"The Hobbit: The Desolation Of Smaug"

Well, it has happened. After the the masterful “Lord Of The Rings” film trilogy and the flawed but pleasant “An Unexpected Journey”, Peter Jackson has finally delivered the first bad film of the franchise. “The Desolation Of Smaug” falls prey to the vices that plagued the “Pirates Of The Caribbean” sequels and worsens its case by combining them with esthetic faults that Jackson had already hinted at in his disappointing adaptation of The Lovely Bones and some scenes of his otherwise solid “King Kong” remake, but are aggravated here in a way that almost reaches George Lucas-like proportions.

When we last left Bilbo (Martin Freeman), Gandalf (Ian McKellen) and their dwarven companions, they were half-way on their way to the Misty Mountains, where the evil dragon Smaug (Benedict Cumberbatch) devastated their kingdom and cast them from their homes. Amidst the mountain of gold Smaug rests upon, the steely dwarven leader Thorin (Richard Armitage) seeks one gem – the Arkenstone, the stone of his forefathers that shall restore his power to unite all dwarf tribes under his command and reclaim their land.

Although I have not read any of Tolkien’s books, I do know that Jackson and his co-screenwriters made the ambitious choice of not only faithfully adapting “The Hobbit” but of making a full prequel trilogy that would attach the dwarves’ quest to the slow yet imminent return of Sauron and the gathering of evil at his service. An ambitious and very risky decision that was met with justified fear and puzzlement from fans. “An Unexpected Journey” – in spite of its occasionally slow pace, particularly in its beginning – did a very good job of balancing the hopefulness of the dwarves’ daring quest with a sense of impending doom ignored by all but Gandalf and Galadriel. In addition, the fate of the old dwarven kingdom and Thorin’s backstory were woven in to give a greater sense of meaning to their quest, as well as a recurring antagonist in the form of Thorin’s old nemesis Azog (Manu Bennett), an Orc now in the service of Sauron.

Leaving An Unexpected Journey, I was hoping that the screenwriting team could stay as even-handed for the duration of the trilogy. Alas, it was not to be. The problem starts as soon as the dwarves are rescued from a spider attack by wood-elves of Mirkwood who then capture them as trespassers. Among these elves is none other than Legolas (Orlando Bloom), the least interesting member of the Fellowship of the Ring, discovered here to be the son of Mirkwood’s king, Thranduil (Lee Pace). He is accompanied by Tauriel (Evangeline Lilly), a character created specifically for the film in order to provide a prominent female character in what would otherwise be an all-male film. While I respect the sentiment behind that decision and Evangeline Lilly herself does a serviceable job, Tauriel unfortunately becomes one of the many elements that end up drowning the story in subplots.

You see, Tauriel is given exactly two purposes: To help the Hobbits kill Orcs with Legolas and pad the film with a love triangle comprised of herself, Legolas and a dwarf named Kili whom she rescued from a spider.

While none of films in the “Lord Of The Rings” trilogy are exceptionally romantic, the relationship between Aragorn and Arwen, and particularly Eowyn’s unrequited love for Aragorn, was handled in a way that evoked courtly love without excessive sentimentalism or purple prose, and served the characters without weighing down the plot. Aragorn and Arwen’s love not only deepened their characters, it represented the future imperiled by Sauron’s forces. A future in which, as Elrond showed in his sublime speech in “The Two Towers”, life and happiness would still be outrun in time by death and grief, but a future nevertheless worth fighting for, on the mere basis of its existence.

The romance in this film however, without inducing Padmé/Anakin levels of cringes, is quite bad. Kili and Tauriel share only two scenes together and chemistry in neither of them. Their lines do not help either. Here’s an actual dialogue sample, as the dwarves are each searched and locked into cells after their capture:

-          Kili: Aren’t you going to search me? I could have anything down my trousers.

-          Tauriel: Or nothing.

Upon hearing that exchange, my heart sank. Never would I have expected the Middle-Earth film franchise to contain sexual double-entendres that even Roger Moore’s James Bond would have dismissed.

But more importantly, the Kili/Tauriel/Legolas love triangle has none of the subtext that gave Arwen and Aragorn’s relationship weight. Whereas Aragorn was Thorin’s equal as a destined leader of men, Kili is but one of his many followers, a character with no particularly outstanding trait, whose name I would not have remembered if it weren’t for this subplot. There is no justification for the inclusion of this subplot whatsoever and thus, as their role is sadly defined by its inclusion, none for the inclusion of Tauriel or Legolas either.

Had Tauriel and Legolas been left out altogether, the film would run more smoothly and would be improved for it. Chief among the improvements would be the subsequent scenes involving Laketown, and the character of Bard (Luke Evans), descendant of Girion, the man who defended Dale in vain against Smaug during his devastation of the place. The character has much potential, but it is undone by his submission to the avalanche of subplots caused by Kili’s injury, the pursuit of the orcs and Tauriel and Legolas’s pursuit of them. Also a collateral damage in this rush of events is the setting of Laketown itself, whose culture – and greedy Master played by a somewhat incongruous Stephen Fry – we only have fleeting glimpses of.

As if that wasn’t enough, Gandalf decides early in the film to leave the party in order to go to Dol Guldur to distract Sauron’s forces and delay his inevitable return. Had Kili, Tauriel and the orcs been out of the picture, this subplot would command more attention and its ominousness would be better perceivd. As it stands, mired between far less relevant side-stories, one feels deprived of a much better film.

The screenplay is sadly not the only thing that bogs down the viewer’s experience. In “An Unexpected Journey”, I had felt reservation towards Peter Jackson’s decisions to brighten the lighting and colour scheme and motion-capture his orcs and goblins with CGI rather than apply heavy make-up on his actors and extras. The result sometimes felt like watching a spectacular video game rather than a film, quite different from the visceral experience provided by real actors and stuntspeople in the original trilogy. “The Desolation Of Smaug” turns my reservation into outright rejection.

