Noir by way of Maron: Nicholas Ray's In a Lonely Place (1950)

Comedian Marc Maron, on his brilliant WTF podcast, has a gift for exposing the raw, the dark, and the hidden, for hitting on personal fears, failures, and neuroses  with his guests, perhaps in great part because he himself seems so willing (some grumpy skeptics might say too self-obsessively willing) to discuss and analyze his own weaknesses with his guests and his listening public. 

Todd Hanson, one of the original writers of The Onion, spoke with Maron in detail about the day (and the aftermath of that day) he tried to commit suicide (an attempt that Hanson’s doctors said should have worked); Conan O’Brien shared personal insecurities in a way that was real and unexpected for someone so much in the public spotlight; and in a more recent interview, actress-comedian Aubrey Plaza (Funny People, Parks and Recreation) told Maron about the stress-related stroke she’d experienced at 20 and admitted that her deadpan, non-committal persona – something she was projecting even during the interview – was a cover or protection from desperate internal fears.  Maron is, perhaps, primarily interested in the fact that the best comedy most often comes out of a well of fear, anger, sadness, dysfunction, out of, in short, deeply messed up people.   But I believe fans of Maron’s comedy and those of who have discovered Maron’s podcast, possibly by way of the New York Times write up about him, love Maron, not because he and the comedians he interviews are so much different or so much more messed up than we are, but because Maron faces - honestly - failings and fears and neuroses that are, very simply, human, and common in some way to us all even, even if most of us don’t use comedy to deal those weaknesses.

Humphrey Bogart, or affectionately, Bogie, with such roles as he has in The Maltese Falcon, Casablanca, The Big Sleep, and even The African Queen, offers us a kind of parallel to the dark side of humanity that Maron explores and exposes with his comedy and his interviews.  Bogie’s roles as Sam Spade, Rick, Philip Marlowe, and Charlie Allnut, respectively, from those films above, offer us leading men who are quite dark in various ways. 

Each of them is more or less tough, anti-social or alienated, wry or drily witty, world-weary, cynical.  Bogart perfectly fits these roles, and while I’ve always thought Bogart had an odd, rather ugly face, with his sagging checks, high creased forehead, and thin wet lips, somehow his characters and his own personality make him, undeniably, one of the best romantic leading men of all time. 

Each character, though often dark, has an unmistakable, winning quality, a charisma, something that emanates equally, surely, from Bogie himself as much as the character, and something that draws us, as willing participants into the character’s darkness.    Film noir, literally, “black film,” describes a group of films from the 40’s and 50’s – including The Maltese Falcon and The Big Sleep – that generally “reflected the resultant tensions and insecurities of the time period” and demonstrated attitudes of “[f]ear, mistrust, bleakness, loss of innocence, despair and paranoia.”  The films contain anti-heroes rather than heroes, and these characters might be described as ”violent, misogynistic, [and] hard-boiled,” and throughout the films there is often a “strong undercurrent of moral conflict [and] purposelessness . . There were rarely happy or optimistic endings in noirs” (http://www.filmsite.org/filmnoir.html).   With actors such as the magnetic Bogie as anti-hero, film noir becomes all the more compelling if often uncomfortable because we are drawn into the blackness and we come to see it from the inside out.

It is possibly odd to connect Maron’s comedy with film noir, odd to connect comedy and tragedy, but there can be a very thin line between the two (indeed, most of us are familiar with the idea that “comedy equals tragedy plus time”).  It strikes me that Maron often looks blackness in the face and embraces it with his comedy in order to make it knowable, manageable, maybe even redeemable, and film noir, likewise, looks blackness in the face by giving us a protagonist, whom we ought to find repellent, but who is, instead, magnetic, someone for whom we root, someone with whom we sympathize.  Both Maron’s comedy and much of film noir acknowledge, expose, and draw us into the experience of real human darkness and we come, I think, to see something of ourselves there, a vision that’s rather disconcerting. 

Nicholas Ray’s In a Lonely Place (1950), starring Bogart as Dixon Steele  and Gloria Grahame as Laurel Gray, 

offers just such a disconcerting vision, and it is Bogart in probably one of his darkest roles.  While the film also offers a critique of the Hollywood film industry, portraying it as an industry that’s more interested in money, youth, and celebrity than artistic integrity, it is the film’s psychological aspects that I am most interested in here. 

Bogart’s Dixon Steele is a well-known, but lately unsuccessful, screenwriter, and we are, in the very first two scenes introduced to his violent, short temper, a temper that is also well-known to anyone who knows “Dix.”  The first scenes are interesting for a couple of reasons: first, the introduction to Dix’s temper is a bit obvious, not at all subtle.  When he moves very quickly from arguing to using his fists on an arrogant but not completely offensive director, another patron of the restaurant comments, “There goes Dix again.”  A clunky way to inform the audience of Dix’s history.  The clunkiness of this worked to distance me (perhaps simply because I am a film viewer from the 21^st century) from the film at first, and so at that point, metaphorically speaking, I sat back a little skeptically: “Right, then, you’re going to have to work to convince me now that you can be more complex and dark than that.”  It did.  More on that later.

As second point of interest, in these first scenes, we see Dix’s clear sympathy for those Hollywood has left behind, here in the restaurant, Dix sides with a once famous, brilliant actor who has turned into an alcoholic and something of a fool.  Dix stands up for him when he is refused service, and Dix’s clear love, respect, and sympathy for his actor friend are genuinely moving; the emotional depth subtly evident in the friendship between the men here hints that the stagey fight with the director will not overshadow what the film has to offer. 

