A Thousand Words: The Salt of the Earth

[Updated 5/16/15.]

A documentary about a photographer faces a novel challenge, one that emerges from the filmmaker's understandable desire to convey the artistic merit of their subject's work. A director who gushingly foregrounds the aesthetic beauty or political import of an artist’s images may unwittingly neglect the potential of their own medium, and thereby reduce the film to a glorified slideshow. On the other hand, swamping otherwise outstanding photos in a surfeit of flashy cinema does a disservice to the individual who created those images, and can result in a film that feels more impressed with itself than with the photographer. Many documentarians strike a balance between these unwelcome extremes by shifting their focus elsewhere. In Gregory Crewdson: Brief Encounters, for example, Ben Shapiro shrewdly directs his attention to the elaborate process by which the titular photographer crafts his mesmerizing tableaus. In Finding Vivian Meier, meanwhile, co-directors John Maloof and Charlie Siskel zero in on the irresistible mystery of their subject's secret life as a street photographer, as well as her confounding personality.

For The Salt of the Earth, director Wim Wenders' love letter to Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado, the method is a more classically biographical one, at least on the surface level. The film uses Salgado's life as its narrative backbone, linking together pivotal events and artistic phases to create the story of an still-unfolding creative journey. To that end, the photographer’s arresting black-and-white images function as a kind of visual log of his professional and personal evolution. This approach is highlighted by scenes in which Wenders and Salgado pore over photos while the latter reminisces about particular projects, in the same manner that other people might page through family albums of faded Kodak prints and Polaroids. Not incidentally, Wenders' co-director on The Salt of the Earth is the photographer's son, Juliano Ribeiro Salgado. In part, the younger Salgado regards the documentary as a means to witness his father's world up close, and thereby familiarize himself with the man who was often absent for long stretches of his childhood. [For the sake of clarity, this post will hereafter refer to the Salgados by their first names.]

Wenders and Juliano’s strategy proves remarkably effective and elegant. On the one hand, the photos are undeniably the visual centerpiece of the film. If The Salt of the Earth does nothing else, it serves as an absorbing introduction to the sheer power of Sebastião's work, which captures subjects as diverse as industrial laborers, refugee camps, obscure cultures, war-torn landscapes, and pristine natural beauty. Through both talking-head monologues and voiceover narration, the photographer provides enlightening context and memorable details about individual shots. Some of the first photos presented in the film are the artists' renowned images of Brazil's open-pit Serra Pelada gold mine, where tens of thousands of miners dug by hand in the hopes of striking the mother lode. The imagery of the countless muddy terraces and swarming bodies is instantly riveting, but it would be much the same on the pages of a coffee table book. What makes The Salt of the Earth's presentation distinctive is Sebastião's vivid verbal description of his original reaction to the mine, which he compares to the great construction enterprises of antiquity, such as the Pyramids at Giza.

Meanwhile, the photos also function as observation windows into Sebastião's story, which the directors plainly find just as fascinating as the images he captured. Indeed, the arc of the artist’s life is a straightforward but captivating one. Abandoning a promising career as an economist in 1973, Sebastião turned to photography, first on assignment for news organizations and then as a documentary artist. He developed ambitious long-term projects with his wife Lélia, bringing his camera to unseen and forgotten corners of world and then publishing the resulting photos in impressively hefty volumes such as Workers and Migrations. However, the years spent documenting starvation, disease, and death in misery epicenters such as the Balkans and central Africa took their toll on Sebastião’s psychological vigor, driving him to disillusionment. (The Rwandan genocide and the multiple refugee crises that followed in its wake seem to have been particular breaking points for the photographer.)

Fortunately, Sebastião appears to have found a spiritual balm in his own backyard, quite literally. After years in self-imposed exile, the photographer and his wife returned to Brazil in the 1990s to take over the desiccated remains of the Salgado family cattle ranch. Faced with uncontrolled erosion and a dusty landscape that in no way resembled the lush domain of Sebastião’s childhood, Lélia hit upon a simple but radical notion: Why not just replant the subtropical forest that once grew on the Salgados’ doorstep? The resulting program of environmental restoration, Instituto Terra, not only succeeded in returning the region into a more natural and sustainable state, but also appears to have re-invigorated Sebastião’s artistic purpose. His subsequent project, Genesis, documented the planet’s most Edenic natural locales, and functioned as a sort of visual riposte to the industrial and post-colonial ugliness of the photographer’s earlier work.

Apart from his personal fondness for the photographer’s images, Wenders clearly regards Sebastião’s life as an admirable one. The Salt of the Earth practically glows with esteem for the artist’s physical and political fearlessness, and nods with understanding as Sebastião describes the anguish of bearing witness to so much human suffering. Lingering on the photographer’s late-career immersion in environmental activism isn’t just a matter of factual accuracy: The new direction rescues the viewer from the hopelessness of all the preceding images of dead-eyed exiles and fly-dotted corpses, much as it saved Sebastião himself. It ultimately proves to be a humane stratagem, and one that Wenders and Juliano apply in a manner that evinces integrity. Rather than glibly tossing aside the darkness that Sebastião has documented, the directors integrate it with the light, depicting both woe and wonder as parts of the same continuum. Sebastião's own words underline this stance, for while he speaks contemptuously of humanity’s boundless capacity for evil, he also acknowledges that our species is an integral part of the natural world.