Never has the world of Middle-Earth looked so artificial, thanks partly to a 48fps format that accelerates every movement and every scene to the point of making them hard to spatialize, and partly to gaudy bright lighting and an overreliance on CGI over practical effects that makes the film resemble a Frankensteinian mixture of soap opera, video game and Lolita Lempicka perfume commercial.

When they’re not artificial and cartoonish, the fight scenes are shot closely and edited in a manner that, in an 48fps format, makes them blur past the eyes from shot to shot without any time to pause and admire. The 3D worsens it by clogging the foreground with constant objects and people. Only too rarely can you take in New Zealand’s gorgeous scenery, as you are either blinded by the bright orange sun or trying to figure out the scene’s topography.

Peter Jackson overkills his action scenes by making his characters jump from one scenery element to the next without the grace and seamlessness Steven Spielberg displayed in “The Adventures Of Tintin: The Secret Of The Unicorn”. This is most evident in the final action scene involving Smaug chasing Bilbo and the dwarves. The unceasing overflow of movement prevents immersion in favour of sensory overload. By the time the film was over, I had a headache.

It’s all the more of a shame since that particular scene comes right after the best one in the film, in which Bilbo tries to sneak into Smaug’s chamber to steal the Arkenstone but accidentally wakes the sleeping dragon and tries to distract him with flattery and pretense of stupidity. It’s an interesting battle of wits compounded by the contrast between the size and demeanour of the two characters. David against Goliath, with his wits as a substitute for a sling.

I can only hope that after this particularly long and uncomfortable bridge, the “Hobbit” trilogy can come to a close with a film that recaptures both “An Unexpected Journey”’s balance of plot threads and the original trilogy’s esthetic authenticity. I hope Peter Jackson watches his previous films – not just the “Lord Of The Rings” but also his marvellous zombie comedy “Braindead” – and realizes how real they felt in comparison to the increasing academicism he has been displaying for the past seven years or so. Above all, I sincerely hope the 48fps fad does not leave this trilogy’s gates and that 3D be used only to enhance the senses rather than numb them. Cinema deserve better than to become just another soldier taking part in the daily assault on the senses we experience.

"Snowpiercer"

Based on a French comic book by Jacques Lob and Jean-Marc Rochette, “Snowpiercer” marks South Korean director Bong Joon-Ho’s first English-language film, after receiving international acclaim for his monster movie “The Host” and his crime drama “Mother” – neither of which I have yet seen, though I intend to do so promptly.

At their best, post-apocalyptic works express contemporary fears about the state of the world while also using the scenario to explore the nature of man through the way different characters react to it. “Snowpiercer” only uses the former as its setting – a global ice age provoked by a disastrous attempt to quell global warming by releasing a cooling gas in the atmosphere – and does not go any further. Cramming a population of survivors from multiple nationalities and cultures into a train’s restricted space could provide for an observation on the kind of society that would evolve from forcing people of such different cultures, values and attitudes to live together in order to survive. But it appears neither Bong Joon-Ho nor the original writers were interested in potentially controversial material. Thus the more essential aspect of any post-apocalyptic work – examining human nature – is reduced to tired dystopian satire of class divide, smiling totalitarianism and cult of personality – in this case, that of the train’s all-powerful designer Wilford (Ed Harris), worshipped as the prophet of the deity that is the Engine.

The totalitarian system keeping the lower classes in the tail section is embodied by two sub-Umbridge female figures: Tilda Swinton’s grotesque Yorkshire-accented Mason and Alison Pill’s sugary schoolteacher/indoctrinator. Mason’s introduction – punishing a mutineer by sticking his arm out of a hole until it gets frostbitten, all while lecturing the crowd like a high-strung headmistress – gets the point across efficiently, her character’s colorful personality and clothing sticks out amongst the general grimness in a way that is both eerie and darkly comical. Unfortunately, her later appearances overplay the comical aspect too much, particularly in the midst of grueling action scenes. The same can be said of the entire scene in which Alison Pill indoctrinates schoolkids in a garish yellow classroom, just after a particularly brutal action scene. The film’s shifts in tone and genre are jarring, not helped by the dullness of the action scenes. Bong Joon-Ho’s shaky close ups intend to evoke claustrophobia, but create mostly frustration – though they are not nearly as incompetently shot and edited as in Paul Greengrass’s films. He uses the presence of axes and hammers as a pretext for slow motion that becomes repetitive very quickly.

The film’s tonal incoherence and inappropriately-paced plot robs its best moments of their emotional payoff and its characters of their interest. Take the film’s protagonist, Curtis Everett (Chris Evans, displaying more range and depth than I’d expect from him). For most of the film, he serves as the rebels’ rugged leader, giving orders with grim determination. Everything about him, from his demeanor down to his appearance – white skin, brown hair and beard, dirty and bloodied face – suggests the most generic of video game protagonists, as if he had been teleported from a zombie survival game.

Towards the end of the film, as he is about to reach his goal and open the gate to Wilford’s quarters, his request is denied by junkie technician Namgoong Minsu (Song Kang-Ho), who up until now had opened all gates in exchange for the fictional drug Kronol, with the help of his equally addicted daughter Yona (Ko Ah-Sung). Exhausted, Curtis drops to the floor and makes a revelatory monologue explaining his motivations. In this, we learn several things:

1)      During his first days on the tail-section, Curtis and many others resorted to cannibalism to survive.

2)      Curtis knows “babies taste the best”.

3)      Edgar (Jamie Bell), whom Curtis had looked after like a little brother until his death in battle, was one such baby he tried to cannibalize.

4)      Curtis’s mentor Gilliam (John Hurt), the brains behind the rebellion, saved baby Edgar by cutting off his own arm to feed it to Curtis and his fellow cannibals.

These important elements give us information about Curtis and about now-dead companions that invite us to see them – and Curtis’s interactions with them – in a new and different light. But whatever emotional impact it might have had is denied by its lateness. Rather than a natural character development, it comes across as a last-minute attempt at gaining sympathy. Had we learned this information progressively, the result would have felt more natural.

