Is the Robinson
Crusoe idea simply an airtight concept? Put a star like Hanks on a pretty island,
stand back and watch the celluloid magic happen? Hanks, whose idea the film
was, and Zemeckis have said they worried that the thing could easily fizzle,
and I think they’re right. There was no guarantee. With zero human interaction
and plenty of chances for ham-fisted contrivance, the island portion of Cast
Away could have proved noxiously boring or inane, or both. That it turned
out so astonishingly well reflects the high degree of skill, assurance and ingenuity
in the execution, plus certain ineffable qualities that perhaps can’t be
anticipated until you see the movie actually weave its captivating spell.

The story opens
on a Western ranch as a package is picked up by a FedEx truck, beginning a journey
that will be completed only years later, at the movie’s end. We next jump
to Moscow–bustling, harried, post-Communist Moscow–where Chuck Noland
(Hanks) is giving an emphatic time-is-money lecture to a group of glassy-eyed
Russian workers. A bit later, back in Memphis, TN, we see Noland comfortably
surrounded by family and his loving girlfriend Kelly (Helen Hunt). The main
virtue of this introduction is that it tells us things simply and clearly: We
are in the era of the global economy, watching a decent, ordinary man whose
world is carefully measured out as increments of time, work, leisure and affection.
A world, in short, where "human nature" is inextricably meshed with
technology’s artifices.

We can’t
help but wonder what happens when such a world explodes, since it is ours, too.
The air crash that ruptures Noland’s existence sends him plunging deep
into the ocean: an arresting image of death, rebirth and christening all at
once. He emerges, dazed but uninjured, on what looks like a stereotypical South
Seas island.

The film quickly
establishes its primary virtue by focusing on the essential while avoiding the
easy and overobvious. Of course, Noland flounders around trying to make sense
of his surroundings and sussing out the skills he needs to survive. He collects
rain for drinking water, and at length manages to make a fire. His feet get
badly cut before he improvises passable shoes. He buries the body of a FedEx
worker that washes in, and sets up Kelly’s photo (mounted into a family
heirloom watch: a transparent, forgivable symbol) as a constant, close-at-hand
reminder of the things he loves.

If you think
of it, though, there’s an endless number of sappy possibilities that Zemeckis
and screenwriter William Broyles firmly and admirably sidestep, everything from
the melodramatics of a crying-jag-cum-breakdown to an infinity of Gilligan’s
Island-like gags. Instead, we get things like this: among the FedEx packages
that wash to shore, the contents range from a volleyball to videotapes to a
pair of ice skates. Nothing that’s tremendously hilarious or life-savingly
useful, in other words. Just an odd bunch of stuff that probably would
be in such a shipment. Yet it’s not all drolly disposable: Noland uses
those ice skates to crack open coconuts, one of his toughest early challenges.

The volleyball,
meanwhile, becomes his one companion. Noland draws a face in his own blood on
the ball’s surface, and names it Wilson, for the trademark it bears. He
talks to it, and it seems to listen. A wonderful stroke of invention, this device
is like much about the movie: smart but not overdone, a handy symbol that also
refracts real emotional imperatives. Who, in the same situation, would not devise
some absurd way to fend off the demon of loneliness?

Besides its
narrative intelligence, this portion of the film has so much going for it on
the dramatic and stylistic levels as to make you realize that Hollywood, at
its best, has always excelled at the special alchemy of visual storytelling
and actorly charisma. Zemeckis and Hanks famously collaborated on the gratingly
cute Forrest Gump, but the island portion of Cast Away–which
depends on a premise rather a gimmick, and a believable hero rather than sentimental
cartoon–is a far superior film, one that makes the most of both men’s
talents. Not that there was any doubt after Saving Private Ryan, but
Cast Away reiterates Hanks’ status as this era’s Hollywood
Everyman, the embodiment of a democratic, middle-class ideal that sets the big-tent
American cinema subtly but decisively apart from the class-bound imaginations
of Europe. For the actor, the tropical setting underscores the triumphant passage
of his last decade: what a long way he’s come, you think, since Joe
Versus the Volcano.

The film’s
themes, too, are perfectly suited to the movies’ broad canvas. Daniel Defoe’s
Robinson Crusoe arrived not long after marine circumnavigation sparked
the first glimpses of a global economy; with the "here be monsters"
portions of maps filled in by sea lanes, literate people contemplated the strange
fact that human society seemed to have the upper hand on nature, which suddenly
became a discrete, alien, conquerable thing. Cast Away likewise arrives
at a critical juncture: the moment after cellphones have girdled the globe in
another sort of human web, one furthering the tricky, fragile illusion that
nothing is beyond technology’s grasp.

What would
you do if that illusion suddenly burst? Could you make a fire or split
a coconut? Cast Away induces the viewer to ponder such questions, yet
the way it does so is just as important as the asking, because it reminds
us of a special property of cinema: its amenability to solitude, to inward,
individual reflection.

To say that
there’s something primal and elemental about Zemeckis’ movie is to
speak not only of the natural world it conjures but of its relationship to the
medium itself. A movie that might’ve been jointly made by Griffith, Chaplin
and Flaherty, Cast Away’s central section strips away all the complications
of dramatic development, action and multiple characters, and allows us to see,
for once, cinema’s most essential operation unadorned: viewers identifying
with a single human figure, who inhabits a magical visual realm that persuasively
stands for all of existence.

It has been
suggested that this imaginary process mimics the solitary pleasures of reading.
If so, it sets Cast Away–and every movie–apart from Survivor,
which, like all of television, favors social ritual over solitude and cannot
imagine the world apart from technological intrusion. And when Noland, after
years of solitude and a last heroic effort, finally returns to civilization,
it’s as if the movie itself suddenly reverts from the vivid idiosyncrasy
of cinema to the bland conventionality of tv. Movies exist to tell us that people
change, where tv reassures us that our favorite personalities are the same,
night after night, week after week. The makers of Cast Away seem not
to understand that the audience returns to society with Noland still in the
mental frame of a movie: they want to see how he’s changed. Instead, the
film tries to tell us that he’s just the same: he still loves Kelly and
his job, etc. This is a horrible, fundamental miscalculation that saddles the
movie with a tedious and distended denouement. Yet it does nothing to erase
the memory of the great movie that exists at the center of Cast Away.

All the
Pretty Horses has been trailed by rumors of trouble for nearly a year. It
was said to have existed in versions of up to three hours; the film released
by Miramax runs just under two. I’ve heard colleagues opine that the movie
needed the extra length, and I can agree that the present version feels oddly
choppy, with rhythms that belong to a longer, more leisurely paced film. But
that doesn’t necessarily mean that longer would have been better. Rather,
Horses, which was adapted from Cormac McCarthy’s bestseller, seems
beset with the most common problem of movies made from finely wrought literary
novels: stripped of the transforming magic of language, the unadorned story
can seem oddly uncompelling.

The story here
definitely lacks something–a strong through-line, a sense of inner necessity
driving the narrative’s picaresque unfolding. Matt Damon and Henry Thomas
are the two cowboy buddies we see early on, and both actors contribute solid
performances to the film. Even better is young Lucas Black, who’s brilliantly
rough-edged and idiomatic as the runaway who gets his traveling party into some
very bad trouble. In fact, what ails the movie has far less to do with any aspect
of execution–Thornton’s direction is capable if not terribly distinguished–than
with the curious intractability of the material. Though the tale, which was
adapted by Ted Tally, includes romance, peril, death and some colorful equine
action, it never adds up to the kind of rugged unity that marks a good western.
As has happened countless times before, the novelist’s wily horse deftly
eludes the filmmaker’s earnest lassos.

Down Anthony’s
Lane

But there’s the occasional
example of film writing so extravagantly awful that my forbearance snaps and
irritated silence bows to professional pride. Such a grating instance is Anthony
Lane’s review of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon in the Dec. 11 New
Yorker. As a piece of prose, Lane’s polite rave for Ang Lee’s
film is competent enough, if typically gaseous and cute. But as film criticism
it’s something far less innocuous, a riot of errors and absurdities that
would make the shoddiest webzine blush.

What’s at issue here
has nothing to do with "opinion," or whether one likes or dislikes
Crouching Tiger. It has to do with the critic’s basic grasp of his
subject, in this case a movie that combines the sleek gravity of a Western art
film with the high-flying acrobatics of a Chinese martial arts movie. Lane seems
to have trouble with both sides of that equation, and I can imagine a couple
of reasons why.

For one, he’s not really
a film critic but a quip-minded belletrist who happened into a lucrative gig
and appears to have no inclination, now, to patch up the gaping holes in his
knowledge of film. (Why learn anything about a subject that’s only there
to be the object of one’s witticisms?) Thus his review reflects a virtually
complete and unapologetic ignorance of Chinese action-movie traditions and conventions
that, besides being of central importance to Crouching Tiger, are by
now familiar to many Western movie fans. The only name he mentions, Bruce Lee,
is the one Chinese star your granny in Dubuque knows.

Arguably a greater stumbling
block, though, lies in the fact that Lane, a Brit who lives in London, is habitually
so uninformed and tone-deaf when it comes to things American. Writing of two
Chinese women in Lee’s film, he says that the younger treats the elder
"the way a young black kid would treat Michael Jordan–as a blend of
role model, escape route, and god." Amazingly, that manages to be racist
in two directions at once. (Why would a black kid, as opposed to, say,
a poor kid, view Jordan as an "escape route"? Does Lane think that
all black kids are poor? Or all poor kids black? Or is it blackness that
this rhetorical kid is bent on escaping?)

When he turns from race
to filmmaking, Lane’s ignorance produces some real howlers. "The career
of Ang Lee–and its prospects–strikes me as the most interesting in
Hollywood today," he grandly pronounces. Hollywood? A native of Taiwan,
Lee has spent his career avoiding H-wood by (a) remaining steadfastly based
in New York and (b) making most of his films independent of the major studios.
If he’s a Hollywood director, Woody Allen is the mayor of Bel Air.

Stumbling on, Lane notes
the varied settings of Lee’s movies, including Civil War Missouri in Ride
with the Devil and "the East Coast" in The Ice Storm, and
explains to the reader that Lee’s films have this diversity "not because
he wants to try his hand but because each new environment promises the chance
of immersion."

In the critical trade, that
sort of analysis is what’s known as pure, grade-A horseshit. It sounds
good but means less than nothing. How does Anthony Lane know why Ang Lee chooses
his projects? Not only does he patently not know, but he appears innocent
of the fact that these choices are jointly made by Lee and James Schamus, Lee’s
longtime partner as producer and writer. Indeed, the creative union of Lee and
Schamus (who goes unmentioned in Lane’s review, though Schamus wrote Crouching
Tiger) is one of the most unusual and noteworthy phenomena in recent New
York filmmaking. But why should the critic know anything about New York’s
film culture? He only writes for a magazine called The New Yorker, after
all.