At this point in the story, Dix’s motivations for defending his friend seem fairly clear: the actor is his friend; Dix is angry that fickle Hollywood has so quickly abandoned a person it once idolized.  But as the film goes on, the nature of Dix’s temper and the motivations for all his actions seem less and less traceable.  In the case of his actor friend, we never doubt that he does love his friend, but we begin to suspect that that love might be mixed with a kind of recognition, the idea that his broken friend is a being not so far removed from himself.  And Dix’s eruptions into rage are both less predictable and more weighty: less predictable because Dix takes on complexity as we begin to see more of him and more weighty because we begin to care more and more about Dix and about the characters who we see love him.

But I should go back a bit to the action that sets the central plotline in motion.  In the beginning, Dix is offered the opportunity to write a screenplay based on a piece of pop fiction.  Dix sneers at the book – “I won’t work on something I don’t like” – but decides to consider writing the screenplay anyway, getting around reading the book himself by asking the restaurant’s coat check girl, Mildred, home with him so that she might give him a synopsis of the book.  She goes home with him, explains the plot and then leaves; in its entire, it is a scene where we see his clear contempt for her and the book and we see his delightfully witty sarcasm (all completely lost, of course, on the naïve Mildred). 

Next morning, Dix is awakened early by a police officer friend, who informs him that Mildred was found dead – murdered – and Dix must go in for questioning.  Dix is let go on lack of evidence, but the police, even Dix’s friend, clearly, still suspect him, and more uncomfortably, so do we.  Or rather, we’re not sure whether to suspect him or not. 

At this point, he’s won us over; his deadpan, witty repartees and sarcasm; his dry Bogie charm; his apparent unconcern are magnetic, delightful, hilarious.  But. We recognize, for all that charm, a man contained, difficult to read.  He is wholly, apparently, unemotional upon hearing of Mildred’s murder, and as his police officer friend, says of Dix in their war days, “It’s hard to tell how Dix feels about anything.  None of us could ever tell.”  It is that mixture of containment, that barrier Dix places between the world and himself and that possible capability to erupt at any moment into brutal violence that makes us increasingly uneasy; we are drawn to him, but we cannot really read him, and where we might have thought him innocent of the murder at first (though contemptuous of Mildred, he didn't seem unkind to the point of violence), we become less sure of when Dix is joking or serious, less sure if how just how far his containment of himself extends.  For his jokes extend to the discussion of the murder case, and when Dix sets up a scene with his policeman friend and wife in order to demonstrate how the murder might have been done, it's difficult to tell if Dix is truly gruesomely relishing the imagined murder or if he is only sarcastically playing into his policeman friend's suspicions of him.    

The more we see of Dix, the more we know that he is both a master of control and a man whose rage might disrupt that control at any moment.

In the midst of the continuing plotline to discover evidence about the murder, Dix meets his new neighbor, Laurel Gray.  Even in the first moment of their meeting, an unspoken moment, in which their eyes meet as Dix takes Mildred to his apartment, we know that Dix has met his match. 

Miss Gray’s still, cool, direct, knowing gaze stands in stark contrast to Mildred’s giddy naïvete - Grahame is the perfect co-lead with Bogart.  One of the great joys of film noir is the crackling dialogue between the leading man and leading woman – there is a quick bantering wit in the screwball comedies, too, but the wit in film noir, as here, reigned in by but slyly working around the Hays Code has an invigoratingly dark edge, laced with double entendre, electric sexual tension, and subtext.  Bogie and Grahame here, sizzling up the screen, rival the best of Bogie and Bacall.

Laurel Gray herself, unlike most of the other characters, is wholly unintimidated by Dix in the beginning, and it is her lack of fear, her cool confidence that makes her such a good match for him.  We want to believe with Laurel, that there is, truly, nothing to fear, that Dix has a dark side that can be managed or changed if he has someone who will both love him and stand up to him.  But Dix and Laurel’s relationship is tinged for us as viewers, from the beginning, by our real unease with Dix, an unease that only grows and that Laurel comes to share.  Dix tells Laurel in one of their first conversations, “I’ve been looking for someone for a long time . . . and now I know your name, where you live” – a statement that could be innocently and genuinely spoken by someone smitten but on the lips of Dix feels dangerous, even if we are still charmed by him.  The dark undertone of this statement is later echoed after Dix and Laurel are together, and he tells her, again, we suspect only half-jokingly, “You go when I tell you to go - and not before.” 

But still, we hope, that Dix and Laurel’s relationship, will prove to be Dix’s lasting redemption, that his fatal flaw –whatever it truly is, wherever it stems from –will be vanquished at last.  But the power of the manic pixie dream girl, the moralizing influence of the angel in the house, the love of a good woman – those are not the happy, easy, and ultimately unsatisfying answers with which this film settles.  Though one character tells Laurel, “Dix needs you,” and we believe, too, he does, that he has, indeed, found in Laurel his match, that in her he might find true companionship rather than the combative isolation he’s build around himself, the problem is that Laurel cannot truly cure him.  She might be his muse, for he begins writing again, with joy, when he meets her,

and they are kindred spirits, but she is only human herself, not a miracle worker who can transform the warp of Dix’s soul. 

We want to believe that Dix can change, that the litany of aggravated assault cases the police have on their records about him are things of the past; we’ve come to love him, be charmed by him, sympathize with him.  We want to excuse his violent temper as artistic temperament – we even wonder if his friend and agent is right - that he wouldn't be the same wit, the same brilliant writer without that darkness: “You don't want normal.  You knew he was dynamite. He has to explode sometimes . . . If you want him, you’ve got to take it all.”  The question the film leaves to Laurel and to us up until the final moments, where the answer is made devastatingly plain, is whether Dix really is as dangerous a piece of dynamite as indicated by his past and if so, whether anyone can make a home with that dynamite.

