a weightier association in the collective memory. Even though my spreadsheet of watched films by date only goes back to 2004, I still recall the last film I saw in a theatre before 9/11: a restored print of Godard’s Band of Outsiders at the Brattle in Harvard Square with a solid Saturday night crowd. Francois Ozon’s slow-burn psychological thriller Under The Sand at the Arlington Capitol was what I first saw in a cinema afterwards, three Saturdays later. It’s no stretch in noting how much the world changed between those two screenings and how coincidentally those two titles represent the collective mood before and after (particularly the Ozon film with its gloomy undertones and quiet, numbing sense of dread.)

Under The Sand

Exactly two weeks after Under The Sand, I saw Mulholland Drive on its opening weekend at the Coolidge Corner Theatre in Brookline. At this point, I appreciated director David Lynch but felt no strong passion for his work. I’d viewed The Elephant Man in a high school class (way over my head at the time); as an adult, I’d watched Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me; the former had unnerved me without necessarily transcending that feeling, while the latter left me cold (granted, I hadn’t seen a single episode of the series at that point! Why I watched this prequel at all is best saved for another essay.) And yet, I’d also seen The Straight Story, which did move me with its deceptively simple narrative and in how it captured the unlikely beauty of a region (rural Iowa and Wisconsin) I’m familiar with—never mind that it’s Lynch’s most atypical work (rated G and produced and distributed by Disney!)

Mulholland Drive arrived in theaters with no shortage of hype. Originally conceived as a 90-minute television pilot for ABC (home of Twin Peaks) in 1999, it was rejected by the network. Rather than leave it behind, Lynch refashioned it into a film, securing funding from Canal+ and shooting additional footage. The 146-minute feature version premiered at Cannes in May 2001 to critical acclaim and Lynch tied with the Coen Brothers’ The Man Who Wasn’t There for Best Director (Nanni Moretti’s comparatively forgotten The Son’s Room won top prize, the Palme d’Or.) By its theatrical release, growing buzz around the film positioned it as one of the year’s most anticipated arthouse attractions.

A film lives up to such lofty expectations (such as the swaggering, singular Hedwig and the Angry Inch) just as often as it does not (to pick an extreme example, all I wanted to do was take a dozen Silkwood showers after feeling thoroughly pummeled by Requiem For A Dream.) My first viewing of Mulholland Drive was closer to that of Hedwig, but with some reservations. I wrote in my journal (this was still pre-blog) of walking away from it feeling “entranced” (a word I surely overused in my twenties) and given my overall impression of Lynch’s back catalog, a little surprised. I described it as “a world of dreams” populated by characters that were less Twin Peaks caricatures (remember, I hadn’t seen the series yet) but more “grounded and fragile.” However, I couldn’t love it due to its unusual structure and inexplicable twists. I suspect I was far from alone in this, as I’ve discussed the film with numerous people over the years who similarly find Lynch’s tendency to leave crucial things open and unexplained a stumbling block if not a reason for outright disliking it.

Still, that initial watch of Mulholland Drive, perhaps enhanced by a continual string of accolades (like Beau Travail the year before, it topped the Village Voice Film Critics poll) stayed with me. I made room for it on my own year-end top ten film list at #9, right between Our Song and The Man Who Wasn’t There. When it hit the then-second run Somerville Theatre in early January, I saw it again. In that journal entry, I wrote, “It’s a film that begs to be seen more than once” before noting how much funnier it was the second time, the half-filled theater often reacting with belly laughs (only to be subsumed by some rather nervous laughter in the brain-melting last half hour.) Whereas I kept trying to figure out what the hell was going on after that first viewing, now I could come up with a few ambitious (if probably insufficient) theories, having noticed reoccurring objects and parallels drawn between characters and situations.

No matter how much I worked on cracking the film’s narrative code, its mystery (as well as its mastery) left me captivated (to use a slightly better word than “entranced”.) I bought the DVD when it came out months later and re-watched it a handful of times before seeing it again on the big screen at the Coolidge in 2006. When I redid my best of 2001 list a few years later, it wound up at #2. In 2012, it secured a place on my list of ten favorite all-time films inspired by the once-every-decade Sound and Sight poll (as did Beau Travail and McCabe & Ms. Miller.) Just last year in a job interview when referencing my professional and academic background in cinema, I was asked (for a non-film related position, I might add) what my favorite movie was: Mulholland Drive popped in my head before anything else.

