A FILM UNFINISHED - FILMSTRUCK

This review as written for DVDTalk.com in 2010; it is reprinted here with the text updated to reflect 2017.

Hollywood can keep making horror films and raconteurs can keep spinning yarns about haunted houses, but nothing will ever be as spooky as real life.

The documentary A Film Unfinished is both a ghost story and a cinematic archaeological project. Yael Hersonski's movie is an excavation of several cans of film left behind in an East German vault by Nazi propagandists. Labeled with the title Ghetto, the footage shows the Warsaw encampment that was the home to thousands of Jews for a good portion of the war. Shot in May 1942, mere months before the Germans would shut the ghetto down and send most of the prisoners to their deaths, the remaining hour of film, abandoned during editing and absent of a soundtrack, is bizarre and disturbing. Little official record exists about Ghetto, why it was made or why it was jettisoned. Yet it serves as a potent document of the conditions in the giant prison, and of how the Nazis tried to curate their own historical records--to the point that we must still question everything we see.

A Film Unfinished essentially takes all of the remaining material--including a more recently discovered reel of outtakes and one cameraman's personal movies, shot in color--and puts together the  footage with what little is known about the original project. Hersonski uses three major sources of information to try to understand what the Germans were hoping to accomplish: the personal diary of the Jewish warden charged with overseeing the camp, the secret journals of prisoners, and the testimony of Willy Wist, a cameraman whose name appeared on the few official documents relating to Ghetto that still exist. The journals are read in voiceover, while the deposition of Wist is reenacted by two actors who mostly appear just out of frame. Wist was either a man living in denial, who had blocked out what happened, or a guilty co-conspirator trying to outrun his past, as he alternately feigns ignorance and seems troubled by the few things he admits to remembering. The sober way in which he talks about the assignment goes against the smiling image of the young man who accidentally gets caught by his comrade shooting home movies. (Hersonski regularly pauses the Nazi film when part of the film crew appears in the frame, highlighting their placement like a prosecutor presenting evidence.)

One of the things Wist remembered was also A Film Unfinished's most controversial scene. The documentary was released without a rating because the dunderheads at the MPAA objected to the nudity in scenes in a ritual bath. One group of men and one group of women are stripped and herded into an underground bathhouse. Barely able to disguise their shivers in the cold water, they dunk themselves repeatedly. It's perhaps the most disturbing segment of the movie, particularly as we learn that these scenes, just like all of the scenes in Ghetto, have been staged. The bathers are gaunt and malnourished, and this scenario was only concocted to humiliate them. There is nothing prurient to be gained by watching it, so any objection to its harsh truth is just misguided. To have left it out would have done history a disservice.

From what Hersonski can gather, Ghetto was meant to achieve two goals: to show that conditions in the Warsaw ghetto weren't as bad as some might claim, and to suggest that the Jews starving in the streets were the fault of the greedy upper class living on the fat of the land while everyone else suffered. Thus, the crews filmed the worst poverty as it really existed in the streets and then turned around and staged opulent get-togethers where healthy-looking prisoners were seen to be having a good time. To counteract what we see, Hersonski not only finds pertinent passages in the written first-hand accounts, but she also gathers a handful of survivors who watch the found footage and react to what they see. They were all children during the war, so the memories are painful and sometimes seeing their faces, filmed in the dark of a movie theater, can be painful as well. They are shocked by how the Nazis tried to twist their miserable existences into things they were not. Thankfully, there are also cathartic moments. At least for a couple of the witnesses, this trip to the past brings some healing.

Unsurprisingly, A Film Unfinished is a somber affair. Hersonski treats the material with a quiet reverence, maintaining an even tone in the narration and using Ishai Adar's moving ambient score as a gentle lifeline to lead the viewer through what is particularly difficult material. There are no huge answers at the end of the movie, no great explanation as to why one group of people would do such a thing to another group of people, why there would be this sickening compulsion to film it and mold it and turn truth upside down. I suppose, though, that's because there are no answers that could make sense, no matter how clear-cut. What motivation would be satisfying? What endgame would actually make any of this seem rational? All we can do is watch and learn and feel, and hope against hope that, as a global people, we will never allow such darkness to fall across our world ever again.

We hope...and yet that haunted feeling lingers. Particularly reconsidering this film in the harsh light of 2017, when Nazis and racists walk the American streets once again. Perhaps if more people see movies like A Film Unfinished, though, they will join the numbers that have already emerged to stand against them.