Much of the film’s genius lies in the way it plays on our desires and hopes for Dix, the way it plays on our guesses about him, our fears about him; up until the last moments, we don't know whether or not he murdered Mildred, we do not truly know – or we don’t want to admit –exactly how far he will go into the dark, relative to Laurel.  Director Nicholas Ray shot two endings to the film – both endings, as common with film noir, are black, but one is blacker.  I will not give away which ending Ray chose, but by the time we get to that ending, Dix’s specific actions – just how far he goes – do not really matter.  Dix’s tragedy has been opened wide to us, and we cannot get away from it any longer. 

Characters, variously, throughout the film say of Dix, “He’s a sick man . . . there’s something wrong with him”; “There’s something strange about him”; “Dix doesn’t act like a normal person.”  But categorizing him as separate from others – as abnormal, as wrong in the head – isn’t, ultimately, what the film decides about him and we can’t decide it either.  We’ve come too close to him, loved him too much for that.  We know he is, certainly, not heartless - he is capable of true love and friendship - and he has wit, charisma, and artistic integrity, possibly genius.  But it is those endearing things about him that make his besetting flaw all the more tragic, and Dix, in the end, while unique as an individual is, we know, even in that darkest place, fully, tragically human, nothing more or less. 

Sometimes, with Marc Maron, we can laugh in the midst of that dark tragedy - using that tragedy to create something good - but sometimes, with Dix, we must acknowledge the suffocating alienation of our own fatal flaws.  And that is the crushingly honest, lonely place to which this film brings us, and it is what makes this film as piercingly relevant in 2011 as Maron's dark, honest comedy.   

"And the sons of God shouted for joy": Terrence Malick's Tree of Life

 

Jessica Chastain, who plays the mother in Terrence Malick’s Palme d'Or winning Tree of Life, called the film, a “visual poem” recently on the Guardian’s podcast.   And that’s about right, for the film follows no classic narrative structure; it’s more stream of consciousness meditation than story.  And I guess it’s the poetic, non-linear quality of the film that has left many audience members baffled and even a little angry, and has prompted articles like this one in The New York Times:  “Walking in and Walking Right Back Out of ‘The Tree of Life’”.  In the screening I attended, the two young men sitting behind us, after 30 minutes of shuffling in their seats and only half-suppressing sigh and groans, stumped out of the theater with a “This is stupid.”  Not the film “starring Brad Pitt” I’m guessing they were probably expecting.

 

I suppose I was able to go into the film a little more prepared than those two young men, having watched Malick’s other films, Badlands, Days of Heaven, The Thin Red Line, and The New World, and fortunately knowing, then, something more about Malick’s sensibilities.  I’d also heard that the film “challenges” and “tests” its audiences, and it did help to be ready for that kind of experience.  And while I confess that the 17-minute section near the beginning of the film--in which Malick imagines the beginning of the universe--and we see not characters but explosions, amoeba, and dinosaurs--did test me a little and while the entire film challenged my ability to understand what Malick wanted to say at each moment, I never wanted to leave; on the contrary, Malick, I think by the sheer weight the beauty on the screen, held me pinned to my seat, often in a kind of rapture. 

In a few transcendent moments in my life, I have been moved unexpectedly to tears by a beautiful painting or sunset or by a strain of sweet music.  This film has that power.  Throughout, I was carried along by waves of sensation; I was frequently in the clutch of threatening tears without really knowing why.  In a classic film or story, you sense the climax coming; you know, usually, when to reach into your pocket or purse for a tissue to sniffle into.  Here, I could not predict that moment, those moments.  And I could not understand the why’s of the emotion that did overtake me.  Was it just the startling impact of the cascading images of beauty?  Was the film tapping into some deep longings or memories or questions buried in my subconscious?  Probably, yes, to all of that.  Still, pinpointing the reasons would be impossible and, I think, not, ultimately, what I want.  While the film asks deeply profound and existential questions and so ought to be examined on the intellectual level, it is also a film that exists, like music, like dancing, like a painting, equally, if not more so, at the emotional level. 

I read a piece a long while ago in The New Yorker featuring the genius pianist and then teenage prodigy, Evgeny Kissin, and the interviewer/writer reflected on the way that Kissin seemed to use words awkwardly, almost with embarrassment during the interview – he could not express himself well.  But when he sat down to play, he was utterly free, eloquent, powerful and graceful; his hands, the keyboard, were the components of his language.  Perhaps, since that article, Kissin has become more adept in giving interviews, but I rather like the idea that his primary language, his heart language, if you will, can voiced only through the piano.  Terrence Malick is a notoriously shy filmmaker; he will not give interviews, and he did not appear at Cannes to receive his award.  Perhaps he feels, and I do feel, that his films speak for themselves and they bear his unmistakable personal stamp, his voice.  The Tree of Life is no exception; it is fully eloquent, but experiencing it is like being immersed in another form of communication, one that reaches not just the intellect but the emotions. 

But all this discussion has been very subjective, hasn’t it?  What is the film about, anyway?  How about some concrete detail?  Yes, hmmm.  Because this film touches on such an emotional level, the concrete is difficult.  I could tell you about Michelangelo’s Pietà if you've not seen it; before I went to Rome, I myself saw pictures of it, and it was described to me by an art historian – I could grasp what she said about the color, form, and detail of work – but until I saw it myself in St. Peter’s Basilica, I had no comprehension at all of its beauty, heartbreak, and power.  This film is like that.  You need to experience it to know it.  And while all films communicate via imagery and so cannot ever be really translated to words, or to my particular words here, Malick’s films, and this one, too, demonstrate fully just how complex and untranslatable the language of film is. 

