Review of Kelly Reichardt's 'Certain Women'

Kelly Reichardt filming Certain Women in Montana

On Saturday, Kelly Reichardt’s latest film, Certain Women, won the top prize at the London Film Festival awards ceremony – an accolade it entirely deserves. 

Here is my review published in Litro:

Its title is a play on words: the women in question are all searching in their own way for certainty and self-definition, while never quite managing to find it. “Certain” can mean specific, or it can mean some, but not all. These paradoxical layers of meaning reveal themselves quietly as the film unfolds. How much, the film asks, can we be sure of our lives, our loves, our jobs, our very selves. Certain Women is a film of open questions whose answers prove elusive.

Based on three short stories (“Tome”, “Native Sandstone” and “Travis, B”) by the Montana-born writer Maile Meloy, Certain Women, like Meloy’s writing, is spare and tender. Reichardt weaves scenes from the lives of four characters from these stories (changing gender in one case and throwing in a teenage daughter in another) into a loosely-knit structure. The classic beginning, middle and end would be too tight a corset for these women. Instead, Reichardt has created a film whose strands radiate outwards from a core made up of the combined desires and needs of her characters. This is not the messy, madcap Robert Altman approach of Short Cuts, and Meloy, although she shares his acuity and depth, is a different sort of writer from Raymond Carver. Place—in this case Montana with its sweeping landscapes, harsh winters and isolation—features largely in Meloy’s writing, providing Reichardt with another character to work with. The feel of Certain Women differs from Reichardt’s four previous films, Old Joy, Wendy and Lucy, Meek’s Cutoff and Night Moves, whose characters seemed impelled by the thrust of moving West, towards the Pacific. This film, on the other hand, takes place in a landlocked space where characters’ lives are hemmed in by mountains. These stories could only happen where Meloy has made them happen: in this case Livingston, Montana and a ranch near Glendive, in eastern Montana. Meloy’s ability to get inside the lives of her women is reminiscent of Alice Munro’s fascination with the inner workings of quiet women trying to live good lives and she works it to equally devastating effects.

Laura Dern in Certain Women

Kelly Reichardt once wrote about how she preferred to work from short stories rather than novels because she likes to “expand, not condense”. Her sense of expansion is what gives her films their breadth and depth, their meditative quality and their trance-like pull, which takes us into deceptively small stories that explode upon impact. This is partly down to Reichardt’s ability to coax wonderfully underplayed performances from her actors, and in this Certain Women is no exception. The opening line of dialogue is spoken as we see a man and a woman getting dressed after what we can assume is a quick lunchtime tryst. “You better get to work,” the man says. And this is exactly what the woman does. She rushes to her office, flustered, blouse half hanging out. There is something so innocuous about this comment and yet it comes over as controlling, almost chilling.

The lives Reichardt focuses on in Certain Women are disparate but connected. Laura (Laura Dern) is the put-upon lawyer of the lunch-time tryst who is being mildly harassed by a disgruntled client, Bill Fuller (Jared Harris). Fuller is unable to accept that he is not eligible for any more settlement money from an accident he sustained at work. At the end of her tether, Laura gets a male lawyer to explain Fuller’s case to him. The penny drops as soon as Fuller hears it from a man’s mouth. “I have been telling the guy he had no case, but he had to hear it from a man,” Laura sighs. Was it just me, or was there a communal outtake of breath in the mostly female audience at this corollary to mansplaining?

Events take on an unexpected trajectory and Laura finds herself strapped into a Kevlar vest and sent headfirst into a slightly comical hostage-taking while a gang of male police officers wait for her to do their job for them. Her client and the cops can only see Laura as hostage bait, as a woman, a shoulder to cry on. Laura’s vulnerability and exasperation (perfectly conveyed by Dern) are the result of her desire to be so much more than the earpiece to her client’s problems, if only she could be seen here for what she really is: a lawyer and a woman.

Without giving anything away, this story overlaps with that of Ryan and Gina Lewis (James LeGros and Michelle Williams) and their monosyllabic teenage daughter Guthrie (Sara Rodier). Guthrie is a Reichardt addition and what better way to drive a wedge between a couple than to throw in a teenage daughter. Her name, which we can assume comes from Woody Guthrie, is the perfect shorthand for this couple and their hipster chic lives. We know the type well. Where Laura’s life is pieced together by surreal moments fuelled by a naïve sincerity, Ryan and Gina are a couple just barely hanging onto their marriage—and they know it. Prickly and sharp with each other, their discomfort with the world and themselves oozes from them. At one point, Gina sarcastically says to her daughter, “Thanks for helping out.” To which Guthrie replies, “No one asked me to.” Gina shoots back, “No one asked me to either, I just figured it out all by myself.” Another put upon woman, this time locked in a dynamic of resentment and bitterness as she volleys between being a mother and a wife. Even when Ryan tries to make it better by telling Guthrie, out of earshot of Gina, “Let’s be nice to your mom today.” Guthrie asks, “Why? Is she sick?” Kindness is something that has a value and these characters simply can’t seem to afford it.

Michelle Williams in Certain Women

Gina’s major desire—and perhaps the one thing that gives her life meaning—is to build a house using “native stone and railroad ties”. Or as Meloy puts it, “things that fit in”. This is important, because Gina and Ryan are “out-of-staters”. Unlike the other characters in the film, they don’t belong in Montana. They visit the elderly Albert who has a pile of native sandstone on his land, which Gina has earmarked for her dream home. She tries to get a price from him, but how can Albert translate the stone into money? For him these are not just hunks of rock, they are part of the earth and bear the marks of the pioneers who carved them from the land—they are his history. “If you want to sell,” Gina tells him, “think of a price. I don’t know how much a rock costs.” And there it is: the gap between the Alberts and the Ginas of this world. You cannot put a price on land and what it means to people—especially in a place like Montana, the “Treasure State” where the ground, and what lies below it, are so indelibly tied to its inhabitants. Ryan tries to cover for his wife by explaining to the somewhat baffled Albert that “Gina just wants this new house to be authentic”. (The italics are in the original story.) At which point the audience is squirming.