There is an earnest passion at work in The Salt of the Earth, not only for Sebastião’s talents as an artist, but also for the guarded optimism that the photographer has discovered in his later years. The film’s narrative trajectory is crucial in this respect: Sebastião’s tale resembles a descent into an Inferno where every imaginable form of suffering can be cataloged, followed by a much-needed ascent into purifying sunlight. Given the horrors that the photographer has seen, his hopefulness cannot be construed as naïve. Rather, it is a hardened sort of optimism, tested and tempered by fire. This is comfortable territory for Wenders, who often explores the human condition through the lives of extraordinary individuals, particularly artists (Lightning Over Water, Tokyo-Ga, Notebook on Cities and Clothes, Buena Vista Social Club, The Soul of a Man, Pina). In The Salt of the Earth, the filmmaker has the good fortune to work with a subject who is astute, eloquent, and possessed of a singular set of world-spanning experiences.

Detective Work: Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter

[Note: This post contains very mild spoilers. Updated 11/19/15.]

The image that opens David and Nathan Zellner’s peculiar, hypnotic new feature, Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter is distorted and snowy, as though it were recorded on videotape that has since deteriorated. Even through the flurry of tracking errors, however, it's easy to discern the white, all-caps letters on a black background: “THIS IS A TRUE STORY”. Many cinephiles will immediately identify this famous line as the one that introduced Joel and Ethan Coen’s bloody 1996 crime drama cum black comedy Fargo. In Kumiko, a water-damaged VHS copy of the Coens’ film has become an obsession for the eponymous woman (Rinko Kikuchi), a 29-year-old administrative assistant living in Tokyo. Using an antiquated VCR, she scrutinizes every frame of Fargo with the rigor of a forensic analyst. Which raises a question: Does the title card represent Kumiko’s viewpoint, as she crouches in her dark apartment, studying the tape for the 100th time? Or are the Zellners, like the Coens, tweaking the viewer by suggesting that Kumiko is itself a true story, despite its unmistakable aura of fantasy? The answer is likely the same one Kumiko gives when asked whether she is an exchange student or a tourist: “Yes.”

Poor Kumiko shuffles morosely through her life as though deep in a trance. The same dead-eyed slackness attends her as she sits idly at her desk, prepares tea for her boss, and eats her instant noodle meals. Her fellow “office girls” are five or more years her junior, and while they are engrossed with beauty and fashion, Kumiko doesn’t seem to have any interests beyond her dwarf rabbit Bunzo and the aforementioned VHS tape. By day she picks at the holes in her stockings and stares glumly as the world goes by. At night she watches Fargo, over and over and over. Early in the film, she is glimpsed gleaning the cassette from a secret cache in a sea cave, but little is revealed about what led her to such a location, or who placed the tape there and for what purpose. What matters is that Kumiko believes with frightening desperation in the cassette’s significance and in the reality of the events depicted in Fargo.

Specifically, she has faith that a close reading of the film will reveal the location of the nearly $1 million in ransom money that bungling kidnapper Carl Showalter (Steve Buscemi) buries in the snow near a barbed wire fence. Kumiko pauses the film and traces the spacing between the fence posts, eventually transferring the image via embroidery onto a swatch of fabric. In her mind, that fictional suitcase of bundled bills is a lost New World treasure, and she is like a Spanish conquistador who is fated to unearth and seize it. Setting aside the fictional nature of the film, Kumiko never grapples with the fact that tens of millions of people have seen Fargo, and presumably are therefore also aware of the money. No matter. She insists that the concealed cash is both her discovery and her destiny.

When her boss hands her a corporate credit card to purchase an anniversary gift for his wife, the temptation is too much for Kumiko to resist. Before anyone suspects that something is amiss, she boards a plane bound for the United States, and is soon stepping off the jetway into the Minneapolis airport, a stranger and a strange land. She has only a rudimentary grasp of the English language, no money beyond the pilfered credit card, and a childlike guilelessness that seems more than mere cultural misunderstanding.  Mostly she just points at a single-page map of Minnesota and declares her destination: “Fargo.” This tactic eventually takes her remarkably far. Never mind that Carl actually buried the ransom somewhere between Minneapolis and Brainerd in the film. The word is as much a mystical invocation as a place name, as the Coens themselves recognized. Very little of Fargo’s action takes place in the titular North Dakota city. Rather, it represents a telltale verbal blood spatter, the locale where sad sack Jerry Lundegaard (William H. Macy) exchanged a car for the services of criminals, and thereby sealed his damnation.

The natural query posed by Kumiko is whether a viewer can understand and appreciate the film without having seen Fargo. The answer is a restrained “yes." Certainly, there are several aspects of the former film which hinge on familiarity with the latter, apart from the opening text. The Minnesotans that Kumiko encounters during her quest are mostly cast from the same “aw geez” mold as those that populate the Coens’ feature: decent, diligent folks who take a good-natured interest in strangers. (One can even forgive their provincial cluelessness about Japan, and Asia in general.) In a nod to Fargo’s dogged Brainerd police chief Marge Gunderson (Frances McDormand), David Zellner portrays a gentle-hearted county sheriff’s deputy who takes pity on the plainly lost Kumiko and goes above and beyond his duty to aid her. (“I want to help you,” he explains, “I’m just trying to figure out how.”) Kumiko’s Minnesota locales unsurprisingly echo those depicted in the Coens’ film, particularly all the lonely rural highways swathed in windblown snow. Other minor allusions abound, some as subtle as Kumiko’s Lundegaard-esque tendency to turn heel and run when situations go pear-shaped, including one occasion in which she clambers out a window.

