Like other sublime cinematic explications of the femininity under duress from the ’90s – The Double Life of Veronique, All About My Mother, and Farewell My Concubine chief among them – The Piano treks into uncharted waters of the cinematic variety as well as the social. In the New Zealand landscape – prefiguring and riposting the picturesque post-card hollowness of The Lord of the Rings – Jane Campion siphons off a visual limbo that boldly provokes us to consider space internally and externally. Campion’s expressive romanticism evokes the lushness of Jane Austen as well as the contradictions in internal, mental states suggested by the Victorian literature that has become so entwined with Western conceptions of both feminine oppression and internal selfhood rupturing against the dying of the light. The non-natural, hyperbolically romantic vistas become counterpoints to the frail, trapped humans who must withhold their emotions from the predation of these landscapes. And, in typical romantic form, the film’s incontrovertible splendor also serves as a visual lexicon for dreams and desires that always fight to waft and permeate out of their fleshy prisons. Continue reading
Un-Cannes-y Valley: The Piano
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The easy path with Krzysztof Kieslowski’s The Double Life of Veronique is to turn it into a prison, a detention center to trap ideas and themes, to stagnate the film and hoist it on the petard of its own conceptual dualities and symmetrical intricacies. To flatten it, essentially, by turning it into a psychoanalytic study or a perceptually oblique delivery mechanism for a philosophical thesis about order. Temptation beckons us to plunge deep into the depths of a work, following a shaft of light to the darkest trenches of the marina to unearth its supposed hidden treasures. In doing so, however, we may dig our own waterlogged grave. 
So, a great many of the films I wish to discuss for the Cannes Film Festival series are exceedingly difficult to come by, so we’ll be keeping things fluid around these parts. I plan on, hopefully, fulfilling the series by the end of May (that’s a review for every year of the festival until the present) but the order of the reviews is, as of this point, up in the air. I’ll be keeping things fresh, skipping as I see fit. It’s just the way it’s gonna be. Think of it as a way to keep us on our toes. Speaking of which, and speaking of today’s subject, not a better film exists for the subject of toes and keeping us on them like we’re dancing on hot coals … 
“Importance” has always been an albatross around cinema’s neck, or the neck of any popular medium of art. The trouble isn’t that it forces artists to shoot for the middle (not middle America or the middle aisle but the middlebrow, aesthetically speaking), but that it so often precludes surreptitious variances in tone and style, it douses cinema in a layer of pummeling pragmatism and assured complacency. It primes a film for the belief that the narrative it is telling, the content of the art, is so essential and valid that playing with the form in which that content is presented becomes tantamount to heresy. It asks us to accept the known, the obvious realm of “content” and narrative, at the expense of the dangerous realm of style and form. 
Finally, after months of delay, it’s time to complete the second half of the Cannes Film Festival Series I began after last year’s festival. I have no proposed schedule, but let’s just say, if I’m on my best behavior, I hope to be done by this year’s festival in May. 
Ray lived by night, Godard left us breathless, Penn ignited the New Wave, Altman turned the camera back on thieves like us, and Malick informed us that lands, despite being the crux of majesty in the world, were indeed bad, all prismatically glimpsed from the confines of the same essential story of lovers on the run from the law. Before all of them, though, a German expat, death and national turmoil lingering in his mind and social opprobrium hot on his tongue, took the same story and welcomed it as an opportunity to remind us that innocence, once drained, has no life left to give. A rejoinder to the torrential downpour of Nazism absconding with the ostensible innocence of his old home and a riposte to the dislocation of Depression-era life in his new home (two paths that would cross circa 1939), You Only Live Once sparkles with director Fritz Lang’s inveterate directorial gloaming. It isn’t the destruction-maestro at his most malevolently implacable (M could never be topped). But this mostly unknown film today not only tackled present-day social schism with fractured, sharded filmmaking but also, arguably, served as Lang’s most explicit premonition of the genre he would become most famous for: the noir. 
Fritz Lang’s post-Metropolis rejoinder to his own maximalist desecration of modern German society is a fanciful, feisty kaleidoscope of Berlin bedlam and Weimar-era hedonism untethered from the astringent social critique of Lang’s Mabuse pictures. While Rudolf Klein-Rogge plays a monomaniacal mastermind of pandemonium here, as he did in Dr. Mabuse from six years before, this erratic, erotic, orgiastic display of Lang’s bravura skill shoeshines German Expressionism with pumped-up serial and rubs itself down in a torrid love affair with presentation itself. If the Mabuse films secretly smuggled in a critique of German society, Spies is, relatively speaking, more of a love letter to the temporal high of monomania, even if it is a note written with a poisoned pen. Certainly, Lang was well aware of the horrors of unfettered ’20s capitalism in Berlin and the imminent rise of the Nazi party – three years later, he would direct the ultimate cinematic statement on Nazism without even mentioning the word. But, just this once, and until its startling and corrosive finale, Lang let his monocle down in one of the ultimate cinematic odes to filmmaking as toybox more than toolbox. 
With The Witch back in theaters and having a field day at the box office, let us look back at the single greatest film about witches ever to grace the screen. 
The incorporeal spirit of his dueling godfathers, Sergio Leone and Don Siegel, haunt Clint Eastwood’s second directorial effort, which also invites the tenebrous psychosis of Eastwood’s debut Play Misty for Me to the party. From Leone, Eastwood attunes to the primordial, baroque expanse of the Western as a dreamscape or an amoral vetting ground rather than a physical place. As a counterbalance, Eastwood matches the florid poetry of Leone to Siegel’s terse brutality to concoct a Western as comfortable with surreptitiously shooting you in the back as it is with orchestrating the social theater of the high noon showdown. 
Deliverance is driven by nihilistic impulses that subsume all sense of morality under the unremitting decay of primal, masculine gruesomeness. The story of four Atlanta businessmen trapped and hunted in rural Northern Georgia, John Boorman’s tone poem to nature as implacable object abstains from ever empathizing with the four men. Excepting Ronny Cox’s Drew, the only primary player who even considers the value of rural natives in an eerie yet oddly touching banjo duel, by far the most famous scene from the film to this day, none of the characters fare well as moral specimens. Arriving in a village hewn out of the earth and continually threatened by it, Ned Beatty’s Bobby bellows about the place, and when redressed for potentially annoying the people of the town, his retort, “People?”, suggests his ignorance about the location he now inhabits. 
The Long Take 