In spite of the inadequacy of words, however, I want to try to respond somehow, in the best way I can, in words, to some of the details of The Tree of Life.  Filmmaker Rian Johnson (Brick, The Brothers Bloom, and soon, Looper) on the /Filmcast recently said that it’s difficult to talk about the film “without sounding pretentious and awful,” and I fear I’ve already stepped into the pretentious and awful category, but I hope you’ll forgive me if I plow on.  It’s the sort of film that makes you want to say something back to it.  

I did worry, before I saw the film, that it itself would be too grand, too over-reaching, too ambitious to succeed.  What filmmaker can make a film about the beginning of the world, of life and not seem pretentious?  Stanley Kubrick attempted it in 2001: A Space Odyssey, and most film critics seem to think he succeeded, but well, he’s Kubrick, and do we really need another film like that?  Malick has proved that we do, I think, and if The Tree of Life equals 2001 in its ambition, it surpasses it in beauty and warmth.  The Tree of Life is about life, the universe and everything, and it does have a very long sequence without human characters, but, unlike 2001, it is firmly grounded in one particular family, one particular person, and because we feel a strong connection throughout to this person, Jack, played by Sean Penn but also played, more particularly and powerfully, by the young first-time actor, Hunter McCracken, the vastness of the universal, indeed, the universe, takes on poignant significance.  I cared about the beginnings of the universe, as Malick has imagined it, because I cared about Jack; Malick beautifully connects to two, the abstract and the particular.

But on to some of the particulars.  The film jumps easily through time and space, but its “present,” if I might call it such, is with Sean Penn, the older Jack, a clearly financially successful man in his late 40’s who appears to be either haunted or emotionally dead or both, and he moves through the space of his cold glass-and-steel city world as if submerged, isolated from the world and the others around him.  Nothing is explicit, but the older Jack is in crisis.   It is clearly an existential crisis, related to the problem of suffering in the world, specifically the suffering of his own family, in the face of the death, some years previous, of his younger brother, a death which came in the brother’s very young adulthood.  This grief opens the film and colors and interprets in some sense all that we see after it.  We see the news of the death broken to Jack’s mother and then to his father.   We see the unbearable weight of grief on both of them and the hollow non-answers of the platitudes those around them offer, relative to the death.

Also framing the film, as a sort of pairing to the grief and death, are two themes: one, appearing on the screen, as a quotation from the book of Job, part of God’s answer to Job’s suffering at the end of that book—“Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy?” (38:4, 7)--and the other, in a voiceover from Jack’s mother—“There are two ways through life: the way of nature, and the way of grace. You have to choose which one you'll follow.”   The film, thus, at its heart, shows suffering and brokenness, and then asks why and explores how we might live in a suffering world, a world that is at once breath-taking in its beauty and horrifying in the ugliness both without and within.   For Malick does not just turn the lens outward and make Jack ask, "why has this thing been done to me?"  We also see Jack in falls from grace, boyish in character though they are, and he must also ask, "why do I inflict pain on others?"  How may we be healed from both?  Is healing possible?

It is through the lens of the older Jack’s memory, that we return with him to his life as a young boy, a boy looking and moving towards manhood, and to his life with his two younger brothers and with his father and his mother.  It is this section of the film, with Jack and his family, that the film is most particular and for me, most poignantly powerful.  The most linearity occurs in these sections though the film is always impressionistic in its storytelling.  This impressionistic character of the lives depicted beautifully captures what memory is like, especially memories of childhood, fleeting but vivid and intense fragments that shape so powerfully one’s sense of personal identity and worldview.  The specific memories as they are so seamlessly cut together pursue both the question of suffering and the question of how to live, following grace or following nature. 

We see Jack observing the way his mother—grace—moves through the world and the way his father—nature— moves through it, the mother (played by the sublime Jessica Chastain) embracing beauty, tenderness, kindness love, herself a part of the graceful natural beauty of the world; 

the father (played by Brad Pitt) doggedly following the path of material success, clearly loving—or longing to love—his boys, but giving them rules, laws, and discipline more than spontaneous affection.  He is a deeply flawed man, flaws that Jack sees and hates.

And so Jack has these two models before him, but he soon finds that living is not so simple as following the beautiful model his mother offers; his own self and desires intrude, and in a few deftly sketched scenes, we see Jack falling from that grace, willfully and almost gleefully inflicting pain on his brother or throwing rocks through a window, breaking the glass simply for destruction’s sake.  His guilt after these things weighs on him, and in a voiceover, an echo of Romans 7 where Paul outlines his internal struggle between righteousness and evil, Jack says, “What I want to do, I can't do. I do what I hate.”  Jack, then, participates in and creates pain,  in opposition to what he knows, fully, is right.  He is thus culpable in some way in regards to the suffering of the world, and in a key moment in the film, he recognizes aloud—an exemplary moment in which I think we understand that the older Jack is interpreting the life of his younger self—that he is more like his father, as troubled as that relationship with him is, than his mother. Trouble within.

The trouble without takes not just the form of his brother’s death, of his father’s harshness, but also the form of the world's scars: the neighbor boy whose head bears a patch of baldness, a burn from a vicious house fire; the man who limps with handicap across the street as the boys stare; the haggard prisoners, at a stop in the town; the man with epilepsy, in a fit on a lawn.  Malick, through the beauty and light of the film, still peppers the world with these figures of suffering or brokenness, and like the vividness of a childhood memory, they cannot be shaken.