However, beyond connecting Fargo’s slightly exaggerated upper Midwestern setting to the same territory that is navigated by Kumiko, most of these links function merely as passing winks to Coen aficionados. Ultimately, Kumiko is a very different sort of film than Fargo. The Coens, as is their wont, craft a tale that is an homage to—and simultaneously a subversion of—crime and detective fiction tropes, ultimately in the service of expansive observations about the absurdity of human behavior. The Zellners, meanwhile, stage Kumiko as a grim, anxious Hero’s Journey, albeit one in which the quest is delusional nonsense. It’s not unlike The Fisher King in this respect, but there the resemblance ends. In Terry Gilliam’s film, mentally troubled Holy Grail seeker Parry pulls disgraced radio shock jock Jack into his Arthurian fantasy, and both men ultimately find something akin to redemption in the quest, its unreality notwithstanding. Kumiko, meanwhile, trudges towards her make-believe treasure in solitude. Good Samaritans come and go during the journey, but no one truly understands her endeavors. The mission is hers alone to endure, and the prize hers alone to claim. As she declares defiantly to her scolding, grandchild-obsessed mother over the phone, she is doing “very, very important work.”

At the surface level, Kumiko works as an unhurried yet nerve-wracking adventure tale in which the heroine’s quest perpetually stands upon the edge of a knife, to borrow Tolkien’s memorable phrasing. There is an unbearable tension inherent in watching Kumiko plod forward through the wintery prairie landscape. She is continuously and perilously exposed, both physically—she is woefully underdressed for the bone-cracking Minnesota wind—and in the sense that as an oddly naïve outsider, she makes easy prey for hucksters and predators. (There don't seem to be many of these creatures in Minnesota, but everyone it the state surely isn't a nice, friendly Lutheran.) As in Kelly Reichardt’s Wendy and Lucy, monetary shortfalls become a fiendish source of sour-gut apprehension. It’s easy to share Kumiko’s icy plunge into panic when a hotel clerk observes that her stolen credit card has been declined, or when a taxi drivers points expectantly at a meter displaying a sum she cannot possibly pay.

Lurking at the periphery of every scene, however, is the nagging awareness that Kumiko has no hope of locating a treasure that does not exist. Accordingly, the empathy that her successes and misfortunes engender in the viewer always carries an unpleasant bitterness, a growing sensation that Something Bad is going to happen when Kumiko’s fantasy runs headlong into reality. This mutates the film into a sort of slow-motion horror story, which is enhanced by the Zellners' and cinematographer Sean Porter’s flair for bestowing the most banal Midwestern locations with an uncanny atmosphere that feels a bit J-horror in character. The film’s soundtrack by indie electronica group the Octopus Project also contributes to this unsettling aura. Much of the group’s work possesses a plastic, bubbly quality, but in Kumiko their sound veers towards the melancholy, with drones, squeals, and wails providing a dose of otherworldliness.

It’s challenging to shake the impression the one of the film’s primary aims is to make the viewer exceedingly uncomfortable, not only with the immediate events shown on screen, but with the entire scenario. Kumiko is, at bottom, the story of a woman who gives up her life for a lie. If the Coens are philosophers, the Zellners here assume the role of psychologists, implicitly inquiring of the viewer: “Do these events upset you? And, if so, why do you think that is?” Kumiko herself functions as a Rorschach test, if only because the film provides few glimpses of her interior life beyond her Fargo-focused monomania. She makes decisions impulsively, exhibits no ability to make long-term plans, and seems to lack an adult’s understanding of the world. (Reproaching her for tearing the Minnesota map from an atlas in a Tokyo library, a security guard wonders, “Why didn’t you just get it off the Internet?”) Is she mildly autistic? Or perhaps mentally ill? Or just a fuck-up?

Although it’s easy to attribute Kumiko’s tribulations to her own foolishness, or to simply conclude that she must be deeply disturbed, the film’s stance towards its heroine is more ambiguous, even sympathetic. In the early Tokyo scenes, the Zellners take pains to show how unappealing the prospect of a “normal” life might be for a young Japanese woman. The pressures to conform to a mainstream, feminine, heteronormative existence surround Kumiko, like a flock of pestering birds. Her boss chides her for her dour demeanor (i.e., not smiling enough), before bluntly asking if she is a lesbian. The other office girls are fixated on their gossip and primping, and ultimately on finding husbands. Kumiko's own mother nags her about her non-existent love life, reminding her daughter that time is running out to land a man, drop out of the workforce, and start siring children. Reluctantly meeting up with an old schoolmate, Kumiko stares into the eyes of the woman’s toddler son and sees something alien and frightening. Given this assault of repellent expectations, escape into a fantasy where she is a fearless explorer of distant lands seems like a preferable alternative.

One can envision a lesser film that holds up Kumiko as an admirable individual and proffers a saccharine, vacuous message about following one’s dreams at all costs. The Zellners’ film strives for something far more ambitious and complex than a paean to quirky individuality. By portraying their protagonist as an erratic, dyspeptic figure and her goal as a ludicrous misapprehension, the filmmakers reframe the story as a sobering moral conundrum. Is it right for a person to put themselves in peril for the sake of a falsehood that they believe to be true? And, perhaps more significantly, what are the obligations of others with respect to that person? Although Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter doesn’t answer these questions, it achieves something singular simply by posing them. That it also happens to be a visually arresting and narratively absorbing film makes it all the more remarkable.

Alternate Realities: Merchants of Doubt

[Note: Updated 11/19/15.]

There’s a striking demographic truth observable in Robert Kenner’s documentary Merchants of Doubt, one that neatly encapsulates the confounding imbalance at the heart of the anthropogenic climate change debate. The film depicts several global warming “skeptic” events, typically hosted by conservo-libertarian think tanks such as the Koch-funded Heartland Institute. These conferences appear to be attended by an overwhelmingly older, white, and male set—the Fox News fringe, in other words. In one memorable shot, Kenner captures a half-full ballroom where a dour, elderly conferencegoer sits alone. He could be a crank physicist, an apologist media hack, or perhaps just an activist citizen whose contempt for government runs bone-deep. Regardless, the image speaks to the Wonderland character of the climate wars. On one side are thousands of climate scientists and incalculable pages of research, along with dozens of international scientific organizations. On the other are a relative handful of dissemblers and true believers. The former are mostly shills backed by corporate fossil fuel dollars, while the latter are primarily tribally-motivated consumers of right-wing propaganda. As Kenner and his collaborators implicitly and rhetorically ask, how does a such a face off between unevenly matched worldviews constitute a “debate” at all?

