Crash into me: a sign of the times

Film is an art form of action. Actors act. And react. They act on their own accord, and they react to one another. Lights, camera, action: film creates movement out of images, time out of movement, and story out of action.
The film crash is an ensemble film. It's got many actors. But these actors crash into each other. And their actions are but gestures, revealing not a deep relationship or cosmic connection, but a choice, forced by events, for or against a complete stranger.
It might seem at times that the moral of the story in Crash is one of empathy. Or altruism. The redemption of society through individual choices and acts that might bind us together and keep society whole. And that might be the case.
But even if it is, there is in the very form of a film like Crash a sign of the times, and I mean sign in a double sense.
Crash describes the kind of society that, in its dogged insistence on the individual, has lost its humanity, its society, its wholeness. Crash says to us: this is what we have become, for we all recognize this. And in its statement, it poses the question: What, then, can we do? Anonymous encounters, strangers helping strangers--these are the elements of society when things come crashing down.
But there's another sign here also. It's the semiotic sign. Saussure split the sign into two, signifier (rose) and signified (love), and claimed that the relationship of signifer to signified is arbitrary. Meaning is achieved in the relations between terms in a system, not between the sign and what it signifies. A dandelion could have come to signify love just as easily as a rose. Nothing intrinsic about the rose makes it a vehicle for the concept of love.
In human communication, though, we use language, which is a system more complex than the system of signs. Action, too, does more than just indicate, or sign, its meaning. Gestures are signs. And it's gestures that make the actions in the film Crash: signs of humanity, genuflections, piling up one upon the other in an effort perhaps to redeem the crash, if we only each make a life-saving choice, show one sign of hope, or make one attempt at a rescue.
Such choices, were we all like the actors in Crash, would save us. We could assume that in each act, a gesture lay hidden. And in each gesture, a sign of hope. And without a word, or a thought, or any real change to the system, that crash might bring us together.

In case it wasn't clear, Crash is a film very worth watching.
Films that share a similar form are those of Kieslowski, Code Unknown, Beautiful People, Shortcuts.

Best of Youth

I so enjoyed watching this over the last couple evenings that I've got to recommend it. There's nothing particularly interesting about the fim from a theorist's angle, or a cinematographer's angle, even a scriptwriter's angle. This is not a film of twists, of action, or surprises. Yet the characters, performances, and events work extremely well together to cover 40 years of Italian history as seen through the eyes of people who in some cases chose opposing sides. And it takes a film of this magnitude, perhaps, to evoke the emotional range and depth that this film does.
It's a mover; have your tissues handy. I think I might have resolved some parental issues of my own last night watching this one!

Cafe Lumiere, and trains passing in daylight

This little film has all the treatment and feel of a low-budget indie production, but it's actually directed by well known Taiwanese director Hsiao-hsien Hou, commissioned by Japan for the 100th anniversary of Yasujiro Ozu birthday. And it's a perfect homage to Ozu, "more Japanese" than a Japanese film could have been (notes one commentator).

Partway through this film I noticed something strange about the relations between actors. I don't think there's a single reaction shot in this film. Certainly no use of the shot-reaction shot technique that's conventionally used by film makers to get across how actors feel about each other.

Shot: actor's attention directed to another actor.
Reverse shot: other actor's face gives away the relationship between the two.

The shot/reverse shot technique seems to work so well, I think, not so much because it's hard to put two actors on the screen at the same time, but because we (audience) relate uniquely to the face and emotion of a single face, and it's that--the film's relationship to its audience through the camera, which places the audience in relation to actors on the screen, that motivates an emotional response in the viewer that's always different with one face on screen than with two or more.

Cafe Lumiere contains no shot/reverse shot sequences. In fact the actors don't make eye contact. And this decision, conscious or not, creates a film in which its characters are always in a scene. Even when they are alone toghether in the smallest of bookstores, we are given a scene and not a relationship.

The camera's still disposition to scenes, urban and interior, captures a landscape of objects and places through which the trapped love of our two lead characters journey in pursuit of a way to connect. Their affections for each other play like muted horns amidst a jingle of train station announcements and contemporary piano movements, there but not together. They are like two passengers, at times on parallel trains (and this is the film's crucial scene), traveling in the same direction but separated by the window panes (pains) through which they direct their looks in a longing to collapse the space between the tracks, able to make the journey, but not together.

Beneath the film's unfocused care and tenderness is the story of Yoko's adoption, her pregnancy, and her decision to repeat her own past by bringing up the child without a father. And her friend's (non-lover's) silent yearning, "at the edge," as he puts it in one scene, pictured in a rendering of his own (yes the actor actually made that drawing) as a lonely fetus (perhaps crying, he notes) in an eyeball surrounded by trains and tracks, alluding of course to suicide, preoccupied with a passion for recording trains and their sounds in order to capture evidence (he notes, and does he mean, of his death, should he join his trains on the tracks?)...