The review’s greatest
astonishments, however, are saved for last. Lane’s concluding paragraph
begins:

"This movie is not
just the best of its kind; it seems on the verge of creating a new kind, surpassing
and deflating the old Bruce Lee jamborees with the same dashing intelligence
that allowed Michael Curtiz’s The Adventures of Robin Hood, starring
Errol Flynn, to outstrip the more basic bravado of Douglas Fairbanks. Curtiz,
the director of Casablanca and Yankee Doodle Dandy, was born Mihaly
Kertesz, in Budapest, and Ang Lee can be seen as a Curtiz for our times: the
uncondescending outsider, reading the runes of the New World. Hollywood needs
such men–civilized craftsmen with honor and humor–more than it needs
the maverick or the self-igniting genius, and just now the need is acute…
Is it too fanciful to suggest that the generation of Lee, Chen Kaige, Wong Kar
Wai [sic], Zhang Yimou, and Hou Hsiao Hsien [sic], or perhaps the generation
that follows them, might ride to the rescue–or, at any rate, the resuscitation–of
American movies with some of the panache that marked the great Mitteleuropa
immigration of the thirties and forties, itself an escape into the entertainment
industry from a world of threat…?"

Not to put too fine a point
on it, but that strikes me as one of the stupidest things I’ve ever read.
It surely takes the cake as the stupidest bit of "film criticism"
committed in the past year. Indeed, its stupidity is so dense and multilayered
as to defy easy untangling.

Crouching Tiger is
the best of its kind? As Lane seems eminently unversed in the Hong Kong tradition
of female-centered martial arts movies, how could he begin to make that judgment?
Well, then, maybe it’s a new kind. Meaning what? A hybrid Western
art film and martial arts film–who’s going to make another one of
those? And even if they did, how could this newfangled "kind" surpass
and displace the kind represented by Bruce Lee, et al.? Do fans of the latter
stand to be won over by art-film finery? On the contrary, they’re the ones
so far who are most down on Ang Lee’s movie.

Even by Lane’s lofty
standards, the horseshit factor here is extraordinarily high. A confectioner
of showy erudition ("born Mihaly Kertesz, in Budapest…") that’s
usually three-quarters hot air, he blithely insults both Bruce Lee and Douglas
Fairbanks, who stand to different sorts of action-movie athleticism roughly
as Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire stand to dance-movie athleticism. He then proceeds
to pen phrases as frilly, absurd and condescending as "reading the
runes of the New World" and "a Curtiz for our times" while bounding
toward what he evidently imagines to be his showstopper: that climactic rhetorical
question.

"Is it too fanciful
to suggest…?" No, Tony, not fanciful. Just dumb as dog poop, and wrongheaded
in about 15 ways simultaneously. One cannot read that sentence and think Lane
has ever seen a film by Hou Hsiao-hsien, the most critically lauded Asian director
of this era, an austere, glacially uncommercial artist who speaks only Chinese
and rarely leaves Taiwan. In the image of Hou riding to the rescue of American
movies–pigtail flying! saber flashing! whistling "Yankee Doodle Dandy"!–Lane
serves up a fruitcake hallucination worthy of Homer Simpson. What could top
it? "Maybe we could get Monsieur Bresson to resuscitate the Die Hard
series!" "Doesn’t T.S. Eliot realize his mission is to rescue
Tin Pan Alley?"

A veteran English critic
recently lamented to me that publishers in London are so bent on wooing the
rising class of young, empty-headed New Laborite stockbrokers that their idea
of acceptable film criticism is reduced to one thing: telling jokes about Hollywood
movies that leave the dim reader feeling smugly superior and in the know. Lane’s
achievement is to have imported this brand of chortlesome Sloane Square know-nothingism
to the U.S. He’s such a clever writer! So funny! So say half-bright
university graduates at cocktail parties across America, and they are not wrong.
Lane is clever and funny. But when he’s not flicking bon mots at
Charlie’s Angels, when he’s faced with a subject that requires
a bit of knowledge and critical savvy, he’s easily the most embarrassing
high-profile film writer in the U.S.

Then again, he’ll write
a piece about some author or literary phenomenon and you realize: he’s
actually very knowledgeable and incisive on certain subjects. And therein
lies the problem. Unlike his New Yorker colleague David Denby, Lane evidently
doesn’t see films as his passion, his metier, his mission. It’s his
paycheck. Alas, critics caught in such velvet cages often end up the bitterest
of writers, bilious with a self-contempt that eventually gives even the funniest
jokes an acrid aftertaste.

The New Yorker’s
dubious treatment of foreign-language cinema has recently been the subject of
various sorts of commentary, from the lengthy dissection in Jonathan Rosenbaum’s
new book Movie Wars: How Hollywood and the Media Conspire to Limit What Films
We Can See (A Cappella) to the numerous surprised comments I heard that
there was no review of Edward Yang’s Yi Yi, which was not only arguably
the fall’s best foreign film but one that would seem particularly appealing
to the magazine’s readership. In the case of Lane, this neglect of the
non-English-speaking cinematic world has an odd corollary in the most curious
aspect of his writing: its giddy, Magic Kingdom vision of Hollywood.

Emerging from Crouching
Tiger, he says, "you can’t decide whether you feel like a five-year-old
coming out of Peter Pan or like a Cary Grant fan coming out of To
Catch a Thief." Has there ever been an American critic so apt to invoke
Cary Grant or some other classic-Hollywood mainstay at the drop of a hat–any
hat? No, this seems a peculiarly English tic, and I would half-seriously suggest
that it conceals the lingering reflexes of empire, with the critic projecting
his Kiplingesque fantasies and panegyrics onto an imaginary kingdom improbably
centered in Southern California.

This is how we get those
"civilized craftsmen with honor and humor," for whom Lane can envision
no higher purpose than to abandon their own art and cultures and rush to save
Hollywood’s blighted, irretrievably corrupt empire. (Those dusky craftsman
chaps, so stout, so true!) This rescue fantasy may be as dizzy as anything ever
offered under the guise of film criticism, but at least it allows us finally
to identify the mysterious figure that looms behind Lane’s description
of Ang Lee and his valiant Asian brethren.

By Jove, it’s Gunga
Din!

By any reckoning,
A Good Baby marches to its own drummer. Set in the deep mountain hollows
of western North Carolina, its story opens with a scene of cryptic, Flannery
O’Connor-like menace in which a traveling salesman (David Strathairn) looks
upon a backwoods girlfriend’s increasingly evident pregnancy with more
malevolence than fondness. A bit later, the film finds a young man named Toker
(Henry Thomas) trailing along the back roads carrying a newborn infant. Offering
little in the way of explanation, he appears to want to find the baby a mother;
among those who reject his entreaties, Josephine Priddy (Cara Seymour) seems
like she might be able to scare up in interest in Toker, if not in his charge.
Meanwhile, the salesman we saw in the first scene begins to haunt the valley,
asking questions about a baby and the man carrying him.

Part Southern
gothic, part tone poem, part folkloric mystery cum downbeat romance, A Good
Baby poses itself the tricky task not so much of straddling genres as of
bridging two worlds, one belonging to the real-life Appalachians, the other
to myth and dream. Adapting Leon Rooke’s novel, Dieckmann creates a form
of stylized dialogue that’s impressive for being both undeniably literary
and convincingly natural. With the help of ace cinematographer Jim Denault,
she pulls off a similar balancing act by visualizing the tale’s mountain
domain in a way that’s strikingly gorgeous yet never prettified, sensuously
evocative without ever getting dramatically rhetorical. The fact that the film’s
way-off-the-interstate setting is constantly, almost tactilely believable, yet
you’d be hard-pressed to say in which decade it takes place (any one between
the 60s and now, perhaps), says loads about the subtle stylistic alchemy Dieckmann
achieves.

The film revolves
around an image that seems to belong more to the deep psyche than to any movie
I can recall: a man cradling a baby, in a posture that is almost maternal. Obviously
this gender-flip of the traditional Madonna and Child will startle and resonate
with some viewers more than others, and even admirers may have to allow that
the story, particularly in its abrupt final section, doesn’t avoid the
pitfall of occasional sentimental softness. Even so, Dieckmann’s enterprise
has an extraordinarily solid cornerstone in Henry Thomas’ performance as
Toker. Formerly the kid in E.T. and soon to be seen costarring in All
the Pretty Horses, Thomas brings an absolute and greatly clarifying conviction
to a part that might have begun and ended as a cipher. There’s something
pained about the character he creates, like a wound from the forgotten past.
Yet it is just this, perhaps, that allows him to succor one who now endures
his own former vulnerability–a strange beneficence that gives A Good
Baby both its mystery and its heart.

Think about
that proposition for two seconds, especially after seeing Samira Gloor-Fadel’s
Berlin-Cinema (Titre Provisoire), and you’re bound to realize what
a nonstarter it is. For one thing, the French-Swiss production says nothing
about the single question it most needs to answer: Why would cine-celebs like
Wim and Jean-Luc add their presences to the film of an unknown? Gloor-Fadel
perhaps wants us to assume that the ummistakable brilliance of her project is
responsible, but in fact that’s the one thing we don’t assume.
Second, doesn’t the filmmaker realize that her premise ultimately can only
underscore her own lack of originality, and the fatigue of the form she means
to celebrate?

Yup, Berlin-Cinema
is another film that’s both impeccably intellectual and essentially clueless.
Anyone who has seen recent Godard films like JLG par JLG and Wenders
works such as Tokyo-Ga and Wings of Desire will instantly recognize
the amalgamated pastiche cum homage that Gloor-Fadel delivers here, although
she departs from her sources by not using her own narration. Rather, we hear
recurrent off-camera musings by Godard, along with various soundtrack excerpts,
while the camera broodingly contemplates present-day Berlin and occasionally
drops in on Wenders, who muses on-camera as he talks with students, tours a
building site with an architect and directs the abysmal Faraway, So Close!
(Question: this Wenders footage dates from circa ’92–what took
so long?)

The auteurs
come and go, talking of Antonioni–plus Fassbinder, Beckett, et al.–but
mainly riding familiar hobbyhorses. Still, these guys are great musers, and
fans should be alerted that the film contains choice material from both. Godard
is his usual gnomic, aphoristic self. "I don’t think film is for seeing,"
he says, "it’s for thinking." And: "The image isn’t
what’s seen, it’s what’s formed." Wenders shows his maturity:
"For a long time I considered writing something opposed to my main work,
which is creating images. For me, writing was always the obstacle, a necessary
evil… I don’t feel like that any more. Today writing and words are…allies.
Words can capture what’s real, can capture poetry and life, better than
images can."