Like Kenner’s previous documentary feature, Food, Inc., Merchants of Doubt is progressive agitprop of modest ambitions. The ideal viewer is someone who thinks of climate change as a problem and knows that some sort of controversy exists about it, but it isn’t clear on the details. The film won’t convince any hardcore deniers of the overwhelming evidence for global warming driven by greenhouse gas pollution. Indeed, Kenner and political historian Naomi Oreskes—whose book with Erik M. Conway inspired the film—spend very little of Merchants’ 96 minutes making the case for anthropogenic climate change, per se. As the film points out, almost every peer-reviewed paper on climate science already accepts the phenomenon as a given, and establishing its reality would be akin to laying out the evidence for gravitation or evolution. (Oh, wait ...) Instead, Merchants devotes the bulk of its attention to scrutinizing the professional denialists themselves. In particular, the film establishes their common history as mouthpieces for Big Tobacco, Big Chemical, and other corporate sectors known for their less-than-stellar record of truthfulness regarding threats to public health.

Merchants is therefore a documentary primarily about hucksterism. To drive the point home, the film frames its exposé with snippets of illusionist Jaimy Ian Swiss explaining the principles behind his card tricks. As Swiss articulates, stage magic relies on an unspoken agreement with the audience that the con will be harmless and entertaining. This is not the case with the institutions that peddle uncertainty about health and environmental issues, and seeing the curtain pulled back on such forces makes for an enlightening and somewhat chilling experience. Kenner generally sticks to the "Big Issues" documentary playbook, building his case with a brisk blend of interviews, animation, and stock footage. It’s polished, but formally undistinguished. As with most documentaries where the goal is educational, the film doesn’t demand a second viewing. That said, Merchants skillfully employs its medium to draw lines of connection and create juxtapositions. It’s one thing to state that the same rogue’s gallery of denialists crops up over and over on multiple issues. It’s another to place two cable news clips side by side to show the same shill deriding the lack of evidence connecting smoking to cancer in one instance, and pollution to climate change in another.

The most intriguing question addressed in the film is one of motivation: Why do denialists deny? (And, secondarily, what motivates their audience to accept and hold onto their lies with death-grip fervor?) The obvious answer is, of course, greed, but as Merchants illustrates, most denialists are a more complex species than mere liars for dollars. Physicist and notorious climate skeptic Frederick Singer, for example, is a former Cold War missile scientist, whose objections to environmental regulations appear to be deeply rooted in his anti-communist ideology. When Singer blithely declares that almost all climate scientists are wrong and he is right, it’s hard not to regard his glib, glassy-eyed certainty as a kind of religious (or, ironically, Stalinist) zealotry. More infuriating are pundits like Climate Depot founder Marc Marano, a conservative knife fighter who regards the entire debate as an anti-liberal bloodsport. The cheery Marano rather astonishingly agrees to be interviewed for the film, and he is quite candid about how much “fun” it is to hound climate scientists and obfuscate for polluters on cable news programs.

The film’s most memorable figure, however, is former South Carolina Rep. Bob Inglis. A right-wing evangelical and limited government Republican, Inglis is the sort of politician who boasts about his endorsements from the NRA and the National Right to Life Committee. Despite his ideological credentials, however, Inglis had a come-to-Jesus moment on climate change when he was able to meet with scientists investigating ice cores in the Arctic. After his position on global warming shifted from denial to acceptance, however, Inglis was defeated in a landslide by a Tea-Party-backed GOP primary challenger, leaving him dazed and despairing at the direction of American conservatism. Watching Inglis politely and futilely insist, “That’s not true,” as a reactionary radio host rattles off brazenly false talking points is unexpectedly sad. More to the point, it's emblematic of the challenges facing anyone who tries to rise above the denialists’ haze of bullshit.

Slow and Steady Wins the Race: It Follows

[Note: This post contains major spoilers. Updated 11/19/15.]

Pivoting off Noah Berlatsky's 2011 Atlantic essay “What The Thing Loses by Adding Women,” a brief discussion on this writer's social media feed recently tackled the question of whether female sexuality—or, more specifically, male characters' perceptions of and relationships to that sexuality—is an essential element of horror cinema. As Berlatsky observes, even in films where female characters are completely absent, such as John Carpenter's 1982 horror masterpiece, that conspicuous lack establishes a potent subtext. Aside from a handful of features where the male presence is largely asexual—The Devil's Backbone and The Blair Witch Project come to mind as noteworthy examples—male anxiety regarding female sexuality (and maternity) seems to be lurking beneath the surface of many, many horror films.

This is particularly the case in the slasher subgenre, where a murderous, usually male maniac stalks and slays a succession of usually female victims. As Carol J. Clover famously articulated in her seminal 1992 study Men, Women, and Chainsaws, female sexual purity and desire play prominent thematic and even narrative roles in such features. In Wes Craven's meta-slasher Scream, horror aficionado Randy (Jamie Kennedy) points out that the unwritten rules of the subgenre dictate that a teenage character (especially a girl) who has sex will usually be gruesomely murdered shortly thereafter. However, even when the killer's motivation hinges on sexual transgression, as in the Friday the 13th series, the hapless adolescent victims (the “Meat”) are usually unaware of that fact.