What answer does Malick give to the questions of the film?  To Jack's crisis?  Does the grown-up Jack find redemption?  Malick, does give an answer, though not, I think, a definitive answer, and in spite of the biblical (and also Roman Catholic) references, I do not believe that the film is specifically tied to the redemption Christianity offers.  The clearest moment of redemption comes when, in a kind of pulling of the pieces of his memories of his family together at the end of the film, the older Jack imagines a reunion on a beach with his family--his father, mother, dead brother, younger brother--a demonstration, perhaps, of the belief that death does not end the possibility of healing, of forgiveness, of redemption, of new life.  And while this scene verges for me on the sentimental, it does not overshadow, ultimately, the beauty and impressionistic subtlety of the rest of the film.  I think Malick’s answer to suffering, guilt, and brokenness relates to new life, to creation, to grace covering over and transforming nature.  The long sequence in the film of the beginnings of the world says that new life underpins even this suffering present life, and that powerful beginning continues on through the births and even the deaths of Jack’s particular family.  Among the many breath-taking images or sequences from this film that will stay with me is one in particular – Jack’s birth.  His boyish form begins in the sea, under the water, and he swims or moves upward until we see his mother in the hospital, surrounded and bathed in white – a baby, Jack, is born.  The wonder and love and joy of that moment is transcendent.  In it, the beginning is contained, and “the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy.” 

I cannot tell to whom to recommend this film.  One’s response to it will be purely personal; you will love it, or it will not work for you, and I can’t predict which it will be.  It may glue you to your seat, or you may itch to leave.  Even if, however, you cannot embrace its themes and loose narrative, it, surely, is one of the most beautiful films I’ve ever seen; and I can recommend it fully to anyone on the strength of just that.  It’s a theater experience quite unlike any other.

"Once Upon a Time": The Spirit of the Beehive by Victor Erice, 1973

I think I held my breath for most of this film.  Every moment, from the opening scene to each subsequent beat, was so perfectly constructed, so beautiful, I could not believe it could sustain itself, could not believe it would not stumble at some point.  But it didn’t – and when it was over, I was left with that sort of ecstasy you experience when you’ve just stood in front of a master work of art and a Something that is transcendent intrudes into your life.


I don’t pretend to know exactly what this film means though I know it is rich in metaphor and symbolism and reading a bit about the historical context tells me it is speaking to the political situation in Spain at the time.  But it’s not one of those films that needs to be understood fully in order to feel you are being immersed into its world. The film tells its viewers – or perhaps I should say, participants - from the beginning that it is a fable or fairy tale, beginning with the words on the screen, "Once upon a time" and so invites us to read its metaphors, but the fable world feels so real, that like the best fables, it doesn’t seem like a fable at all.


The storytelling is stripped down to its barest form – it is richly full of visual cues and contains very little dialogue - and yet somehow all the structure of a story is there, from set-up to denoument.   And each character is made rounded and full with sure, spare strokes – we know the father, wrapped in his own life and private, philosophical thoughts about bees and hives; the mother, so distant and also wrapped in her own thoughts and in another love; and the two children, the older and rather cruelly mischievous Teresa, and the younger Ana, whose dark eyes are pools of still, grave sadness, and, for one or two brief, dazzling moments, sheer innocent delight.  The family lives together in their big house, but the rooms and long corridors feel as bare as the storytelling, and the people in the house seem never to be together, each isolated from the other – a metaphor for something that I feel but do not yet understand.

The film opens as a travelling picture show comes to town, and the villagers gather to watch Frankenstein, and in it that horrifying monster who carries with him such pathos.

And here, in these moments of watching the way a film, the way a moment in a film, a character in a film, captivates and takes hold of the imagination of our young protagonist, Ana, is where I began holding my breath.  All the joy of film, of art, of imagination, of the way our experiences of film and art can be such deeply personal experiences, uniquely tuned to who we are as individuals is here in these first moments and carried delicately and deftly all the way into the final moments.  I don’t think the film is about the experience of film, primarily, but I could not help but see the joy and power of film here.

Along with its subtle, rich storytelling, The Spirit of the Beehive is one of the most visually beautiful films I’ve seen.  Frame after frame of perfectly composed, perfectly lit shots – the interiors, the close-ups, and the exteriors with the wide expanses of bare land and hills, all individually stunning and all united around visual themes, colors.  As I sit and write, I can see shot after shot in my mind’s eye, each holding a kind of visceral and emotional depth that I feel even if I, again, don’t always understand: the crushed, oozing mushroom; the ridges of tilled land Ana’s feet run and stumble over to get to the lone, abandoned building; the yellow honey-combed panes of the windows in the family’s home; Ana’s face mirrored in the pond with the sorrowful face of the monster fuzzily in the background; the long, winding road and a single bicycle trailing away on it; Teresa playing and jumping over and through the flames of a fire while Ana watches from the edges of the light;  Ana’s foot pressing into a large footprint.

This is one of those films that has been, dimly, on the edges of my consciousness as something I "should see sometime."  When I began it, I realized there would be no “should” about it – it is all desire and answered delight.  It's a film that deserves more specific querying and close analysis, but for now, I'm content just to bask in its emotional, visual richness.

Never Let Me Go - a film by Mark Romanek

**SPOILERS**

A thin young woman lies on an operating table in a stark room, lit with bright cool lights. A respirator hangs from her mouth, and the doctors busy themselves around her open abdomen. The beeping of the monitor connected to the woman is the only sound. The beeping begins to go fast, and then faster, faster, but the doctors continue on, unhurried, never glancing at the face of the woman on the table - there is not the usual half-panic, hurry, and concern one might expect in an operating room with such hectic beeping. The beeping rises and rises until the individual tones merge into one line of sound. Still, the doctors and nurses move deliberately, efficiently, unhurriedly. A red organ is carefully lifted from the body; the ventilator is taken from the unresponsive lips. The doctors and nurses leave, no backward glances, and the woman  is left on the table, alone, her body gouged and open, helpless, pathetic, undignified.