Godard and
Wenders are keenly aware that film is about to disappear. Both, in fact, have
taken the lead in advocating the use and exploration of video technology. Berlin-Cinema
listens respectfully to such advice without having the least interest in heeding
it; Gloor-Fadel’s images (black and white mixed with color), which handsomely
remind us of the lyrical materiality of film, have an elegaic feel simply for
being celluloid. The modernist esthetic she evokes is similarly shrouded in
mournful retrospection. As Godard says, "In 50 years, the cinema we’ve
known will be like the Dead Seas Scrolls." As if that’s not already
the case.

Berlin-Cinema
(Titre Provisoire) will be shown at the American Museum of the Moving Image
Sat.-Sun., Dec. 9-10, along with Walter Ruttman’s 1927 Berlin, Symphony
of a City (Sat.) and Wenders’ Wings of Desire (Sat. & Sun.).

Such withholding
touches on the primordial significance of naming, and in turn on the
fact that, though commonly regarded as an uncommonly successful pop group, the
Beatles were, in essence, a religious phenomenon. The name, the thing that most
directly connects the worshiper to the adored (the four-in-one), appears only
at the end, to fix and seal the drama of ecstatic longing; such is the secondary
status accorded the visual. Until then, and forever after, the real name
remains private because it belongs to the individual fan alone; inscribed on
the heart, it is uttered subvocally at every moment of the film, "Beatles…Beatles…Beatles…"

Likewise, the
Beatles themselves utter a private language. The word, of course, is love, same
as it was 2000 years ago, same as it ever was. Yet inasmuch as every word is
a betrayal, a shell, they relay their meaning in nonsense, puns, jokes, funny
voices and, of course, songs and singing that still sound like the very definition
of joyous, youthful exaltation. Never mind what the calendar says; the real
Harmonic Convergence happened in 1964, on the radio.

A Hard Day’s
Night by all rights should have been little more than a shoddy knockoff.
Shot quickly in the spring of ’64 for $500,000, it emerged as an instant
classic due to a combination of elements and talents (including director Richard
Lester and screenwriter Alun Owen) that may as well be described as miraculous.
Seen today, it’s very much an artifact of its time. I hadn’t recalled
how extensive the World War II references are, or that Paul’s obnoxious
grandfather is an IRA man–"a soldier of the Republic," as he
cussedly puts it.

Technically,
the film belongs to that brief but glorious moment (the early 60s) between the
arrival of the lightweight, mobile 35 mm camera and the predominance of color;
its sinuous black and white gives us the Beatles at their most iconic and mod.
While A Hard Day’s Night shared an era with Breathless, The
400 Blows and other masterpieces made under the same technical circumstances,
Lester’s film is perhaps best equipped for immortality. It’s my hunch,
at least, that long after the work of Godard & Co. has become the Dead Sea
Scrolls, the Beatles will still be the Living Word, as fresh and ineffable as
any four voices ever uplifted in harmony.

About the only
thing that had been given out about the new film’s story is that it opens
with a terrible train wreck and the mystery of why one man alone, David Dunne
(Bruce Willis), survives it. That probably gave many viewers advance visions
of a catastrophic, nerve-shattering opening reel a la The Fugitive. Well,
guess again. The horrific train wreck happens, but Shyamalan doesn’t devote
two seconds of screen time to it. Instead, he gives us an elegantly ominous
prelude that’s easily one of my favorite scenes of 2000.

Dunn is seated
in the train and the camera films him from the other side of the seats in front
of him, positioned so that it has to slide back and forth to keep him in view
between the seats. For example: it slides right to catch a view of a pretty
girl who comes up and asks about the seat beside him; left to register his answer
and interested look at her; right to catch her tummy revealing a little tattoo
as she reaches up to put her bag in the overhead bin; left to see him quickly
remove his wedding ring and deposit it in his pocket; right to observe her taking
her seat as he offers her a magazine as a way of breaking the ice; and so on.

This is wonderfully
adroit and expressive visual storytelling. As most of the scene takes place
without a single cut, the peekaboo camera style keeps us guessing by creating
a nonedited equivalent of a standard shot-countershot editing pattern. But it’s
more than just clever. It’s also a neat encapsulation of Shyamalan’s
entire imaginary universe, where people are always alone even when they seem
together, where mortality constantly looms and where the invisible, the obscured,
the unknown, is at least as important as life’s daylight half.

The scene’s
verbal component equals the visual. Shyamalan has a knack for oblique, understated
dialogue, and here the conversation between Dunn and the girl is so natural
and casual that you hardly register what it is he says that makes her suddenly
reply firmly, "I’m married," show him her wedding ring,
then get up and move to another seat. Dunn sighs, puts his ring back on and
gazes out the window. The train wreck we never see comes just after the fade
to black–unless you consider that, figuratively speaking, it has already
happened.

Indeed, what
does happen in this inaugural scene that connects to the rest of movie?
What we learn later, as already noted, is that the subsequent train wreck killed
scores of passengers while leaving Dunn completely unscathed. But maybe that’s
not what really happened. After you see the movie, try on this explanation:
in reality, the train wreck happened and no one died except him. The
rest of the story is his dream of what his life would have been like if the
equation had been reversed and he survived rather than perished.

That interpretation
is perfectly viable, but there’s a problem with it. It more obviously fits
another movie: The Sixth Sense. In fact, the parallels between Unbreakable
and its predecessor are numerous enough to perplex some admirers even while
they clarify certain of Shyamalan’s core ideas. For one: though his ancestry
may be Indian, his dramatic landscape seems heavily imbued with Catholicism,
including the concept of original sin. Both movies begin by showing their protagonists
as guilty of some transgression (Dunn perhaps sins against his marriage vows
only in his heart, but to the devout that’s as bad as the carnal deed),
after which they are laid low by the punishment of a violent catastrophe. Both
men appear to rise from the dead, but their real redemptions come only after
a long ordeal in which a human intercessor leads them toward an understanding
of their "real" nature, which has been hidden by their own incognizance.

The beauty
of The Sixth Sense was that it gave these ideas a form that perhaps could
not have been simpler or more organic. Indeed, that may be the problem with
Unbreakable. Arguably, the only direction left for Shyamalan to go was
toward greater complexity, disjointedness and at least partial, or occasional,
incoherence.

In any case,
after emerging unhurt from the train wreck, Dunn finds himself in the midst
of challenges that most screenwriting pros might consider too diffuse and loosely
related. As the opening scene hinted, he’s got problems with his wife (Robin
Wright), while his 12-year-old son (Spencer Treat Clark) regards him with an
odd mix of awe and suspicion. A stadium security guard, Dunn seems vaguely unhappy
in his job. But his greatest perplexity takes the form of a man named Elijah
Price (Samuel L. Jackson), who invades his life almost like a living question
mark asking why he survived that rail disaster.

Shyamalan introduces
Price early, showing him born (in Philadelphia, where the film takes place)
with broken arms and legs. A decade or so later, he’s a curious kid obsessed
with comic books. Come the present day, he is a rather fierce character who
runs a tony gallery devoted to comic-book art. But if comics are his occupation,
Dunn becomes his preoccupation. Price seems to know something about the security
guard that Dunn himself doesn’t know, which in turn holds the secret of
Dunn’s miraculous survival.

If all this
sounds not only intriguing but also rather convoluted and opaque–well,
it is. The hallmark of Shyamalan’s style is a penchant for hushed tones
and shots that isolate the main characters as if within the cathedrals of their
own consciousnesses. In The Sixth Sense, this was appropriate in every
way from the dramatic to the conceptual to the metaphysical. In Unbreakable,
it, alas, only adds to the impression of too many solitudes with too little
to unite them into any sort of whole, whether dramatic, conceptual or metaphysical.
Every time Willis turns a corner, he seems to run into another story element
(a high-school car crash, an aversion to water, etc.) that you hope will be
the connecting thread but that usually turns out to be another strand destined
to be left dangling.

On a scene-by-scene
basis, the film is enormously engaging to watch; Shyamalan’s craft is now
so sharp and insinuating that he can make even the most mundane exchange crackle
with energy and resonance. Yet he also sets up expectations that demand a tricky
sort of payoff. Both The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable might be
called, for lack of a better term, dramas of retrospective revelation. That
is, they depend on late-in-the-story disclosures that make you look back at
everything that’s come before and suddenly understand it all differently.
(Shyamalan didn’t invent this form: see The Crying Game, The
Rapture, etc.) The great thing about such dramas is that they have a built-in
philosophical kick, since philosophy begins in the supposition that there’s
a "real" world hiding behind the apparent; the tricky thing is that
their revelations have to be both perfectly timed and comprehensively convincing.

In fact, The
Sixth Sense and Unbreakable both depend on dual revelations that
come at different points in the films’ latter halves and relate to the
two main characters. An hour into Sense, Haley Joel Osment says, "I
see dead people," which explains not only his dilemma but the story’s
conceptual grounding to that point; then, the last scene tells us that Bruce
Willis is in fact one of those dead people, which elucidates his dilemma and
the remainder of the tale’s mysteries. In a narrative nuts-and-bolts sense,
Unbreakable doesn’t work nearly so well because its revelations
(don’t worry, I won’t reveal them) are late in arriving and somewhat
defective, the sort that induce head-scratching rather than jaw-dropping.

Plus, philosophically,
they seem a tad wrongheaded and sophomoric compared to those in The Sixth
Sense. Shyamalan’s earlier films evidenced a sensibility that looked
at pop forms and saw in them the potential for spiritual meaning. When The
Sixth Sense gave its expertly imaginative testimonial to the postmortem
survival of souls, and to a "world of souls" surrounding the visible,
it connected the moviegoer’s hunger for belief to a much older system of
belief. Unbreakable does pretty much the opposite: it ultimately takes
quasi-religious belief and asks you to invest it in the cheesy, ephemeral forms
of pop art. It could be called Pulp Gnosis.

And that would-be
title connects us to the final question that Unbreakable leaves hanging:
Will Shyamalan turn out to be a Tarantinoesque tyro with one pop masterpiece
in him, or a Catholic filmmaker like Hitchcock who converts his obsessions into
a long string of great movies? For now, the jury is still out.

As Variety
noted, there are still only about 16 theaters in North America equipped for
digital projection, but once the industry works out a plan for sharing conversion
costs between the studios and theaters, expect that number to skyrocket.

Digital projection
per se eliminates film from movie theaters, but "prints" must still
be brought in some form, such as CD-ROM or videotape. Digital distribution by
satellite eliminates even that. It is, in effect, the final technical step in
converting film houses into tv facilities, and thus cinema into television.

How long will
it be before you’ll be able to see "first run" performances of
things like Survivor and Who Wants to Be a Millionaire at the
local ’plex? Any bets?