The clashing of values and backgrounds also surfaces in the third narrative in which a frazzled young lawyer, Beth Travis (Kristen Stewart), has taken a teaching job nine hours from where she lives. Combining the impossibly long return drive with a full-time junior lawyer job is wearing her out. But she wants to make it work as a way of avoiding what her family sees as the pinnacle of success for a woman: selling shoes. One night a nameless ranch hand (Lily Gladstone) wanders into her adult education class. We don’t know why she’s there, but there is a sense that she is restless and seeking something by driving around in her heated truck on a cold night. She awkwardly walks in to the classroom and sits at the back taking everything in with a look of confused wonder.

Beth and the ranch hand soon make a habit of going to a diner after class, where they don’t so much as get to know each other as tentatively find things out. Over the course of their meetings, the ranch hand develops an attachment to Beth. Where there is attachment in a Reichardt film, there is the potential for abandonment and heartache. Gladstone manages to wordlessly turn her disappointment into tragedy. Like all the performances in Certain Women, Gladstone’s is pure alchemy. In Meloy’s story, the ranch hand is a guy called Chet Moran who walks with a limp from a childhood blighted by Polio. By allowing this chaste infatuation to spring up between women, we are encouraged to consider the difficulty, the lack of a straightforward vocabulary, around same sex crushes in small towns, and the universality of love that goes unreturned.

Kristen Stewart and Lily Gladstone in Certain Women

Beautifully shot on 16mm by Christopher Blauvelt, who also filmed Reichardt’s Night Moves and Meek’s Cutoff, the film’s grain and texture reflect the distance between people physically and emotionally, as if there were visual static in the air. Reichardt was thinking of shooting it digitally but when she looked at some test scenes, she realized that “the layers of snow on the ground looked like a white wall – there was just no detail”. So she turned to film. The soundscape of Certain Women,designed by Kent Sparling, veers between the manmade and the natural. The small town of Livingston, Montana, where most of the action takes place, is signposted by the incessant whistle of a train. When we leave town, the characters are roused or stunned into silence by the rush of wind and water. The man-made and the natural come together in a striking way in the third strand of the film. Every morning, there is the rumble of the stable doors as the ranch hand opens them to reveal the snowy landscape, the horses, the mountains, and the near silence stretching out into the distance. In the barn, the radio drones. The ranch hand is not quite out of contact of the world, but very nearly. It is this note that Reichardt ends on. A sort of temporal and spatial netherworld between places and states of being. The narratives are not tied up neatly; they are too real for that. Instead they jostle and shift, like melting ice moving down a river. They lift and sink in turns—each small movement affecting the whole. This is what Certain Women is like: a half frozen river summoning us to jump in and yet we know if we do we will emerge not quite the same as before.

For the original article: http://www.litro.co.uk/2016/10/london-film-festival-glorious-uncertainty-certain-women/

Film Review: In Jackson Heights

March 14, 2016

Gentrification Nation: Frederick Wiseman’s In Jackson Heights

By Joanna Pocock

CINEMA   DOCUMENTARY   GENTRIFICATION   UNITED STATES

Frederick Wiseman’s In Jackson Heights gives voice to the victims of gentrification.

Frederick Wiseman’s films rely on subtlety. Long and expansive explorations, they allow the viewer time to take in the minute details that make up conversations, connections, and actions. The 86-year-old director has spent most of his career filming the inner workings of institutions, and does so with the painstaking thoroughness of an archivist or an archaeologist. The small preposition in the title of Wiseman’s forty-third film, In Jackson Heights, is crucial. Without it, the film would be about the multi-ethnic area of Queens, New York, but what Wiseman is saying here is, “Come with me as we go inside”. Faces, surfaces, stories, past tragedies, present inequalities, and future uncertainties are excavated by this poet-archaeologist and in them is revealed the beauty of our shared humanity. A broken baby Jesus in the local Articulos Católicos shop is cradled like a real baby before being whisked off to be fixed, Hindu gods radiate technicolour splendour during a Hare Krishna service, and fruits and vegetables in the local markets are as much symbols of a home left behind as they are sustenance for a new life in America. Even eyebrow threading takes on a meditative quality while women perform the quick movements like dancers. Nothing is too mundane or banal for Wiseman’s eye.

In Jackson Heights takes us inside the innermost sanctums of mosques, Catholic cathedrals, Holocaust survivor services, halal butchers (replete with the throat-cutting of live chickens), council offices (with saintly telephone receptionists taking angry calls), meetings of gay seniors, immigrant support groups, taxi driver training classes (where people who have never seen a map are taught to read one), transsexual support groups and a strange musical performance involving the earnest tickling of china bowls in a Laundromat – and dozens more.

Underneath what seems like a loose structuring of these disparate strands of society lies an absolute control of the material. The film is bookended by wide shots of Jackson Heights: it opens with a bright tableau of the area on a spring day and closes at night on the fourth of July with fireworks going off in the background over Manhattan. Fireworks that, like Manhattan itself, are both beyond the reach of the protagonists and yet within their view. Individual tales of immigrant struggle, pain, loss, and frustration play out within the larger context of community. The personal and the political are never far from each other, and Wiseman doesn’t lose sight of the constant threat just under the surface of these people’s lives: gentrification. Nor does he bash us over the head with his ‘message’. It’s there for those who take the time to look.

