Partir

Suzanne a la quarantaine. Femme de médecin et mère de famille, elle habite dans le sud de la France, mais l'oisiveté bourgeoise de cette vie lui pèse. Elle décide de reprendre son travail de kinésithérapeute qu'elle avait abandonné pour élever ses enfants et convainc son mari de l'aider à installer un cabinet. A l'occasion des travaux, elle fait la rencontre d'Ivan, un ouvrier en charge du chantier qui a toujours vécu de petits boulots et qui a fait de la prison. Leur attraction mutuelle est immédiate et violente et Suzanne décide de tout quitter pour vivre cette passion dévorante.



Six mois auparavant, une éternité, Suzanne menait une vie prévisible, feutrée, bourgeoise. Deux enfants presque adultes, et un mari très enfantin, un médecin macho, style « ma » femme, « mes » gamins, « ma » maison, « mon » métier, « ma » virilité... Pour des travaux dans la villa, un ouvrier était venu, un Espagnol au nom russe, Ivan. Suzanne l'avait involontairement blessé, conduit en Espagne voir sa fille, puis revu sans raison. Avant, précisément, que la déraison ne l'emporte. Elle lui avait cédé comme si elle se délivrait. Et tout rejeté d'un bloc : les conventions, l'hypocrisie, ses enfants. Et ce mari, d'abord sanglotant, puis ...

L’amour et ses déclinaisons fondent la filmographie de Catherine Corsini. Parfois traité avec humour (La Nouvelle Eve), ou avec romance (Les Ambitieux), l’amour, dans Partir, fait souffrir. La réalisatrice choisit l’épure pour raconter ce (mélo)drame, chroniqué comme un fait divers à coups de cadres larges et fixes, mais activés par le mistral et la tramontane du Languedoc-Roussillon. Le film se voudrait charnel, mais le bannissement volontaire de toute psychologie finit par éteindre tout sentiment et exclure le spectateur de cette histoire d’amour…






… qui finira mal. Un coup de feu retenti en introduction et le film débute en flash-back. Il relate de sa naissance à sa fin tragique, la passion amoureuse de Suzanne (Kristin Scott Thomas) et Ivan (Sergi Lopez), deux étrangers pour qui partir c’est rester ensemble. Comme dans Noces rouges de Claude Chabrol, l’abus de pouvoir et le chantage sont les atouts du mari cocu (Yvan Attal), dont les plans machiavéliques font obstacles au bonheur épicurien des amants.

On le sait, on le sent : Partir est un film sur l’émancipation et c’est aussi un film de femmes (Catherine Corsini s’est accompagnée d’Agnès Godard à la photographie). Ce féminisme est incarné à l’écran par le personnage de Suzanne, quadragénaire entière, déterminée, honnête, et joyeuse (comme l’illustre cette séquence où une guêpe rentre dans son chemisier). Où est la faille ? Nulle part. Suzanne est si complète… qu’elle en est lisse. Pourtant elle est l’élément moteur du film puisqu’elle est présente dans toutes les scènes. C’est son itinéraire qui construit Partir, dans le sens où la narration décrit le processus logique de son émancipation. Ni plus, ni moins : le rythme est lent puisque embarrassé de détails pas forcément essentiels. Ainsi, c’est l’action et la représentation des émotions (et non leur incarnation) qui importent, au détriment de la saveur intérieure des prises de conscience des personnages. Catherine Corsini ne craint pas les scènes faites d’un seul plan privé d’action, auquel le spectateur devra dégager sans mal son sens premier et unique. Exemple : Suzanne et Samuel sont dans le lit conjugal, elle lit, tandis que lui pianote sur son portable. Conclusion : on ne fait pas l’amour chez les Vidal. Alors qu’il cherchait l’ardeur de la passion, le film souffre d’une froideur d’exécution.

Toutefois, reconnaissons à Partir ses petites perles. À l’écriture, ce sera au cours d’une situation périlleuse dans une station essence. En termes de mise en scène, ce sera lors de la scène fondamentale du premier baiser. Le parti pris est original, et cette fois l’intention atteint son but : ce cadre large laisse toute liberté à l’action, et comme l’amour donne des ailes, l’instant est simplement beau. Mais l’intérêt principal de Partir réside dans ce qu’inconsciemment il donne à voir et comprendre des rapports amoureux et du travail. Au-delà de l’histoire d’amour entre la bourgeoise et le prolo et de ses conséquences matérielles, le travail sonne le glas de l’amour physique. Dès lors que Suzanne et Ivan payent leur amour à la sueur de leur front en récoltant des melons, plus aucune scène charnelle ne vient rendre compte de leurs ébats. Impossible de faire l’amour en travaillant, et si le début de leur histoire se caractérisait par une alchimie sexuelle, le travail plane comme une menace. Sans fêlures, sans brèches, et si purs dans leur passion, l’amour ne saurait être mis en péril par la condition matérielle des amants ; c’est ainsi que tranche le film… le triomphe est bien mièvre.

Disgrace

David Lurie (John Malkovich), twice-divorced and dissatisfied with his job as an English professor in post-apartheid South Africa, finds his life falling apart. When he seduces one of his students, Melanie (Antoinette Engel) and does nothing to protect himself from the consequences, he is dismissed from his teaching position, and goes to live with his lesbian daughter Lucy (Jessica Haines), who shares a farm in the Eastern Cape with trusted black worker Petrus (Eric Ebouaney). For a time, his daughter's influence and natural rhythms of the farm promise to harmonise his discordant life. But the balance of power in the country is shifting. In the aftermath of a vicious attack by three black youths, he is forced to come to terms with the changes in society - as well as his disgrace.



Review by Louise Keller:

Desire and its consequences are at the heart of this complex drama that has the power to shred us emotionally. Based on the Booker prize winning novel by J.M. Coetzee, this is the kind of film that knocks you for a loop. It surprises at every turn, takes you where you least expect to be taken and twists a knife into your heart just after you think you have endured the worst of it. Directed and adapted by the husband and wife team who brought us the quirky and accessible La Spagnola in 2001, Steve Jacobs and Anna-Maria Monticelli have a profound grasp of the subject matter, resulting in a mature, thought provoking work that resonates. Subconsciously, the film throbs with truth as we find ourselves sinking deeper and deeper in a quagmire of redemption, acceptance and reconciliation reflecting the South African divide.

When we first meet John Malkovich's lust-driven University professor David Lurie, we quickly understand his philosophy that there are more important things in life than being prudent. He teaches romantic poetry and listens to classical music, while lust fuels his leisure time. Disgrace is the result of his liaison with his student Melanie (Antoinette Engel). But that is just the beginning of the journey. We take a sharp right hand turn as David drives through the distinctively barren South African terrain to the remote farm where his lesbian daughter Lucy (Jessica Haines) lives. The harsh reality of daily life begins, where desire is examined from a converse point of view. Rape and the confrontation of an unfathomable cultural mindset start life spinning as fast as the hubcaps of the pickup trucks on the desolate, dusty roads.

Malkovich is one of those actors who cannot help but carry loads of gravitas. Here, as always, he is brilliantly credible as a severely flawed man forced to learn the reality of the poetry he teaches. ('One who goes to teach learns the keenest of lessons; one who goes to learn, learns nothing'). Haines gives a staggering performance as Jessica, the strong woman who makes tough decisions as her comfort zone crumbles as she loses everything, while Eriq Ebouaney is striking as Jessica's neighbour Petrus, whose life philosophies must be accepted. There are two especially devastating moments in this film and they arrive unexpectedly. The first is the scene in which Malkovich is crying: we see him as from the back of a car carrying unusual cargo. The second is at the animal shelter, where David helps Bev (Fiona Press) in the heartbreaking task of dealing with unclaimed dogs. Special mention to Antony Partos' exceptional score which accentuates and tugs at our emotions and Steve Arnold's splendid cinematography which captures the starkness of the landscape. Disgrace is a powerful work and one that is not easily forgotten. Sadly, the resonance of life in South Africa feels only too real and familiar.

Review by Andrew L. Urban:
In 1999, Disgrace won the second Booker Prize for Nobel laureate J.M. Coetzee. That is both an accolade to admire and a mountain to climb if you're going to adapt the novel into a film; such a different medium. Astonishingly enough, Anna Maria Monticelli and husband Steve Jacobs have pulled it off. There may be quibbles about some aspects and some scenes, but the film works as a piece of cinema, whether connected to the book or not. And as I haven't read the much lauded book, I can only respond to the film.

The saturated self awareness that John Malkovich brings to his roles is perfectly suited to the character of David Lurie, a man whose love of literature, especially the romantic poets, contrasts with his unromantic personal style. When he seduces young Melanie (Antoinette Engel) it is only superficially romantic. (Here is one of my quibbles: I'd like to have seen the precise nature of this seduction; how Melanie succumbed is so crucial to our view of David's actions and thus his character.)

But that's just the start, in a work that jolts us to attention with the vicious attack against David and his daughter Lucy (Jessica Haines) at her remote flower farm, where David has gone after his forced resignation from university. It is here that we are confronted with the demons of post apartheid South Africa that J. M. Coetzee writes about with evident heartache. It's a complex story with uneasy and uncomfortable truths; and it is Lucy - in a wonderful performance by Jessica Haines - who delivers the symbolic and also tangibly real progeny of this traumatised state.

Malkovich and Haines aside, Disgrace features remarkable performances from both Eric Ebouaney as Petrus, the man who shares farming land with Lucy, and whose history sows the seeds that grow the plants of the new South Africa; and Fiona Press as the Animal Welfare League vet who provides a haven for abandoned dogs - and David. She, too, is a symbol, a representative of people of good heart who try to make a difference, often in vain.