I liked Men
of Honor, make no mistake. Tillman’s direction displays a very smart
blend of restraint and exuberance, and Cuba Gooding Jr.’s performance as
Brashear is perhaps the best work to date by a young actor of extraordinary
talents. The film also has the appeal of unveiling a hitherto unexamined professional
world–who knew what Navy divers do?–and of paying attention to real
American lives, something that Hollywood movies bother with too infrequently.

Yet it’s
also worth asking how real the film’s version of reality is. Men of
Honor tells Brashear’s story mainly by focusing on his relationship
with Master Chief Navy Diver Billy Sunday (Robert De Niro), a tough-as-pig-iron
trainer who at first opposes Brashear’s candidacy and later champions him,
yet nothing in the film itself tells you what the press notes reveal to critics
who bother to read them: Sunday never existed. Invented by screenwriter Scott
Marshall Smith, the character is described as "a composite of various Navy
men whom Brashear met during his career."

What to make
of those words? I would venture, first, that such a composite is a perfectly
defensible artistic device, one that’s been used in countless movies to
give comprehensible dramatic shape to prolix and messy real-life events. The
problem is, Sunday doesn’t strike me as an amalgam of anything or anyone
real. He seems like an essentially fictional character made to order: the kind
of lovable-badass opponent that Hollywood convention now automatically dictates
for dramas of racial antagonism/bonding.

At its start,
the story doesn’t appear to need him. Honoring the biographical record,
Tillman shows Brashear growing up on a dirt-poor farm in Kentucky. When he decides
to leave and join the Navy, it is 1948, the year Truman desegregated the military,
and his hard-bitten father (Carl Lumbly) urges him never to look back. In the
Navy, Brashear is consigned with other blacks to the galleys. But glimpses of
deep-sea divers in action give him a passionate objective. He writes 100 letters
over two years, and eventually finds himself the first black candidate at the
Navy Diving School in Bayonne, NJ.

Sunday, the
school’s chief instructor, is a former diver who injured himself in an
heroic act of insubordination and now is consigned to teaching. He chomps a
MacArthuresque corncob and refuses to let Brashear out of the figurative galley,
referring to him forever as "cookie." Whether or not you accept him
as a composite of real-life models, Sunday is a particular type of movie construct,
one that might be termed a benign, situational racist. That is, he’s nasty
to Brashear because of the environment that’s bred him, not because of
any deep, ineradicable hatred of blacks. This of course allows him to convert
from antagonist to ally later in the story.

At first, Brashear
is shunned by all of his fellow diving aspirants except for one stuttering sailor
named Snowhill (Michael Rapaport), who explains his refusal to follow the crowd
by saying that he’s "from Wisconsin." No doubt, there’s
some truth to the film’s suggestion that the military reacted to Truman’s
order by sequestering its racism in enclaves of soldier elites. But the movie
also pushes the point to absurd, cartoonish extremes in having the diving school
run by an aged commander called Mr. Pappy (Hal Holbrook), who sits in a weird
observational tower polishing his medals and issuing shrill block-the-darkie
orders like some demented, cracker Wizard of Oz.

Thankfully,
the story’s elements aren’t all confined to such hootable fantasies.
Brashear also struggles against the limits of his seventh-grade education, and
in the course of trying to pass written tests meets Jo (Aunjanue Ellis), a medical
student who will become his teacher and wife. The scenes of diving, both during
and after Brashear’s schooling, are another area where the film conjures
up believable and compelling hardships. This is no lightweight gig with snorkels
and flippers. The divers wear enormous, helmeted outfits like something out
of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, fed with oxygen from tanks at surface
level. From beginning to end, their undersea tasks look devilishly perilous
and difficult in the extreme.

In a not uncommendable
sense, Men of Honor shows why American movies have come to rule the world:
they valorize the dreams of every little guy by positing big ideals worth aspiring
toward, like achievement and honor and equality. In so doing, they polish the
ideal of America itself. Yet there’s something curiously retrograde in
the fact that a movie like Tillman’s must depend so heavily and formulaically
on racism for its dramatic torque. One is tempted to imagine that if that racial
difference didn’t exist in the U.S., Hollywood at this point might be inclined
to invent it to provide simple, black-and-white battles rather than having to
struggle with subtlety.

No doubt Brashear
dealt with all sorts of superiors in his climb up the Navy ladder. So why not
represent these people with a variety of characters? Having most of them "composited"
into De Niro’s tough guy comes off, in effect, as an all-too-familiar sop
to white audiences. It says, "Here you are, the ignorant but essentially
good-hearted white guy who’s sure to be redeemed by the end of the story.
In fact, you’re already forgiven for thinking that the story is really
about you rather than the black guy, Carl what’s-his-name, who’s
there to serve as the instrument of your self-affirmation."

Such are the
patronizing assumptions that Hollywood stokes and keeps in business while imagining
that this form of pandering serves the cause of tolerance and understanding.
Screenwriter Smith also invented a wife (Charlize Theron) for the invented Sunday,
and the press notes quote him describing her as "a tough but vulnerable
bombshell." That phrase alone gives you the mental level at which most
Hollywood movies–even ones, like Men of Honor, with fascinating
subjects and topnotch acting–are conceived and pitched these days. Most
characters and dramatic ideas must ape cliches so rudimentary that they might’ve
been spit out by computer. "Tough but vulnerable bombshell," like
"determined black guy battling hard-ass white superior," comes from
a world where no story element can be smarter than the dumbest producer, who
naturally assumes that audiences won’t be half as bright as he is. In the
culture trade, that’s known as a self-fulfulling prophecy.

You Can Count
on Me directed
by Kenneth Lonergan

Into Sammy’s
life at this problematic moment comes her long-unseen younger brother, Terry
(Mark Ruffalo), a ruffled, saturnine roustabout who’s been in jail in Florida
and now seems like he’s ready for a bit of family solidity, no matter how
provisional or temporary. Naturally, Sammy would like Terry, potsmoking fuckup
that he is, to serve Rudy as a pal and male role model, but what feels both
surprising and exactly right about the story is that her brother’s return
allows Sammy to start acting out: she commences an ill-advised affair with her
jerk of a boss, as if daring Terry not to be the safety net she’ll
need when she falls. Orphaned as kids when their parents were killed in a car
crash, the siblings are still trying to make sure that they can, yep, count
on each other.

Television-style
patness and superficiality are the prime pitfalls of a film like this, and You
Can Count on Me doesn’t entirely escape. There are scenes, such as
the one in which Terry and Sammy talk in a restaurant on their first meeting,
where the acting is too "actorly," the writing and direction a bit
forced and obvious. But generally, Lonergan creates a world where both his performers
and the characters they play are able to etch out small, everyday truths that
belong to the actual difficulties of life rather than the dictates of anyone’s
screenwriting software. These days, that kind of humane, insightful originality
is rare enough to celebrate.

Reeling

This
dim season’s two worst movies so far are Neal LaBute’s Nurse Betty
and Joe Berlinger’s Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2. I measure
awfulness not by any kind of theoretical rockbottom of utter dreadfulness, but
against the promise formerly exhibited by the films’ makers. In the case
of both of these crappy and punishingly banal Hollywood movies, we have former
Sundance heroes whose foreheads should now be branded "SELLOUT." Or
worse yet, "unsuccessful SELLOUT."

Blair Witch
2–which should be titled Scream 4–is the rottener by a
considerable margin. The original Blair Witch Project was such a stunning
micro-budgeter because it did something no horror film had dared to do in decades:
trust in the viewer’s imagination. Besides ingeniously reviving a genre,
the 16-mm- and camcorder-shot film constructed a fascinating, Hawthornesque
fable about the uneasy relationship between current technology (and the people
bound to it) and nature, while also discovering symbolic expressive uses in
the clash of film and video.

The thing that
stands out about BW2 is the amount of self-delusion that must have been
invested by every key participant at every stage. In electing to trash the original
film’s virtues and turn out just another of the stupid, flashy, nonscary
teen "horror" pics to which BW1 was such a stellar alternative,
the team behind the new film must’ve thought they were furthering the value
of what could be a very respectable and lucrative franchise. I wonder what they
think now that Blair Witch is synonymous with "fuggitaboutit."
The original’s creators, Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez, executive-produced
here, so they deserve part of the blame, as do the honchos at Artisan Entertainment.
But a goodly share must also go to former documentarian Berlinger (Brother’s
Keeper), who with this stupefying dreck does to his reputation something
that’s too gruesome for any horror flick.

The Legend
of Bagger Vance directed
by Robert Redford

I haven’t read the
Steven Pressfield bestseller that was the source of Redford’s film, and
at this point you’d have to pay me a fair amount of money to do so. One
assumes the movie is far less grating than the book for the simple reason that
it is a movie: We get to look at stars, ogle beautiful clothes and landscapes,
and return visually to a less hectic time. With a book, it would be a lot harder
to allow the mind to drift away from the, um, story.

I use the term loosely.
Story, or the lack of it, is the thing that separates Bagger Vance from
Hollywood’s last attempt to extract holiday-season millions from a gauzy
tale of mystical redemption set in the Depression-era South. Based on the writings
of Stephen King, who is to the narrative fiction trade what geysers are to the
oil industry, The Green Mile was wall-to-wall story, three-plus hours
of story packed tight enough to give Tolstoy constipation. In fact, that was
what I liked about Frank Darabont’s otherwise rather sappy movie: it seemed
to share King’s gleeful delight in his storytelling fecundity, a prolixity
that makes Bagger Vance–and most current Hollywood movies–seem
drip-fed by comparison.

Certainly, Redford and company
think they have a story, because Pressfield’s book gives them a
premise that looks like the launching pad to something big. After the opening
flourish of a Pvt. Ryan-like framing device (another old white guy falling
to his knees: this time it’s a duffer’s fifth heart attack, not James-Jones-does-Proust),
the movie rockets back to the Great Depression and Savannah, GA, where the obligatory
boy narrator, Hardy (J. Michael Moncrief), recalls the troubled career arc of
his great golf hero, Rannulph Junuh (Matt Damon).

Forget that his name suggests
an author who thinks Southerners have an inborn difficulty with hard consonants–Junuh
has his own woes. Circa 1916, he’s the golden-boy champeen of the links,
with a lusty attachment to the fair Adele (Charlize Theron), whose daddy owns
half of creation. But then comes World War I. Junuh ships off to the European
trenches, sees his entire company get turned into vulture niblets and comes
back one of Hemingway’s damaged men. Here the film makes a huge and momentarily
baffling jump, from circa 1918 to 1930. The Roaring 20s have roared by without
blowing a kiss; Savannah, by all appearances, never got to Charleston.

The reason for the leap:
Depression-era hardship is a plot point. Adele’s daddy has blown his disappointed
brains out after opening the world’s greatest golf resort at just the wrong
historic moment. She wants to save the place with a splashy exhibition match
that pits greats Bobby Jones and Walter Hagen against a long-unseen local hero.
But can Junuh be rescued from drinking and playing cards with the field hands,
as Those Who Can’t Forget are wont to do?