This scene, this image of the woman, of the lonely body on the table is at the center of Never Let Me Go, a film about the inevitability of death, the loneliness of death, the starkness of death, the frailty of the dying and the dead, and the selfishness and lack of compassion of the living. Heavy stuff indeed. But somehow, this film is simply beautiful, one of the most beautiful films, in fact, that I’ve seen this past year. And in spite of the heavy weight of the subject matter, in the quiet center of the film, there is no reaching for grand philosophical statements about life and death. There is only an unassuming poignance and resonance.

The film’s story centers on three young people who grow up without parents, cloistered behind the walls of a school called Hailsham, growing up to serve a purpose from which there seems to be no escape. Their marrow of their lives, when they reach adulthood, is to be given in service of others - and they have no choice in the matter. They were born for the purpose.

In a traditional Hollywood film, we might expect our young heroes, beautiful as they are and centered in the story as they are, to find escape, to fight their way to the freedom to live as they wish. But this film is not a traditional film. Where we expect a rise to some kind catharsis, even if that catharsis is a raging, fiery one of death, we get only a quietness. It’s a film of anti-catharsis in a way, if there can be such a thing.

It’s a film the undermines our expectations for what a conventional film should do at so many turns - but instead of giving us shocking twists away from convention, we instead get simple, gentle turns in other directions, turns that, if we have been paying attention, we could have seen coming, but perhaps we might see clearly only in retrospect.

From early on in the film, our three young people, as children, are caught in a kind of love triangle, and while our sympathies are with the sweet, thoughtful girl called Kathy (Carey Mulligan) and the boy she’s interested in, Tommy (Andrew Garfield) (and there is a beautifully built series of moments, depicting the shy childhood romance between Kathy and Tommy), we watch with Kathy, as her friend Ruth (Keira Knightley), woos and wins Tommy.  It is a puzzlement - Kathy and Tommy seemed made for each other.  But our expectations are thwarted.  And they are thwarted again when we take, in the film, a leap in time: the children have grown, Tommy and Ruth are still together, Kathy still watches, quietly, from the outside.

We are thwarted still further when a break between Ruth and Tommy yet later does not result in Tommy and Kathy finding one another - the film simply goes on in its quiet way, the characters moving through life, giving in to it, letting it carry them.  And even later in the film, after our three have gone separate ways, when they find a way, by chance, to meet with each other, meeting on a beautiful, isolated beach, Ruth, in a gesture of guilt and admission of jealousy and unrightful previous possession, does not reclaim Tommy, but gives him up, gives him to Kathy.  But the scene does not offer the catharsis we might expect; it is instead a strange anticlimax, falling well after where the normal climax would come, an anticlimax that intentionally undercuts all our expectations for what a romance in film is “supposed to be” - instead of giving us a love affair, it brings us only the offer of a love affair - but an offer that we know, and the characters know, is an offer that comes too late.

We do not get the rushing together of the lovers into each other’s arms after years of painful separation as we might get in a conventional film; we get only years of calm acceptance and then quietness in the face of Ruth’s confession.  Kathy’s response is silence, and then a “it’s too late, Ruth.”  And it is.  Tommy and Kathy have a few moments of tenderness together, but we know Tommy has no time.  We’ve just seen him, before Ruth’s confession, on the beach in the midst of an excited exploration of an abandoned boat, clutching his side - and we know the inevitable is not far off.  A love affair, if there will be one, will be only as quiet and staid as is the reception of Ruth's statement.

So the catharisis that could possibly have come earlier in the story cannot come now at this point in the film.  And the film is intentional in that.  Instead of catharsis, we have, instead, two people, who have quietly loved each other, but long ago gave each other up, two people who have a few small moments together at, essentially, their deathbeds.  And this, I think, is exactly what the film is about.  Death in life.  And the ways that we simply carry on, carry on with the life we have, without fighting, until death.

There is a slim hope of a possible deferral of their deaths, but it is a hope we know that is born of fragile wishes and ignorance - and, Kathy, at least, is careful in her hope - careful in hope throughout the whole film.  She hopes, but she tempers her hope always - they know that they will die, and very soon.  Kathy has no real illusions, and so, because we are primarily following her, neither do we - nor should we, if we are wise - as viewers.

In the scene in which this hope for Tommy and Kathy will be answered, once and for all, a scene which we might normally view with suspense, there is only an uneasiness and dread - poignance - but still, deep unease.  And I believe the film gives us all the subtle hints we need up until this point of hope to know that this scene - where Tommy hopes to prove a reason for a deferral - will not bring any real suspension of or hiatus from the march towards death.

We see our first hint towards that stark truth when we see the Madame, the sort of superintendent of Hailsham, at the school for the very first time when Ruth, Kathy, and Tommy are still children.  The Madame arrives in a car and walks up the steps through the curious children - walking with a look of distance, distaste, possibly, on her face - and we see one action in which she lifts her bag up so that she will not touch the children.  And then we know just how what she - and by extension the outside world - considers these children to be, inhuman, Other.  We have the hint there that there is no real hope for any sympathy, for true deferral for these children.

There is another hint towards this truth in a moment in a cafe when Tommy, Ruth, and Kathy have their first contact with the outside world, a moment when the idea of and hope for a deferral for lovers is first broached.  A deferral for lovers.  Surely, there will be that . . . ?  Our three are with another couple who is in love and desperate, desperate for some hope.  We see the painful expectation on the faces of other couple, their belief in a rumor about a deferral, as they eagerly ask our Hailsham three for confirmation of the rumor.  But then the crushing fact comes that the Hailsham children have never heard of such a thing.  In that scene, in that moment, the rumors about deferrals, all the stories of hope, are crushed, if not explicitly, then implicitly.  If there is not a deferral for lovers, for  the sake of this sacred thing called love, who will be spared?  And this cold knowledge adds to the dread, the knowledge we have as viewers that these characters we are following will die in exactly the way that all the others have died.  Simply because we are following their story makes no difference - they are our characters, but the fact that we love them doesn’t matter.  They will die exactly as planned.