A GAP store has moved into the area offering 70% discounts. It has swallowed up eight small businesses. A local mall with fifty family-owned shops looks like it will be the next casualty of property developers. One Colombian gentleman who has had his business there for twenty-two years complains that he and others like him have “no political representation”. He goes on to list the people who should be out there fighting his case, such as state senators and representatives, but they are all in jail or involved in scandals. Another restaurant owner tells a couple of young activists that his staff is made up of older women who have been working for twenty years as waitresses, “How can I tell them they have no work when the time comes? These new corporations, all they want are bonitas,” he says. What Wiseman does with such a light and sympathetic touch is show us what is at stake when individuals lose out to corporate money and interests. The loss is so much more than financial. They are forced to give up their sense of belonging, shared histories, and hope—the very qualities that make us human. When big businesses move in, the organically forged common ground between sex workers, Bangladeshi vegetable sellers, lonely senior citizens, Latino beauticians, and the seemingly endless variety of human beings who meet in the cramped public spaces of large cities are lost forever. Every scene in the film is played out in a public or a shared space, and the importance of these environments is paramount. Towards the beginning of the film, members of a group of gay seniors are discussing whether they feel comfortable meeting in the community centre of a synagogue. Dialogue ensues about space and belonging, which are at the heart of this film. It is as much about the surface of where a journey begins as it is about the soul of where we find ourselves.

In Jackson Heights pulses with life and complexity. We hear tragic and terrible stories like the Mexican woman who stands up in front of an immigration support group to tell the tale of her daughter being lost in the desert for fifteen days as she tried to cross the border into the United States. The woman often stops and searches for the right word, allowing us to see how all our stories are constantly searching for the right words and the right ears to hear them. There is the older man who worked for a cleaning company and had recently been fired for no reason, who confesses to feeling hopeless but tells his story with such dignity that one does not want to believe in his hopelessness. There are tales of discrimination and a repeated trope of a child killed by a garbage truck, and yet for all the sadness within the individual struggles, there is comfort to be had in community—albeit a community on the verge of being eaten up by developers.

The other strand woven deftly into the fabric of film are the stories of Julio Rivera and Edgar Garzon, two gay men beaten to death by skinhead sympathizers in Jackson Heights. Rivera was killed twenty-six years ago and Garzon eleven years later. Their memories are very much alive in this film as we see the planning of the Gay Pride Parade and the meetings of gay and transgender inhabitants of the neighbourhood discussing their enduring challenges. The Jackson Heights councilman, Daniel Dromm, is a colourful presence throughout the film, walking in the Pride Parade in his suit and tie and a rainbow feather boa.

True to Wiseman’s style, there is no narration or voice-over, no talking head interviews, no questions from behind the camera, artificial lights or trickiness. Wiseman carefully constructs the feeling of time passing—there are three nights and three days over the 190 minutes—by editing his material to resemble lives unfolding. He has famously written bout his editing process: “Cutting a documentary is like putting together a ‘reality dream,’ because the events in it are all true, except really they have no meaning except insofar as you impose a form on them, and that form is imposed in large measure, of course, in the editing.” Although most people today consider Wiseman a spokesperson for the cinema vérité crowd, he didn’t like this term, preferring to call his films “reality fictions”.

In Jackson Heights is an epic poem in which the heroic deeds have been replaced by the normal lives of people who sometimes finds themselves in heroic or tragic situations. It is a reminder that to be human is not always to be greedy, ugly and shallow, which is what we are told on the continuous loop of 24-hour news, reality TV shows, and celebrity gossip. Instead Wiseman takes this opportunity to show us that despite our flaws we are capable of kindness and beauty and connection. I am grateful to Frederick Wiseman for capturing this side of us, albeit fleetingly, but captured nevertheless for all the world to see.

Appeared in Litro: http://www.litro.co.uk/2016/03/gentrification-nation-frederick-wisemans-jackson-heights/

Hazard, Viper, Defiance: The Films of John Cohen

Finding Nearly Forgotten Music 

Why the musician and filmmaker John Cohen still thinks that true objectivity is an elusive beast.

Joanna Pocock
June 2, 2015   

This article appeared in the June 22-29, 2015 edition of The Nation.

John Cohen's photo of Roscoe Holcomb.

“Can I add something to your mix?” asks John Cohen after I tell him that I’m attending the Big Sky Documentary Film Festival in Missoula, Montana, to write about it. At the time, I was new in town, having just moved there from London, England, and was finding my footing by writing about the place.

“Yes, please,” I reply. After all, this is the man who introduced the great banjo player Roscoe Holcomb to the world, photographed Bob Dylan before anyone else, and was the stills photographer for Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie’s iconic 1959 film Pull My Daisy. Of course I want his feedback.

“What is documentary?” he says, fixing me with a razor-sharp look.

“I think it’s changing at the moment. In flux,” I answer, thinking about the award-winning Canadian interactive documentary Highrise and the other i-docs I’ve recently sat through, headphones clamped over my ears, clicking around screens to unveil stories with no beginning, middle, or end.

“That film tonight,” he says, referring to Alex Gibney’s Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief, based on the book by Lawrence Wright, “is just so different from my films. It is so objective,” he adds. “I don’t trust objectivity.”