Africa plays its soulful, bitter sweet self as the continent where nature's wild beauty is a helpless witness to atrocious actions by mankind, and provides some soul-searching images thanks to Steve Arnold's splendid cinematography. The score is another valuable contribution by the multi awarded Australian composer Antony Partos, and for all its sombre notes, the film is a rich, textured and emotionally engaging experience that challenges our ethical and moral views about South Africa - as I suspect does the novel.

Public Enemies

Every great director has at least one truly bad film in him, and Public Enemies is Michael Mann’s. It is not just a failure, but one of those movies in which the gap between its quality and its maker’s talent is so immense as to be nearly inexplicable. To be fair, it is possible that my expectations for Public Enemies, which chronicles the 1933 FBI manhunt for legendary Midwest bank robber John Dillinger, were unfairly high. But from the man who made Manhunter, Thief, Last of the Mohicans, Collateral, and the masterpiece Heat, a film this empty, dull, lifeless, and—most shocking of all—crudely made cannot be anything other than a major disappointment. This may not be fair, but it is a fact. We expect bad films from the likes of Brett Ratner. We expect great ones from Michael Mann. Such is the price of genius, and in Public Enemies, Mann pays it.



In all fairness, however, it must be admitted that Public Enemies is not just Mann’s failure. It is also another in a long line of equally inexplicable failures to successfully translate the myth of John Dillinger and his eventual demise to the screen. I use the term inexplicable because if the Dillinger legend is anything, it is unquestionably a great story. It has love, violence, friendship, irony, and death. It has a charismatic antihero and, in the person of straitlaced FBI agent Melvin Purvis, who led the manhunt, the stoic nemesis who eventually takes him down. It is a quintessentially American story featuring two classic American archetypes—the free-spirited outlaw and the upstanding sheriff—locked in a duel to the death in a world not unlike that of the Western but much more recognizably ours. In other words, it is a story that seems tailor-made for the movies. And yet, Hollywood has proven consistently incapable of doing it justice.


This is not for lack of trying. Almost from the moment he died in a hail of police bullets outside the Biograph Theater in Chicago, Dillinger has been an object of Hollywood’s affections. Over half a dozen films have been made about him, with John Milius’s Dillinger (1973), produced by legendary B-movie mogul Roger Corman and starring the much-underrated Warren Oates, probably being the best of them, but none have even approached the heights of the great gangster films like The Godfather (1972) or Bonnie and Clyde (1967). Most of them have been, at best, forgettable. It seems that something about Dillinger and his tale eludes the powers of cinema, and the best retellings of it have been in books like John Toland’s fascinating if sometimes inaccurate The Dillinger Days (1963).

The reason for this is probably Dillinger himself. Profoundly evil and, by all accounts, profoundly attractive, he is too complicated, schizophrenic, and disturbing a character for any mainstream film to accurately capture. A violent, charming sociopath, Dillinger was a rapist at thirteen, a convict before he reached twenty, and by the time he was finally cornered and killed by the FBI, a murderer many times over who counted several police officers among his victims. If anything distinguished him from his fellow thugs, it was his unnerving self-awareness, coupled with what seemed to be an instinctive understanding of the role that mass media was coming to play in American life. Decades before Charles Manson and O.J. Simpson, Dillinger was the first American criminal who succeeded in turning himself into a cultural icon. Accordingly, he cultivated a Clark Gable-style mustache, went out of his way to charm the press, never missed a chance for a photo opportunity— especially if it made the authorities look foolish—and became a specialist in such baroque gestures as vaulting gracefully over bank counters and refusing to steal money from poor farmers. He understood, probably because he shared it, that particularly American sympathy for outlaws, especially when their efforts are directed at the vast unknowable systems that seem to govern so much of modern American life. And like most sociopaths, he had a keen sense of what people find attractive, and quickly learned how to exploit it to his advantage.

The real skeleton key to the Dillinger legend, however, is probably the fact that while his chosen profession was somewhat unorthodox, he was very, very good at it. Americans have never much sympathized with Balzac’s observation that behind every great fortune lies a crime. They love a success story, no matter how tawdry the details (witness the recent sickening genuflection before the memory of the odious Michael Jackson), and Dillinger was unquestionably a success, robbing banks with seeming impunity, eluding the best efforts of law enforcement for months, and escaping from jails advertised as impregnable. For a brief moment, he was rich, good-looking, and famous, which is usually all Americans need to at least grudgingly admire someone. In this sense, he anticipated modern American icons like Simpson and Jackson, whose transgressions, however horrendous, are endlessly forgiven in the name of their celebrity.


The Dillinger of Public Enemies is both much more likable and far less interesting than the original. Played by perennial teen heartthrob Johnny Depp, he is both dull and a pretty nice guy, of which Dillinger was most certainly neither. Depp channels none of the sociopathic joie de vivre which so endeared the outlaw to a bruised and cynical American public. Instead, he remakes the outlaw as a sort of emasculated Byronic hero. Sensitive, sentimental, damaged, and driven, this Dillinger rarely speaks above a monotone, and seems more like a shuffling, drug-addled rock star than a gangster. All of the outlaw’s most legendary moments—jumping over the bank counters, letting the farmer keep his money, joking with the press, having his picture taken with his arm on the shoulder of his prosecutor—are portrayed in the film, but Depp’s performance is so woefully blank and uninflected that they pass by with barely any impact. While Mann has often used understated, affectless performances to his advantage (witness Robert DeNiro’s tour de force of underacting in Heat), in this case it serves only to empty Dillinger of what made him interesting in the first place.

Christian Bale’s vacant portrayal of Dillinger’s pursuer Melvin Purvis is equally woeful. Purvis has generally been portrayed by historians as either a stalwart lawman or a bumbling incompetent, and Mann tries to provide us with a little of both, resulting in a character who is both totally incoherent and just as uninteresting as his quarry. As with Mann’s portrayal of Dillinger, the reality was far more compelling and far more disturbing: Purvis was a puritanistic southerner who got the credit for killing Dillinger, though historians now believe there is a strong chance he never fired a shot (Mann’s version of events implies that this was in fact the case, though the climactic scene is so bizarrely edited that it is almost impossible to tell who is firing at who). Some thirty years later, the ex-lawman committed suicide, supposedly using the same gun with which he may or may not have shot Dillinger. The conflicting forces that must have been at work in the psyche of such a man ought to make for great drama, perhaps even great tragedy, but Mann more or less ignores them, and by the end of the movie one is simply left wondering what Purvis is doing in the film in the first place.

The only truly persuasive performance in the film belongs to French actress Marion Cotillard, who plays the ostensible love of Dillinger’s life, Billie Frechette. Cotillard depicts her as an innocent in love, which is probably inaccurate (before she hooked up with Dillinger, Frechette had already married and left another convicted criminal), but nonetheless touching, and at certain points she displays a ferocious carnality sadly lacking in the portrayal of Dillinger himself. She alone seems to be alive in the way legend demands. Billy Crudup, who plays J. Edgar Hoover, is also effective, though his character rarely rises above the shallow caricature which has become the standard Hollywood portrayal of the late FBI director. Nonetheless, there is an eccentric ruthlessness to Crudup’s Hoover that locks him immediately into the mind of the viewer, which cannot be said for the ciphers portrayed by Depp and Bale.

The acting, however, is the least of the film’s problems. Most troubling of all, especially for those familiar with Mann’s earlier work, is the cinematography, which must be one of the most wrongheaded stylistic decisions in cinema history. Put simply, Public Enemies is the ugliest big budget movie ever made. Mann shot the film on high definition video, and while films like the last two Star Wars prequels and Superman Returns have managed to get a reasonably film-like look out of digital cameras, Mann seems to have opted for a more primitive version of the technology, perhaps in imitation of the execrable Lars Von Trier’s equally execrable Dogma movement. The result simply bears out Roman Polanski’s opinion that Dogma films look like the cameraman is masturbating while stricken with Parkinson’s disease. The images have no depth, movement tends to blur in confusing and disorientating ways, even the night scenes feel overlit, and there are endless shaky-cam shots, every one of which ought to have been filmed on a dolly track. The final effect is to induce nausea in the viewer, and total incomprehension as to why Mann would lavish such expense on costumes, production design, and period detail only to photograph them as if he were making a 1970s no-budget BBC drama.

This becomes even more baffling when one considers Mann’s previous work. A notorious perfectionist with a fetish for architectural compositions and modernist styles, the crowning glory of most of its films is their visual beauty, which together with his use of ambient music draws the viewer into that vicarious fugue state which always constitutes cinema at its best. The opening shot of Heat, for example, features an LA commuter train slowly approaching the camera as it pulls into an enormous modernist train station, the train’s gleaming exterior echoing the architecture surrounding it, so they both appear to become part of the same metallic topography. Throughout the shot, a single ominous note plays on the soundtrack. The viewer has no idea where the film is set or what is happening at this point, but by the time Robert DeNiro steps off the train Mann has us in his pocket. We are all asking ourselves: Who is this man? Why are we watching him? What is about to happen? This is pure filmmaking, holding the viewer spellbound with nothing more than cinema’s own wordless, hieroglyphic language.

The worst sin of Public Enemies, however, is that it not only fails as cinema but, in making itself unwatchably ugly, actually seems to be at war with it. Whatever his motivations might be—and I suspect Hollywood’s fetish for digital technology is one of them—Mann appears to have been stricken with a violent hatred of his own medium. This may eventually lead to something of value, but if Mann continues in this vein, there is a strong chance that we will have to evaluate his career as that of wayward master whose ultimate contribution was, sadly, to the degradation of cinema itself.