This is a great little film about hesitation and the desire to overcome it, a film that leaves open the possibility of redemption and which attaches it to the younger generation, who in their innocence and freedom might stand a better chance than the bound generation that brought them into the world to begin with.

Mike Leigh's Naked Cinema Verite

In the video store recently I saw one of those little staff reviews on a post it that prompted me to take it out on the guy at the cash register, which wasn't fair of me given that Tower Video most certainly doesn't pay the rate that would get them a film critic—-which is nothing. I dont remember the staffer's words exactly, but the gist of it was "A brilliant film for its darkness and cynicism. David Thewlis' gives the performance of a lifetime as nihilistic Johnny."
This upset me because David Thewlis (Johnny) is precisely not a nihilist. He's an idealist.
I looked up some other reviews just now on IMDB.com and found that a lot of reviewers read David Thewlis as a nihilist, or a cynic. And I found myself wondering why. Thewlis appears to be a nihilist, he acts cynically, but his actions land him in situations, and bring him to endings, because he can't break out of his own repetition. He's got the insights and the clarity of mind to give him awareness of how things are and what he's doing. But he's broken, disappointed, and at some point he was probably damaged by his family and is now playing out his childhood drama with others (some of whom don't care, would care, might care, or do care about him).
Mike Leigh's method of directing in this film is perfectly suited to producing the nocturnal milieu in which David Thewlis staggers towards his exit. It works because the actors develop the story using emotional connections and communication. The film is about how these people feel, and its entertainment obtains from the tensions, distance, spaces and gaps that punctuate their attempts to understand one another and to find some kind of peace. None of these characters get what they want. Which is why I think the film is a psychological film, and should be read not for its thematic substance (which might be described as an articulation of per-apocalpytic nihilism) but for its exploration of the lives and actions of people whose hearts and minds are crippled by fear and uncertainty, people who search for something better in reality but can't seem to do it together. Naked is the expression of hearts exposed.


From reviews on imdb.com

"One of the most powerful British films of the 90s. Mike Leigh directs David Thewlis in an unrelenting, uncompromisingly cynical portrayal of self-loathing and alienation."

"Don't waste your life" A security guard advises the nihilistic anti hero Johnny. This film is macabre, raw, and with dialogue as sharp as anything ever witnessed on celluloid."

"Being a fellow northerner, I can see echoes of myself in Johnny, which no doubt adds to the film's appeal for me. But I'd recommend it to any intelligent viewer, not least because of the contrast it throws up between nihilism and nothingarianism."

"Mike Leigh's masterpiece; the tale of Johnny, a mid twenties Mancunian drifter who heads down to London (having nicked a car) and tracks down an old girlfriend. He seduces Sophie (the excellent Katrin Cartlidge), unleashes a display of venom on his old lover, Louise (Lesley Sharp) and staggers off into the night when both women become too much for him to bear.

This is one of the hardest films I have ever had to review. Topics such as urban alienation, career-choice unemployment, leeching, homelessness, drug taking and sexual violence would normally send me running for cover; but what we have here is so well constructed and so skilfully acted that it transcends it own headline topics.

This is a classic case of car-wreck film making: You don't praise or celebrate much, yet it is deeply fascinating and even hypnotic. People are tap dancing on the edge of a metaphorical cliff - some are there of there of their own free will."

Bubble in a bubble, and how bubbles stick together till they burst

---Contains Indirect Spoilers---

Soderburgh's recent release, the first out on dvd and in the theaters at the same time, is well worth its short 70 odd minutes of viewing time. Filmed in a week and with a non-professional cast, Bubble is the first of six planned HD releases. But the film's low budget and speedy production are what make this film so watchable. The camera's still, and dialog is simple. There are no events but one, there are no actions but one. Here emotion is in check, tension is built on suspension, absence, and a sense of waiting.
Soderburgh says in his commentary that he'd wanted to do a film on a triangle of people gone wrong. But the triangle's only one element, as it's a triangle that's never more than a week old. Relationships between the actors break too quickly for us to find out what kind of triangle they might have had together. Their bubble bursts, and its pop resounds as other bubbles pop with it. For it's really just one actor who's own bubble bursts, and with her bubble, the bubble of a triangle, and the bubble of a town, and the bubble of a way of life, a life of doll-making, and tedious, no-way-out Mcjobbing.
Bubbles, like triangles, have three elements: surface, tension, and emptiness. A film called bubble can only do one thing, and that is burst. I hope this little gem of a film bursts into our consiousness in a big way.

You've been living inside a bubble (an adaptation of Pop, or is it cold play)

You can't think 'less you know who you're talking to
Never closer but always drifting apart
You've been living in a bubble
And the bubble's living you
Actors gone and stage now empty
The silence loud, your play gone cold
Too late to burst

(for a friend)