When Cohen was living in New York City in the 1960s, along with Jack Kerouac, the Maysles brothers, and Robert Frank, the idea of authorship and objectivity was being explored and expanded. Cinéma vérité had established limits because it didn’t conceal the presence of a camera, and yet it was understood that trying to erase the director’s presence resulted in another series of formal problems. True objectivity is an elusive beast.

“I want to feel the filmmaker in the film,” Cohen says.

“Yes,” I say and fall silent.

John Cohen holds up one of the many photos he took of Bob Dylan.

The work of John Cohen is all about experience and has nothing to do with the mess of facts available on our iPhones. But now that we’re firmly in the age of information, documentaries have become more concerned with delivering “content” than with sharing a human response to a subject. And with the rise of i-docs, choice is what it’s all about, allowing viewers to select preprogrammed narratives at the touch of a button. We are all authors now, as we navigate the brave new world of interactive documentaries.

Cohen points to the bluegrass-tinged string trio Scrapyard Lullaby performing on a makeshift stage and says, “I’m going to be playing with them on Sunday night.”

It takes me a second to remember that Cohen is 82 and, with Mike Seeger and Tom Paley, a founding member of the New Lost City Ramblers. Formed in 1958, the Ramblers ignited the old-time music revival by bringing the rural vernacular music of the South to audiences whose knowledge of folk music didn’t stretch beyond the Kingston Trio. Not only did they bring the music of the people back to the people, they also managed to get near-forgotten performers to play live around the country, sharing the stage with the likes of Clarence “Tom” Ashley, the Stanley Brothers, Maybelle Carter, Elizabeth Cotten, Dock Boggs, and Roscoe Holcomb.

The New Lost City Ramblers were very much on the scene when Bob Dylan arrived in Greenwich Village from Minnesota. Cohen told me of a clip he’d found of Dylan, which he’d filmed on a rooftop in 1962. He was testing the camera that he and Robert Frank had just bought from the Maysles brothers in order to make his first film, The High Lonesome Sound(1963). The sound recorder was broken, so the clip was silent. Over two minutes of raw footage, Dylan seems to channel Charlie Chaplin as he playfully tries on a variety of hats plucked from his guitar case.

Recall any photo you’ve seen of Dylan from the ’60s, whether he’s smoking or not, walking down a street or sitting in a loft, and there’s a good chance it came from the camera of John Cohen. Unsurprisingly, Dylan has a huge amount of respect for Cohen and the New Lost City Ramblers. In his Chronicles, he writes: “Everything about them appealed to me…. All their songs vibrated with some dizzy, portentous truth. I’d stay with The Ramblers for days…. For me, they had originality in spades, were men of mystery on all counts. I couldn’t listen to them enough.”

* * *

My first exchange with Cohen reverberated long after that opening-night party at Big Sky. It turned out to be the first of many rushed conversations over several days, between screenings of his films and over cups of coffee in the lobby of the Wilma Theatre, or sitting by the stage at the Top Hat in Missoula.

The High Lonesome Sound has become a touchstone for musical and cinematic authenticity—the cinematic equivalent of Alan Lomax’s and Harry Smith’s field recordings. Cohen makes it clear from the beginning that for the subjects of his film, which was shot in eastern Kentucky, “Music is the celebration of the hard life…. The home music and the church singing are a way of holding on to the old dignity. Music is not an escape. It gives a way of making life possible to go on.”

The film’s images possess and haunt the viewer. A miner, smoking a cigarette, crouches into a wagon as it delivers him underground. What looks like fog rolling across lush, ancient forest turns out to be coal smoke. Children play in wheelbarrows and dogs scamper in the background as men, smeared in soot, wander home from the mines. Girls in pretty dresses skip through the grass. In the Holiness Church of God, men and women cry out and feel the Holy Spirit as it absolves them, comforts them, and releases them from life’s pain. Flannery O’Connor’s hardscrabble world is momentarily given life.

The music that Cohen captures—whether the singers in church or Roscoe Holcomb on his porch or the Shepherd family around their dinner table—is the connective tissue that links the mines, church, and people in this part of America, which in 1963 already looks and feels very forgotten. Towns with names like Hazard, Lynch, Viper, and Defiance, and a lane called Lonesome Mountain Road, all make an appearance, the names themselves pointing to a past and present as far removed from Greenwich Village as possible.

Holcomb, who had never been filmed or recorded until he met Cohen, talks of his music as being spiritual—not in the sense of a New Age seeker, but rather of touching something beyond the realm of the seen or the everyday. His banjo playing, he explains, “is a gift, and I believe God gave it to me. And I believe it enough to where I’m going to let him take it.”

His face is serious and thin, marked by lines etched in a pattern of worry, work, and sorrow. It’s the countenance of William S. Burroughs drained of self-consciousness. Holcomb’s penetrating voice tells of a hard life and a deep soul. One of the finest banjo players to have ever lived, he speaks like a philosopher and sings from a place that seems almost untouchable. The songs themselves are old, and yet in their purity and simplicity they come across as timeless.

According to Cohen, the scene shot in the Holiness Church of God in Delphia, Kentucky, almost never happened. In fact, a lot almost never happened in this film. Cohen went to the church every Sunday for five weeks, asking if he could film a service. And every Sunday, he was told no. On the last day, he went to the church and told the congregation he was leaving. “Oh, c’mon in,” they said. “You’re one of us now.” He filmed using only available light, and the scenes have a powerful intimacy, as if we were right there with the preacher and the men and women speaking in tongues, receiving the Holy Spirit, convulsing with passion for Christ. They don’t seem to be aware that they’re being filmed, such is Cohen’s sensitivity and his ability to be present while remaining unobtrusive. The hand of the director is there, but it is unseen. It works like magic. To answer his earlier question to me, “This is documentary.”