Not so in writer-director David Robert Mitchell's new indie horror flick It Follows, in which teen heroine Jay (Maika Monroe) has an inaugural assignation with her new, older flame Hugh (Jake Weary) in the backseat of his car, only to be subsequently chloroformed, tied up, and debriefed. Hugh regretfully explains that he has “given” her something by having sex with her, just as it was given to him. That something is the singular attention of a malevolent shape-shifting entity, which will now follow Jay wherever she goes until It catches her. What exactly will happen to Jay should she fall into Its clutches is initially ambiguous, but it's clearly Not Good. Hugh barely has enough time to give Jay some rudimentary advice for surviving Its pursuit (“Never be in a room with only one exit.”) before It arrives, assuming the form of a nude middle-aged women who walks slowly but deliberately towards them. Hugh then hustles Jay away and unceremoniously dumps her in front her house, underwear-clad and sobbing, in a manner that says, “Good luck. It's your problem now.”

In this way, It Follows takes that which is subtext in most horror features and integrates it directly into the story: sex equals death. What's impressive about Mitchell's film is how this approach results not in a crude, exploitative treatment of adolescent sexuality, but an astonishingly cerebral work of cinema, blending aspects of social realism, teen melodrama, occult horror, and the slasher flick into an experience that is greater than the sum of its parts. To an extent, this is because the film leaves a significant amount of white space where another horror film might have doodled in a convoluted backstory and mythology. It Follows reveals virtually nothing about the origin or nature of its monster. The film simply establishes the Rules and then observes as Jay and her small circle of allies puzzle out how (and if) she can escape Its unnatural and seemingly implacable pursuit.

Even characterization takes a backseat to the film's primary concerns. The characters are not cartoonish, but neither are they particularly well-developed. Blonde, doe-eyed Jay harbors a faintly myopic view of the world, but like most Final Girls she's made of tough stuff. Her no-nonsense little sister Kelly (Lili Sepe) is affectionate, but also aware that she is overshadowed by Jay's age and beauty. Gawky Paul (Keir Gilchrist) is a childhood friend of Jay's, and obviously quite desperately in love with her. Bespectacled Yara's (Olivia Luccardi) main attribute is that she is perpetually snacking while nose-deep in her distinctive pink clamshell e-reader. (Yara functions as a kind boorish yet erudite Greek chorus, offering choice quotes from Fyodor Dostoyevsky's The Idiot that comment on the film's events.) Later this quartet is joined by Greg (Daniel Zovatto), the older, easy-going guy across the street, who also happens to have a romantic history with Jay. That is as much as the viewer learns about the principals, but more details would be superfluous. By not sweating elaborate character- or world-building, It Follows can invest all its energy in the two essential tasks of all great horror films: scaring the viewer and making them think. 

On both counts, It Follows is a resounding success, being perhaps the first truly frightening and thoughtful American horror feature since 2011's Take Shelter. The galvanic character of the film's terrors stems in part from adherence to a kind of lo-fi magical realism. Whether by choice or necessity (the film's budget was a relatively paltry $2 million) or some combination of both, It Follows is a film that squeezes every ounce of unnerving dread out of seemingly mundane people, objects, and settings. The entity Itself is the personification of this horror-on-a-shoestring philosophy. Like the titular germ-like organism in the aforementioned The Thing, the monster in It Follows has no native form. It apparently cannot speak, but its guises are superficially human. At times these are terrifyingly familiar to Jay (Yara with a bloodied face) and at times they are completely bizarre (a partly unclothed young woman in fake vampire fangs and makeup, urinating obviously down one knee-socked leg). Although It Follows has no elaborate creature effects, it manages to make ordinary figures like an elderly woman in a hospital shift seem physically menacing.

While some jump-scares make an obligatory appearance, It Follows is mainly a horror film of long, agonizing stretches in which the characters (and viewer) are simply waiting for something to happen. It is established early on that the monster moves at a slow, steady walking pace. A victim might buy some time by, say, getting into a car and driving like hell for hours and hours, but It will always catch up. This lends much of the film a sense of weary, sickening anticipation, and reveals the peculiar genius of Mitchell's approach. The viewer will often find themselves nervously scanning the out-of-focus background of each shot, straining to catch the first glimpse of the monster as It mutely plods into view. The natural expectation created by cinematic negative space becomes a canvas which the filmgoer covers with their own anxiety.  The viewer thus experiences, in some small way, the frazzled, heightened state of animal fear in which Jay spends most of the movie's events. In one superlative shot, the film utilizes a glacial 360-plus degree pan from within a windowed hallway to suggest the omni-directional vulnerability of the preoccupied characters. (This is only enhanced by the slightly smeary quality to the film's digital photography, which prevents the viewer from getting a clear glimpse of distant figures while the camera is in motion.)

Credit where credit is due: Mitchell's disciplined control of the film's protracted pacing and cinematographer Mike Gioulakis's exceptional camera work would not be nearly as effective without Michael Perry's anachronistic production design and the film's distinctive, retro-synth score by Disasterpiece (the working moniker of musician Rich Vreeland). Although Tangerine Dream's iconic Thief score is a prominent point of reference for the latter, Disasterpiece's work also evokes a host of late 1970s / early 80s horror films, including Apocalypse Now, The Shining, Scanners, The Fog, and the first A Nightmare on Elm Street. (Panos Cosmatos' Cronenberg-esque 2010 experimental mind-fuck Beyond the Black Rainbow leaps to mind as well.) It Follows' score lends a melancholy aura to even relatively mellow scenes of teenage suburban idleness, but it's the prominent use of relentless metallic droning when the creature appears that injects the film with such an ominous tone. This wall of sound creates an impression of psychic assault, like a satanic migraine lancing straight into the cerebral cortex. The creature that stalks Jay might be a flesh-and-blood predator that can maim and even kill, but it is also an entity born of fear, apparently capable of reading its quarry's mind and adjusting its shape accordingly.