I’m not going to make that particular case for it here; to name a single favorite film out of the thousands I’ve seen is increasingly an impossible task. Neither will I fully go through it scene by scene given limitations of time and space and my readers’ patience. However, I have to address the narrative and will do so starting at the very beginning. To this day, I struggle explaining why I feel a sensation akin to goose bumps upon just hearing the opening swing-band music as images blur and skitter across the screen. Soon enough, they settle on a tableau resembling those Louis Prima-scored Gap commercials from the late ‘90s but with slightly older and decidedly amateurish dancers, not to mention all those overlapping silhouettes. As jarring and exciting as any beginning, it barely has anything to do with the rest of the film; only over two hours later does one character (whose visage flashes over the action at the scene’s conclusion) mention once having won a dance competition. Is that what the opening scene depicts, or is it a dream?

In the film’s grander scope, such a question is irrelevant. Mulholland Drive might be the ultimate movie gathering power predominantly from feels rather than plot. Still, one must consider that latter. The narrative throughline of Betty (Naomi Watts), a blonde, fresh-faced aspiring actress from Podunk, Canada apartment-sitting for her Aunt Ruth in Hollywood and her relationship with Rita (Laura Harring), the mysterious brunette car accident survivor/amnesiac she finds squatting there easily draws one in. As compelling a mystery as anything featuring Nancy Drew or Jessica Fletcher, it’s Lynch as his most outwardly engaging and tender.

Alas, as much as it, well, drives Mulholland Drive, it serves as only a part of its universe. The film’s first half often plays like the TV pilot it was conceived as, given to multiple storylines that in a feature context resemble planted seeds meant to develop into full-grown branches in subsequent episodes: the man (Patrick Fishler) recounting his nightmare to another man at Winkie’s, a Denny’s-esque diner where the dream took place; a ropey hit man (Mark Pellegrino) whose attempted mark goes horribly and absurdly awry; Adam, a hotshot filmmaker (Justin Theroux) whom, in a closed-door boardroom is forced by mafioso (one of ’em played by longtime Lynch collaborator/scorer Angelo Badalamenti!) to cast a particular actress as the lead in his next picture, declaring upon her sight, “This is the girl.” That last thread actually develops further as Adam endures and suffers various foibles, only for his story to briefly merge with Betty’s as she visits his film shoot directly after an audition where, performing an intense scene with an older actor (played by Chad Everett!), both she and Watts reveal what skilled actresses they are.

The Betty-and-Rita story increasingly takes up more screen time as the film lingers past the 90-minute mark until they find a key to open the blue box in Rita’s purse. As Rita unlocks and opens it, the camera seems to dive into its darkness; on the other side, everything has abruptly shifted. Watts is now Diane, whose name earlier bred a spark of familiarity in Rita, leading her and Betty to scope out Diane’s drab apartment only to find her decaying corpse lying in bed. Watts-as-Diane, disheveled, glumly shuffling around her shitty bungalow is nearly the polar opposite of Watts-as-Betty, so cheerful even her pink sweater literally sparkled with sequins. Harring also reappears, only now called Camilla, a successful actress who has been helping Diane get bit parts. Camilla (also name of the “This is the girl” actress) is in a relationship with Adam, who is still a filmmaker; at a house party they invite Diane to (out of pity, it seems), they introduce her to Coco (Ann Miller—yes, that Ann Miller), whom we previously knew as the manager of Aunt Ruth’s apartment complex; she is now Adam’s mother. It’s all purposely disorienting and as Diane’s mental and emotional instability surges into the red zone and the film ends with her suicide by gunshot, it’s not difficult relating to her madness.

Eat your heart out, Ann Miller.

For years, my most basic interpretation was that everything up until Rita opening the box was Diane’s dream with Betty an idealized version of herself. It’s probably no coincidence that when Betty becomes Diane, the first words heard are “Hey, pretty girl, time to wake up” from The Cowboy, the flat-voiced, Uber-Lynchian figure who ultimately convinced Adam to obey the mafia’s wishes (do we even have time to get into who or what else The Cowboy is?) Going back to my notes after that first watch in 2001, I described the entire film as a dream or a series of dreams dissolving into one another, rather than the opening of the box as a demarcation line between dreams and reality. Those words now startle me, for on my most recent rewatch, they sum up how I currently interpret Mulholland Drive. Given Lynch’s notoriety for refusing to explain anything in his films (no commentary tracks from this guy!), it’s fitting that his greatest work is one of his most enigmatic. He purposely leaves a trail of clues, some of which even match up, but there’s no grand denouement, no rationalization for why Betty becomes Diane—although earlier dialogue such as Betty’s “It’ll be just like the movies—we’ll pretend to be someone else,” or Rita’s anguished cry of “I don’t know who I am” resemble premonitions in retrospect.