Seven years after The High Lonesome Sound, Cohen made The End of an Old Song (1970), about unaccompanied ballad singers in North Carolina. One of the greatest of these was Dillard Chandler, from the town of Sodom. The film opens with Chandler in his spartan cabin, saying he isn’t too lonely because every now and then he goes to town and takes a woman out and maybe keeps her for a day or two. Chandler tells us, “My address is Route 3,” and then adds that he has no mailbox and no use for mail. This is a land where people have no bank accounts. It is impossible to imagine, in our hyperconnected age, such acute physical isolation—and yet, for all our connectivity, many of us also live alienated lives.

In one extraordinary scene, Chandler goes out to find a companion for the night. He meets a dark-haired woman in a bar. We can’t hear their conversation, but in a voice-over he tells us, “All my good times are past and over.” Then he stares at the jukebox, which has been playing Merle Haggard and George Hamilton IV. “Is this the future?” he seems to ask. When the woman he’s been talking to slips away to sit with another man, Chandler’s face is that of a character from one of the ancient ballads he sings with such longing. This is a document of life being lived as art.

Cohen tells me a story about being the “good little filmmaker”: After he finished The End of an Old Song, he went to North Carolina to show it to the people who were in it. The film started, and Cohen noticed that Chandler wasn’t in the audience. He became worried that he was portraying Chandler in a bad light to his community. But when Chandler talks in the film of getting a girl for a night or two, men in the audience began shouting out, “Dillard, you tell it like it is!” This is also documentary.

To wrap up the festival’s weekend retrospective of his work, Cohen took to the stage with Scrapyard Lullaby. They played “Jenny Jenkins,” “The Girl and the Snake,” and “The Coo-Coo Bird,” among other traditional tunes. He told me he was going to sing a song he had written in Missoula 40 years ago, when he was playing with the New Lost City Ramblers. He had been here for some kind of “cultural event” (spoken in the tone of someone who is not in favor of manufactured culture) and was taken to see a church on a nearby reservation. He said he couldn’t sing the song here all those years ago, but felt that Missoula was probably ready for it now. “I liked the Indians, but I hated that church,” he told me.

Cohen sang the song a cappella. It tells the story of how the church had been painted with holy scenes. Someone realized that the figures in the paintings were white—not a native face to be seen. So a painter was brought in to add some Indians: They were portrayed as those writhing in the flames of hell. All these years later, Cohen’s anger is still palpable. Yet this anger somehow never dominates his work. It simmers quietly, giving his work its urgency and potency, even as his films and songs convey a respect for the ability to weather injustice and heartbreak.

At the very end of the last evening, someone asked Cohen to name his favorite creative act.

“Inhaling and exhaling,” he replied without missing a beat.

To me, that fleet-footed response captures what John Cohen’s work is all about: not just being alive, but being alive to all the possibilities around him. What more is there?

John Cohen's photo of Jack Eliot and Woody Guthrie in 1961.

Joanna Pocock 

June 2, 2015   |    This article appeared in the June 22-29, 2015 edition of The Nation.

http://www.thenation.com/article/208921/finding-nearly-forgotten-music#

Film Review: Force Majeure

March 29, 2015

Force Majeure and the Artifice of Control

By Joanna Pocock

ANALYSIS   FILM   FORCE MAJEURE   REVIEW   RICHARD OSTLUND

Force Majeure (originally titled Turist) by Swedish director Ruben Östlund is like a Caspar David Friedrich painting inhabited by characters from a Michael Haneke film: the stark yet sweeping Romanticism of the French Alps is a counterpoint to the vanity and shallowness of a bourgeois family on a skiing holiday. Their neon ski garb and their civilized manners are no protection against the forces of nature, which ultimately shatter their fragile cocoon. On day one of their holiday, Tomas (Johannes Bah Kuhnke), Ebba (Lisa Loven Kongsli) and their two gorgeous children, Vera and Harry (real-life siblings Clara and Vincent Wettergren), are photographed on the slopes by the resident photographer. In their body language we sense immediately that something is amiss: the strained smiles, and the awkwardness as the photographer asks Tomas to put his arm around Ebba.

A simple photograph betrays all the frictions and falsehoods at play in Force Majeure.

Our feelings of unease are further heightened by the mise en scène: barren, crisp white mountains, sterile tunnels connecting ski runs and empty chugging chair lifts recall The Shining more than Ski School. Vivaldi’s almost manic Summer segment from his Four Seasons soars over images of the resort and its incessant snow-making machines. Ominous canon fire, used to create controlled avalanches, also punctures any ease on the viewer’s part. We are firmly on European art-house terrain, and stunning it is, too.

The ski resort’s sleek blond wood interiors and the photogenic family lazing in their matching long underwear self-consciously parody the world of advertising. Yet from the first moment we meet them, we know that under this veneer of middle-class life lie some very deep flaws just waiting to be explored. And Östlund does just this. He forensically exposes the cracks in this relationship just as his compatriot Ingmar Bergman did in Scenes from A Marriage. In this case, Östlund puts the couple in danger. He asks: How will they react when they are torn from their normal day-to-day mode and forced into survival mode? And the film itself answers this question: Not very well.