Actually, he emerges from
his despond as if he’s ready. The big problem is internal, a form of damage
that manifests as the wrong kind of golf handicap: he’s lost his swing.
Just can’t find the grip, the stance, the winning arc. Which can only mean
one thing: he needs to get in touch with his inner Negro.

That would be Will Smith,
wouldn’t it? America’s least threatening brother strolls in from the
low-country mist grinning and nodding his broad-brimmed hat, oblivious to the
fact that in any less clueless movie he would be playing Tiger Woods and Matt
Damon would be his caddy. Smith’s Bagger Vance is an all-purpose
mystical guide from the great beyond, devoid of anything as specific as an accent
or a past. Reports have it that the movie excised overt supernatural powers
that the book allowed him, but that only leaves him all the more vaporous; neutered
in every way beyond the vaguely therapeutic. Yet his value to massa is undeniable:
in recovering his swing, Junuh obviously hopes to get his schwing back
too. Adele indeed has a lot riding on her big exhibition match.

As I say, it’s a premise.
It takes too long to set up, and after that…don’t forget to set the snooze
alarm. As a spectator sport, golf may be notoriously boring to nonenthusiasts,
but the makers of Bagger Vance act like that’s its biggest advantage.
Rather than segmenting the competition into several briskly dramatized matches,
they stretch one game to well over an hour, which in screen time feels well-nigh
interminable. And to make sure things don’t get too interesting, they deprive
the competition of any gut-level personal rivalry. Junuh, Jones (Joel Gretsch)
and Hagen (Bruce McGill) are gentlemanly co-equals; none would spoil the collegial
mood by actually disliking one of his Gatsbyesque fellows.

Bagger Vance is set
in the South, yet its sensibility screams California–and argues
that Hollywood filmmakers should stow their Joseph Campbell for a while. Even
by the standards of misty-eyed sports fables, Redford’s film lacks the
kind of human and social traction that mystical yarns, especially, need for
lift-off. It’s a gesture toward a story rather than a story, a tribute
to blond-guy soulfulness that can’t help but feel a little self-regarding.

Still, it left me thinking
about its iconography, which may well be the movie’s real drawing card.
Sure, its way of making Depression-era poverty seem clean and wholesome, and
of ridding the South of any hint of racial friction, makes Norman Rockwell look
like a hard-hitting social realist by comparison. Yet once we reach the big
game, this headlong retreat from the present evinces a more specific and positive
goal than mere escapism. Here, Gatsby opens his shirt to reveal the heart of
Alfred Lord Tennyson. The players become chevaliers jousting with lances of
hickory, the lilt of ancestral Scottish voices is heard on the breeze, and the
emerald fairway seems to stretch straight down to Avalon.

No, I’m not saying
that the movie has now left planet Earth behind. I’m saying it has gained
a foothold in a very real cultural myth that is perhaps strongest of all in
the South, and that becomes more anomalous and more subliminally appealing
as our culture watches the belief structures of amour courtois fall before
the corrosive imperatives of technological materialism.

"Ritual and romance"
I think the phrase is, and in giving us a fleeting glimpse of what it indicates,
Bagger Vance makes the point that movies, here in the moment before digital
projection wreaks a crucial change on the medium, are more than ever serving
as an oasis from the overwash of trivializing toxicity that most pop culture
has become. The story Redford’s film tells thus may not be more than a
weak combination of new-agey wishfulness and locker-room sentimentality, but
the world it glancingly evokes–a world of belief and tradition, beyond
place and ideology–still connects to powerful, immaterial realities that
bear thoughtful reflection.

•

Also on the subject of (some)
movies as a refuge from current pop culture’s general toxicity: I was thoroughly
engaged and ultimately touched by my esteemed colleague’s recent rhapsody
over David Gordon Green’s George Washington. Yet I also fear the
work in question presents us with an instance of "eye of the beholder"
if not "the emperor’s new clothes": Not only was the review far
more accomplished and lucid than the film it lauded, it also unfortunately suggested
the danger to film culture (and the disgruntlement of prospective viewers) of
a critic so assiduously describing the movie he wished to see, while
failing to acknowledge much of what’s on the screen.

When I saw George Washington
I, too, was struck by something unusual: a 35-mm feature that evidently went
before the cameras with an barely coherent script. You don’t see that every
day. Nor do you often see a movie with so many imbalances in the performances
(in this case, the mostly black juveniles are generally far better than the
grownups). As a final product, the film suggests a shambling patchwork that
was given its semblance of "poetic" logic by some feverish cobbling
in the editing room, with plenty of help from that dependable caulk for wormholed
narratives, voiceover narration.

Granted, the pie-eyed idiosyncrasy
of that narration suggests a certain naive originality (albeit of a sort that
won’t be entirely novel to Southerners up on their regional fiction), and
Green has an unmistakable flair for ’Scope compositions and grungy backdrops.
Yet the movie’s level of craft and vision is still that of a student film,
and to me it’s only a mark of our current cinematic decline that such modest,
inconsistent virtues as it offers could get it admitted to the New York Film
Festival and cause some critics literally to go gaga. The Times called
it a "a fairy tale by Faulkner," a phrase that makes about as much
sense as "special-effects extravaganza by Frederick Wiseman."

To me, the obvious key to
George Washington’s appeal is that it inadvertently manufactures
a kind of downhome art-film utopia in which contemporary kids–mostly black,
while the writer-director is white–remain entirely untouched by the toxicity
mentioned above. There’s no godawful rap music in the film, no tv, no video,
no neon, no malls, no profanity: not much of anything cultural, in fact, that
suggests the year 2000 in the USA.

But that’s not to say,
as some have, that the film eschews pop culture entirely. In fact, it features
recurrent motifs–a Davy Crockett-style cap, a superhero outfit, etc.–that
have one thing in common: they belong to the suburban pop world of 40-50 years
ago, when it seemed that such playful icons might stimulate the collective imagination
rather than point the way toward its poisoning. That older, happier possibility
obviously remains a potent dream, no matter how disproved by contemporary reality.

Iran 2000,
Part 2

Two factors deserve credit
for that. First, the celebration’s 2000 edition, which was held in Tehran
on Sept. 11, marked not only the past year’s artistic achievements, but
also the 100th anniversary of cinema in Iran. Second, coming two days after
Jafar Panahi’s The Circle became the first Iranian film to capture
the Venice Film Festival’s Golden Lion, it implicitly commemorated a year
in which Iranian cinema hit yet another peak in global recognition, spurred
in part by the emergence of a new generation of filmmakers.

Established just four years
ago by Khaneh Cinema, the umbrella organization for Iran’s film guilds,
the Feast of Cinema is the younger and by now the grander of Iran’s two
large film awards ceremonies. The other comes at the end of the Fajr Film Festival,
which is held every February. But Fajr, where until 1998 all Iranian films were
obliged by government regulation to have their premieres, follows the ground
rules of many big festivals by hosting both international and domestic competitions.
The Feast of Cinema, by contrast, is strictly an Iranian affair that, like the
Oscars, celebrates an industry as much as an art.

The ceremony this year moved
from indoors-downtown to a Forest Hills-like tennis stadium at the Enghelab
Sports Complex in well-to-do northern Tehran. The 4000-seat al fresco venue
allowed for the extra spectacle and pageantry associated with the celebration
of Iran’s cinematic centenary, which, as it turned out, helped provide
something Iranian cultural events never seem to lack: controversy.

Seifollah Daad, a former
film producer who’s now the deputy minister of Culture and Islamic Guidance
for Cinematographic Affairs, opened the evening with a speech that implicitly
deplored the Iranian cinema’s prerevolutionary phase while crediting its
current strengths to the policies and values of the Islamic Republic. More than
one observer noted the ironic contrast between this message and the fact that,
during the montage of film clips that preceded Daad’s speech, the crowd
awarded some of its lustiest cheers to prerevolutionary stars and movie scenes.

The ironies continued with
the address by Majid Majidi, the current head of Khaneh Cinema, who warned against
artistic recidivism in the form of "commercial" filmmaking. These
remarks would no doubt surprise American cinephiles who see Majidi’s own
movies as consummately commercial: his Children of Heaven is so far the
only Iranian film to be nominated for an Academy Award, and just before I arrived
in Tehran, his Color of Paradise grabbed the title of highest-grossing
Iranian film yet released in the U.S.

But by Majidi’s definition–which
most Iranians would share–his expertly crafted films are about values and
ideals, and therefore are "artistic" as opposed to "commercial."
What he was agitating against was the kind of pandering-to-vulgar-tastes moviemaking
that reigned during the Shah’s era, and that he now sees returning in Iranian
genre films like Mummy 3, an unapologetic schlockfest whose posters were
ubiquitous in Tehran in September.

In Iranian terms, both Daad
and Majidi could be described as occupying the conservative side of the political
middle, and their official positions give them added impetus to defend cinematic
"Islamic values" against anything that smacks of the ancien regime.
But to some Iranians, the country’s theocracy itself increasingly feels
like the old order, and they’re restless for change. When one of the Feast’s
prize winners got up to receive his award, he asked for a minute of silence
for two prominent reformists now in prison. The gesture sparked a firestorm
of criticism in the conservative press the next day, but during that minute
there was very little heckling. (In Iran as in America, the audience at the
Oscars skews heavily toward the liberal.)

Climaxing an awards segment
that was notable for its concise speeches and galloping pace (our Oscar givers
could learn a few things, obviously), the Best Picture prize went to Khosro
Sinai’s Bride of Fire. The film, which I saw a few days later at
a downtown cinema, is a solid melodrama about a young medical student who’s
forced by tribal custom to return to her village and marry her atavistic, deeply
screwed-up cousin (brilliantly played by Hamid Farrokhnejad, who deservedly
won Best Actor). Though it’s not anyone’s definition of an art film,
Bride of Fire skillfully explores themes–traditional versus modern,
duty versus freedom, male versus female–that are at the heart of Iran’s
current debate with itself, and therefore ideal for a mainstream hit.

As indicated by the fact
that 47 features were eligible for prizes this year (along with 81 shorts, 54
animated films and 85 documentaries), Iran’s cinema is a much bigger animal
than most outsiders realize. Roughly, those features break down into three categories:
crappy genre and propaganda movies that rarely make it beyond Iran (fans of
this sector will be happy to know that Mummy 3’s Sirous Ebrahimzadeh
won Best Supporting Actor); mainstream movies like Bride of Fire; and
auteurist art films. Most of what gets exported belongs to the latter category,
although there’s a fair amount of overlap between it and the mainstream
group; Majidi’s films obviously belong to both. Some art films end up getting
far more attention outside Iran than inside, but occasionally one like Makhmalbaf’s
Salaam Cinema becomes a blockbuster at home.