Still, when thinking about the film, I always go back to that bizarre swing-dance opening. Whether or not it has anything to do with what follows, it undeniably sets a tone: nebulous and perplexing for sure, but also expectant and positively giddy. Where (and possibly when) in the world are we? The simplest answer (to the former at least) is Los Angeles. Lynch seems to view the city as his medium here, a canvas with space for him to manipulate, paint over and reassemble what’s already there. For instance, he inserts numerous establishing shots panning over the cityscape—in particular, the steel-and-glass-heavy Downtown skyline mostly at night. He just hovers over it all with Badalamenti’s near-ambient, white noise score playing a crucial part. He avoids most recognizable landmarks, instead opting for an anonymity heightening an encroaching dread.

Instead of Grauman’s Chinese Theater or the Hollywood Sign, he renders ordinary, everyday locales as places to remember. Think of those already vaguely recognizable to a viewer of a certain age, like Winkie’s coffee shop or an abandoned drive-in movie theater. In this film’s universe, they’re presented as significant a part of the overall design as Aunt Ruth’s cozy, incredibly well-preserved art deco apartment or Adam’s swanky mansion in the Hollywood Hills. This extends to reoccurring objects such as mirrors, an ashtray and a rotary phone (!) as well as settings that aren’t what they initially appear to be—most notably, the abrupt cut to a tableau of singers decked out in 1950s outfits performing the Connie Stevens song “Sixteen Reasons” in a recording studio. Again, where (and when) are we? As the camera pulls back, we see it’s actually Adam’s film set, an audition for a scene in a Stevens biopic he’s directing—the one he’s being forced to cast a particular lead actress in.

After Betty and Rita’s discovery of Diane’s corpse (which climaxes in a chilling superimposed image of the two of them reacting in horror), most of these locales and objects seem to just melt away, restricting the action to Aunt Ruth’s apartment where Rita begins cutting off her hair to disguise herself until Betty lends her a wig. The two women now look nearly identical, and their relationship soon turns sexual. Then, in the middle of the night (with no explanation), Rita asks Betty to take her to a place revealed as Club Silencio. They sit down in the sparsely attended, dilapidated old theater. A goateed magician takes the mic and delivers a spiel about how “It’s all recorded… it’s an illusion.” He introduces Rebekah Del Rio, who sings Roy Orbison’s “Crying” in Spanish, her tremulous, haunting voice filling the cavernous space like a siren, powerful enough to raise every last hair on your body. She makes it through half the song, her intensity forever rising until she suddenly *drops* to the floor… and the song continues. After all, “It’s all recorded… it’s an illusion.”

Arriving just before Rita opens the box, the Club Silencio scene could be the key to unlocking the film’s allure, if not entirely its logic or purpose. It’s as if everything has been building towards this gorgeous, striking, transcendent, shocking moment where we witness a great performance that’s not entirely truthful. Similarly, the engaging, intriguing stories of Betty and Rita, Adam and Camilla, Diane, Coco and all the rest of these Los Angelenos aren’t entirely truthful or are at least altered to allow for simultaneous truths, none of which are absolute. Mulholland Drive is indeed a panorama for Lynch to fearlessly explore connections between dreams, reality and also the movies (“Why film?”, indeed), not to mention all of the wicked, sublime and terrifying possibilities that surface as they overlap.

Essay #12 of 24 Frames.

Go back to #11: Beau Travail.

Go ahead to #13: The Royal Tenenbaums.

24 Frames: Beau Travail

Chris KriofskeLeave a comment

Finishing graduate school felt like surfacing from a lingering fog. With equal parts liberation and sheer terror, I had gotten my paper and I was free all right, but to do what? I didn’t invest a small fortune in earning a Master’s in Film Studies with any specific career goal in mind. Six months later, I’d learn to adapt and figure something out once I could no longer defer my student loan payments; in the meantime, I fully took advantage of not tying myself down to any structure. Bidding adieu to my formal education meant I could now watch all the films and read all the books I wanted to. No more assignments or syllabi—I had the autonomy (and acquired tools) to forge my own path.