Departures

Departures (おくりびと, Okuribito?) is a 2008 Japanese film by Yōjirō Takita. It won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film at the 2009 Oscars and has earned $61,010,217 in Japan as of April 12, 2009.[1]

When "Departures" was announced as the foreign-language Oscar winner in February, it was the first time a film from Japan had won the award in more than 50 years.

Overtaking what were widely considered to be the neck-and-neck front-runners, "Waltz With Bashir" from Israel and "The Class" from France, no one was more surprised to hear "Departures" called than the film's director, Yojiro Takita.
A handful of Oscar prognosticators and insiders had been turning to the film in the final buildup to the event, simply because "Departures" is such an audience-friendly picture. Opening Friday in Los Angeles, "Departures" plays as a gen- tle comedy of manners in its early sections before it slowly transitions into a heart-tugging story of forgiveness and redemption.



When a self-admittedly so-so cello-player (Masahiro Motoki) finds himself unemployed after his orchestra in Tokyo goes out of business, he returns to his small rural hometown. Mistakenly answering an ad for what he thinks is a travel agency, he reluctantly takes a job as an "encoffiner," someone who performs a ceremonial preparation to corpses before burial to ready them for their journey into the afterlife.

At first he hides his new job from his wife and old friends in town. Taken under the wing of his new boss (Tsutomu Yamazaki, familiar to American audiences from the one-time art-house hit "Tampopo"), he comes to appreciate the deeper meaning of his new line of work. Lessons are learned, old wounds healed, etc.

"Departures" has won more than 80 awards from around the globe and has taken in more than $60 million at the Japanese box office.

"There was no way I could have imagined the film would take off like this," Takita said recently through a translator in Los Angeles. "When you have death as a theme, people don't generally tend to get excited about it. So I had no way of knowing how the audience would receive it. We've been fortunate."

The project originated with its star, Motoki, who became taken with a book on the practice of encoffining and thought it would make a good movie. After reading an early draft of the script by Kundo Koyama, Takita, a veteran director with dozens of films to his credit, signed on.

"I knew of the existence of encoffiners, but I had never actually seen it with my own eyes," Takita said. "It's important to emphasize this was not a practice that was very common in Japan at all. It's safe to say that most Japanese people were unfamiliar with the existence of encoffiners before the film came out; it was more of a niche service offered in rural areas."


Yôjirô Takita's Departures was the surprise winner of Best Foreign Film at the 2008 Academy Awards, beating out the urban realism of Lauren Cantet's inner city school drama The Class and Ari Folman's Waltz With Bashir, a personal documentary that recounts a soldier's experience in the Israeli-Lebanon conflict. Departures takes on equally earnest subject matter; the film's title makes reference to the cleansing ritual that prepares dead bodies for burial in Japanese society.

Given its topic, Departures is surprisingly light-hearted: a feel-good film with uplifting music by Joe Hisaish, a composer best known for providing the score to Hayao Miyazaki's animated adventures. For a movie that tackles the subject of death head on, the film has many moments of unmistakable physical comedy.
At the time of the awards ceremony, American audiences had not had a chance to view Departures. In hindsight, the selection makes good sense. The Japanese film is competently made, pleasing to audiences, and in no way controversial. If this sounds critical, it is -- the Academy's choices are usually on the safe side. In 2008, Cristian Mungiu's 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days, a difficult but also tremendously powerful film about illegal abortion in Romania, received the prestigious Palme d'Or at Cannes but did not even merit an Oscar nomination.

Departures tells the story of Daigo Kobayashi (Masahiro Motoki), a cellist who loses his job with a symphony in Tokyo and decides to return to his small mountain village with his wife Mika (Ryoko Hirosue) to start over again. Answering an ambiguously worded want ad, Daigo finds himself in the employ of a quirky funeral professional (Tsutomu Yamazaki) who prepares deceased bodies for burial and entry into the next life.

A Lighthearted Approach To Difficult Subject Matter

At first, Daigo is revolted by the work. Many jokes are made at his expense as the squeamish young man learns to become comfortable in the presence of the dead. In Japan, this profession -- one step closer to death than even the undertaker -- is considered especially unclean; Daigo risks becoming a social outcast upon embracing his new employment. Even his wife shuns him.
The film, however, serves to remind the audience that death is very much a part of life. Not only is Daigo's choice of work not to be perceived as dirty, it is unmistakably noble. This point is hammered home. Daigo learns the intrinsic value of his profession from the impassioned gratitude of various mourners. The film documents not only the marked change of perception that Daigo undergoes, but also that of his reluctant wife. By the film's end, Daigo is required to perform numerous departures, the camera following the elaborate cleansing procedure step by painstaking step.

In addition, Daigo frequently plays his childhood cello outdoors in the wilderness of his new environs. The sweeping music and bucolic landscape serve to heap on the emotion to Takita's already heavy-handed manipulation, culminating in the death of Daigo's long lost father. Daigo's new skills serve him well, and the ritual he had previously performed in the service of others brings him much necessary release -- and a neat close to a much too neatly made film.

Departures (2009)
Starring: Tsutomu Yamazaki, Kimiko Yo, Ryoko Hirosue, Masahiro Motoki
Directed by: Yojiro Takita
Produced by: Yasuhiro Mase, Toshiaki Nakazawa
Running Time: 2 hrs. 11 min.

Three Monkeys

A family is dislocated when small failings become extravagant lies. The film opens as a wealthy businessman, Servet, running a campaign for the upcoming election, is driving in his car alone and sleepy, struggling to keep his eyes open. Seconds later he hits and kills a pedestrian in the middle of the road. Servet panics when another car with a couple inside approaches. He sneaks away. Eyüp, a man living in a slum at Yedikule neighborhood in İstanbul, with his wife and only son, is the driver of Servet. He wakes up in the middle of the night with his cell phone ringing. It's his boss, telling Eyüp to meet him immediately. Shivering in shock, Servet explains the current events to his driver. His excuse is if the fatal accident comes out in press it would terminate his political career, so he proposes Eyüp to take over the penalty and stay in prison for a brief period of time in exchange for a lump sum payment upon his release, whilst still paying his salary to his family so they can get by. Eyüp accepts the deal.

An unspecified time passes, summer arrives, and Eyüp's son İsmail fails to enter college again. His mother, Hacer, who works in the catering division of a factory, starts worrying about her son after unpleasant events, and tries to convince him to get a job. İsmail suggests driving children between home and school but of course they don't have any financial source for this kind of an enterprise. İsmail asks his mother to request an advance payment from Servet without consulting Eyüp. Hacer meets with Servet, in his office after the election (which he lost), and requests the money. After Hacer leaves the office and starts waiting for a bus at the stop Servet persuades Hacer to accept a lift from him back to her home.

More unspecified time passes, and İsmail intends to visit his father. Things take a poor turn when he finds his mother having an affair with Servet. İsmail stands passive. More time passes, and Eyüp has been released from prison. He senses things are "a little peculiar" inside his home. Hacer is in love with Servet and insists to maintain their affair. Servet disagrees. That night, Hacer and Eyüp are invited to the police station and informed that Servet has been murdered. Police officers interrogate the two and Eyüp finds out that Hacer was cheating on him. He denies knowing nothing about it. İsmail confesses that he murdered Servet. Eyüp calms down when he pays a visit to a mosque. Afterwards, Eyüp goes on to speak with a very poor man who works and sleeps inside a tea house in the neighborhood. Eyüp makes the same proposition to the poor man, Bayram, that Servet made to him: to claim the crime committed by his son. Bayram agrees. The last scene shows Eyüp at his home's balcony, staring at the Marmara Sea, and along with thunder it starts to rain.


Three Monkeys, Nuri Bilge Ceylan, 109 mins, 15

Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan has turned his innovative talents to that old cinematic favourite, the crime thriller

Reviewed by Jonathan Romney



When is a thriller, strictly speaking, a thriller? There's a fascinating cinema tradition in which directors associated with art films will take a stab at crime material.


This lets them tackle the extremes of human experience without the taboos imposed by mainstream fiction; it can also let highbrow auteurs prove that they, too, can keep viewers on the edge of seats (as opposed to nodding off in them). The results have often been fascinating, if not always classifiable as thrillers. Luchino Visconti took on James M Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice, in his 1943 film Ossessione: the result – unmistakably – worked as a genre thriller, but it was also a lot more, an acute psychological study and a founding text for Italian neo-realist cinema. But Almodovar doing Ruth Rendell in Live Flesh? Not remotely a thriller: the director is far more interested in making an Almodovar film.

Such distinctions are ultimately subjective, so I'll leave you to decide whether Three Monkeys, by Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan, is a thriller or an art film disguised as one. Either way, it offers an intriguing new angle on typical noir material, as well as a new perspective on Ceylan's style. This brilliant director made his international mark with the 2002 feature Uzak (Distant), about a disillusioned Istanbul photographer; his follow-up, Climates (2006), was a painfully intimate drama about a couple splitting up, all the more uncomfortable because the leads were played by Ceylan and his wife, Ebru Ceylan.

Three Monkeys retains the emotional concentration of Climates and the plasticity of time that Ceylan developed in Uzak. But this study of tensions between three family members and an outsider also tells a bracingly tawdry crime story, albeit in extremely pared-down fashion.