And so in the scene in which Tommy and Kathy, together, hope for life, we have been given all the hints we need, to know, at least subconsciously, that hope is useless.  We have seen enough, felt enough, to know that this is not a story that will have a happy ending, not a story that will demonstrate the triumph of the human spirit, the fighting against the machine, the fighting face of the odds.  No, the scene only confirms what we have known, surely, all along, death will come as has been planned, at the time it has been planned, and the characters will accept it in the same way that we've seen them accept everything, submitting to what they have been made for.

It is a film that builds its tragedy slowly, and without histrionics and wild gestures and, beautifully, without convention.  It simply gains in heaviness by simple additions of weighted, small moments.

But the idea of life in death, of the inevitability of life in death is not the only idea in the film.  The film is also about the actions of the soon-to-be-dead living towards the dying, towards the dead.  We see that action with the doctors who have removed the organ from the young woman and left her coldly on the table, but we also see it in our main characters.  As Ruth is languishing, sick and ill, in the hospital, Kathy comes to see her, to tell her that she and Tommy will try to apply for a deferral of their fate.

We see in that scene the stark contrast between a woman who is in the very grasp of death, who has no hope, no love left, and a woman who has a few more years before death comes to claim her, a woman who has a very small something to hope for - and the second woman, the one with the hope, leaves the other to her loneliness, without, that we can see, regret.  And in spite of the love we have built up for Kathy, we see in her a coldness towards Ruth’s plight that comes from her own concern with herself, from her own slim hope that she might be able to extend her life - for just a little while.  She does not fight against her ultimate fate, but the extension, oh, the extension, she will reach for that if it's there, over the dying, helpless form of her friend.

And there in that scene, in that capsule - the one woman dying, the other woman still alive and wrapped in her own hopes - the horrible truth is that our characters are just the same as those who have destined them to their fate,  for our characters can be as cruel in their small hope to live just a few years more as those who take life from them.

So this film is indeed, about death, about the inevitability of death, about our fragile lives - but it also about the horror of the ways in which we scramble over one another in order to beg Death for a moment more of life.

This is a film that will resonate for a long time to come - because of its loveliness, its devastation.  It's a film of understatement and interiority - and so utterly, cooly beautiful in the execution of those two things.  The film is so much about what is not said, so much about undercurrent.  It’s constructed in such a way that it undercuts what we might expect, but it undercuts those expectations in very quiet ways, so quietly and beautifully, in fact, that we don’t even realize perhaps, until long after we’ve left our cinema seats, what it has done.

35 Rhums - a film by Claire Denis

Something is off about many of the synopses I’ve read for this film:

Imdb: "The relationship between a father and daughter is complicated by the arrival of a handsome young man."

Netflix: "This heartfelt slice-of-life drama by filmmaker Claire Denis tells the story of widower Lionel (Alex Descas), a train driver, and his grown daughter, Josephine (Mati Diop). The two spend most of their time together, but change is in the cards. A neighbor (Grégoire Colin) becomes attracted to Josephine, a family friend retires and Lionel tries to maintain a friendship with his ex-girlfriend (Nicole Dogue)."

Metacritic: "A widowed conductor, looking forward to retirement, lives with his grown daughter in a Paris suburb. When a neighbor starts to show interest in his "little girl", the conductor tries to adjust."

None of the synopses are “wrong” so to speak, but I think trying, with a series of brief words, to make explicit what is deeply implicit in the film does a certain injustice to the film’s story, if "story" is what it should be called. It is a film, in so many ways, in which nothing really happens, and all of the above synopses seem to be trying to explain the film in terms of “what happens.” Part of the problem with those synopses, unless you are already a fan of the director, is that they fail to stir up any kind of interest because “what happens” sounds, well, pretty boring, right? I couldn’t help but be reminded, with those synopses, of the Seinfeld episode, “The Comeback,” in which Elaine, rents a film, with a title, clearly inspired by art-house cinema, called The Pain and the Yearning, and the film’s description is “An old woman experiences pain and yearning.” 35 Rhums might sound, if you try to describe it, very much like The Pain and the Yearning. And if you try to describe it with any kind of enthusiasm to your friends, they’ll perhaps think a) your life must be very dull indeed, b) you are a film snob who has lost touch with reality, or c) you are trying to be a film snob and not fooling anybody.

35 Rhums, I think, defies any succinctly worded description; it must be experienced on its own terms and in its own time. But if one is willing to do that –let the film be what it is – the reward is immense. I admit, when I first sat down to watch it, I had to make a conscious effort to relax into the pace of the film. During the first several minutes – watching train tracks run and weave, watching a man smoking a cigarette, watching the tracks again, from day into night – I knew I would have to re-set my internal film metronome; the pacing and storytelling of this would be much different than the film I had seen most previously, Star Trek, every scene of which urged me to BE EXCITED. (And Star Trek was, actually, a lot of fun. )

After having said 35 Rhums is not a film that submits easily to words, I guess I’m going to have the audacity now to try to write about it. I expect I’ll fail in many ways, but I want to try nonetheless because the experience of the film was such an extraordinary one, and I want to try to respond in some way. I had a halting conversation afterwards with the friend I was with – we both began sentences and finished them lamely and then sat in silence. And then tried to speak again. However much we failed, though, to express ourselves and our thoughts, our silences were peaceful somehow, not awkward. That may say more about our friendship, which is a close one, than about the film, but I think it does say something about the film, too, which had nestled its way somehow into our experience of being for that evening.