The score's vintage flavor also enhances Perry's stellar design, which places the film in an ambiguous period when electric typewriters, cathode ray tube televisions, and e-ink pocket tablets coexist. The odd contemporary details aside, however, the whole film has a distinctly throwback feel, what with its boxy American cars, nonspecific latish twentieth-century fashions, and a teenage existence where diversions seem limited to games of Parcheesi, midnight creature feature movies, and the occasional clumsy lay. This lends the film a weird, unsettling aura pitched somewhere between the cinematic Americas of Steven Spielberg and David Lynch.

The film's Detroit locations, meanwhile, suggest an environment that is crumbling and forgotten, perhaps even a post-apocalyptic setting. (One could almost believe the decay is staged, if Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady's 2011 documentary Detropia hadn't revealed far worse urban rot in the Motor City.) It is a landscape of decrepit row houses overgrown with weeds, ugly public buildings long overdue for upkeep, and half-demolished concrete edifices that wouldn't look out of place in some abandoned corner of post-Soviet Ukraine. Even the suburbs of this environment seem to sag: the houses are dim, smoke-stained spaces full of shabby furniture and cheap, outdated fixtures. This place's economy hasn't just declined; it's packed up and lit out for the Territory. Like the 1970s-80s Yorkshire saga Red Riding, everything about the look and feel of It Follows' setting suggests an earthly purgatory. It brings to mind a line from Zbigniew Herbert's doom-laden “Report From a Besieged City,” a poem also quoted in David Cronenberg's Cosmopolis:

here everybody is losing the sense of time
we were left with the place an attachment to the place
still we keep ruins of temples phantoms of gardens of houses
if we were to lose the ruins we would be left with nothing

Late in the film, the screenplay allows details from the real world to seep into the story, when it is observed that the adolescent characters dwell on the suburban (read: white) side of 8 Mile Road, Detroit's notorious demographic dividing line. Parent-imposed restrictions on their younger wanderings once prevented the kids from venturing across this racial and economic boundary to the nearby Michigan State Fair—which, in one of those unspoken ironies, is now defunct and has been replaced by an unrelated fair in a more distant suburb.

The aforementioned parents rarely appear in It Follows, which shares many themes with the aforementioned A Nightmare on Elm Street: shameful family secrets, generational disconnection, and the irrelevancy and impotence of adults with respect to the dangers their children face. Jay and Kelly's widowed mother (Debbie Williams) is glimpsed only at the film's periphery, her face never entirely visible even when she is roused from her stupor of alcohol and grief. A similar off-handed depiction of parental figures can be observed is Gus Van Sant's Paranoid Park, a feature that likewise focuses its attention on the mindsets of its adolescent characters. Adhering to the teen viewpoint is entirely fitting, given that It Follows is concerned with the loss of sexual innocence as a psychological experience rather than as just another peril that sets parental hangs wringing. 

Indeed, the prevalence of false parents among the monster's faces—Hugh's mom, Greg's mom, and Jay and Kelly's dad all make an appearance in Its rotating wardrobe of masks—hints that the parents are part of the problem. Given that It often appears naked or in underclothes, there is an element of incestuous ickiness to the creature's menace, perhaps plucked from the Freudian nightmares and longings of its victims, or perhaps based on past incidents of abuse. This incestuous aspect to Its threat is usually only vaguely implied, as when It appears as Jay's deceased father in a grimy undershirt and boxers, and then begins viciously throwing objects at her. Rarely, it becomes quite explicit, as when It assumes the form of Greg's mother—her night robe open to expose her breasts—in order to gain access to his room and savagely assault him. This jarring scene is when the creature's previously indefinite intentions become grotesquely clear: It literally rapes its victims to death.

This mingling of sex and death contains a potent erotic charge, of course, owing in part to the perverse sexuality at play when women are threatened with or subjected to violence on film. The sequence that opens the film—one orthogonal to Jay's story—depicts a teenage girl, Annie (Bailey Spry), fleeing from an unseen assailant down her street in broad daylight, clad only in underwear and high heels. This brings to mind not only the terrorized Dorothy (Isabella Rossellini) stumbling naked and sobbing out of the dark in Blue Velvet, but also local news director Nina's (Rene Russo) vivid description of her show's spirit in the recent Nightcrawler: “a screaming woman running down the street with her throat cut.” Within ten on-screen minutes of Annie's savage murder, Jay not only has sex, but is stripped down to her (virginal pink!) bra and panties, drugged, and bound. This places her in a position of absolute helplessness at the hands of her boyfriend Hugh. (He's not the "real" threat, of course, but the image is still a disturbing one.) One doesn't need a degree in feminist film theory to recognize the linkage between female peril and male arousal. Indeed, the confusion of sex with violence in the male erotic imagination is hardly a new phenomenon. In Yara's reading material of choice, The Idiot, Myshkin's romantic rival and frenemy Rogozhin quite openly discusses both his sexual longing for and his murderous rage towards the “sullied” woman Nastassya, admitting that the two urges are inextricably linked in his obsessed mind.

Such readings also underline one of the film's other primary themes, that of mortality and its link to sexual awakening. Not for nothing is orgasm described as la petit mort: the fleeting sensation of calm transcendence that follows a sexual climax, which provides a kind of existential clarity. Such insight is not available to children, who are ignorant of both sex and their own mortality. In an early scene, Hugh expresses a wish for a return to the blissful ignorance of childhood, when he was not cognizant of either sex or death. Orgasm, and thus sex generally, opens the mind to a secondary loss of innocence, that of mortal awareness. One could identify the entity that follows in the wake of sexual experience as the Grim Reaper, lurking in the background for the rest of a person's life, even in their happiest moments. The inescapable certainty of this specter of death then colors everything, spurring subsequent sex acts as a kind of proverbial whistling past the graveyard.