The film begins with a middle-aged man driving at night, then running away from the scene of a hit-and-run. He is Servet, a politician standing in a Turkish election; he doesn't want his crime to endanger his chances, he tells his driver Eyup (Yavuz Bingol), and offers him a large sum of money to take the rap. Eyup accepts the deal in order to provide for his wife and son, then disappears into prison – and disappears temporarily from the film, for while we expect this to be Eyup's story (especially since Bingol is a well-known singer in Turkey), he's off-screen for the best part of an hour.

Ceylan then leaves us to puzzle over what is happening in Eyup's absence. We learn that his teenage son Ismail (Rifat Sungar) is getting into bad company, but we don't know exactly what trouble he's getting into, any more than does his mother Hacer (Hatice Aslan). Early on, there's a long take of Servet carping on the phone about his thrashing in the polls: it is only after a while that Ceylan reveals that Hacer has been sitting opposite him, having to listen to all this. Given the churlishness of this unappealing bald pudgy man (played by one of the film's co-writers, Ercan Kesal), it comes as a surprise to learn, but only after some time, that Hacer has fallen for him.

Three Monkeys is a sombre slow-burner, but with a thread of black comedy running throughout: the ringtone on Hacer's mobile phone starts off as a running gag, before you realise how much it foreshadows the bleak denouement. The intrigue coalesces into a murder story with a last-minute twist – a very sobering and ambivalent twist, at that. You may leave the film uncertain about what exactly has happened – or about which of the four characters are the three monkeys of the title, with its allusion to seeing, hearing, speaking no evil. But Ceylan withholds the answers: he'd rather you came out of the cinema and debated it, maybe over a strong Turkish coffee.




The film displays Ceylan's trademark visual finesse: the close-ups linger on the characters' faces as their emotions shift, not always readably, while he applies his panoramic distortions not only to the cityscapes but also to the enclosure of the family flat. After using high-definition video for the fine-grained naturalism of Climates, Ceylan here puts it to very different use, shooting in colour but bleeding the image to metallic shades of grey. Decide for yourself whether Three Monkeys classifies as a genre thriller – but in terms of intelligence and cinematic invention, this tantalising film carries a thrill entirely its own.





Three Monkeys an Exemplary, Deadening Exercise in Malaise
By Nicolas Rapold

You can imagine frame grabs from Nuri Bilge Ceylan's art noir Three Monkeys popping up in a Bordwellian film-studies textbook (or blog post). Observe the jack-in-the-box close-up (against deep-background action) for a politician hiding after a hit-and-run; notice how his fall guy's family apartment is shot from unsettling heights and at angles slightly askew to the walls; soak up the digitally manipulated jaundiced palette, like watching an entire movie through the shades that eye doctors give out. The Turkish director's shifting story of guilt—the politico's flunky comes back from serving time and confronts his wife and son over infidelities—does not lack for carefully engineered technique, which is as stringently orchestrated as in past acclaimed films Distant and Climates. But Ceylan is essentially talking past his characters, whose thoughts are treated as secondary to DP Gökhan Tiryaki capturing their faces with the right hope-curdling hue. The heavy mood of indolence and rage, calibrated with ellipses in action, is stifling—everyone seems to move in a queasy haze. The climactic landscape shot—storms brewing over a harbor streaked with tankers and a distant man in silhouette—is suggestive of broader, communal malaise, yet confirms the film as an exemplary but deadening exercise.




When Self-Interest Clashes With Unruly Desire


At least since 2003, when his third feature, “Distant,” won two prizes in Cannes, the Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan has been a star of the international art-film circuit. “Distant” and its successor, “Climates” (a Cannes selection in 2006), are distinguished by careful framing, minimal camera movement and a mood that combines deep ennui with erotic longing. Though the films occasionally glance at modern global and Turkish social realities, they have a studiously abstract, timeless quality, a style that seems intended to soothe gloomy late-born cinephiles with intimations of Antonioni.



The mood of “Distant” is pretty well summed up in the title, and while “Climates” begins in warm sunshine, it feels most at home in the wintry landscape of its final scenes. Mr. Ceylan’s latest movie, “Three Monkeys,” which earned him an award for directing at Cannes last year, is in some ways a departure. The long takes and exquisite compositions are still there, but this time Mr. Ceylan trains his cool, detached sensibility on a ripe and pulpy melodrama that might have originated in a James M. Cain novel. The emotional weather is unusually hot and sticky, and the themes of class antagonism and sexual cruelty are overt, even if the literal depictions of sex and violence remain oblique and understated.



The basic story is as tight and simple as a slipknot. Servet (Ercan Kesal), a politician in the midst of a re-election campaign, is involved in a hit-and-run accident on a dark country road. He persuades his driver, Eyup (Yavuz Bingol), to take the fall for him, which will involve serving a relatively short prison sentence in exchange for an unspecified but large sum of money. Eyup, who lives with his wife and teenage son in a small apartment with a mind-blowingly cinematic view of the Bosporus, furrows his brow, shrugs his shoulders and accepts the offer.



Complications, as the saying goes, ensue. In Eyup’s absence, his son, Ismail (Ahmet Rifat Sungar), who can’t seem to pass his university entrance exam, drifts from adolescent idleness toward something potentially more dangerous. Hacer (Hatice Aslan), the boy’s mother, motivated at least partly by anxiety about her son, seeks out Servet’s help and ends up having an affair with him. What follows, while not exactly predictable, fits squarely within the logic of classic film noir, where cold-eyed self-interest quickly becomes entangled with unruly desires and the primal imperatives of honor and obligation.



All of it unfolds in hushed tones underneath a livid green sky, almost as if the clouds had been bruised by the emotional brutality the characters inflict on one another. Mr. Ceylan, a photographer as well as a filmmaker, at times falls prey to the pathetic fallacy, letting rain and lightning and mocking bursts of sunshine do too much of the dramatic work. And at the end he proves so besotted by his own prodigious ability to produce cinema with a capital C that he keeps the film going even after the story is effectively over. Good pulp depends, above all, on a ruthless sense of economy, and “Three Monkeys” is just a bit too profligate, too fancy, to be entirely convincing.



Which is not to say that it isn’t interesting. Somber as Mr. Ceylan’s films are, each is leavened by a bit of deadpan, minimalist comedy: an errant hazelnut skittering across a wooden floor in “Climates”; a maudlin pop song used as a cellphone ringtone here. And what Mr. Ceylan does with his actors is close to uncanny. Their dialogue is almost entirely literal and pedestrian, in keeping with their resolute ordinariness, but their equally ordinary faces become masks of mysterious, almost sublime feeling.



This is especially true of Ms. Aslan, whose face, with its wide, downturned mouth and dark-rimmed eyes, would be at home in Noh theater or silent film. Without her charisma, the movie would feel much more like an arch formal exercise. But Mr. Bingol, brooding stoically behind a dark mustache and heavy brows, and Mr. Sungar, pouting and gaunt, also impart their share of poetry. Only Mr. Kesal, playing a man in dubious possession of a soul, is a creature of pure prose.



The title of “Three Monkeys,” which Mr. Ceylan attributes to Confucius, raises a bit of a mathematical puzzle, since there are, after all, four main characters. Which three are the monkeys? Who is the odd man out — or, as the case may be, the lone human being in the primate menagerie? Does Servet make monkeys out of the other three, a working-class family at the mercy of a rich and powerful man? Is Ismail the innocent young victim of a morally obtuse older generation? Is Eyup a decent guy undone by monkeyshines perpetrated by his boss, his wife and his son? Or is it the men who are beasts, menacing Hacer and driving her to the brink of madness? Her husband and her lover both threaten to kill her, her son slaps her face, and she can’t seem to escape any of them.



The film’s shifting, elusive point of view is evidence of Mr. Ceylan’s skill. But he keeps himself, and the audience, safely outside the cage, while the four hapless beings inside suffer and struggle, beyond the reach of our compassion, as if some coldhearted creator had made them for no purpose beyond his own amusement.

Séraphine

The winner of 7 French Academy Awards, including best film, best original screenplay, and best actress, Martin Provost’s Séraphine stars Yolande Moreau as painter Séraphine Louis, aka Séraphine de Senlis, a plain, poor, uncultured, devoutly Catholic, and emotionally unbalanced housekeeper who became known as a major artistic talent in the early 20th century.

Written by Provost and Marc Abdelnour, Séraphine focuses on the artist’s relationship with avant-garde art dealer Wilhelm Uhde (played by Ulrich Tukur), who one day discovered that his cleaning lady in the town of Senlis was a masterful painter.

A sleeper hit in France, Séraphine has been met with raves on this side of the Atlantic as well. The LA Weekly’s Scott Foundas called it "the best movie made about a painter since Maurice Pialat’s exquisite Van Gogh in 1991 — and one of the only ones that truly grasps how close artistic genius dwells to the realm of madness," while in New York Magazine David Edelstein enthused that Séraphine is "sublime … one of the most evocative films about an artist I’ve ever seen."




Martin Provost’ Seraphine tells the story of Seraphine de Senilis, a lower class middle aged woman whose love of painting enabled her to persevere through the hardships of poverty and self-doubt, ultimately becoming one of the most respected avant-garde artists in France.

The film introduces Seraphine as a soft spoken hotel housekeeper who meticulously completes her task for meager wages. She is looked down upon by her employers because of her shaggy appearance and lack of lady-like grace. Seemingly uninterested in the politics of the world around her, Seraphine Collects her small wages and purchases small containers of paint. Not being able to afford every color that she needs, she creates paint using the resources available to her (using cow’s blood and candle wax for red). Eventually a new tenant named Wilhelm Uhde arrives at the hotel. Uhde is a German art collector who seems to have become disillusioned with the art world. Upon seeing one of Seraphine’s painting; he is newly impassioned and is eager to display Seraphine’s art to the world. At first Seraphine is hesitant but eventually allows Uhde to display her art to a selection of dealers and traders. The film then follows Seraphine through her brief moments of success and critical approval to her tragic downfall, maintaining the themes of perseverance and dedication in spite of social shortcomings.