While Iran’s cinematic
boom was shrewdly stimulated and nurtured by the Islamic Republic from 1983
on, outsiders also seldom recognize how deep its roots run. On the art-film
side alone, there’s been nearly 40 years of sometimes extraordinary artistic
growth and development, which can be most concisely summarized in terms of decade-defined
"generations." After the 1960s and a group of notable precursors,
the 70s saw an explosion of activity that was dubbed the "Iranian New Wave";
it produced world-class filmmakers including Abbas Kiarostami, Dariush Mehrjui,
Amir Naderi, Bahram Beyzaie and others who are now in their artistic prime.

The 1979 revolution caused
the whole apparatus to grind to a halt for a time, but the social and industry
renewal that followed brought forth, in effect, a second new wave of directors
with their own postrevolutionary sensibility. The 80s juggernaut included Mohsen
Makhmalbaf, Rakhshan Bani-Etemad (Iran’s leading woman director) and several
others. Though the early 90s saw a bit of a slowdown, due partly to increased
restrictions imposed by the hardliners, its filmmaking generation eventually
included Panahi and Majidi, whose audience-friendly The White Balloon
and Children of Heaven (respectively) caught fire internationally, kicking
the Iranian cinema to a whole new level of box-office and critical success.

And now, with impeccable
timing, generation 2000 has arrived. Beginning with three top awards at Cannes
in May (including a shared win of the Camera d’Or for best first film),
Iran has proceeded to clean up at many of the year’s prize-giving festivals:
Montreal, Venice, Pusan, Edinburgh, Chicago. While some of the attention has
gone to veterans like Panahi and Bahman Farmanara (Smell of Camphor, Scent
of Jasmine), most of the prizes have been won, remarkably, by first-time
directors. Not since 1986, when that second new wave broke, have there been
so many acclaimed debuts.

The first one to reach American
theaters, Bahman Ghobadi’s Time for Drunken Horses (which shared
the Camera d’Or and, in Tehran, won the critics’ prize for best film),
opens in New York and more than a dozen other cities this Friday. A stark, impassioned
drama about children who live among smugglers on the mountainous Iran-Iraq border,
the film is one of those Iranian works that draws inevitable–and in this
case deserved–comparisons to the Italian Neorealists. It certainly marks
a promising start for its director, a 30-year-old Kurd who’s worked with
Makhmalbaf and Kiarostami.

Though he’s first out
of the gate in the U.S., Ghobadi has plenty of company and competition, including
a whole crew issuing from clan Makhmalbaf. For the past couple of years, Mohsen
Makhmalbaf has said, he’s been "making filmmakers, not films."
His daughter Samira’s second film, Blackboards, was one of the big
Cannes winners. Now comes The Day I Became a Woman, the first film by
Samira’s stepmom and Mohsen’s wife, Marziye Meshkine; it won top awards
at Venice, Pusan and Chicago. Other current offerings from Makhmalbaf Film House,
as it’s called, include the debut documentary by Mohsen’s teenage
son, Maysam.

It’s tempting to call
this whole surge of activity "the Khatami wave." Not only has the
loosing of restrictions on filmmakers by President Mohammad Khatami’s government
contributed to the boomlet, but many of the films bear the mix of forward-looking
restiveness and present-tense frustration that’s characterized Iran during
his regime, with its constant see-saw between idealistic reformism and conservative
reaction.

I also realized while in
Iran that the Khatami era has witnessed other changes pertinent to filmmakers.
When I first visited the country in 1997, three months before his election,
I don’t think I saw a single cellphone or Internet connection. Now both
things are ubiquitous in Tehran, and other technological innovations are following
fast in their wake. Abbas Kiarostami told me he will shoot no more movies on
film. He’s now completing a UN-sponsored documentary feature about AIDS
children in Uganda, and it convinced him, he said, to use digital video for
all his work.

The current strength of
the Iranian cinema internationally doesn’t appear salutary from every angle.
To an extent, it’s a product of the hype-driven, flavor-of-the-month mentality
that reigns at many international festivals, where programmers who wouldn’t
give Iranians the time of day 10 years ago now will condescendingly tell them
what kind of films they’re expected to make (this according to one well-known
director). And, no doubt, Iran also looks good because virtually every other
national cinema today resembles a dead bug decorating Hollywood’s windshield.

Still, watching the Iranian
Oscars underscored how remarkable, and unlikely, the Iranian ascent has been.
A decade ago, many cinephiles would have considered the idea of a cinematic
renaissance in Iran beyond laughable. Now, for an ever-increasing number
of people, "foreign film" means Iranian films, in the way it used
to mean European films. How long can it last? I wouldn’t hazard a guess.
The one thing that occurred to me in Iran is that the more Americans see of
Iranian art films, the more they’re going to be intrigued enough to cross
the line into mainstream territory. Bride of Fire or its like coming
soon to a theater near you? Don’t be surprised.

Iran 2000,
Part 1

Considering what happened,
I should probably ask Almereyda what he was thinking when he agreed to go to
Iran in September. The invitation came from me. Call it a stab at movie diplomacy.
Since 1997 I’ve been contributing occasional time and effort to an amazing
outfit called Search for Common Ground. A nongovernmental organization based
in DC, Search takes a creative approach to global fence-mending. At stress points
like Rwanda, Bosnia and Gaza, it tries to ease tensions and build bridges by
using things like arts, sports, science–anything it can think of, really.

Between Iran and the U.S.,
which haven’t had official relations in two decades, cinema’s an obvious
means to stimulate a little cross-cultural conversation. In the last three years,
Search has sponsored a number of film-related projects, including hosting gatherings
of U.S. and Iranian filmmakers at the Cannes Film Festival and bringing a number
of Iranian filmmakers and critics to the U.S. More recently, it seemed like
the time was right for some traffic in the other direction. Search’s Iranian
partner in these initiatives, Khaneh Cinema, which is roughly Iran’s equivalent
of the motion picture academy, sounded eager to host an American filmmaker.

Michael Almereyda, I learned,
was available and willing, and his Hamlet, starring Ethan Hawke, Bill
Murray, et al., seemed an ideal film to show. Not only is it minus the sex,
skin and ultra-violence that are verboten in official Tehran, but the Shakespeare
play was said to be universally familiar to Iranians. More particularly, I figured
Iranian filmmakers would be fascinated to learn how Almereyda converted a small
budget into such a sleek and imaginative production, shot on location in New
York City.

As it turned out, however,
all these sterling attributes were nothing compared to what really counted:
the filmmaker’s personal aplomb and highly developed sense of the absurd.

The absurdity began almost
at once. I’d told Search I thought Almereyda should arrive in Tehran with
another American–like, say, me–since I knew from experience that a
foreigner’s first encounter with Mehrabad Airport could be a bit freaky.
But travel complications meant that Search’s project coordinator, Stacy
Heen, and I arrived separately the night before. The next evening we went to
the airport with various Khaneh Cinema handlers. Because most planes landing
in Tehran arrive in the same block of time late at night, Mehrabad was, as usual,
bedlam.

After we pushed through
the crowds of waiting families and past the guards with machine guns, Parto
Motahdi, our translator and Khaneh facilitator (and my friend from a previous
trip), got special passes that allowed the two of us to go past the customs
area to the edge of the hall where passengers enter after deplaning. I was sure
Almereyda would be happy to glimpse his welcoming committee before having to
confront the grim-faced immigration guys beneath the giant portraits of Ayatollahs
Khomeini and Khamenei. But there were only ayatollahs in the hall; there was
no Almereyda.

Parto and I watched every
passenger go through immigration. We asked the flight crew, Did you see an American
in business class? No, they said, no such person on the flight. We dashed outside
and had the airport officials call Lufthansa, which said no, his name was not
on the passenger manifest from Frankfurt. This was freaky. I grabbed
one of the Iranians’ cellphones and called Almereyda’s apartment in
the East Village, leaving a message: "We’re in Tehran, dude–where
are you?"

Stacy and I returned to
the hotel and stood in the lobby (would that there had been a bar!) looking
at each other, trying to puzzle out the next step. Ten minutes later, Michael
Almereyda walked in, cool as a rock star despite a slight air of puzzlement.
Said he’d found his way from the plane (he’d been on the Lufthansa
flight, of course) to the airport’s VIP entrance, where he was inexplicably
charged $50 and finally released into the parking lot. A friendly cabbie named
Reza brought him to the hotel and refused a tip for his help.

•

"Godfrey, this is Michael.
I’m in the lobby. A policeman is with me. He picked me up and is going
to take me to the station for questioning."

This was the next morning,
about 10:15. Forty-five minutes earlier, I’d had breakfast with Almereyda
in the hotel coffeeshop. We laughed and shook our heads about the night before.
As we finished eating, he said he’d like to go outside and look around.
I thought for maybe half a second about whether I should go with him. But I’m
a big advocate of exploring on one’s own. Plus, I know this area. It used
to be my neighborhood.

Three years ago I came to
Tehran, rented an apartment and stayed most of the summer. Tehranis see very
few Americans, but if my nationality usually surprised them, the news that I
was renting an apartment often left them convulsed with laughter. It
was rare enough, I suppose, to be considered bizarre. (I was told I was "brave,"
which I took as a tactful euphemism for "crazy.") But I never had
the slightest trouble. And I developed a real fondness for my corner of the
city, a cul de sac off Vali Asr St., below Vanak Square.

So I told Almereyda after
breakfast, "Sure, go ahead. Just turn right, out of the hotel. You’ll
walk down to a big square, which is a good area to explore."

When he called from the
lobby, I couldn’t imagine what had happened. I immediately tried to phone
a couple of our Khaneh handlers, then a couple of Iranian friends. Busy, every
one. (The Tehran phone system seems to have grown even worse since the invasion
of cellphones.) So I hurried downstairs.

Almereyda was with the manager
and a plainclothes policeman. The term really fit this guy. His clothes were
plain, he was plain, his expression was never anything other than plain. I asked
if a trip to the police station was really necessary. With the manager translating,
the policeman said it was. I asked if I could accompany Mr. Almereyda. The cop
nodded. Then he added it would only take 10 minutes. When he said that, I thought
we might really be in for some trouble. Nothing in Iran takes 10 minutes–nothing
you’d want to have happen to you, anyway.

The police station was small,
plain and unadorned with any kind of fancy technology. I couldn’t imagine
why the Iranians would want citizens of the great nation of Kojak to see this
dump. Nevertheless, they parked us in a back room where four or five plainclothes
cops proceeded to scrutinize us and talk among themselves. I assumed we were
waiting for a translator for the interrogation. I gradually pieced together
the circumstances that brought us there.