Needless to say, the monster in It Follows elicits numerous other metaphorical interpretations, from sexually transmitted disease to post-traumatic stress disorder induced by childhood abuse. The frequent references to “passing” or “giving” the creature's curse to a sexual partner favor the former, but It Follows is ultimately a work that operates more clearly as a nightmare scenario than as neat allegory. As with slasher films, it's tempting to indict the film's worldview as anti-sex or at least morally conservative. Granted, the monster's predations have led to a recurring pattern of desperate one-night stands, followed either by gruesome death or another link in a daisy chain of disingenuous sex. If the film has an ethos, however, it is one that favors emotional intimacy and sex positivity. The film's ambiguous ending sees Jay and a freshly deflowered Paul walking hand-in-hand down a suburban street, the couple perhaps being followed by It or perhaps not. Having established that the curse's donor retains their ability to see the normally invisible entity, the recipient has a natural ally, but only if they stick together and watch each other's backs. It therefore becomes apparent that it is not fucking per se that gives the monster strength, but the endless cycle of fucking followed by callous abandonment. Inasmuch as the characters have any hope of defeating It someday, that hope arguably lies in sleeping with as many of their trusted friends as possible.

SLIFF 2014: Life of Riley

Cinephiles often characterize prolific French filmmaker Alain Resnais’ lengthy “late period”—spanning roughly three and a half decades until his death this past March—as an era of formal experimentation. There is merit in this description: Resnais drifted away from the anxious severity of features such as Hiroshima mon amour and Muriel in favor of a disarming playfulness. Beginning in the 1980s, he started toying with the relationships between cinema and other mediums, from operetta to comic strips. Most conspicuously, Resnais adapted several theatrical plays into features, often using them as an opportunity to try out some newfound cinematic technique or stylistic flourish.

Sometimes, however, experiments fizzle. Such is the case with Resnais’ final film, Life of Riley (French: Aimer, boire et chanter), adapted from British playwright Alan Ayckbourn’s play of the same name. Resnais previously directed film versions of Ayckbourn’s Intimate Exchanges and Private Fears in Public Places. In the latter (retitled as Cœurs, or “Hearts”), Resnais unaccountably transforms the writer’s desolate tale of disaffection into a sudsy yet poignant comedy. While disappointingly airy and oddly over-praised by critics, Cœurs at least feels like a good faith attempt to translate a work from stage to cinema. The same can’t be said of Life of Riley, which in many ways plays like Cœurs’ more ungainly, half-assed cousin.

Set in present-day Yorkshire, Riley features a cast of three men and three women, paired off into three male-female couples. Kathryn (Resnais regular Sabine Azéma) and Colin (Hippolyte Girardot) are modestly bourgeois—he's a doctor, she's a dental receptionist—with a row house in Leeds and the free time to perform as amateur actors in a local troupe. Fellow dramatic society members Jack (Michel Vuillermoz) and Tamara (Caroline Sihol) are living lavishly on the latter's self-made fortune, which also supports Tilly, Jack’s teen daughter by a previous marriage. Meanwhile, schoolteacher Monica (Sandrine Kiberlain) has recently fled to the country to live with her older lover Simeon (André Dussollier), a taciturn widower and farmer.

The link between these characters is the eponymous George Riley, who is Monica's ex-husband and a mutual friend of the four wannabe dramatists. The gimmick is that Riley never actually appears onscreen. He is not some cryptic, hovering Godot-like figure, however. He stands astride the film's events, the unseen mover and shaker behind the plot. Inevitably, his name intrudes into every conversation, as the characters are all infatuated with him after a fashion. The screenplay's sly joke is that each person describes a somewhat different impression of the man, who seems to be in the habit of peddling self-serving and contradictory half-truths. As a result, Riley scans as a man-shaped dotted outline rather than an actual character—or, alternatively, as a mirror that reflects each person's weaknesses. The only truism that emerges is that Riley is something of a disingenuous son-of-a-bitch.

The story begins with a bitter revelation: Colin has learned through a colleague that Riley has been diagnosed with terminal cancer, and that he has only months to live (if that). Gathered together to rehearse a new play at Jack and Tamara's luxurious estate, the four friends are shell-shocked by the news of Riley’s illness. Bizarrely, they resolve be to cast their friend in the play, ostensibly to distract him from his grim prognosis with art and camaraderie. Meanwhile, a conflicted Monica attempts to disentangle herself from Simeon so that she can care for Riley during his remaining days, despite the fact that a part of her still loathes her ex-husband. Detailing the plot any further would be superfluous. Everything that follows in Life of Riley is essentially a flurry of posturing, manipulation, and bad judgment emanating from the film's set-up.

On paper, Riley makes for a wry little tale about self-delusion and faux-virtuous narcissism, but Resnais makes some unfortunate choices in the process of bringing it to life. He presents the film in the manner of a shoestring theatrical production, complete with the painted canvas backdrops and chintzy props one might encounter in a community theater filled with preening fifty-somethings. (Hey, just like the play within the film!) It’s an amusing but one-note gag, and while it doesn’t particularly enrich the material, Resnais’ commitment to it hobbles the film in some respects. He and cinematographer Dominique Bouilleret shoot most of Riley in sleepy medium shots. When an extended monologue occurs, the film cuts to a jarring close-up in which the speaker is suspended in a green-screened cartoon limbo. Each scene change is signified by a dissolve to a slapdash illustration of the next setting, in a shot that often lingers awkwardly for far too long. The performances match the film’s style, with the majority of the dialog delivered in a hurried, emphatic manner that would be more fitting for live theater. (Vuillermoz in particular tends to play to the nosebleed seats, to the point where Jack almost seems like a cartoon character.)