Unlike many biopics which usually tell a simple narrative story of a historical figure, Seraphine tells not only the story of Seraphine but also analyzes the circumstances which lead to her anti-social behavior and secretive love of art. Class separation is a major motif that runs throughout the film, as numerous times we see Seraphine being condescended to our taunted by those around her. Provost is possibly suggesting that if it were not for her isolated and impoverished lifestyle, she would not have been able to produce the work that she did. The idea of using hardship for inspiration is also present in the character of Wilhelm Uhde as he is the only one who recognizes the potential that Seraphine has. He discovers her at a time in which he had lost interest in the world or art, he sympathizes with the emotions that could have inspired such work, and sees the vision that Seraphine was trying to create. When Uhde becomes more successful as an art dealer, he abandons Seraphine leaving her alone and penniless, no longer being able to relate to the desolate and weary mindset that he once shared with her. Although subtle and slow with

Provost analyzes not only the life of a troubled artist, but also gives his take on the dangers of success and human beings innate need for connection and emotional release.

Yolande Moreau delivers and excellent and brave performance as the troubled artist, balancing the emotions of humor, intense concentration and despair. While viewing her portrayal of the character the viewer is always toying with the idea that Seraphine mentally ill, but the brilliance of her art prevents us from jumping to that conclusion. Even by the film’s tragic conclusion there is still a question of whether or not Seraphine is in fact mentally ill, or is it simply that the people around her were not able to appreciate a person of her eccentricity and brilliance.

Seraphine is a simple slow, and contemplative film, tells the story of a seemingly forgotten contributor to the world of art that was misunderstood and underappreciated in her life time. Provost gives a great critic on the human condition, while showing how perseverance and dedication will lead to success no matter how brief or fickle.

Pranzo Di Ferragosto

A middle-aged man on his uppers, lives with and looks after his elderly mother, as unpaid bills pile up around him. As the traditional Italian holiday weekend of the 15 August approaches, the hapless hero is potentially offered, at least a partial, solution to his pecuniary problems. His landlord, one of his friends and even his doctor each persuade him to let them dump their elderly relatives on him, so that he can accommodate them and wait on them over the holiday period. Notwithstanding his reluctance to take on such nannying duties, the lure of relief from his financial straits is too much and so an assortment of ill-matched, elderly ladies descends on the tiny flat.

Written and directed by one of Italy's most celebrated screenwriters, Gianni di Gregorio (most recently contributing to the acclaimed Gomorrah), here making his feature debut, Mid-August Lunch is a miniature gem, by turns comic, embarrassing, engaging and emotionally affecting. This is a small but beautifully rendered drama of manners that captures the nuances of people's behaviour and shows a mis-fit group of individuals, coping (or not) with each others' idiosyncrasies. A completely unique film, Mid-August Lunch is a charming and convincing first feature from di Gregorio.



Small but utterly charming, Gianni di Gregorio's low-budget feature about an ageing Roman who suddenly finds himself looking after four ancient ladies over the mid-August dog days has enough heart to make up for its paper-thin story, and conceals a serious social message behind its delicate comic treatment of the burdens of old age, and the elderly as a burden. This won its 59-year-old director the Luigi De Laurentiis prize for Best First Film at Venice, where it caused a small commercial flurry.

Producedby Gomorrah director Matteo Garrone, this opened in Italy September 5 on limited release where it struck a chord with general audiences, notching up the weekend's highest screen average after Kung Fu Panda. There's something local about theemotionsit touches in a country that is increasingly unable to look after its old people within the family, but is haunted by the prospect of placing grandma in a home.





This is not, however, an exclusively Italian issue, boding well for its ability to cross over as a small arthouse hit thanks mainly to the memorable, semi-improvised performances by four non-professional actresses who make up the supporting cast. Sales have been good.

Gianni (played by the director himself) is an immediately recognisable Roman character; outside the house, he's a relaxed habitue of old-style Trastevere wine bars; inside, he's very much under the thumb of his tyrannical elderly mother (Valeria De Franciscis), a high-born lady fallen on hard times.


Aware that he is deep in debt and in arrears with his payments to the building co-op, its administrator offers to cook the books in Gianni's favour if he minds his own elderly mother over the mid-August 'Ferragosto' holiday (when even the few able-bodied Italians still left in the city head en masse for the beach). But the wily administrator turns up with an ancient aunt into the bargain; and when Gianni's angina starts playing up, the doctor friend who examines him makes things worse by throwing his own mother into the mix, so he can work a late shift at the hospital.


So a gaggle of old ladies (the average age of the four actresses is 88) is left in a small apartment with a reluctant but long-suffering and well-bred host. The women bicker, throw sulks and make friends, while Gianni attempts to monitor their pill intake and pacify them with food.

The film is dominated by the rich, worn hues of Rome in full summer. And the soundtrack - a faintly Balkan folk-jazz soundtrack of shrill trumpets and accordions - hits the right bittersweet notes.

Genova

Michael Winterbottom’s latest feature, Genova, is the newest addition to an oeuvre which, at this stage of his career, seems to encompass a film from almost every genre. Although more off-kilter than that other famous genre-hopping auteur Stanley Kubrick, Winterbottom is equally adept at crossing the various cinematic divides. If Code 46 was his sci-fi, 9 Songs his, er. . . romance, and A Cock and Bull Story his comedy, then – equally tenuously – Genova could well be his supernatural chiller.



Genova opens with Marianne (the ubiquitous Hope Davis) a young married mother driving a car with her two daughters passengers in the front and back. She is playing happily with her youngest but is paying scant regard to the road. Unsurprisingly, this soon results in an accident which leaves the two daughters traumatised but unhurt and Marianne thoroughly dead. Father Joe, played with typical British stoicism by Colin Firth, subsequently accepts a position at a university in Genova from his friend Barbara (Catherine Keener) and whisks daughters Mary and Kelly away from the overbearing sympathy of family and friends for a new start in an exotic location.

Genova is right from the get-go a Michael Winterbottom film. His trademark tonalities and natural, kinetic camerawork are in abundance throughout; every shot looks like it could have been made on a home video camera or could be taken from the eyes of a person walking down the street right behind the main characters. Through this approach, he creates strong emotional ties and an intimate sense of family – building genuine empathy with his audience that only serves to heighten the impact of the more heartfelt grief scenes and the supernatural elements.

The film packs a real emotional punch as a snapshot of a family dealing with a trauma and trying to move on with their lives. The focus is not on shouty scenes, set-tos and long emotional walks along rainy windswept coastlines with a bottle of whiskey in hand. The film instead acknowledges the scale of personal loss, recognising that something like the death of a family member is simply too big for the cinema screen. It chooses to focus on the impact of loss on the minutiae of the family itself. Genova depicts a young family that has become lost. Each member is lost in their own way, Joe within himself and his work, Kelly within hedonism and discovering her sexuality and Mary, rather chillingly, lost in trauma, guilt and the city.

Examining aspects such as trauma and guilt, Genova is a film that, on many levels, functions as a ghost story. The youngest daughter, Mary, is the prime focus of this aspect of the film. She is the most damaged (at least outwardly) and because she is the youngest. Like countless ghost, horror and supernatural films before it, Genova uses the age-old device of a child to create tension and discomfort. The child is the figure of innocence that can be turned on its head for evil purposes (Children of the Corn, The Omen etc) but also a figure that we naturally want to protect. Genova uses this typical horror trope, creating a connection with Mary and then using our desire for her wellbeing against us. Seeing her screaming for her mother in her sleep and crying uncontrollably is unsettling and upsetting, and while the appearance of Marianne’s ghost is seemingly a comfort to Mary, we know that it can only be a bad thing – either as a signifier of her mental trauma or as some intimidating otherworldly presence. Mary seems as deeply traumatised by the death of a family member as Julie Christie was way back in Don’t Look Now, both of them travelling to foreign places to escape the trauma of bereavement but neither of them being capable of escaping their own feelings of culpability.

Indeed Genova shares other similarities with Don’t Look Now in its recreation of the city as a self. Genova is a simulacra in a sense; it exists as another reality - a place that functions as a means of escape and also the means of totally losing oneself. It acts as a metaphor for grief in Winterbottom’s film, a deeply unsettling place with narrow streets that all look alike, full of falling plates of glass, strange men and incomprehensible dialects. Genova is monstrous in its benign indifference, like death itself, and the family must learn to live in and with it.

A palpable feeling of unease seems to come in and out of the film, which unfortunately lends it an uneven and unbalanced identity. On the one hand, we have a tremendously uncomfortable scene where Joe is searching for Mary in an ever increasing state of panic after a trip to the beach gone wrong; on the other, we see him teaching his students or watching Kelly perform a heart-warming piano recital. While juxtaposing these different elements paints an expressionistic portrait of a family, it doesn’t really help with the overall feel of the film, which seems at times to be at odds with itself. It doesn’t seem to be able to decide if it's a study in grief, a portrayal of redemption and self-discovery, or a deeply unsettling mood piece.

The film undoubtedly functions effectively within all three modes, but the supernatural elements are its strongest suit. It comes up trumps with Marcel Zyskind’s cinematography, which is almost Blair Witch-like as it follows the disparate family members in their bewildering stumbles throughout Genova, the city of their grief. Kelly’s P.O.V. as she flies across the city on the back of the scooter without a helmet is beautifully captured, evoking the transience of life and of the city itself, making us wonder if she will fall off and if she even cares at all.