But I haven’t said much about the film itself yet. As the synopses indicate, it is, indeed, about a father and a daughter who live together in an apartment in Paris or on the outskirts of Paris, certainly not the Paris of films we usually see, but one that is contained by the bounds of the rather small lives this father, Lionel, a train driver, and his daughter, Josephine, a student. And so what we see is relative to their day-to-day life – their apartment, the train tracks, a favorite bar/café, a classroom, a neighbor’s apartment. The film beautifully, in small ways and with very few words, builds our conception of the relationship between the two and of the significance of each to the other – the buying of a rice cooker, the cooking and sharing of a meal, the fetching of slippers, the listening to the sounds of each other going about some household task – we don’t need to be told that these two, in their quiet rhythm of life in the apartment, are deeply at home with one another.

Their bond and the satisfaction of that bond is set against three other characters in the film who live, in contrast, in a kind of isolation and loneliness:

Gabrielle, a neighbor, who drives a taxi by day, who seems cheery and kind, but who is alone when at home, and though she seems to have known Lionel and Josephine for a significant amount of time, cannot quite break into the bond they share, though clearly she longs to;

Noe, another neighbor, a young man, who lives alone in his dead parents’ apartment, and whom we first meet when he comes home, hears music coming from Lionel and Josephine’s apartment, and begins to move towards their door, but backs away and continues up the stairs, stumbling over a bike before he enters he own dark, untidy apartment;

and last, Rene, a co-worker of Lionel’s, forced into retirement, and even while surrounded by his well-wishing co-workers giving their loving farewell gifts, cannot quite hide his loneliness and despair. Each of these three are alone, and while they live, continuing on the track set before them, they seem to go doggedly, without purpose.

Lionel and Josephine’s relationship alone is what perhaps keeps them from the same lonely isolation and purposelessness. Lionel’s job is a job, that’s all; he seems to genuinely care for his fellow workers, but one doesn’t sense anything deeper in the relationships beyond the general camaraderie that comes from sharing a particular job’s world. Josephine appears to be a diligent student; she speaks intelligently and with some interest in the classroom; she plays soccer; she has a job - but as with Lionel, these activities don’t seem to bring her any particular purpose or joy. Josephine might be Noe, had both, instead of one, of her parents died; Lionel might be Rene if he did not have Josephine. Their love for and care for each other is a gravitational center to which they can always, and do, return. But Josephine is a young woman at the beginning of life and Lionel is closing in on the end of his, and it’s clear, the film says to us, that they cannot remain indefinitely in this circle of quiet warmth that they are to each other – and they are both conscious of this.

Noe’s and Josephine’s attraction to one another is one indicator of the inevitable break between Lionel and Josephine that must happen at some point. And I love the way the film sets up this tension among the three characters, a tension that is both immediate – in the sense that the three must interact with each other in social situations – and far-reaching because it indicates something deeper, something that must eventually change between the father and daughter.

Noe is an odd character. While I felt at home with Lionel and Josephine – though both are to some extent inscrutable, not least because they speak so little – Noe’s presence brings an unease to the film, both because of who he is personally and because of what his presence indicates for Lionel and Josephine. The unease stems partly from physical space of his apartment – uncared for and untidy, old couches and bits of trash on the floor – he doesn’t seem to belong there. He never has milk; he doesn’t know where his aspirin is and when he’s asked for some, he shuffles for it aimlessly among the random items on his shelf. He leaves his window open when he leaves for a few days, and Lionel must go up and shut it when it begins to bang in the wind at night. Noe’s apartment stands in another contrast to the neat, if small and rather spare, space where Lionel and Josephine live. Their space clearly belongs to them in the way that a home belongs to people who love each other – the home is cared for because they care for each other and that space is an extension of themselves, for each other. Noe would never paint his walls as Josephine has done to hers.

And yet, Noe is not, in the end, a character one mistrusts – he is directionless and alone, and who he is builds our unease, but he is certainly not a threat because of who he is personally – the threat that he is comes primarily from his potential in breaking up what has been a close party of two. The film delicately moves us back and forth between an unease with Noe and an attraction for Noe (and he is decidedly attractive), a back and forth that surely mirrors Josephine’s own feelings. One scene perfectly captures this back and forth – a scene in which Lionel, Josephine, Noe, and Gabrielle are all together – “together as a family again” as Gabrielle says at one point with a forced brightness and longing – Noe kisses Josephine, and she kisses him back, but then pushes him away; but when he begins to leave – as if accepting her rejection - she pulls him back to her, and they sit down together, at an awkward distance, against a wall. The scene is beautifully understated – the feeling and drama runs almost entirely beneath the surface, but it says so much about the primary tension in the film. With Josephine, we feel it’s so difficult to know what to want – we want Noe for her, and yet we do not want her to leave the solid warmth and security of the relationship with her father. We know what she is leaving – we do not know, quite, what she is moving towards. We know, only, that she will need to move soon.

The film builds so slowly and with such small moments (indeed, it didn't feel as if it was even building at all), I was not quite prepared for the emotional impact of the end. To say it held emotional impact is strange, however, because nothing really happens - nothing specifically on screen, that is. The genius of the film is such that it was able to overwhelm me at the end by virtue of the small moments that had come before and to make me weep when that “nothing” of the end happened – when Lionel’s friend plays the piano and I hear the sounds of a party in the background, when Lionel drinks his 35 shots, and when Lionel takes the rice cooker out of the package from which it had never been removed. Those nothings were, beautifully, everything.