This danger arrives in the form of a controlled avalanche, which appears to go awry, and threatens to engulf the family along with dozens of other tourists while they eat lunch on an outdoor terrace. We watch as the avalanche goes from a sight to be captured on every iPhone, to something that is getting a bit too close, to a seemingly catastrophic event as everyone either runs for cover or dives under tables. It is beautifully shot, using footage of a real avalanche in British Columbia, a large green screen on set in Gothenburg and real smoke to look like snow. As Östlund has said in interviews, he wanted to create the most spectacular avalanche sequence in film history.

The formal rigour with which Östlund has lead us though this terrain is then echoed in the controlled dynamic between the central couple. Control is an underlying theme throughout the film, with Tomas and Ebba trying vainly to stem their reactions to the avalanche. The landscape has its wildness tamed by being reduced to manicured mountains covered in manufactured snow and yet one feels at any moment it might rebel. To Östlund, this parallels human emotions, which like nature are also not to be controlled. The marriage portrayed in this film, like the mountains in the background, is rife with fissures that have the potential to engulf the members of the family at any moment. Despite willing themselves back to normality after their near catastrophe, the characters have revealed themselves to be what they are: Tomas is the sort of man who runs away from his family, grabbing his phone on the way; while Ebba stays put and tries to protect their children. For the rest of the film Ebba tries to reconcile what she sees as her husband’s deep cowardice with the man she thought he was. Her frustration, which she tries to keep under wraps simmers up when she and Tomas are with other couples. These excruciating scenes of public humiliation and domestic unravelings make for some of the best moments in the film. Ebba displays the icy beauty of a Bergman actress, particularly that of Ingrid Thulin (Cries and Whispers, The Silence). She is an actor who quietly watches, and without a word manages to convey her every thought. Kuhnke’s performance expresses something creepier. He is not an innocent and even his tears, it turns out, are fake.

Östlund delivers a strange ending.

Unfortunately, what is played out after the moment of danger, whilst insightful and gripping, seems to then escape the director’s control. The film’s inscrutable logic falls away. It is all the more noticeable because the first two thirds of the film are so perfectly water tight. This is a film in search of an ending, and Östlund can’t seem to settle on one. When the family leaves the resort, we see them on a bus with other holiday-makers. The driver incompetently lurches around hairpin bends narrowly avoiding sheer drops. Ebba, in a panic, insists that the driver let her off. She doesn’t take the children with her. She commits the same crime of which she rightly accuses Tomas. Yet, it is not clear what the director is saying here. Are we to believe that because the danger in this case is simply perceived by Ebba and not necessarily real, it is acceptable for her to flee, leaving the children behind? Or are we to questions the idea that there is one set of rules for a woman and another for a man? I was baffled. Just as I was baffled by what comes next. The passengers file off the bus and do a sort of Nights of Cabiria-style ponderous walk. Tomas lights up a cigarette and comes clean to his family about being a smoker: gone are the pretences. Now that they have seen themselves nakedly for what they are — she: neurotic and prone to publically shaming her husband and he: cowardly, unfaithful and manipulative — they can finally let it all hang out. Then the camera lands on the young Fanni (Fanni Metelius), who we know from previous scenes is having an affair with a much older married man, Mats (Kristofer Hivju). Is the director trying to convey in this shot, that the mess of relationships is destined to live on in future couplings? Is he making the point that we all start off thinking we will be different, as do Fanni and Mats, that our marriages and relationships will be pure an untainted by the darker forces that lurk within us only to be proven wrong when our flaws eventually surface? That, ultimately, it is impossible to keep our natures under control? I wasn’t sure. Yet, the point of a good work of art is not to come to any hard and fast certainties but to get us probing and thinking about what these certainties might be. And Force Majeure does this brilliantly.

 Force Majeure is in UK cinemas from April 10th.

For the original review, see http://www.litro.co.uk/2015/03/force-majeure-and-the-artifice-of-control/

Film Review: A Hard Day's Night

July 2, 2014

Feature Film: A Hard Day’s Night

By Joanna Pocock

A HARD DAY'S NIGHT   FILM   REVIEW   THE BEATLES

A Hard Day’s Night is an explosion of joy onto the bleak, bombed out cultural landscape of post-war Britain.

The film is full of The Beatles’ most iconic imagery. Source: Flickr.com

The great French film director Jean Renoir called Richard Lester’s A Hard Day’s Night “an extremely important film, which even reflects the unconscious desire for change in the English nation.” Its ability to accurately reflect a time, he says, was purely “accidental”. His words get at the heart of this film, which is both utterly unselfconscious and of the moment. The opening shots of the Beatles running to catch a train, their screaming fans in hot pursuit – a blur of legs and bodies – is pure visual and musical exuberance. It is an explosion of joy onto the bleak, bombed out cultural landscape of post-war Britain. You can see in the Beatles’ performances – their abandon, their innocent lack of savvy – that Beatlemania was still fun in 1964. It would be two years before the difficulties and the financial and creative arguments would set in.

Much has been written about that opening chord of A Hard Day’s Night, which is absolutely electrifying. It is a wake up call, an invitation to a whole new soundscape which has more in common with Stockhausen or music yet to be written than it does with Cliff Richard and the Shadows. That famous clang is not simply George Harrison on his new 12-string guitar but a combination of chords played simultaneously by Harrison and John Lennon, with a pure McCartney bass note. It is so brilliant and yet so difficult to fathom that it has been called the magical mystery chord. And although it is such a recognisable chord and such a part of the rock-pop canon, it still sounds new.