Genova is by no means an easy watch but it's certainly an intriguing one, in which supernatural undertones underpin thoughtful emotional content that really hits home at times. The performances are uniformly excellent: especially from Willa Holland, who is so jaw-droppingly attractive that she easily steals the show from a criminally underused Catherine Keener. Winterbottom purists won’t be disappointed by this showing but others might want to look towards something that isn’t suffering from such an identity crisis.

El Niño Pez

¿Cuál es el proceso que lleva a la creación de una leyenda? Alrededor de este pregunta la directora argentina Lucía Puenzo escribió con tan sólo 23 años su primera novela. El viernes, nueve años más tarde, El niño pez, la adaptación al cine de su propio libro, inauguró la sección Panorama Special (fuera de concurso) de la Berlinale. Tras el éxito de XXY, que ganó el Gran Premio del Jurado en Cannes en 2007, el segundo largometraje de la directora argentina ha causado reacciones enfrentadas en su proyección.




La del niño pez es una leyenda que la joven Ailín, empleada paraguaya de una familia aristocrática de Buenos Aires, se inventa para superar un trauma de su adolescencia. Pero también es un hilo que une en una atormentada historia de amor a la empleada y a Lala, la hija de la familia argentina de su misma edad.

A partir de estas premisas, la película se va transformando a lo largo de una hora y media desde el relato de un amor homosexual a un road movie entre Buenos Aires y Asunción para terminar en un thriller con tiroteos y fuga desde la cárcel. Toca temas tan distintos como una relación lesbiana que se consume a escondidas, el incesto, la corrupción policial, los conflictos generacionales y hasta el entrenamiento de perros.

Energía en el escenario
El público de la sección Panorama suele estar compuesto por cinéfilos que no se cortan en salir de la sala a los diez minutos de película si algún detalle no les convence o en atacar con preguntas cínicas a directores y actores en el debate posterior.

En el caso de El niño pez, la reacción fue doble. Varias personas dejaron la sala, aunque al final hubo un aplauso prolongado. La crueldad de las preguntas fue anulada por el carisma de Puenzo, energía pura en el escenario: contesta en modo preciso, completo y divertido.

"Para adaptar la película tuve que liberarme de todo lo literario", explica Puenzo después del debate. "Y para lograrlo fue necesario sacrificar el punto de vista", que originariamente era el del perro Serafín. "En este proceso el género se impuso y la película se hizo más densa y más oscura".

Según Puenzo, el montaje fue la fase decisiva de su obra, ya que fue en este momento cuando encontró el "estallido" que andaba buscando. En la película revertió el orden cronológico de la versión literaria: "El filme arranca con la huida, momento en el que la protagonista Lala toma conciencia de sus acciones", y así empuja "a que el espectador reconstruya con ella los acontecimientos que la han llevado al viaje".

Un Conte De Noel

Arnaud Desplechin makes movies that play like epic novels built out into live-sized pop-up books. Virtually Cubist in their multi-faceted narrative complexity, they cast such a spell that they’re almost interactive. When you watch a Desplechin film, you can smell perfume and feel bass shaking a room, and you feel the burden of each character’s long-simmering loves and resentments as if they were your own. Beyond surround sound, it’s surround space, surround time, surround life.



A Christmas Tale (Un Conte de Noel), Desplechin’s latest, is a darkly comic dysfunctional family fairy tale, more Meet Me In Saint Louis than The Royal Tenenbaums, with a healthy dose of A Midsummer Night’s Dream thrown in. With its whimsies and excesses playing out under the oddly liberating spectre of expected death, the whole thing is infused with a fin de siecle sensibility. While ailing matriarch is Junon Vuillard (Catherine Deneuve) infuriatingly matter-of-fact regarding what may be her own last holiday (she explains the seriousness of her condition to her husband in their warmly-lit budoir, backed by the strains of cafe jazz), her grown-up kids reflexively take the reminder of the ticking clock as an opportunity for boozy, reckless revelry, as an excuse to fight and to stop fighting repressed desires. Weird, warm, gleefully funny and unavoidably heartrending, this grand tale of a family reunited by mortality is, in it’s most impressive trick, not a bit morose. To borrow a line from Desplechin himself, speaking after a screening at the New York Film Festival, the Vuillards “don’t have time for melancholy”; to borrow a line from his script, “suffering is a painted backdrop” for the business of getting through the day.




Via a prologue heavy with flashback shadow puppets giving way to direct camera address, we learn that Junon and husband Abel (Jean-Paul Roussillon) lost a child to cancer forty years earlier when a bone marrow donor couldn’t be found; at the beginning of the story’s present day, Junon learns she’ll die without the same procedure. And so her adult children and their own lovers and kids are asked to get their marrow tested and then come home to Roubaix. There’s humorless oldest sister Elizabeth (Anne Consigny), a genius playwright; pretty boy Ivan (Melvil Poupaud), who arrives with wife Sylvia and two young sons in tow; and Henri (Mathieu Amalric), the irresistibly charismatic bad seed middle child who Elizabeth “banished” five years earlier under mysterious circumstances. Also on hand for this holiday steeped in wine and old fights: Cousin Simon (Laurent Capelluto), whose life-long crush on Sylvia will require dealing with; Paul (Emile Berling), Elizabeth’s troubled teenage son who may or may not have some sort of psychic sensitivity; and Faunia (Emmanuelle Devos), Henri’s new, “bombshell” Jewish girlfriend, who swallows the rowdy familial scene with a sly smile and bespectacled outsider eyes.

There are layers of in-joke here for the initiated, both snarky and rather sweet. Junon admits that her least favorite houseguest is Sylvia, the motherly but secretly restless wife of Junon’s youngest son Ivan; Sylvia is played by Chiara Mastroianni, Deneuve’s real-life daughter. In Desplechin’s last film, Kings and Queen, Devos played the ex-wife of Amalric’s Ismael Vuillard. Although Desplechin insists that Ismael is no relation to these Vuillards, A Christmas Tale reunites Devos and Amalric as an oil and water romantic unit, as if giving their doomed lovers from Kings the last chance that narrative logic wouldn’t previously let them have. Devos is a sideline character in Christmas, but an important one: her unfathomably calm tolerance of Henri’s uncontrollable impulse for destruction is an emblem of Desplechin’s unique humanism. One doesn’t come to care for a creature of chaos like Henri in spite of their warts and flaws, but because of them.

(It’s worth noting that Amalric is so compelling here that it’s hard to find words that can do the experience of watching him justice, but to even say that is to state something painfully obvious –– I’m not sure there’s any more fun to found in international cinema right at this moment than an Amalric performance in a Desplechin film.)

Desplechin’s pleasure-desperate heroes (often embodied by Amalric) make bad, impulsive decisions, and watching them can touch off a kind of gleeful voyeurism, as if to exclaim, “How can they get away with that?!?” We react this way, probably, because we’re so used to people in movies letting their id take over only to run up against near-instantaneous punishment; we think it’s normal to see adults treated like children when they behave like adults. But in real life, we torture ourselves more often (and more intensely, and more effectively) than we suffer recrimination at the hands of the people we anger or disappoint, and the cycle of self-pity/self-realization/self-flagellation is a long one.

In other words, we get away with it until we don’t, and here Desplechin is cheifly concerned with the giddy high of being In It, with consequences left for sorting out on a longer timeline than the film has in mind. And why not? The Vuillards are a family united by an impending mortality, united in irrationality, passion, casually crippling depression, self-medication. They’re a family where the most sedate member, the fixer, visits his adolescent nephew in a mental ward with booze and smokes in tow. They’re sequestered together in the enchanted space of a slightly crumbly, possibly haunted manse, where no one will ask them to pay for their mistakes until after the holiday. With death on the horizon, Desplechin’s imagined family are liberated to push their lives to the limit, most thrillingly in Amalric’s winking, balls-out bravado. Desplechin pledges solidarity with his chracters by rendering their story via ample, borderline whimsical formal gambles and dizzying montage. A Christmas Tale feels thoroughly like a magic hour scramble. How does he get away with it? Form follows content.

State of Play

State of Play is a 2009 American political thriller. It is a film adaptation of the critically acclaimed 6-part British television serial State of Play, which first aired on BBC One in 2003. It is directed by Kevin Macdonald and written by Matthew Michael Carnahan, Tony Gilroy, Peter Morgan, and Billy Ray.

The film tells of a journalist's probe into the suspicious death of a Congressman's mistress. Russell Crowe plays the journalist and Ben Affleck plays the Congressman. Support comes from Helen Mirren, Jason Bateman, Robin Wright Penn, Rachel McAdams, and Jeff Daniels. The plot of the six-hour serial has been condensed to fit two hours, and the location changed to Washington, D.C. Macdonald said State of Play is informed by the films of the 1970s, and explores the topical subjects of journalistic independence and the relationship between politicians and the press. It was released in North America on April 17, 2009.



Now that Hollywood has discovered that the key to putting fannies in seats is to make movies based on comic books -- and lots of 'em -- releasing an intelligent adult thriller about the death of newspapers sure seems like a stupid move. Instead of a guy in a latex leotard clinging to the side of a building, we have a chubby, middle-aged newspaper journalist (in this case, Russell Crowe) clinging to his job, not for the money or even for the glory but for the sake of the principles involved. All he wants to do is to get the truth out there, accurately; he's even happy to share a byline with a cub reporter (in this case, Rachel McAdams), as long as the story gets told the right way. Who on earth is going to pay to see that? Especially with no 3-D glasses involved.