“Snowpiercer” has a lot of good ideas aside, the greatest of which is derived from its primary setting: A journey within a journey, from one end of the train to the other as it continues its permanent ride across the world. In the end, what is the point? To wait patiently until temperatures rise and the world becomes habitable again? How much longer can humanity endure without running out of food? Would it not be preferable to die on one’s own terms instead of being trapped within a constantly moving prison? When its attention is on Nam, whose goal is precisely to take his chances outside, “Snowpiercer” comes close to seriously addressing these questions. Alas, its screenplay chooses to resemble a video game as generic as its protagonist, rather than a more profound one.

"Gravity"

In an article titled “Pulp Affliction: The Sorry State of Film Study”, Boston University film scholar Ray Carney said the following about Hollywood filmmaking:

“The superficiality of the experience is in fact what many viewers love about Hollywood movies. They take you on a ride. You climb into them, turn on the cruise control, and sit back. Not only are the events, characters, and conflicts entirely predictable (most movies are their trailers), but there is nothing really at stake for anyone–actor, director, or viewer–in any of it. It's an amusement park ride–a few programmed thrills and then all is well. When it is over, you leave the theater and go home untouched and unchanged.” (excerpt from http://people.bu.edu/rcarney/carncult/showbiz.shtml)

While I respectfully disagree with Professor Carney’s negative view, I can see exactly where he’s coming from. It is true that many Hollywood films – particularly action films – offer an experience akin to amusement park rides. I just happen not to consider that to necessarily be a bad thing. And Alfonso Cuaròn’s Gravity demonstrates this point better, perhaps, than any film made in the past twenty years – with the possible exception of Christopher Nolan’s Inception. Watching Gravity in 3D is exactly like being on the most exciting of rollercoaster rides.

Or is it really? After all, rollercoaster rides offer much more limited emotional experiences. They do not immerse you in a character’s emotions or story. Even in “narrative” rides like the Phantom Manor in Disneyland, you never lose the slightest awareness that you are a spectator riding in a seat. The ride that comes the closest to achieving this level of engagement is Star Tours, and even rides such as those cannot be considered cinematic, as they rely on moving seats and an automate placed in front of the screen.

From that perspective, Gravity could be considered the missing link between Star Tours and cinema. From the opening 17-minute tracking shot to the final low-angle shot of Sandra Bullock standing triumphantly on the beach, her arms up in the air as she welcomes life back, Gravity does a masterful job of transferring the viewer’s consciousness into its film space and giving them a false but uncannily convincing impression of full immersion.

This is achieved by long, seamless tracking shots that count as some of the most virtuosic ever put to screen: Like most great long tracking shots, they do not draw attention to themselves but gently guide the viewer in an exploration of the film space. The setting in actual space is perhaps the best possible justification for their existence, as there are few obstacles to obstruct the camera’s trajectory. The movements are slow, and at times, Cuaròn’s camera appears to be gliding along with its actors. Not since Stanley Kubrick’s space waltzes in 2001: A Space Odyssey has the impression of space motion been so well conveyed.

Of course the fundamental difference between Kubrick and Cuaròn’s approach lies in Cuaròn’s emotional proximity to the protagonist of Dr. Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock in a career-topping performance), exemplified by the visibility of the electronic displays on her visor in subjective shots. The length and combination of these tracking shots and subjective shots – the former often overlapping into the latter – allow for a detailed exploration of a wide range of human emotions.

And this is where we get to the heart of what Gravity achieves that makes it more than a glorified rollercoaster ride. Cuaròn immerses the viewer into his film with a dual purpose: To excite them and to put them face to face with their own humanity. It is puzzling that the actress tasked with the gist of such a job should be one of the most recognizable film stars in the world. Are movie stars not movie stars precisely because they appear to be more than human to us? Do we not idolize them because we project the best of what we like in ourselves and each other into them? Surely a lesser known actress would be a better cypher, I thought to myself. And yet, in spite of it all, Sandra Bullock succeeds far beyond anything I would have expected. There isn’t a trace of the movie star in her. Never has she been so human, not even in her likeable “everywoman” roles in films like Speed. She runs a rich gamut of emotions with an authenticity reminiscent of Charlize Theron and Gena Rowlands. Fear, panic, resignation, weariness, frustration, ecstasy. She expresses all these emotions and more as if she were experiencing them for the first time.

That’s what I called “the gist” of the transmission of human experience.  The rest of it is taken care of by the wide range of shots covered by Cuaròn – and director of photography Emmanuel Lubezki, whose previous partnership with Cuaròn resulted in his masterpiece Children Of Men, the best film of 2006. Mostly liberated from the shackles of natural and man-made constructions, the camera is free to multiply shot sizes and angles without ever breaking. This is something that few other long takes have achieved, with perhaps the notable exception of the breathtaking opening three-and-a-half minutes of Orson Welles’s Touch Of Evil. This technique, combined with the frequent subjective shots and 3D, alternatively makes the viewer a partner of Dr. Stone or Dr. Stone herself.

The remarkable Bullock-Cuaròn-Lubezki trio helps transcend occasionally facile characterization that sometimes succumbs to rather irritating gender stereotypes. Dr. Stone’s companion for half of the film is Lieutenant Matt Kowalski (George Clooney), a handsome and flirtatious veteran who uses his cool charm and wit to calmly guide Dr. Stone through the long and perilous ride back to the space module after debris send them adrift and kill their coworker Shariff (Paul Sharma). During that ride, he gets Stone to calm down by getting her to talk about her civilian life. It is there that we learn that her post-work routine consists of driving endlessly without purpose, something that she has been doing since the accidental death of her 4 year-old daughter. It’s a very common Hollywood trope that I’m getting a little weary of: A character’s problem is stated and represented by a metaphor – in this case, also a parallel to much of her situation throughout the film – that will get a callback later as she overcomes it – in this case, when she accepts her daughter’s death and uses it not as an excuse to give up and hope to be reunited with her in a hypothetical afterlife (Stone is heavily implied to be an agnostic) but as an impediment to keep on living.