Serendipitously, I completed film school at an extraordinary time for new movies. While 1999 produced its share of high-profile critical stinkers (due to its May release date, Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace ended up my first new movie in a cinema, post-commencement), it’s now considered an above-average year for film akin to 1939 (The Wizard of Oz, Gone With The Wind, Stagecoach), 1967 (The Graduate, Bonnie and Clyde, In The Heat of The Night) or 1974 (Chinatown, The Godfather Part II, Young Frankenstein.) Brian Rafferty’s 2019 book Best. Movie. Year. Ever. made an extensive case for enshrining it; even before the year itself ended, Entertainment Weekly ran a somewhat hyperbolic but enthusiastic cover story titled “1999: The Year That Changed Movies”.

For proof, look no further than to Election, The Straight Story, Being John Malkovich, The Sixth Sense, Magnolia, The Talented Mr. Ripley, Three Kings and All About My Mother. Consider lesser-seen cult pictures such as The Limey, Ratcatcher, The Iron Giant, American Movie, Judy Berlin, Dick, Topsy-Turvy and Jesus’ Son. Don’t forget expert popcorn entertainment like Galaxy Quest, Office Space and South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut. I could even make an argument for films I personally don’t care for (Fight Club, Eyes Wide Shut) that nonetheless were positively received and part of the zeitgeist. Heck, one could even stump for The Blair Witch Project, which I never need see again but can’t ignore the seismic impact it had at the time. (As for that year’s Best Picture Oscar winner, American Beauty, I suspect it’s aged as poorly as most would claim in the Me Too, post-Spacey scandal era, but I might be into revisiting it in maybe another decade.)

It’s difficult to explain why so many important films came out that year. One could look to pre-millennium tension/anticipation, arguing that directors and studios were simply inspired to get this product out before century’s end, but I don’t think that’s all of it. Call it coincidental or a reflection of rapid technological and social change brought on by that newish invention, the Internet or maybe just the optimism of an upwardly mobile era; in any case, 1999 was (by COVID-era standards) a great time to be alive and a bountiful year for cinema. I took advantage of it, seeing as many new films as an impoverished 24-year-old could afford. Whether checking out new stuff at Kendall Square Cinema, Coolidge Corner Theatre and the now long-gone Nickelodeon near BU or older gems at the Brattle, Harvard Film Archive and Museum of Fine Arts, I kept up with most notable mainstream and arthouse titles, even if I had to wait until a few reached the then-second run Somerville Theatre or video stores (I’ve only seen The Matrix once, stoned at a friend’s apartment.)

No longer subject to required viewing, I paid more attention to new films than I had as a student, even making my first year-end top ten list in 2000 (although I could’ve easily done one for 1999.) Actually, it included a few titles technically from 1999 that didn’t receive a local theatrical release until well into the new year: Abbas Kiarostami’s The Wind Will Carry Us (#2), Eric Mendelsohn’s now-long-unavailable and mostly forgotten Judy Berlin (#3, and also the iconic Madeline Kahn’s final film) and Zhang Yimou’s Not One Less (#7) are all copyrighted 1999 but were first accessible to most American audiences the next year. This is a perennial issue for the local or amateur critic: Is Wong Kar Wai’s In The Mood For Love the best picture of 2000 or should I still consider it for my 2001 list, for I couldn’t possibly see it in Boston until March of that year?

The number one film on my 2000 list falls under the same conundrum: it first played Boston in June of said year although it premiered at the Venice Film Festival the previous September; its first domestic screening was at Sundance in January. This sort of delayed release cycle is particularly vexing when making a best-of decade list: does it belong in the 1990s or, due to such circumstances, qualify as a 2000s-eligible film? These are the kinds of questions that spark debate and keep film geeks like myself up at night, but no matter: Beau Travail, the fifth feature from French director Claire Denis, is, depending on what criteria I use, my top film of 2000 or 1999 or one of my favorites from the 90s or the 00s.

Born in Paris, 1946, Denis grew up in colonial French Africa due to her father’s work as a civil servant. Her first feature, Chocolat (1988) is purportedly influenced by her childhood as it centers on a French woman looking back to her childhood in French Cameroon and the bond she developed as a ten-year-old with Protée (Isaac de Bankolé), her family’s African servant. Denis’ next three narrative features all either focus on Africans living in France or include at least one significant character of that persuasion. None of these films found as much of an American audience as Chocolat but they marked an artistic progression as Denis subverted other genres (the thriller in 1994’s I Can’t Sleep) and took on such unlikely subjects as amateur cockfighting (1990’s No Fear, No Die.)