Even just three or four years ago, the existence of a reasonably smart adult film like "State of Play" -- which is based on a BBC television series and which was directed by Kevin Macdonald ("Touching the Void," "The Last King of Scotland") -- wouldn't seem so unusual. Today it stands out starkly in a landscape of aggressively ironic comedies, ambitious but lackluster animated pictures and the aforementioned comic-book movies, particularly when beautifully made, unapologetically grown-up thrillers like Tom Tykwer's "The International" fail to find an audience. And as disappointed as I was with Tony Gilroy's too-tricky romantic caper "Duplicity," it did make me nostalgic for pictures aimed at an adult audience that at least make some attempt at style and wit. Maybe "State of Play" (on which Gilroy worked as a writer) is, as those movies turned out to be, just tilting at windmills, another desperately hopeful picture made for a moviegoing audience that no longer exists.

Even if that's the case -- especially if that's the case -- we need more mainstream movies like it. In "State of Play," Russell Crowe's Cal McAffrey is an investigative reporter for the Washington Globe (clearly a stand-in for the Washington Post) who's drawn into a case that affects one of his closest friends, upstanding congressman Stephen Collins (Ben Affleck), who's leading the charge against a multibillion-dollar contractor accused of committing atrocities against Iraqi civilians. When a woman who, it becomes clear, is Collins' mistress dies in a subway accident, Cal begins to follow certain threads that don't lead where they should. One of Cal's young colleagues, Della Frye (McAdams), is also chasing down bits of the story, but she's not, in his eyes (or in the movie's), a "real" reporter: Della works for the paper's "online side," as it's rather cavalierly called, and although she's smart and scrappy, she has no qualms about slapping a semi-informed blog post on the paper's site. Cal, seasoned, beaten-down and, like most of his ilk, knowing that his days as a professional journalist are probably numbered, has little respect for her. But his boss (played by Helen Mirren) lays the situation out clearly: "She's hungry, she's cheap, and she churns out copy every hour."


Once Cal starts working more closely with Della, he sees she's smarter and more dedicated than he's given her credit for: It turns out he expects more of her than the paper does, and she rises to the challenge. Because the central idea embedded in "State of Play" isn't "online bad, print good": It's that the craft of journalism has to find a way to survive into the next generation, which wouldn't be such a dire problem if the architecture that supports journalism as we know it weren't crumbling around us by the minute. While "State of Play" is, in some ways, an elegy for the printed newspaper, it's really more of a rallying cry for newspapers to rethink and retool everything, fast. The new house has to be built and ready before the old one crashes to the ground.

It's something of a marvel that Macdonald manages to get those ideas across cinematically in "State of Play" without making them seem forced and heavy-handed. "State of Play" does get a little creaky in its last third -- at that point it needs to be more streamlined, more concise. (Although when Jason Bateman shows up as a player in this sordid little Capitol Hill drama, he injects a fat dose of humor and life into the proceedings, which keeps them from flagging too much.) But Macdonald, the screenwriters (the script was written by Matthew Michael Carnahan, Gilroy and Billy Ray, adapted from Paul Abbott's script for the television series) and cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto manage to weave their ideas through a sturdy-enough plot, so we never feel we're being preached to. Macdonald knows how to give filmmaking precision the illusion of being casual. In an early sequence Crowe shows up at a crime scene, and as he's quizzing one of the cops (he's brought an extra cup of coffee to smooth his way into the guy's good graces), Macdonald lowers the sound of the dialogue and brings up the ancillary noise, that of traffic and helicopters: The suggestion is that no matter how important you may think your job is (or how important it actually is), life goes on around you -- it's not about to stop.

Crowe is an extremely gifted actor who not only has hit the age at which leading-man glamour is harder to hang onto; he's also working at a time when leading-man glamour isn't as big a draw as it used to be. In "State of Play," he's a little thicker around the middle, and a bit more lumbering, than usual. His Cal is shaggy and sleep-deprived -- he has the look of a guy who keeps forgetting to shower. Crowe's lack of vanity is perhaps its own kind of vanity; you might call it bad grooming used as an actor's tool. But the effect works. Cal wears his seriousness and fortitude like a shield, even though he knows his profession is facing defeat. He shows some ragged tenderness, too, particularly in his scenes with Stephen's wife -- he's been friends with the couple for years -- played by Robin Wright Penn.

But Cal's contentious interplay with Della is the movie's backbone, and McAdams meets the challenge admirably. She makes Della both likable and frustrating. She's got all the raw materials a good journalist needs; the problem is that no one has taken the time to clue her in to the delicate ins and outs of the profession. Or to the fact that, sometimes, getting the story right just takes time and legwork. McAdams is capable of showing both chipper cluelessness and burgeoning insightfulness. When she and Cal start working together seriously on their story, he assigns her to what she perceives as a lesser task and grumbles, thinking he's patronizing her. Actually, he is -- but the greater idea, which she's sharp enough to pick up on, is that the seemingly tiny parts of a story often expand to be crucial ones.

When Cal and Della finally have their story ready -- and they don't run with it until they're certain it is ready, which is yet another suggestion that "State of Play" takes place in a movie dream world instead of the real, contemporary one -- he suggests that they put it up right away, that night, online. Della responds with a line that struck me as almost laughably corny when I heard it, although the reality is that it stuck me like a pin: "When people read this story, they should have newsprint on their hands."

Yes, they should, although they probably won't: Even though Cal and Della run their story in the print edition, the truth is that most of the people who read it, even in this movie dream world, will probably do so online. The movie's closing credits show a newspaper being lovingly produced, and the sequence is visual poetry: We see the plates being made, and the paper running off the presses sheet by sheet. That's already a quaint image of days gone by, and the movie knows it. "State of Play" is a work motivated by fear, not nostalgia. It's less concerned with the idea of saving newspapers as we know them than it is with the notion that serious investigative journalism has to survive, in pixels if not in print. The trick is to save it before the presses stop running for good.

Transylvania

With a title like Transylvania and the presence of dark princess Asia Argento, you could have expected gothic vampires and a lot of blood getting sucked, but Gypsy Director Tony Gatlif prefers to take us on a harsh road trip.



Music, as a symbol of life, is the real theme of Transylvania, which follows Zingana (Asia Argento), a disturbed and pregnant girl who travels to Transylvania to find the father of her child, a musician, and whom, after being abandoned, wanders like a homeless until she meets another lost soul who takes her under his protection





Asia Argento (Scarlet Diva, Marie-Antoinette, XXX) is incandescent here, as she often is, and she carries this film on her shoulders, exhibiting madness, strength and fragility at the same time. There isn't much happening, the filmmaker mostly focusing on the emotional journey of his characters. While the setting is pretty basic, the film is however pretty intense, taking your guts with its roughness.






Music is omnipresent, officiating as a thread that leads the characters to their destiny. The folkloric songs symbolize hope and happiness and should only been used as positive energy, a stated by a group of musicians toward the end. Obviously the association of music and gypsies isn't far from the universe of Emir Kusturia (Life is a Miracle), and one can regret that the film, which is also in the continuity of Gatlif's Exiles, lacks originality. But if you're into these kinds of tough emotional and psychological foreign fares, Transylvania is certainly for you, and it was one of my favorite films at AFI Festival where I saw it.

Still Life

Jia Zhangke (simplified Chinese: 贾樟柯; traditional Chinese: 賈樟柯; pinyin: Jiǎ Zhāngkē) (born 1970 in Fenyang, China) is a Chinese film director. He is generally regarded as a leading figure of the "Sixth Generation" movement of Chinese cinema, a group that also includes such figures as Wang Xiaoshuai and Zhang Yuan.[1]

Jia's early films, a loose trilogy based in his home province of Shanxi, were made underground and outside of China's state-run film bureaucracy. Beginning in 2004, Jia's status in his own country was raised when he was allowed to direct his fourth feature film, The World with state approval.

Jia's films treat themes of alienated youth, contemporary Chinese history and globalization, as well as his signature usage of the long-take, colorful digital video and his minimalist/realist style. The World, in particular, with its portrayal of gaudy theme park filled with recreations of foreign landmarks is often noted for its critique of globalization of China.[21][22]

Jia's work speaks to a vision of "authentic" Chinese life, and his consistent return to the themes of alienation and disorientation fly in the face of the work of older filmmakers who present more idealized understandings of Chinese society.

Critics have noted that whereas "Fifth Generation" filmmakers such as Zhang Yimou churn out export-friendly and lushly-colored wuxia dramas, Jia, as a "Sixth Generation" filmmaker, rejects the idealization of these narratives in favor of a more nuanced style. His films, from Xiao Wu and Unknown Pleasures to Platform and The World, eschew the son et lumière that characterizes so many contemporary Chinese exports. But the films' recurrent and reflexive use of "pop" motifs ensure that they are more self-aware than the similarly documentarian Chinese films of Jia's Sixth Generation peers.

Still Life (Chinese: 三峡好人; pinyin: Sānxiá hǎorén; literally "Good people of the Three Gorges") is a 2006 Chinese film directed by Jia Zhangke. Shot in the old village of Fengjie, a small town on the Yangtze River which is slowly being destroyed by the building of the Three Gorges Dam, Still Life tells the story of two people in search of their spouses. Still Life is a co-production between the Shanghai Film Studio and Hong Kong-based Xstream Pictures.[1]

The film premiered at the 2006 Venice Film Festival and was a surprise winner of the Golden Lion Award for Best Film.[2] The film would premiere at a handful of other film festivals, and would receive a limited commercial release in the United States on January 18, 2008 in New York City.