The character of Dr. Stone in and of herself is not a problem. Her backstory in and of itself is not a problem. What is a problem is the way her problem is resolved, and the way her rapport with Lieutenant Kowalski is written. Both are adequately summed up in the film’s worst scene: Alone in a space module whose battery has run down, deprived of Kowalski’s guidance due to his sacrificial death tens of minutes earlier and left with no hope of being rescued, Stone gives up and waits for her death. Suddenly, she hears a knock on the door. An astronaut outside opens it and gets in. Who should it be, but Kowalski, alive and well! With his usual charm and humour, he reminds her of her flight simulations, cheers her up and suggests ways for her to get around her predicament. The camera – which, typically, has been showing this in one shot – pans closer towards Dr. Stone, then back to the left to reveal that this, indeed, was just a hallucination/dream. But it provides Stone with the necessary motivation to keep fighting for her life and win.

The problem of this scene is twofold:

 

-          Firstly, it gives the viewer the feeling of being cheated. Everything they have seen so far has stayed very securely within the boundaries of realism. Seeing a character whose death – in the film’s realistic context – is quite unequivocal, suddenly reappear is a distracting break from immersion. George Clooney (who incidentally pitched that scene as an uncredited script contributor) is a super-famous film star not known for dying in his films, so killing him off in the first half of the film appears quite bold. His apparent survival thus strikes the viewer as a betrayal of that apparent boldness, and the confirmation of his status as a hallucination feels like an attempt to cover up the mistake.

-          Secondly, it plays to the simplistic gender stereotype of the woman as easily succumbing to emotional duress and needing a man’s calm authority and seductive appeal to stabilize her and motivate her. I readily concede that most women are more emotional than men are, but it is precisely because Dr. Stone is an astronaut – one of the most physically and intellectually demanding jobs in the world – that such overreliance on Kowalski’s guidance irritates me.

Yet Gravity succeeds as a human story in spite of these Hollywoodian contrivances and conventions because of Bullock’s never-endingly committed performance and Cuaròn’s careful attention to her character’s emotional journey. It surpasses Danny Boyle’s decent 127 Hours and even Cast Away – Robert Zemeckis’s best film – as a tale of endurance beyond all possible prior experiences. It does not reach the majesty or profundity of 2001: A Space Odyssey or the poetry of Wall-E (though both Stone and Wall-E make similar use of a fire extinguisher), and I confess to not having seen Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris yet. But in its successful transportation of the viewer’s consciousness into a veritable realm of fictional space, I consider it a successful work of art and a possible trailblazer for new possibilities. We may be surprised at the new places Gravity could take cinema.

"The Young And Prodigious T. S. Spivet"

If there’s one aspect of John Hughes’s films that has consistently influenced children’s films or films about children, it’s his tendency to flatter his young audience by writing highly intelligent yet misunderstood young protagonists and contrasting them with an adult world full of greed, selfishness and stupidity. It’s a simple, easy way to make kids feel important and special without really teaching them anything aside from accepting their family of lesser mortals.

At first I feared “The Young And Prodigious T. S. Spivet” was headed in that direction. Its story about a boy genius (Kyle Catlett), whose love of science – inherited from his entomologist mother (the great Helena Bonham Carter) – is at odds with the more physical interests of his twin brother (Jakob Davies) and their stoic cowboy father (Callum Keith Rennie) as well as his shallow whiny sister (Niamh Wilson), could easily have lent itself to a condescending comparison between enlightened sophistication and country ignorance. It looked like it was going to be the classic tried-and-true story of the misunderstood kid who is neglected by one parent and/or misunderstood by the other and who has to fool adults to get his way – in the latter case by claiming his perpetual motion machine as his father’s invention and pretending to speak for him on the phone. I expected the young boy to achieve his goal – namely to leave his rural background behind for Washington D. C. to collect the Baird Prize for his invention – and subsequently return to a more appreciative family. And those things do indeed happen, but not quite in the traditional fashion.

The Spivet family is haunted by tragedy, you see. While the opening 10 minutes are cleverly edited to hint at something not being quite right while still introducing every family member as alive, we eventually find out that T. S.’s aforementioned twin brother Layton has been dead for a year. It is this element that gives the screenplay its opportunity to subvert the formula. It casts T. S.’s flight from home and dysfunctional Relationship with his family in a different light; indeed the very home is cast in a different light. It ceases to be a predictable “quirky” sitcom premise and becomes more akin to a modern biblical Genesis, in which Adam and Eve are a strangely mismatched couple with vastly different interests and personalities, Abel’s death is a tragic accident and Cain’s exile is self-imposed.

Through the eyes of Frenchman Jean-Pierre Jeunet, Eden takes the form of a peaceful Americana, isolated from the modern world and resembling an idyllic island in a sea of grass and corn. It is quite far removed from the negative stereotypes many Europeans such as myself tend to associate with rural America. Jeunet does away with the yellow –orange–and–brown tint that dominated his previous films’ colour schemes and replaces it with a much wider palette that breathes new life into his images. It recalls the South Dakota of Terrence Malick’s “Badlands”. Yet Jeunet’s Americana is surprisingly more optimistic than the poisonous beauty of Malick’s masterpiece. When T. S. finds refuge in a wagon carrying a mobile home promising its prospective owner the “taste of true American freedom”, it is both an ironic observation on the double-nature of T. S.’s self-sought freedom – free from the constraints of home but forced to hide from authorities as a runaway – and a constant reminder of the value of what he is running away from.

One recurring motif of Jeunet’s previous films – most notably the overrated “Le Fabuleux Destin D’Amélie Poulain” and the unfairly dismissed “Micmacs À Tire-Larigot” – is the use of comic book-like thought bubbles that pop out to depict something that the character is imagining, something that is happening simultaneously or a flashback. Either way, the character dominates most of the screen, with the thought bubble occupying a small portion of it. It was cute in Jeunet’s previous films but the 3D gives it new life, putting the thought bubble in the foreground while the person imagining it is less clear to the mind’s eye without losing their presence completely. I have never been a fan of 3D. Even the much-praised 3D in the decent-but-overrated “Life Of Pi” was distracting at best. Here, however, Jeunet takes inspiration from pop-up books – images of which open all three segments of the film – and thus taps into his audience’s collective memories by bringing back unconscious childhood sensations of discovery. While it does not convince me of 3D’s future, it is refreshing to see it used in a way that enhances the film’s experience and serves a purpose – namely to connect the audience with its protagonist’s mindset – rather than a gimmick.