Good word of mouth from critics I read such as Jonathan Rosenbaum and J. Hoberman gradually accumulated in the months between Beau Travail’s Sundance premiere and domestic theatrical release. They raved about the performances, the conceptual savvy of interpolating Herman Melville’s Billy Budd and its brilliant cinematography among other facets. Most significant, though, was how Denis assembled it all into a complete work of art that was referential and recognizable but also something original and bold. You can bet I bought a ticket to see it on the Coolidge’s main screen opening weekend. In my estimation, it lived up to all the hype even if I didn’t fully understand everything it was trying to do—the narrative flashback structure likely went over my head during that first viewing. Really, it was how nearly overstimulated yet blissfully satiated I felt while piecing together the images and sounds onscreen, the ways they informed and occasionally contrasted against each other and how tension accumulated throughout, reaching a breaking point only to find its unlikely release at the end.

Beau Travail (which roughly translates in English as “Good Work”) finds Denis returning to the continent of her youth, following an ethnically diverse troop of the French Foreign Legion in Djibouti, a country in the Horn of Africa bordering the Red Sea. Mostly told in flashback, the film’s POV is of Galoup (Denis Lavant) in the present day from his tiny, sparse apartment in Marseille. Pushing 40, Galoup is a Legion lifer; in Djibouti, he was in charge of a section of a dozen legionnaires while also serving under his mentor, Commandant Bruno Forestier (Michel Subor, who played an identically named character (minus the title) in Jean-Luc Godard’s Le Petit Soldat decades before.) Galoup spends his days in the desert leading his section in training exercises such as aggressive calisthenics and challenging obstacle courses (like jumping over hurdles and fences and in and out of deep pits.) At night, he and his men visit the closest village’s chintzy but well-attended disco, dancing with and romancing the local women. 

This would seem a conflict-free existence, stationed on a remote edge of the world during peacetime. However, the arrival of a young recruit Gilles Sentain (Grégoire Colin) upsets the fine balance Galoup has indefinitely maintained. At once, he’s suspicious of the tall, charming, handsome-verging-on-gawky Sentain and the attention everyone pays him. Galoup also admits to some jealousy: “Sentain seduced everyone; he attracted stares,” he reminisces from Marseille without entirely clarifying why this bothered him so much. Did Sentain’s being the center of attention simply shift focus and authority away from him? Perhaps something deeper was festering, his envy a manifestation of a contained desire. Within this troop, it wouldn’t be without precedent. When Sentain later informs Forestier, “I was found in a stairwell” regarding his provenance, the Commandant responds, “Well, at least it was a nice find.”

It’s tempting to paint Galoup and Forestier as repressed homosexuals and leave it at that, but I don’t believe that’s entirely what Denis was going for here. Sure, she physically depicts the often-shirtless young male legionnaires as god-like specimens—one training exercise even consists of them in groups of two, violently “hugging” each other repeatedly as a means of attack (or maybe saving the other from harm?) On first viewing, I thought it was one of the gayest things I’d ever seen onscreen. Perhaps if a gay man such as Kenneth Anger or Derek Jarman had made the film, then such homoeroticism would be undeniable. As a woman, however, Denis suggests other interpretations. The body positivity of an all-male principal cast may be homoerotic by default, but with Denis at the helm, one also can consider the female gaze—a radical concept in itself because we simply don’t see it anywhere nearly as often as its male equivalent.

Whether Galoup really wants to fuck Sentain is also less relevant than the disruption of power the film explores as an adaptation of Billy Budd. In Melville’s novella, the young, titular character, a sailor, strikes and kills an officer who has falsely accused him of mutiny. In Beau Travail, the Budd figure (Sentain) hits the officer (Galoup) after the latter severely punishes another soldier for a petty offense and yet, he does not kill him. Instead, Galoup reverses the table when he reprimands Sentain by dropping him off in the middle of the desert with a faulty compass, essentially leaving him to die. When found out, Galoup is discharged from the Legion and shipped back to Marseille, thoroughly stripped from the purpose sustaining his identity and life.