Almereyda had done as I
suggested. Walked down to the square, looked around, then sat down on a pile
of rubble and took out a notebook and began to make some notes. What neither
of us realized was that my old neighborhood had changed since I lived there.
A few days before, the Mujahedin-e Khalq, a group based in Iraq and at war with
the Islamic Republic, shot some mortars into the area, aiming for the police
headquarters but missing. My guess is that Almereyda sat down on one of the
resulting piles of bricks and the plainclothesmen figured he was a Mujahedin
spy, no doubt scribbling something like, "Boy, we blew the hell out of
this shack! Flat as a pancake!"

None of the cops spoke English,
but as we sat there and eyed each other, they became convinced that Almereyda
spoke Farsi, or at least understood theirs. I think this was because Michael
sometimes wears a look that’s no more than wry curiosity but can seem like
knowing bemusement. So the cops thought he maybe not only understood them, but
maybe was laughing at them too. This didn’t help. They started passing
around a pistol, some kind of healthy-sized automatic. I think they were just
bored, but at this point I started trying to explain that Almereyda was in fact
a famous film director, and giving the cops phone numbers of our supposed
handlers and asking that they be called. None of this provoked the slightest
change in the staring game.

If this were a movie we
would now cut back to the hotel, where my friend Roxane stands in the lobby
looking mystified. A Columbia grad student who’s been in Iran for five
months on a Fulbright doing anthropological field work, Roxane’s a big
fan of Almereyda’s downtown vampire movie Nadja, and eagerly accepted
my invitation to have lunch. When we don’t show up, she starts getting
nosy. Eventually one of the hotel workers lets her in on our whereabouts. She
heads for a payphone.

Back at Fort Apache north
central Tehran, Almereyda and I are approaching the end of our second hour of
interrogation-by-dull-stare when the doors burst open and in charges a squadron
of Iranian movie producers, all talking at once–talking to each other,
to the cops, to their cellphones. But mainly their cellphones. I swear a couple
of them are doing deals as they are nominally springing us from the pokey. At
their center is producer and Khaneh officer Fereshte Taerpour. Though Taerpour’s
a woman, I would nominate her to star in any Iranian remake of Patton.
She has two cellphones and is always on both of them, even as she deals
with the cops.

I was later told that the
calls regarding our case reached the ministerial level. Whatever, it still took
a couple of hours to spring us, and Almereyda had to sign a statement about
what he was doing when he was apprehended (writing in diary, not spying for
the Mujahedin). I have no idea if the cops were ever told the main reason the
Khaneh producers were hustling to get us out of there: we were expected at the
Iranian Oscars.

•

The showing of Almereyda’s
Hamlet four nights later was a teeth-grinding disappointment to me. Admittedly,
I was hoping for big things: a large hall filled with most of Khaneh Cinema’s
considerable membership, plenty of hoopla and press coverage, the works. Instead,
our overworked Khaneh hosts delivered a screening so "select" it was
virtually a state secret. But I knew the main reason why.

This is not a good moment
for anyone in Iran to make a big show of embracing Americans. On an individual
level, Iranians are as fond of American people as they are crazy about Hollywood
movies (which they see via satellite tv and bootleg videos). Collectively, they
favor opening up to the world, as they proved by electing the urbane reformer
Mohammad Khatami president in 1997, and by voting overwhelmingly for reformist
candidates in last spring’s elections to the Majlis, Iran’s parliament.
But there’s a big downside to the progressive surge: it makes the conservatives
feel threatened and avid to fight back. When Khatami attempts to open up to
the world by launching a "dialogue of civilizations"–involving,
say, exchanges of filmmakers–such cultural initiatives become a very visible
target.

The result is that movie
diplomacy, like other sorts, finds itself hit with as many annoying roadblocks
and slowdowns as Tehran’s horrifically overloaded freeways. Since I’m
very impatient by nature, I can only admire the equanimity displayed by my friends
at Search for Common Ground. Like Iran’s reformers in recent months, they
seem inclined toward the long view, realizing that change takes time and faces
endless obstacles. But maybe they’re also encouraged by the bright side;
in this case, there’s at least one convert.

Almereyda seems taken with
Iran. He never says, "What the hell did you get me into?" In fact,
the rest of his trip turns out pretty well. Besides attending the Iranian Oscars,
he gets feted at the Swiss embassy, explores Tehran’s labyrinthine bazaar
and flies off for a day in the stunning city of Isfahan. He even seems pleased
with the small but responsive crowd at Hamlet, which includes the directors
Tahmineh Milani and Dariush Mehrjui.

In any event, he never loses
his rock-star cool. Not long after the episode in the police station, we’re
going somewhere in Tehran and I notice him pull out his digital video camera
and start shooting. My first reaction is, "Uh-oh." But then I think:
"What can they do to him–haul him off to jail and accuse him of being
a spy?"

Yi Yi (A
One And a Two) directed
by Edward Yang

The gatekeepers he was referring
to are the people who determine which foreign-language films reach the general
public: their number includes film distributors and, in a slightly more remote
sense, festival programmers. Trusting these folk–that is, believing that
every year they unfailingly winnow out the best foreign films and set them on
a course for U.S. art houses–is something that many cinephiles perhaps
do without giving it much thought, and others do because they really have no
alternative. But I was astonished to think any critic with a brain and access
to international festivals would do it, because my experience has taught me
just the opposite. When I set about assembling a "10 best" list for
the 1990s, I was dismayed but unsurprised to see how many of the outstanding
foreign films had passed the decade with little or no access to American filmgoers.

Chief among those unseen
masterpieces, Taiwanese director Edward Yang’s astonishing, four-hour teens-in-turmoil
epic A Brighter Summer Day (1991) not only eluded the nets of American
distributors, it was also passed over by the Cannes and New York film festivals,
a blunder that looked ever more embarrassing as the film’s critical reputation
built throughout the decade. Recently I asked a Cannes programmer who was on
duty at the time how the oversight could have happened. With a frown, he said,
"Festivals make mistakes." (Here insert history’s riposte: "No
shit.")

Still, my point here is
not to bash the gatekeepers, but rather to lament that various factors–some
beyond their control, some not–conspired to keep the New Taiwanese Cinema
off the cultural radar of American filmgoers during the period of its rise and
greatest fecundity, roughly the mid-80s to the mid-90s. As a result, the very
belated commercial appearance (last year) of Hou Hsiao-hsien’s oeuvre,
and the arrival this week of Yang’s Cannes triumph Yi Yi (A One and
a Two), are welcome events that nonetheless suffer from distortions of perspective
that invariably accompany a lack of context.

One example: discussing
foreign films in the Times a few weeks back, Stephen Holden opined that
"most critics would agree" that the current cinemas of Taiwan, Iran,
Spain, China, Denmark and France are "flourishing artistically." I’m
not sure how many critics would actually agree with that preposterous
statement, but those who do should have their passports renewed. Clearly, "flourishing
artistically" applies only, if at all, to Iran, a special case where an
authoritarian regime has kept out virtually all foreign films while shrewdly
supporting its own filmmakers’ efforts at overseas success. The other cinemas
Holden mentioned are all in advanced stages of decay or on government life-support.

According to the Cannes
programmer mentioned above, speaking a month ago in Telluride, Taiwan’s
cinema is now "virtually dead." The island’s three internationally
lauded auteurs, Yang, Hou and Tsai Ming-liang, make their films, in effect,
for export, with funds that mostly come from Japan and Europe. That’s worth
bearing in mind by anyone–critics included–who might risk mistaking
Hou’s work or Yi Yi as proofs of a currently vital national cinema.

The vitality belongs to
the auteurs, whose relationship to their national cultures grows more interestingly
problematic as their conditions of production become more transnational. In
this sense, Hou and Yang stand in sharp contrast to each other. Hou’s films
are fastidiously, self-consciously "Chinese" in setting, subjects
and style, and usually take place in the past. Yang’s films, generally
set in the present (the 60s-set Brighter Summer Day is an exception),
display a style that might be called international-modernist, and depict a cosmopolitan
Taiwan that’s overwashed with influences from Japan, the U.S. and Europe.

Amusingly, much as certain
precious Western cinephiles once embraced Ozu and Mizoguchi as more "Japanese"
than Kurosawa, Hou now gets championed in certain quarters as more culturally
authentic than Yang. Yet Yang’s cinematic world, in which Taiwanese companies
ape Japanese high-tech prototypes and American capitalism drives everything,
surely is more authentic to the experience of anyone who steps off a plane in
Taipei; it simply doesn’t foreground or make a fuss over its "Chineseness."

In fact, local cultural
identity seems to mean less to Yang now than ever before. In Telluride I tried
to probe him about how Yi Yi comments on Taiwan’s present realities.
He demurred when I mentioned Taiwan, saying that the more he has traveled of
late, the more it has struck him that the crucial divide now isn’t between
nations, the U.S. and China, say, but between big international metropolises
and everywhere else.

Taipei and New York are
more like each other than New York is like the American hinterlands, he mused.
People who live in these cities increasingly belong to the same culture, and
it’s not a national or traditional culture. It’s a global urban culture.
Thus, says Yang, he doesn’t make Taiwanese (much less "Chinese")
films, because he doesn’t really understand or inhabit the parts of Taiwan
beyond its capital. He makes Taipei films, films set in a city that more and
more resembles every other big, flashing, sleepless city.

This outlook has two noteworthy
consequences. First, and not incidentally, it provides Yang’s films (Yi
Yi especially) with a significant correlation between the cultures they
depict and the cultures that finance and consume them; unlike Hou’s films,
which give Westerners arty repesentations of an exotic Other, Yang’s unfold
and offer fascinating insights into the prosaic, global here and now. Second,
the fading of local culture means that culture itself recedes as a central question,
leaving Yang to focus on the individual life, the lone city-citizen and his
immediate kin.

It’s worth stressing
that a long intellectual itinerary has led Yang to the felicities of Yi Yi,
because one of the film’s virtues is a deceptive conventionality that can
make it seem a lot less complex and hard-won than it is. Running three hours
yet so steadily engrossing that its end arrives before you want it to, Yang’s
story chronicles the ups and downs of an ordinary Taipei family (mom, dad, sis,
kid bro, plus assorted relatives) as its members endure everything from business
challenges, injury, first love and possible infidelity to religious crisis and
the encroachment of mortality.

Alternately funny and poignant,
the film sometimes dances alarmingly close to the lures of melodrama and sentimentality,
yet it emerges as unself-consciously beautiful, humane and heartwarming in a
way few movies manage without collapsing into sappiness. At the same time, Yi
Yi easily repays multiple viewings because its most impressive accomplishments
transpire far beneath its ingratiating, carefully drawn surface.