“The Young And Prodigious T. S. Spivet” does not always balance its themes of coping with death and being misunderstood quite perfectly. A potentially interesting plot point arises when T. S. reads his mother’s stolen diary and finds out that she herself had doubts whether her husband really loved her or not, but it is never brought up again. When T. S. finally makes it to Washington, the screenplay shifts to safer territory, as T. S. uses his acceptance speech to finally spill the beans about his brother’s death (set to Clint Mansell’s “Leaving Earth” from the outstanding video game “Mass Effect 3”) and is subsequently exploited by the Smithsonian Institute’s greedy undersecretary Mrs. Jibsen (Judy Davis). The expected satirical truisms about the media and its sensationalism ensue. But the main point – that T. S. and his family were each coping with Layton’s death in their own way and neither were truly acknowledging it – remains unbroken.

"Dark Passage"

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: A man wrongly accused of murder seeks to clear his name. While evading the police, he comes across a mysterious femme fatale who is determined to help him. Her motives aren’t too clear at first, but she’s about the only person he can trust in a world filled with misguided cops, crooks and murderers.

What I’ve just described is the plot of many thrillers of Hollywood’s classic era, particularly those directed by Alfred Hitchcock (North By Northwest and To Catch A Thief come to mind). Take away the recurring motif of the innocent man wrongfully accused of murder, and you’ve got other classic film-noirs such as The Big Sleep, Chinatown and The Big Heat. Delmer Daves’s Dark Passage, the third of the four films Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall made together, can be counted among them. While it is not one of the exciting or deepest of film-noirs, it is certainly one of the most audacious ever made.

 What other word could be used to describe a 1947 Hollywood film starring one of the world’s most recognizable stars, whose face is not completely visible until the 39^th second of its 62^nd minute? A film whose first 37 minutes consists mostly of scenes shot from a subjective point of view representing said star’s vision, with only his dialogue and voiced-over thoughts to let the audience know his identity?

What could have been an ephemeral gimmick is rendered ingenious and even insightful by its use at the service of the tried-and-true “wrong man” plot and its setting in a noir universe. As the viewer adopts Parry’s point of view, they are forced to experience his sensations from the moment he climbs out of the barrel on the side of the road. Everything he experiences is experienced by the audience at the same time. The effect is particularly powerful when he – and thus the viewer – is subjected to the gaze of the other. Whether it’s the falsely innocent curiosity of a Clifton Young’s hitchhiked motorist, Lauren Bacall’s knowing, penetrating stare, or the ambiguous smile of a shady cab driver, the viewer is under constant scrutiny and cannot escape it. The identification process is effortless, almost unconscious. Like a gunless, bloodless pre-video game era first person-shooter.

 

 

Bogart’s impeccable voice-over helps the audience imagine his accompanying facial expressions, despite the fact that multiple shots of newspapers depict his character as having a completely different face.

After Parry’s plastic surgery – notable for Houseley Stevenson’s remarkable performance as a back-alley surgeon who constantly alternates between affability and potential menace – Bogart spends approximately 25 minutes of the film with his face covered in bandages. As Parry must not speak until the healing process is complete, Bogart must convey his character’s emotions through his eyes.

It is during these 25 minutes that I realized the size of the role Bogart’s eyes play in his acting. His tough demeanour and casual wit always concealed wounded masculinity and self-criticism – sometimes even self-loathing – that was best exemplified in Nicholas Ray’s masterpiece “In A Lonely Place”, which boasts Bogart’s greatest performance. Delmer Daves uses Parry’s condition to showcase this in an almost equally beautiful way. Deprived of his acid tongue and forced into hiding, Bogart has rarely been so vulnerable and his eyes express more fear and sadness than he could ever have allowed himself to show in any other condition.

When the bandages finally come off, and Bogart moves towards the mirror in a left-to-right pan, the discovery is double: For Parry, it is the discovery of a new face he will live with for the rest of his life. For the viewer, it is the rediscovery of a face they thought they knew so well, yet spent much time deprived of its sight and exposed only to eyes that hinted at hitherto unforeseen facets of Bogart’s aura. It is indeed a whole new man they see.

To talk about the film’s plot would be pointless. The film’s direction, main characters and atmosphere are its strong points, not its plot. It is worth mentioning, however, that this is probably one of the more pessimistic of film-noirs of Hollywood’s classic era. Quite literally through Bogart’s eyes, the viewer is exposed to a cruel and unfair universe filled with strange and suspicious characters who are either shady or downright hostile. Justice cannot be obtained through conventional means, and even the unconventional ones fail. There can be no other choice but to rely on luck and the kindness of fate (or in this case an overly generous screenwriter-director) to earn a happy ending.

"Finally, Lillian And Dan"

Watching “Finally, Lillian And Dan” is like discovering a treasure chest buried in your garden and finding it to contain precious metals as well as a long-lost copy of the Bible. You feel privileged to witness a rare and beautiful thing that was there under your nose for so long, and you want to share it with the world. Hopefully I will achieve this with my review. 

Both titular characters are young, single and lonely. Lillian (Gretchen Akers) works at a nondescript office. In her first scene, her boss awkwardly asks her out on a date. All Lillian can do is sip nervously on her coffee, answering with small talk but incapable of giving a proper reply. The only fellow human being she regularly interacts with is her grandmother (Lucy Quinn), who is tired of coddling her.

Dan (Jason Kean) is unemployed and spends most of his time wandering around in his car or in the streets, carrying a large pink toy rabbit. Everything about him, from the rabbit to his round, shy eyes, suggests a lost child looking for someone to share feelings and moments with.

 

In the hands of a more conventional filmmaker, the meeting of these two odd souls could have been a pleasant but fairly unexceptional independent romantic comedy like “Juno”. But Mike Gibisser, like John Cassavetes, refuses to satisfy his audience’s desire to be entertained. His characters are distant, obscure, a little frightening in their otherness, and nothing is done to make that otherness appealing or likeable. The audience has no choice but to take them as they are, and bear with them. 