Ultimately, Resnais’ efforts to recreate the absurdity of a low-rent theatrical production just seem limp and half-hearted. The “play-as-cinema” conceit isn’t an inherently dubious conceit, of course. The problem is that a lot of blandness lies between, say, the contemptuous Brechtian harshness of Lars von Trier’s Dogville / Manderlay dyad and the ornate unreality of Joe Wright’s Anna Karenina. In contrast, Riley’s conspicuous fakery is just underwhelming, and never amounts to much thematically. A generous viewer could argue that Resnais is highlighting the silly play-acting and flagrant phoniness that are the stuff of human relationships, but that seems a woefully banal subject for such formal effort. Ultimately, the film’s primary effect is to compel the viewer to seek out a polished live production of Life of Riley to witness it in its original form.

SLIFF 2014: New World

[Note: This post contains minor spoilers.]

The underworld war of succession is one of the stock stories of East Asian gangster cinema. Hong Kong director Johnnie To's lyrical and marvelously vicious Election films are the contemporary exemplars of the subgenre, but that certainly hasn't dissuaded other filmmakers from trying their hand at such stories. For New World (Korean: Sin-se-gae), screenwriter-turned-director Hoon-jung Park blends a tale of mob warfare with an undercover cop psychological drama, and the result is an engrossing, tightly plotted thriller.

There's deep cover and then there's deep cover. Officer Ja-sung (Jung-Jae Lee) is in the latter category, having spent nearly a decade infiltrating and then working his way up through the ranks of Goldmoon, the most powerful crime syndicate in Korea. He's managed to position himself as the lieutenant to the organization's heir apparent, Jung Chung (Jung-min Hwang), a swaggering mongoose of a man with all the tastes and self-control of a teenage boy. However, when the group's chairman suddenly dies, the grasping, eerily composed Joong-gu Lee (Sung-woong Park) begins to make a play for the Goldmoon crown, sparking a bloody struggle during the lead-up to the syndicate's election.

As it happens, Ja-sung is on the cusp of leaving the undercover life, but his superior—the rumpled, ruthless Chief Kang (Korean cinema icon Min-sik Choi)—is not about to let his inside man walk away at such a crucial moment. In contrast to many crime thrillers, the police in New World have no grand scheme to take down the syndicate Once and For All. Kang is a realist, and knows that the syndicate can never truly be undone, as a new leader will always rise to fill a power vacuum.  Kang does believe, however, that Ja-sung can nudge the outcome of the election, pushing Jung Chung and Joong-gu Lee into a mutually destructive conflict while handing the throne by default to the group's weak, older vice-chairman. Only three people know of Ja-sung's true loyalties: the police commissioner (Ju Jin-Mo), Chief Kang, and handler Shin Woo (Ji-Hyo Song), whom Ja-sung visits under the pretext of receiving private Go lessons. Such secrecy is for the policeman's safety, but it could also put him in a nasty position if his police confidants were unable to vouch for him.

In this and other respects, New World's plot recalls the acme of the modern “mole” film, the Hong Kong thriller Infernal Affairs (and its American remake, The Departed). What Park's feature does slightly better than either of those films, however, is foreground the characters' psychological anguish, and in particular the undercover protagonist's terror, rage, and moral confusion. Lee proves to be a fine choice for the lead, as the physicality of his acting matches the film's approach. His wiriness and chiseled cheekbones lend him a feline demeanor befitting a mobster clad in Ermenegildo Zegna, but his perpetual frown also gives him a dourness that complements Jung Chung's libertine ways.  Lee is skilled at conveying the anxious weariness of a man who has labored too long at the same high-stress task.  When things begin to go south and his cover is jeopardized, his skin seem to go waxen and onion-thin, and his expressive, darting eyes become the rats that squeal on him.

This isn't to say that New World lacks for more visceral pleasures, such as wince-inducing violence, unexpected narrative swerves, or those moments of pure cinema that have become a standard feature of the East Asian gangster picture. In one jaw-dropping scene, an enormous, hand-to-hand battle royale unfolds in an underground parking garage, where hundreds of goons scuffle in a sea of suits, sunglasses, and flashing knives. Said brawl culminates in a gruesome, sloppy close-quarters elevator showdown that is the antithesis of Captain America: The Winter Soldier's precisely choreographed take on the same.

Overall, however, New World is at its most intriguing and memorable when the action, such as it is, consists of Ja-sung's increasingly desperate attempts to maneuver his way unscathed through a lattice of falsehoods (most of it of his own construction). Indeed, it is a remarkably talky gangster film, full of brooding conversations between allies and harrowing cat-and-mouse games between enemies (Does he know? Does he know I know he knows?). This is hardly a surprising feature, given Park's history as a screenwriter. That pedigree is also apparent in the way that the characters are gradually revealed to be more nuanced than an off-the-cuff assessment might suggest. It's particularly prominent in the case of Jung Chung, whose goofy antics conceal a vicious, amoral cunning, which in turns hides a startling sentimentalism.

New World also has some structural tricks up its sleeve. While the film's events are presented mostly chronologically, Park and editor Se-kyung Moon often toy with the viewer's assumptions about off-screen occurrences. (Rule of Thumb: Don't make inferences about anything that isn't actually shown.) This creates a recurring sensation of sour-gut fearfulness, where characters—and the viewer—become wary of trusting their own instincts.  Ultimately, New World proves to be a nervy, consuming work of character-centered drama, more than earning its 134-minute running time, a rare enough feat in any genre.