With a flurry of comic lyricism,
the tale opens at a wedding where 40ish paterfamilias N.J. (Wu Nien-Jen) encounters
his long-unseen first love in an elevator and notices that there’s still
a spark between them. She’s a musician who’s been living in America,
but the fact that his company is trying to forge a deal with a Tokyo concern
gives N.J. the chance, as the story unfolds, to go to off to Japan for a few
days with his old flame and consider starting anew.

The other members of N.J.’s
family eventually have their own Rubicons to cross. While his wife Min-Min (Elaine
Jin) is distracted to the point of seeking the spiritual guidance of a guru,
daughter Li Li (Adrian Lin) gradually develops a crush on a boy who turns
out to be seriously unhinged. Meanwhile, seven-year-old Yang-Yang (Jonathan
Chang) explores the world through the lens of his own camera and a mind that
can’t help turning every experience into a philosophical quandary.

Various other relatives
occupy the comedy-drama’s periphery, and a crucial one gives the story
its dead-silent center. Rendered comatose by an accident, Min-Min’s elderly
mother is returned home with doctor’s instructions that the family members
talk to her frequently to stimulate her senses. What does one say to an old
woman who shows no signs of consciousness? The dilemma adds to existential puzzlements
faced by four people who not only don’t speak much to each other but don’t
seem especially adept at facing themselves. To talk to Granny, each must construct
a narrative that he or she can listen to and live with.

The film’s mastery,
however, lies far less in its plot or characters than in the subtlety of its
design and execution. Yang fortunately has never fallen prey to Hou’s brand
of hyperformalism, but that’s not to say that form doesn’t carry much
of the meaning in his films; it merely means that he’s more delicate about
it. In interviews he has said that he wanted to reflect on the different ages
of a person’s life, but rather than following one character through many
years, he created different characters representing the whole spectrum of age.
That’s almost like symbolic speech signaling the motives that inform the
film at every level: balance, wholeness and a perspective that emphasizes the
long view of individual, family and social life.

Yi Yi, in fact, is
a supremely humane and wonderfully accessible movie that could equally be appreciated
on an almost abstract level. The ways that Yang balances every opposite (young/old,
happy/sad, individual/family, love/disappointment, etc., etc.) are quite amazing
in their significant thoroughness, just as his skill in interweaving innumerable
plot strands and moods without calling attention to their seamlessness recalls
that, before turning to filmmaking, he was an engineer who considered going
into architecture. Beyond that, there’s the sheer skill and truthfulness
he’s able to conjure in scene after scene, moment after moment, of the
film’s unfurling.

A Brighter Summer Day
is, I think, still the masterpiece Yang is most likely to be remembered
for. Made when he was in his 40s, it has the jagged energies and lunging ambitions
of an artist still gripped by the demons of his youth but suddenly in the full
possession of his own powers. Yi Yi is a more relaxed and mellow film,
a contemplative work by an artist who’s crossed the threshold of 50 and
realized that he has achieved a measure of contentment and philosophic perspective.
Both films, though, are similar in feeling deeply personal, which separates
them from Yang’s estimable but more intellectual other features.

Yi Yi, the seventh
of Yang’s features yet the first to make it into the U.S. marketplace,
will no doubt come as a startling surprise to some viewers. "Where has
this terrific filmmaker been hiding?" people will wonder. The answer, of
course, is not so much in Taiwan as on the other side of the gatekeepers.

Dancer in
the Dark directed
by Lars von Trier

Cinema has been dying for
a very long time–no doubt since the moment someone thought to anoint movies
as an art–and we all love a good death scene. Around the time he filmed
Jean-Paul Belmondo thrashing like a stuck flounder on the Paris pavements at
the end of Breathless, Jean-Luc Godard opined that his crowd, the young
creators of the French New Wave, were only recognizing that the kinds of movies
they really loved could no longer be made, that they had already passed into
history. Their own movies, Godard suggested, were a way of mourning.

The main difference between
Godard circa 1960 and Denmark’s Lars von Trier circa 2000, one might say,
lies in what is being mourned. Godard’s generation mainly mourned American
genre films like musicals and gangster movies (which together comprised an emblem
of cinema’s Eden, its unrecapturable innocence) and in doing so, they created
the modernist European art film. Von Trier, in his recent work, and perhaps
his work as a whole, mourns the passing of that very same mod.Euro.art.film,
although duller-witted viewers of his Dancer in the Dark will be forgiven
for thinking that he’s paying tribute to the bygone genre of the musical.

Speaking of the dull- (and
otherwise-) witted, the two esthetic transitions noted above can’t be fully
appraised without reference to audiences. The New Wave’s films reflected
a viewer, French and worldwide, that had moved or was moving, moviewise, from
innocence to knowingness, the latter being defined as an understanding that
invested cinema with the discriminations of classical culture, modernist literature,
etc. In retrospect this movement can easily be seen as the valiant last stand
of mass upperbrowism, aka book-smartness, in the West. In any case, the movement
implied by von Trier’s films runs in exactly the opposite direction: its
viewer, having swallowed that old knowingness whole, imagines himself smart
even as he rapidly grows dumber and dumber–i.e., uneducated in anything
but pop "culture" and therefore increasingly incapable of meaningful
discriminations.

At the moment a prime emblem
of this postmodern puerility is Robert Wise’s The Sound of Music.
I don’t mean that the estimable movie is puerile; for anyone who may care,
it’s the studio system’s last great musical and easily one of the
best Hollywood films of the 60s, a bad decade for Hollywood films. But Wise’s
expertly sticky-sweet songfest has lately turned into a fetish object for people
desperate to feel superior to pop entertainments while remaining in abject,
simpering thrall to same.

The phenomenon comes to
us from–where else?–dimmest England, where the sport of travestying
The Sound of Music in costume and song last year became a fad among,
as the Times noted recently, an audience of gay men and middle-aged women.
Now, I would submit that such localized silliness in itself is no proof of cultural
collapse. What worries me is when it gets a cheery endorsement from the Anglofools
at The New Yorker, and, worse, 20th Century-Fox rereleases the movie
as a campified "singalong"–apparently incognizant that most filmgoers
would be happy to take it, shall we say, straight, and indeed that the studio
could make mountains of money with a carefully managed, noncampy revival.

Dancer in the Dark
inhabits the same murky terrain. In opening with a scene in which its protagonist,
played by the singer Bjork, is rehearsing a small-town stage production of The
Sound of Music, the film announces its appeal to people whose identities
are bound up with things like snickering at the Wise movie. (Go to any show
of Dancer and you’re sure to hear their fatuous, idiotic chortles.)
Yet if this indicates certain of the newer film’s limitations, it doesn’t
describe its totality. Because Dancer is also for people who’re
bothered by anyone’s urge to sneer at old-style pop innocence.

Shot by Robby Mueller in
widescreen digital video, von Trier’s film (using the term figuratively)
features Bjork as Selma, a Czech immigrant to the U.S. who works in a rural
factory making stainless-steel sinks. Rapidly going blind, she’s determined
to save money to pay for an operation to save her son, Gene, from the same fate.
But fate has some nasty surprises in store. Selma’s creepy landlord Bill
(David Morse) swipes her savings, and in trying to recover them, she commits
a crime that can send her to the death house. The only compensation to all this
kitchen-sink dreariness, it turns out, is that Selma’s mind occasionally
drifts into a place where her life’s transformed into a big, splashy movie
musical.

Although obviously influenced
by self-conscious latter-day Euro musicals like Jacques Demy’s and Dennis
Potter’s Pennies from Heaven, Dancer stands apart with a
unique trademark: its thorough, painstaking ludicrousness. Not only is the story
sheer, unvarnished pulp bathos (like Titanic, its plot might have come
from a penny-dreadful of a century ago) but everything surrounding it is similarly
hootable. The tale’s characters, mostly American, are played by the Euro
likes of Catherine Deneuve, Peter Stormare, Cara Seymour and Jean-Marc Barr.
America itself, meanwhile, is played by a Swedish soundstage decked out as an
armchair gauchiste’s vision of current redneck-proletarian abjection.

Von Trier unquestionably
deserves credit for the puckish wit in all this. Unlike the makers of the deeply
stupid Rosetta, he doesn’t pose the setting’s Marxist fantasy
as something to be taken seriously; he knows it’s every bit as goofy as
having la grande Deneuve play a blowsy backwoods factory worker named Kathy.
Yet one must also allow that the entertainment value of such fancies is too
conceptual to be more than very occasionally rib-tickling. And Dancer
undeniably suffers from being overlong and raggedly focused; we sit through
a lot of dull exposition before those bouncy, color-enhanced musical numbers
come to the rescue.

Still, simple entertainment
isn’t really what’s at stake here. The film’s central conceit
is a gamble. Von Trier says to viewers: "I know all these dumb, hokey conventions
are past redemption. But watch. I’ll take them and push them beyond the
pale, make them as stupid, ludicrous and unbelievable as I can, and I’ll
still get you. I’ll make your heart leap at the musical numbers, and I’ll
make you cry in the end." And damn if he doesn’t win this wager, which
leaves him looking like an artist rather than the chump you half expected.

Though the remaining question–so
what?–isn’t easily answered, the film’s execution sticks to the
mind like a hummable tune. Von Trier shot the musical numbers with 100 digital
cameras going at once, adding to the impression that his main talent is for
stunts, yet the dancing and choreography do hold their own against the technology.
The best thing about the entire movie, though, is Bjork, who sings like a heavenly
chorister, holds the camera like a total natural and wrote a pack of great songs
to which von Trier and Sjon Sigurdsson added the lyrics. Give this woman an
Oscar, say I.

Perhaps the main drawback
to the whole enterprise is that, in its story of a stainless-hearted woman driven
to the depths by the cruel, cruel world, Dancer so closely resembles
Breaking the Waves, the director’s international breakthrough of
four years ago. Was von Trier, you wonder, so desperate to win the Palme d’Or
at Cannes (which Dancer predictably captured) that he was willing to
stoop to calculated self-imitation? Has he totally run out of ideas?

Let us be charitable and
allow that Dancer may be a purposeful companion piece to Waves,
one that reminds us of the other half of the art film’s European-American
heritage. Much as Waves obsessed on von Trier’s Danish forebear
Carl Theodor Dreyer, the new film fixates on the world of Busby Berkeley, Vincente
Minnelli and Gene Kelly. The latter terrain, though, it sees through the same
distanced glass once employed by Godard and company, the prism of European analytic
estheticism and romantic self-projection.

Both Waves and Dancer
wonder, with a half-mocking, half-serious concern, what comes after belief,
which for many Europeans of recent vintage has meant God or cinema, or sometimes
both. The problem is, the question only means something if there’s a memory
that belief actually mattered, or a sense that it might again. And von Trier
ultimately seems unable convince himself that content of any sort is ever more
than frivolous. All that’s left, not surprisingly, are giddy stunts, fanciful
formal gestures and a slight, nagging feeling that something crucial has been
lost.