Take the scene in which they first meet: A checkout line at a supermarket. A wordless repeated exchange of furtive glances and deliberate avoidance of eye contact. Gibisser avoids sentimentalism by focusing on his actors’ body language and small automatic yet uncalculated gestures: The way Lillian readjusts the collar of her jumper, Dan’s lowered darting eyes. The surrounding sounds of products being placed on the counter and indistinct distant conversations help ground the audience in the reality of the moment. Thus the scene’s tonal shifts, such as the sheepish little grin that spreads on Lillian’s face after Dan looks at her a couple of times, become truly special moments of happiness.

Lillian and Dan build their relationship by communicating with each other through their body language, expressing much more of themselves than they do with their dialogue, which can be at times indistinct and whose content is, most of the time, fairly anecdotal. Through Gibisser’s monochromic lens, his patient examination of their body language and his actors’ performances (including a truly miraculous one by Gretchen Akers), Lillian and Dan discover love in a way that I’ve never seen done before in a film. They may not be the most “realistic” couple in the sense that they do not necessarily evoke couples we know or form. Rather, they are a canvas, used by Gibisser to reveal the gradual discovery of each other’s feelings and bodies that is love. The final shots before the credits roll is about as perfect an ending to a film as I’ve ever seen: 

-          Seen from above in elbow-level shots, the couple is lying together in bed for the first time, fully clothed and chaste as can be. They’re still feeling a little awkward; Dan is fiddling with his collar and fingers, as Lillian smiles nervously at him. She gets a little closer to him, tentatively raising a finger to touch him before snuggling closer to him.

 

-          We cut to a point of view from behind Lillian, as Dan still fidgets about then sits up to remove his cardigan, every movement diligently followed by his camera.

-          Return to the above point of view. Dan is lying with his eyes closed and his hands clasped together on his chest. Lillian is still looking at him tentatively. After a few seconds, she lies flat on her back and shuts her eyes. Dan, his eyes still closed, then turns on his side to face her. Lillian makes a final little turn on her side to complete their symmetry. The shot is held for a second or two, allowing the characters’ finally-achieved inner peace to sink in before the end credits roll. All is well.

 “Finally Lillian And Dan” can be viewed in its entirety for free at Vimeo: http://vimeo.com/41871767

Mike Gibisser, in the unlikely event that you may be reading this, thank you for making this little gem and for making it available for the world to see. It is a happier place for it.

"Diana"

In recent years, British cinema has developed a trend of biographies about the lives of 20^th century British political leaders and public figures. I think we can hold screenwriter Peter Morgan responsible for it, after Stephen Frears’ “The Queen”, which he wrote, garnered international commercial and critical success. Afterwards came Jean-Marc Vallée’s “The Young Victoria” – which I haven’t seen – in 2009, Tom Hooper’s decent-but-overrated “The King’s Speech” in 2010, Phyllida Lloyd’s disappointingly by-the-numbers “The Iron Lady” – aka “Margaret Thatcher’s Greatest Hits” – in 2011 and Roger Michell’s “Hyde Park On Hudson” in 2012 – which I have not seen either.

The success of this British biographical subgenre suffered somewhat after the mixed reviews received by the last two films, and the overwhelmingly negative critical reception “Diana” has received does not bode well for its future. Savaged by British and French reviewers alike, the film – particularly its screenplay – has been likened to Harlequin novels and soap operas such as “The Young And The Restless” due to its treatment of the ill-fated romance between Princess Diana (Naomi Watts) and Pakistani surgeon Hasnat Khan (Naveen Andrews of “Lost” and “The English Patient” fame), which lasted two years before her tragic death in a car accident in Paris.

While “Diana” is plagued by many problems, some of which involve its romantic content, it isn’t quite the cinematic trainwreck so many have described. Its primary success is the portrayal of an emotionally exhausted naïve idealist with a messiah complex and a desperate need to be loved. I don’t know if that was what the real Diana was like, but the film is at its best when it focuses on her struggle with finding her purpose and dealing with her fame, making questionable decisions – such as her famous televised interview with Martin Bashir – and being constantly assaulted by paparazzi.

Alas, the crux of the film is devoted to her relationship with handsome, erudite Pakistani cardiologist Hasnat Khan and the conflict between their lifestyles. While Naveen Andrews gives a very convincing performance and shares decent chemistry with Naomi Watts, the characters’ romantic interactions are predictable and safe, never giving the audience the treat of being surprised or uncomfortable, never straying away from contemporary movie romance territory: Diana cleaning up Hasnat’s room when he’s not there, complete with a lipstick heart on his mirror; a – possibly fictional – best friend Sonia (Juliet Stevenson, the most underrated actress in the UK) who never rises above the stock “best friend” character you’ve seen in countless contemporary romance films…. We even get an incredibly corny musical montage of Hasnat and Diana fooling around in the countryside. To make the montage even more ridiculous, it’s set to Jacques Brel’s beautiful song “Ne Me Quitte Pas”. I guess Oliver Hirschbiegel was trying to hit us home with the inevitability of their relationship’s tragic end, but his dissonance achieves silliness rather than poignancy.

This demonstrates the heart of the film’s problem: It treats its protagonists as romance film archetypes rather than the real people they were. “The Queen” was successful because it treated its characters with restraint and dignity. This glamour tabloid characterization makes the film’s condemnation of the paparazzi feel hollow, even hypocritical. At times it feels like it could have been written by a devout reader of Paris-Match. I counted three instances of someone reminding her “you’re the most famous woman in the world” as if she were a chosen one. No wonder the real Hasnat Khan found the film laughable.

And this sappiness quickly infects the portrayal of Diana’s activism as well. We are treated to scenes of her visiting landmine victims in hospital, observing demining activities and making speeches at various charities. Stephen Jeffreys’ screenplay depicts these activities as a way for Diana to both put her much-hated fame to good use and get in the public’s good eye. This could have been a good occasion to present us a more ambiguous Diana, perhaps even wonder if she herself wondered how sincere she really was in those efforts, but we get no such complexity. It reaches a culmination in two particularly bad scenes:

-          Diana is visiting Italy, surrounding by a crowd of onlookers and photographers. She sees a blind man standing confused & frightened by the noise, walks to him, calmly takes his hands and lets him touch her face. All that’s missing is a heavenly choir.