It’s a story ripe for Greek tragedy, tracking Galoup’s hubris, his inability to adapt or see beyond the prescribed duties and goals he’s set for himself and how one poor decision bites him in the ass and essentially ruins life as he sees it. Yet little about Beau Travail feels heavy-handed or excessively downbeat, not even with the ostentatious strains of Benjamin Britten’s Billy Budd opera woven throughout the soundtrack. In fact, that grandiosity becomes absurd in this context as it plays over men training to fight in a nonexistent war—men often rendered as insignificant specks in an extreme, beautiful, cruel landscape on an edge of the world, teeming with wide swatches of deep blue skies, sparkling, cerulean seas and a whole lot of nothing. This sort of irony runs rampant through the film but at an elevated, artful level. We’re both encouraged to register the utter pointlessness of a military in peacetime but also understand what it means, what palpable value it holds for souls like Galoup who don’t care to know anything else.

If Denis’ longtime cinematographer Agnes Godard is responsible for the film’s spectacular look (nearly each frame stuns in its use of mise en scene and/or negative space), then Lavant gives Beau Travail its soul—not an easy proposition since Galoup is such an internal, closed-off figure. Best known for a trio of films made with director Leos Carax (The Lovers On The Bridge), Levant, with his short, wiry frame and pockmarked face already cut a distinctive figure only enhanced by his acrobatic approach and kinetic fury. Since Galoup is nearly the opposite of all that, Levant’s performance exhibits a fascinating duality. Even as he’s all decorum and procedure on the outside, his interior monologue (the decision for him to narrate in voiceover is an effective one) has more the demeanor of a boiling yet closed-off teakettle. Upon first seeing Sentain, he says, “I felt something vague and menacing take hold of me.” Later, rather menacingly backlit against a bonfire, he notes to himself, “We all have a trashcan deep within.” One senses that Galoup’s own can is fairly cavernous, full of so many things he can’t dare openly express or act upon.

When he does act, it goes all wrong. Upon his banishment to Marseille, he retells the story of how he got there in his mind while doing what he can to adhere to the sort of highly structured regiment the Legion provided and required. He meticulously makes his bed with hospital/military corners and painstakingly irons his dress shirt as if preparing a Papal garment. He lies down on that flawlessly made bed, a gun in hand across his stomach. One can easily guess his intent, to end a life that has no longer carries any purpose. Another filmmaker might’ve concluded with him pulling the trigger, or a quick cut to black just before. Instead, as the camera captures the small pulse of his bicep, music fades in from the background—Corona’s Eurodance diva house hit “The Rhythm of The Night” from a few years before, its big beat thumping along with Galoup’s pulse.

Then, a cut—not to black, but to Galoup standing alone in a familiar location, the chintzy Djibouti village nightclub. He’s cladded in a black dress shirt, a cigarette dangling from his fingers. He stands still, almost nonchalant against a diagonally mirrored wall adorned with colored blinking lights. The Corona song plays loudly as Galoup takes a few steps, walking around the dancefloor as if scoping out the scene. The camera occasionally moves with him but does not cut. In time, he does a little twirl, reacting to the energetic beat and the music’s joie de vivre. Each movement he makes is deliberate yet feels effortless. Eventually, he almost organically transforms into a whirling dervish, dancing as fast as he can, like a man on fire embracing the flames as they consume him. After a cut to black, with the film’s ensemble cast names appearing one by one on a black screen, we return to Galoup, standing still again before immediately diving back into his frenzy, rolling around on the floor, in and out of the frame.

It’s one of the most astonishing endings in cinema—as entirely unexpected and abstract as anything by Tarkovsky or Kiarostami but a whole lot more fun. Is dancing on his own in an empty nightclub Galoup’s final vision before his death, or might it be his ideal afterlife? We’ll never know for sure; what matters is how it serves as a means for him to release all the tension, repression, guilt, desire, irritation, madness, etc. that he had built up over a lifetime. Suddenly, it makes perfect sense to cast Levant as such a constipated soul if he’s given this climax, this chance to burn it all off onscreen not through self-harm or acting out against another body but in a mad tango with himself on the dancefloor. It may be a fantasy, but it also transcends the idea of a fantasy sequence for how it flips the switch on Galoup—look who was hiding in plain sight all this time. His life is still tragic, for he can only achieve such transcendence alone. For Denis to share it with and in doing so completely take us by surprise, however, is where Beau Travail, like many other films from that era on the cusp of two centuries attains its singularity.

Essay #11 of 24 Frames.

Go back to #10: Close-Up.

Go ahead to #12: Mulholland Drive.