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Sometimes film festival juries actually get it right. Jia Zhangke has been making films for ten years, but, until now, a major festival prize (from the “big three” of Cannes, Venice, and Berlin) has eluded him. Finally, though, the Golden Lion bestowed in Venice on his newest feature Still Life acknowledges what students of international cinema already knew: Jia is one of the leading filmmakers of our time. His works advance the art of cinema in ways that are dazzlingly innovative, while also being precisely attuned to the radical new demands of 21st century society. Each of Jia’s films articulates an abstract structure of time and space, and a more sensual structure of feeling, through which we can see and feel our way to coming to grips with a new, changing world.





Prizes have little intrinsic values: the sales agents, distributors, critics, and the worldwide festival system together create an economy of cinema as marketable international luxury commodities, whose circulation and valorization are ratified and sustained by festival awards. I would rather set “prize-ability” against what Jia has accomplished with Still Life. This new film signifies an implicit refusal to participate in that particular economy, one that his most recent films, culminating in the international success The World (2004), have seemed more and more willing to integrate themselves into. The spectacle, the flash, the internationalized film language of The World (Jia’s first “official” film) made it as internationally distributable as a serious product of the Chinese independent film world could be, but at the cost of shifting the balance away from independence and toward easy consumption.






Still Life doesn’t play to the audience: it’s more tough, complex, dense, allusive, and mysterious, than any feature Jia has made to date. Like most of his feature films, Still Life presents characters on some sort of quest. Both main characters Sanming (Han Sanming, who played the same character in 2000’s Platform and The World) and Shen Hong (Zhao Tao) are searching for absent spouses. Coal miner Sanming’s wife left him 16 years ago, and he’s only just now travelled from his native Shanxi province to find her at her former home, the town of Fengjie, located on the Yangtze River in Sichuan province, just upstream from the giant Three Gorges Dam project. When Sanming discovers that the address his wife left him has now been flooded by the rising reservoir project—as has much of Fengjie—he decides to stay and wait for her, and gets a job with a demolition crew hammering the city to bits in advance of its imminent flooding.





Shen Hong is looking for her husband, who disappeared only two years ago to work in a factory in the Fengjie area. She seems to want her husband back, and finds an old colleague of his, Dongming (Jia regular Wang Hongwei), to help. When she eventually finds her husband, she tells him that she has a lover and that she wants a divorce. Sanming, on the other hand, does want his wife to return, and especially wants to see his daughter whom he has never met. We eventually find that he purchased his wife, who was abducted, probably by marriage brokers, and forcibly sent to live with him in Shanxi. Though he doesn’t find his daughter, in the end he meets his wife, and the possibility is raised that she might return to him in the future if he can raise enough money to pay her family’s debts.





Laying out a plot description this way is a bit misleading. Though there seems to be the outline of a well-behaved narrative—actually, two narratives, in which characters try to solve problems, proceeding chronologically towards a late climax and resolution—storytelling seems beside the point as you watch it. Narrative expectations are constantly thwarted: information is presented piecemeal, out of order, or elided completely; the climaxes are downbeat, purified of affect, and seemingly empty sections of time acquire the most weight.




Jia’s camera has two key preoccupations: physical bodies and landscapes. The bodies are male, copiously presented, and frequently half nude. This is something completely new in Jia’s work. His camera slowly, repeatedly, pans over groups of ruddy skinned workers as they rest, eat, play, or hammer away at the infrastructure of Fengjie that they are slowly pounding into rubble. These tableaux of bare-chested men are not movie-beautiful: they are natural, tough, work-honed bodies, with a tangible sense of weight, of taking up space, containing a wiry potential for endless physical labour. One might even detect something like an eroticized gaze in the film’s obsessive, close, lingering pans.





Landscapes are treated in a remarkably similar way: long, slow, 180-degree pans that turn vast fields of rubble, waste, and half-decayed, soon-to-be-demolished buildings into epic tableaux. In style, these images seem partially derived from traditional Chinese scroll painting, but have nothing to do with them in content. It is precisely the spectacular ugliness of the physical devastation of the urban environment around the Three Gorges that captures the camera’s gaze: an anti-still life that monumentalizes destruction, giving it an awful, sublime grandeur normally reserved for scenes of natural beauty.





It is precisely in the intersection of these two obsessive imageries that the film generates its own particular beauty: namely that of bodies walking through wastelands. Both main characters pick their way, without comment, through this post-disaster landscape, two individual lives persisting within an absolutely inhospitable environment. One of the things the film celebrates is this miracle of human persistence: how the necessary—survival—trumps the impossible.

Miracles are on offer, too, in a wry, understated mode. Jia offers visions of flight and some strange magic. An impossibly shaped building takes off like a rocket before the men with the hammers can get to it. A flying object streaks before Sanming’s and Shen Hong’s eyes: Is it some embodiment of their need to move through impossible barriers, their ability to imagine how to change their worlds? They never meet, but an angel ties them together: a young singing boy who smokes and strolls in and out of their worlds, singing at the top of his voice. In the end, another symbolic linkage: a high-wire artist appears, in the distance, suspended between two buildings that are destined no doubt to topple over some time soon.





Still Life incorporates a complex symbolic system that suggests possible meanings without fixing them definitively. Most prominently displayed are the set of four ambiguous symbols of consumption and enjoyment that the film underlines with titles onscreen: cigarettes, wine, tea, and candy. They stand in as replacements for the standard four household items (fuel, rice, cooking oil, and salt) that represent the daily necessities of life in a set Chinese expression. Jia’s update replaces survival with pleasures, even addictions. Those looking to find support for an ambivalent interior critique of the concomitant pleasures and dangers of turning cinema itself into a series of tantalizingly consumable items could do worse than start here.





That high-wire act is another symbol, one of a series of spectacular linking images that includes the new suspension bridge over the Yangtze lit spectacularly by order of an official for his assembled VIPs. The Three Gorges Dam itself appears at the end of Shen Hong’s story, both linking and separating the two sections of the river: the massive upstream reservoir with its disappearing strata of devastation and the downstream section leading to Shanghai. This ambivalent signifier of construction/destruction serves as an ironic backdrop to Shen’s announcement that she herself is leaving her husband. The physical landscape seems just as much in need of sustaining connections as the characters we see wandering through it.

The image of the Dam raises a whole set of political issues contained within the film, a social critique that works much more powerfully on an abstract level than as a direct commentary on the long-lived debated over the Three Gorges project. That the film was approved by the Film Bureau for exhibition in China is quite an achievement for Jia and his co-producers the Shanghai Film Studio. The film implies that the Fengjie Relocation Office is a gathering place for local thugs, who, organized by goon contractor Mark (a charismatic Chow Yun-fat worshipper with a gangster’s swagger), and at the behest of local demolition officials, beat up poorly compensated residents of local apartments who are not moving out quickly enough. This nexus of official corruption, massive property theft, and gangster muscle is well known throughout China, but displaying it even glancingly onscreen, in a film going into Chinese movie theatres in December, is rather unexpected. It’s also notable that censors allowed the scene at the Dam to pass (I don’t think marriage breakups are the sort of activity party officials imagined threir monumental structure serving as a cinematic backdrop for). Chinese press reaction to the Venice win was predictable, universally lionizing Jia as the latest exponent of national pride and then deftly subsuming him into the pantheon of contemporary cultural heroes.

On the screen, Still Life offers an unusual kind of beauty, both astringent and monumental. This beauty is mediated through images that are distinctly video in origin (HD, but video all the same). It’s there in the crispness of line, in the almost brutal sense of contrast between hot whites and dim blacks. We are far from the lush HD images of The World, the degraded medium definition video of Unknown Pleasures (2002), the classical 35mm palette of Platform, or the 16mm indie grunge of Xiao Wu (1997). There are trade-offs, obviously, in a filmmaker’s choice of medium today. What Still Life gains is precisely the shock of truth. Its “video-ness” suggests an immediate, direct transcription of reality that challenges the viewer in what can only be described as an ontological way. Look at what reality is; look deeply into the way things actually exist, the film seems to be demanding. At the same time, it denies the processed, aestheticized pleasure of much of today’s mainstream art cinema.

Jia shot Still Life in some of the same locations and at the same time as the documentary Dong and the relationship between the two is provocative. Dong records the painter Liu Xiaodong as he prepares two large-scale works, one of half-naked male workers in Fengjie lounging with the river as a backdrop, the second of female entertainment workers in Bangkok lounging en deshabille amidst fruits and furniture. In Dong, we are supposed to be seeing documentary truth, as the artist Liu paints real people in a real place. But Sanming is in Dong, as are some of the other characters from the movie. Yet he is not really a worker in Fengjie, he only plays one in Still Life. So what is he doing in Dong? Similarly, shots are shared between the two films: the creepy disinfectant team in their moon suits, the bare-chested men hammering in syncopated rhythms at the city ruins, the collapsing wall of one wrecked building.

As Jia maps it, cinema does not divide neatly into fiction and documentary. Dong creates a subjective world, as much inside the mind of the artist Liu as outside in objective space. Still Life digs deep to reveal an underlying reality, mobilizing sophisticated formal strategies to create images of truth. These same strategies demand—or, rather, construct, during the process of watching—viewers who are ready to watch, absorb, and feel this vision. It is a vision of a man-made hell, of the monumental and limitless destruction left behind by a society rushing to tear up its foundations and gut its history. And it is a vision of embodied resistance—an individual, physical resilience that can spark an impossible, miraculous, but tangible hope in a world that seems to offer none.