-          Diana is being driven through the Bosnian countryside for a diplomatic visit, sees a Bosnian Muslim woman at a cemetery visiting her son’s grave, orders the car to be stopped and gets out to hug her, snapped by accompanying cameras. The event is displayed on newspaper front pages with the proud headline “This is the real Diana”.  Rarely have I seen a shot contain so much unintentional irony and lack of self-awareness.

 We are meant to side with Diana constantly, rarely question her or allow ourselves to not completely adore her. That attitude appears to waver when Diana causes Hasnat to dump her or argue with her. The first is when Hasnat is exposed by tabloids as her secret lover, and her reaction is to deny it publicly, thinking she’s doing him a favour but only succeeding at making him a laughing stock. An insightful screenwriter could have seized the opportunity to illustrate her character’s lack of touch with common people and their problems, but the incident is forgiven soon enough. She angers him a second time when she attempts to conciliate her life and his by making Doctor Christian Barnard (Michael Byrne) recommend him for a position in Boston, not realizing his attachment to his life in London. She reacts to him dumping her by trying to call him using a fake Liverpool accent and screaming his name outside his window. This stalker behavior is another potentially interesting character facet to be explored, but it is again quickly forgiven.

When Hasnat dumps Diana for good, Diana decides to fully embrace the paparazzi’s obsession with her by contacting tabloid reporter John Fraser – with the rather jarring calls of “Hello, handsome!” – and making sure he captures every shot of her kissing Dodi Al-Fayed on his yacht. All of this, the film implies, is done in attempts to make Hasnat jealous – or spite him – and get him to notice her. Scenes on the yacht reminded me of Michelangelo Antonioni’s “L’Avventura” and his pertinent portrayals of the emotional alienation experienced by the rich and successful. A better film would have taken cues from him and explored Diana’s constant need to be loved, by both men and the general public, and exposed its destructive effects on her.

This need to be loved is explored too little and sunk by simplistic dialogue with her therapist Oonagh (Geraldine James) about a recurring dream she has about falling, which she interprets at first as a fear of letting go, before deciding she wasn’t falling but flying.

Diana’s children William and Harry are mentioned but only seen once - from a large camera distance – in a brief scene in which she waves goodbye to them and hopes to see them in four weeks. It’s clearly implied to be the last time she ever saw them in person, and is the first of many examples of the film’s transparency in its attempts to emotionally manipulate its viewers. It becomes more blatant in the depiction of Diana’s final moments before leaving the hotel, as Diana comes to the end of a corridor and turns around to gaze at the emptiness behind her, in a deep-focus crane shot accompanied by a rumbling background noise dominating the soundtrack. As she resumes her walk, the scene becomes more distasteful as the soundtrack gets overrun by repeated mobile phone rings from Hasnat – who hadn’t been returning her calls – met with Diana’s answering machine.

If the film manages to remain watchable and even intentionally entertaining in spite of these large problems, it owes most of it to Naomi Watts. Her performance is heartfelt, committed and subtle, never trying to be as blatantly manipulative and forced as Hirschbiegel’s direction, yet sadly restricted by the screenplay’s reluctance to treat her character as a three-dimensional complex human being.

It saddens me to see so little true emotion and humanity from the director whose film “Downfall” boldly dared to examine Adolf Hitler’s state of mind with compassion and sobriety as his world literally crumbled above and around him. Without brushing off his crimes, he had managed to make audiences feel sorry for the most deservedly reviled man in history. You’d think he would be capable of showing similar insight in doing the same thing for one of the most admired women of her time. Alas, while the film is never as cringe-inducingly awful as I was afraid it might be, it isn’t good enough to deserve Naomi Watts’s beautiful performance.

"Beauty And The Beast" (1946)

Jean Cocteau’s “Beauty And The Beast” came out in 1946, just a year after the end of World War II, two years after the French Liberation and fourteen years after his first feature film, “The Blood Of A Poet”. Being a filmmaker was but one of the many talents of this complete artist. Cocteau was a poet, a playwright, a painter, a sculptor, a screenwriter, a novelist, a director of photography, a critic, an actor, a composer, an editor, a costume designer, an illustrator and a ballet creator as well as a film director.

As the title of his first feature film might indicate, Cocteau preferred to think of himself as a poet above all other things, and his adaptation of “Beauty And The Beast” makes it easy to see why. Modern viewers more familiar with the also-masterful Disney version might find themselves disconcerted by its lack of structure and character development. Cocteau is telling a fairytale, in every way. He doesn’t try and make it more sophisticated. It’s a fairytale and it’s told as such. This is made clear before the film even starts, as an opening crawl asks the audience to place themselves in the mindset of children, who accept the content of fairytales unquestioningly and unconditionally, their minds unshackled by logic or judgment.

Thus, like in fairytales, most characters are fairly archetypal without descending into caricature (Baz Luhrmann, I’m looking at you). Belle (Josette Day) is kind, honest, loving and compassionate. Her sisters, like Cinderella’s, are petty, selfish, arrogant and shallow even when reduced to poverty. Her brother Ludovic (Michel Auclair) is a well-meaning self-described scoundrel. This leaves the film’s two most complex characters and, not coincidentally, they are both played by Cocteau’s lover and muse Jean Marais: The Beast and Avenant.

 

Avenant is a character that did not appear in Madame Leprince de Beaumont’s original fairytale. He appears as Ludovic’s best friend and, most importantly, Belle’s suitor. A proud, handsome blond Adonis, Avenant attempts to woo Belle only to be politely turned down. She tells him she does not love him and is in any case too devoted to her father to marry. Avenant responds by forcibly trying to kiss her, stopped by Ludovic’s interference. They fight but still they remain friends. As the family’s merchant father is ruined by the loss of his fortune, Avenant convinces Ludovic to sign a contract with a moneylender enabling him to repossess their home and furniture to pay off his debts. This reduces the family to poverty.