The plot of the film is only important in that there isn’t one: A Hard Day’s Nightfollows a day in the life of the Beatles as they head to a live recording session and concert in London. There are a few obstacles thrown in along the way, such as when Ringo goes AWOL after Paul’s granddad (played by Wilfrid Brambell of Steptoe and Sons) tells him to leave the Beatlemania bubble and go out “parading”. This scene is oddly prescient of the weight of their fame to come. But in essence A Hard Day’s Night is a string of absurdist vignettes, witty banter, Chaplinesque sight gags and song sequences whose deftness, originality and musicianship gave birth to the music video. A lesser filmmaker working with lesser musicians would have ended up with a mess. But the chaotic and irreverent structure adds to the film’s enormous energy.

Just as the Beatles were sloughing off the torpor of the 1950s, Lester was also part of a new formal approach. Borrowing from the Nouvelle Vague with his use of fast cuts, hand-held cameras, a small crew, available light and characters talking straight to camera, Lester was deploying the new film grammar seen in such films as Godard’s Breathless (1960), but adds another level of innovation by using these art-house tropes in what is essentially a pop music vehicle. A Hard Day’s Night is a perfect synthesis of high art and popular culture.

The script, written by Alun Owen and nominated for an Academy Award in 1965, is chock full of one-liners. When a journalist asks George what his hairstyle is called, George replies, “Arthur”. Or when John is asked at a press conference how he found America: he replies, “By turning left at Greenland”. When Owen saw the Beatles perform, he rewrote some of his script to take into account their uncanny ability with repartee. Some of the film was improvised, and the Beatles come over as four absolutely distinct (and seriously funny) individuals despite the matching outfits. They are anything but manufactured products. Previous to A Hard Day’s Night, music films were synonymous with the antiseptic Elvis vehicles with their generic boy-meets-girl plots. By contrast, A Hard Day’s Night feels modern. It wipes away the cobwebs of an austere and class-ridden Britain with a sense of possibilities not yet explored. In the verité-style scenes on the streets of London, the shattered buildings provide a context for these four lads with their long hair, wit and infectious tunes. You get a sense from this film of just how fresh the Beatles must have seemed after years of war and food rationing. In this context the madness of Beatlemania seems the only logical response.

Lester’s black and white photography is stunning. He uses the camera playfully, never staying in one place for long. The jump cuts, the sped up film and aerial shots are interspersed with close-ups of the four Beatles. This scatter-gun approach creates an elegant and consistently seamless language with the form of the film perfectly serving the images. The climax (which is literally climactic) is the Beatles’ final performance once they have made it on stage after their various hijinks. The mainly female fans jump in their seats, hold their heads, cry, scream and silently mouth the name of their favourite Beatle. The longing, the love, the awakening of these young women is incredibly visceral. The power of the perfect pop song is there for you to witness and to hear for yourself – particularly during the stunning harmonies of She Loves You. The film cuts between shots of the Beatles singing and smiling – always smiling – and then pans across the audience so fast that the faces of the fans blur into one in thrall to the music. And what music.

It would be wrong to ignore the politics that Lester and Owen smuggle into this film. The entire cast, with the exception of the Beatles and their Liverpudlian managers Norm and Shake (Norman Rossington and John Junkin), sounds like the Queen. At one point Paul McCartney does the Spanish Republican salute after delivering a mini-speech about the “workers” to a bowler-hatted commuter on a train who refuses to open the window (talk about a stuffy carriage). McCartney’s eccentric grandfather rants to a group of Bobbies in a police station about Irish Republicanism accusing them all of being “paid assassins”. Pretty stirring stuff when you think about it.

Like Don’t Look Back, D.A Pennebaker’s Dylan documentary, A Hard Day’s Night stands on its own as a great film, rather than simply a vehicle for one of the most important cultural and musical icons of the twentieth century. It was John Lennon who wanted Lester on board after seeing a film he directed with Peter Sellers and Spike Milligan; and shot through is the anarchic, surrealist humour reminiscent of the Goon Show. Even in the opening running scene, George slips and falls, and Ringo tumbles over him. Later on a woman falls down a hole, Paul’s granddad is accidentally lifted onto a stage where he interrupts some very earnest opera singers, and the list of mishaps goes on.

Underneath the gorgeous black and white photography, the matching suits,the deftness of the mise-en-scène, the life-affirming music and the humour is a serious film. A film that says you can create joy and beauty without irony or cynicism. Jean Renoir said that its “essence was confirmed only by [its] existence”. The Beatles and Richard Lester have produced a rare thing: a work of art whose essence is both modern and timeless, hilarious and profound, silly and deeply moving. Listening to the songs you realise that there was the world before the Beatles and the world after. It is inconceivable to imagine life without their music. Those who might think of A Hard Day’s Night as a glorified music video need to think again.

A digitally restored version of the film opens on July 4, commemorating the 50th anniversary of its premiere at the Pavilion Theatre in London’s Piccadilly Circus.

The Criterion Collection has also released a DVD/Blu-Ray edition.

Quote from Renoir on Renoir, Interviews, Essays and Remarks, Cambridge [University Press: Cambridge (1989), page 122].

http://www.litro.co.uk/2014/07/feature-film-a-hard-days-night/

Film Review: The Golden Dream

June 24, 2014

Feature Film: The Golden Dream

By Joanna Pocock

FILM   SOMEWHERE BETWEEN THE BORDERS

Diego Quemada-Diez’s film, The Golden Dream, tells the story of three young Guatemalans attempting to cross the border to the United States.

One cannot watch Diego Quemada-Diez’s film, The Golden Dream, without thinking of Gregory Nava’s 1983 film, El Norte. Both feature impoverished Guatemalans making the journey through Mexico to Tijuana and eventually into Los Angeles; and both films feature indigenous Guatemalans in central roles. But where El Norte is populated with riveting three-dimensional characters, The Golden Dream is flat and formulaic.