Modern audiences will quickly recognize Avenant as the precursor to the Disney film’s Gaston. Like Gaston, he represents the Beast’s opposite number: Whereas the Beast is ugly, considerate and unselfish, Avenant is handsome, rude and brutish.

Yet he is not the monster Gaston turns out to be. When Belle returns for a week to take care of her ailing father and reveals the secret trinkets the Beast has entrusted her with, Avenant, Ludovic and the sisters concoct a plan to steal them, find the Beast’s castle and kill him. Whereas the sisters are motivated by spite, jealousy and envy, Avenant’s motives are nobler: he believes the Beast is keeping Belle under an evil spell and that he can use his treasure to pay off her father’s debts.

It makes sense from his point of view. If a woman you loved came back after spending a long time as the captive of a beast who had threatened to kill her father for picking his rose, claimed that he treated her well and was wearing magic jewelry, wouldn’t you assume her to be either under an evil spell or suffering from Stockholm Syndrome?

Avenant, while not an especially nice man, is not evil. But his love for Belle has driven him to attempt murder and burglary – the former crime being futile, since the Beast was dying of a broken heart until Belle’s loving tears resurrected him. Just at that moment, Avenant is punished by an arrow throw by the animated statue of Diane and turned into a Beast just as the Beast is resurrected with Avenant’s handsome traits. It is then that Belle finally admits that she did love him.

This is summed up by the ex-Beast, who observes that love can turn a man into a beast just as easily as it can turn a beast into a man. Specifically, the love that Avenant felt for Belle that she never openly returned to him turned him into a Beast, whereas the love that the Beast felt for Belle and that she reciprocated in his dying moments turned him back into a man. An interesting distinction that raises a few questions: Could Belle be held partially responsible for Avenant’s fate due to her refusal to admit her feelings for him, out of love for her father? If so, this would give an additional twist on the meaning of “love can turn a man into a Beast”. Not only did Avenant’s unrequited love for Belle turn him into a Beast, but so did Belle’s love for her father.

I am not highly versed in psychology, but this Oedipus-like quadrangle is well-suited to Cocteau’s oneiric style. Cocteau’s first film, “The Blood Of A Poet”, was a surrealist work of art about a young artists’ sexual insecurities. Sexual insecurity is arguably even more present in “Beauty And The Beast”, in the shape of the Beast.

Viewers like me who grew up with the Disney film will remember that film’s Beast being its protagonist in the classical sense as he is the one who undergoes a journey of transformation: Turned into a Beast as punishment for his arrogance and selfishness, he grows from self-loathing volatile brute to gentleman after Belle teaches him to control his temper.

In this film, the Beast’s demeanor is much more collected. He does not raise his voice often and generally behaves like a gracious, polite host. The beastly nature of his character is not so much temperamental as it is sexual. This is represented in several different ways:

 

-          His vehement rejection when she looks at him in the eyes after he carries her unconscious body into her bedroom and she wakes up. Was he tempted to rape her? Did her awakening and look in his eyes snap him out of it?

 

-          The ambiguous look on Belle’s face during their first nightly meeting, when he appears behind her. Is that fear, arousal, or a bit of both? Also, look how she handles that knife.

 

-          The scene in which she observes him from a hiding place as he paces the corridors, gazing at his smoking hands. Whenever he has killed or appears to feel a strong emotion, the Beast’s hands or back smoke as if they were on fire.

 

-          A few minutes later, he goes into her bedroom and voyeuristically uses the magic mirror to see where she is hiding. She then goes into her bedroom and orders him to get out, he reacts with embarrassment and shame, like a boy caught masturbating by his mother.

 
He can only appear to her later in the night, supposedly because his beastly impulses are more controlled than during the day. In one scene, an early stroll in the late afternoon is briefly interrupted when the Beast senses a doe nearby and is almost overcome with the urge to hunt it.

The Beast is mysterious and fascinating because of what he represents. We never find out exactly why or how he was cursed, or even if he was cursed in the first place. For all we know, he could have been born that way. He is an embodiment of Man’s innate compulsions, resisting sexual temptation and violent urges.

None of this, of course, is explicitly defined as such. The film’s surface is that of a fairytale, and its sexual undercurrents can easily slip through the minds of children. But it is there, in the subconscious. And what better way to express the subconscious than through dreams? This is where the extraordinary sets and special effects come into play: The Beast’s castle serves as a refuge for repressed desires and feelings. Visitors are constantly surrounded by protruding arms, silently guiding them through dark corridors and luxurious meals, protruding out of walls and tables. The statues silently observe them, like voyeurs, watching their every move.

The darkness created by scarce lighting accentuates a mixture of uneasiness and fascination, particularly in the dining room and hall corridor. The backgrounds seem barely existent, the furniture and candle-bearing arms coming out of seeming nothingness. It mixes both intimacy and claustrophobia; you feel both alone and surrounded, attracted and repulsed, much as Belle feels towards the Beast.

 

A “Beauty And The Beast” review would be incomplete without mentioning Jean Marais’s performance as the triple role of Avenant, the Beast and the ex-Beast. It is a complicated and fascinating one. As Avenant, Marais is as masculine and brash as one would expect a swashbuckling hero to be, arrogant but not entirely devoid of charm. The charm is merely buried by the arrogance. As the Beast, that charm is present in his high raspy voice, creepy yet oddly seductive. His eyes do the rest of the work, enhanced rather than burdened by an astonishing makeup that reportedly took 5 hours a day and makes him look like a cross between a lion and a bear. So compelling is he that, when turned into a human, he becomes comparatively bland and uninteresting even compared to Avenant. Reportedly, the final transformation prompted Greta Garbo (or Marlene Dietrich according to Roger Ebert) to shout out "Give me back my Beast!" during the American premiere of the film.

Jean Cocteau’s “Beauty And The Beast” is a beautiful work of art not only because of its timeless visual magnificence but because it visually conveys the source material’s subconscious meaning with subtlety, attention and intelligence without straying from the story.