Quemada-Diez’s film suffers from a desire for political simplicity: the baddies are rotten and the good guys are innocent victims. There is zero nuance in this world view, and it makes for boring and predictable art. Quemada-Diez worked with the British director Ken Loach as a camera assistant on his 1995 film Land and Freedom and also collaborated on Carla’s Song and Bread and Roses. In interviews he cites the British director as a major influence, and this has perhaps contributed to his overly simplistic approach to art as political statement.

Quemada-Diez shot the film in a Loachian style, using non-actors and available light, and filmed it in sequence, improvising many of the scenes. The central characters are Juan (Brandon López), a 16-year old Guatemalan, and Sara (Karen Martínez), a girl who chops off her hair and binds her chest in order to pass herself off as ‘Osvaldo’. They are joined on their journey by Chauk (Rodolfo Domínguez), an indigenous Tzotzil Guatemalan who speaks no Spanish. The dynamics between the three work well at first, especially in the sexual jealousy between Chauk and Juan who both fancy Sara. The improvisational and almost documentary approach to directing his actors however eventually reveals its limitations. Juan, Sara and Chauk simply don’t develop enough to carry an entire film. There is no insight into how this journey might be affecting them, and this doesn’t allow for the building of dramatic tension. The contempt Juan holds for the ‘Indian’ Chauk feels real, and is well played out. But I get the sense that Quemada-Diez doesn’t want to delve too deeply into his central characters because if he did he would find both good and bad, which would muddy the waters of his polemic — the implication being that victims of terrible circumstances are unfailingly good people.

The film looks beautiful, thanks to Maria Secco’s photography. The lush locations provide a powerful foil for the suffering experienced by the immigrants who are carried through stunning landscapes atop rusty, lurching trains (often at sunset or twilight when the rainforests and desertscapes are at their most photogenic). The many sunrises and sunsets become a trope throughout the film reminding the viewer that the movement of the sun across the sky is the one constant experienced by these teenagers — it’s their one certainty, the only thing they have to hold onto.

Every now and then, the director throws in some magic realism, in the form of Chauk’s recurring dream of snow tumbling and swirling through a black sky. This dream is accompanied by plinky plonky piano music alerting us to the fact that this is a Poetic Moment. The music throughout this film is a problem. Jacobo Lieberman and Leo Heiblum have created a score that alternates between this tinkling piano and soaring strings. It is a shame Quemada-Diez felt he had to rely on music to tell us what to feel rather than letting the action and the faces of his actors do the job. Alerting the audience to moments of emotion through music sits uncomfortably with the more documentary approach the director uses with his actors.

The journey made by the teenagers is harrowing, but the baddies they meet along the way come over as cartoon villains. We get sexual predators; pirates who empty the migrants’ pockets of what few possessions they have; Mexican police who steal their shoes; hostage takers who demand the phone numbers of migrants’ families in the US in order to demand money in return for their release; and of course, this being Latin America, we get drug smugglers. It is a paint-by-numbers approach to showing us one of each type of villain. I would have liked to perhaps get to know a few of these bandits, some of whom might be as desperate — and dare I say it as human — as the people they are fleecing.

At one point Juan, Sara and Chauk are given work on a sugar cane farm and after a few long days of hard labour they share an evening of tequila and abandon with their fellow workers. The night descends into drunkenness. Juan and Sara dance to a song that seems to have meaning for them and they wander off together to spend the night. I felt the first connection to these three teenagers and I wanted more scenes showing them with their guards down. Sara becomes a flirty young woman and Juan becomes a sweaty inebriated teenage boy and Chauk becomes the humiliated gooseberry. I realised how up until this scene, I had felt very little for them despite their incredible hardships. Perhaps because they are portrayed as cyphers or symbols of oppression rather than real flesh-and-blood people.

There is no plot to speak of as the story basically revolves around whether our protagonists will make it across the frontera. Juan makes it, and the scenes of him in an American meat factory are powerful. Once on US soil, his suffering happens in isolation: gone is the comradeship of the journey north. It is an unsettling scene as we watch him picking up scraps of offal and debris from the factory floor, and plopping them into a bucket. He looks resigned to his fate and in this look lies the central question of this film: was it all worth it? But Quemada-Diez doesn’t privilege this question, or explore it.

I wish the film had ended on this note or had taken this idea further, as Nava does in El Norte. Instead Quemada-Diez cuts to snow falling, reminiscent of Chauk’s snow dreams. Why is Juan suddenly sharing the dream of the ‘Indian’ he once disliked but came to love? Is this an attempt to show every migrant’s struggle as basically one united struggle? If so, this only serves to diminish the specificity of each and every migrant’s story with its attendant joy and pain. This scene somewhat undermines the previous one which leaves us feeling that life in America holds some promise, but the reality also delivers despair and degradation. What is a dream of falling snow next to the reality of a life spent picking up bloody scraps in a meat factory?

I have stood on that very border and looked through the chain link fence from El Paso, Texas, towards Ciudad Juarez, the murder capital of Mexico, and felt the forces of history and the injustices that often accompany them, and wondered at the surreal discrepancy between the paved, first-world streets of America and the dusty, cardboard and corrugated metal houses of Mexico a few hundred feet away. It is a strange and intriguing place full of violence, hope and sadness. But this film doesn’t come close to conveying the true nature of this border and the complex lure it holds over many of those who live south of it. As an enterpriseThe Golden Dream is to be applauded, but as a fully-rounded film, it falls short.

http://www.litro.co.uk/2014/06/feature-film-the-golden-dream/