TWIN PEAKS: FIRE WALK WITH ME - #898

Sometimes don’t you just wish people would leave well enough alone?

Listen, I love Twin Peaks. And I love David Lynch. So much so that I saw Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me on opening weekend. I saw it with my friend who also loved Twin Peaks, and I think there were only three of us in the whole theater, which usually makes everything better. You know, because it’s quiet and the theater is yours and you can just enjoy it. No such luck here. I hated Fire Walk With Me. So much so that I waited until just this past year to watch it again, despite re-watching the whole of Twin Peaks itself more than once, as part of my re-immersion for Twin Peaks: The Return (or, if you will, Season Three).

Now, I know some of you are clicking off or discounting my opinion for bias or are firing up the comments to let me have a piece of your mind, but let me just say this: not only is twenty-five years a long time to hold a grudge, but I don’t “hate watch” anything. I would never give a movie another spin without some genuine interest in seeing if I was wrong. Over the decades, I have heard many defenses of Fire Walk With Me, heard many a person tell me how much it terrified them, and I was interested in seeing what those people saw. I mean, I’m not twenty years old anymore, maybe the person I am now will find something completely different than he once had. Hell, the movie I watched right after this was Luc Besson’s The Fifth Element, which I also hadn’t seen in nearly twenty years, and I didn’t like it as much now as I had when it was new. Anything is possible.

The funny thing is, I had pretty much the same reactions I had the first time, only softer. I partially credit Twin Peaks: The Return, which maybe has helped by elaborating on what would have been Lynch’s technique and intention here. Certainly these two elements connect to each other better than the actual series bridges the gap between. There’s also probably some managed expectations. When Fire Walk With Me first touched down in cinemas, my yen for it was high; spinning it again, I had a better idea of what to expect.

Here are the two main reasons I have trouble with Fire Walk With Me:

(1) It doesn’t work as an individual piece. As both a prequel to the Twin Peaks television show and the beginning of an intended film series about the Black Lodge mythology, it relies heavily on what you know while simultaneously withholding new information in anticipation of a later payoff. It’s merely a sliver.

(2) As a prequel, it doesn’t show us anything that we actually need to know. Fire Walk With Me does not enhance the mystery of Laura Palmer. There is nothing new to be gleaned from witnessing her final days, for seeing her realize the true identity of her tormentor. In fact, it may even detract from the mystique by putting too fine a point on some things. I’ve always felt that Twin Peaks was at its best when there were two potential explanations. Is Leland Palmer possessed by a man named Bob, or is Bob merely a dissociative coping mechanism? (Sorry if you see that as a spoiler, but then why are you reading a review of a prequel to a murder mystery?)

If the goal was to better know Laura Palmer, there was more to be gleaned from Jennifer Lynch’s  book, Secret Diary of Laura Palmer, than there is in Fire Walk With Me. Lynch and co-writer Robert Engel don’t add any more to who she is. This is not a story of an innocent being ruined, but merely the last days of someone who has been victimized to the point of no return. And worse, there is a creepy aspect to how Lynch chooses to show the events, leering at Sheryl Lee’s naked body, that seems to dispel any condemnation of the abuse that got her here. The camera sweats and pants in her presence as much as Leland Palmer does, lingering on Laura’s exposed pain as if the suffering itself were art.

Which, let’s be real, if it’s art, it’s because Sheryl Lee elevates it. If there is any one reason for Fire Walk With Me to exist, it’s to show what a beast of a performer she is. Laura Palmer is no easy role. She’s simultaneously meant to embody the American cliché of the perfect “girl next door” and show all that is rotten behind that illusion--in other words, the culmination of Lynch’s oeuvre up to that point embodied in one character. At this time in her life, Laura doesn’t know whether she’s coming or going. Between the trauma she’s suffered and her self-medicating, her moods swing at the flick of a light switch. At the same time, she attempts to maintain a semblance of control by being all things to all people. Lee manages to hit every note--every feeling, every mask, every persona--while also maintaining a consistency that means Laura is never actually “out of character.” She’s always the same person underneath, she never deviates. It’s astonishing to watch. How Sheryl Lee wasn’t every famous director’s first choice for their next movie is beyond me. (And there still isn’t an actress whose scream can unnerve and curdle the blood as much as Lee’s, as evinced by her anguish at the end of The Return.)

The opposite can be said of Ray Wise in the Leland Palmer role. Whatever nuance and restraint he had in the television series is gone; Lynch has reduced him to a bug-eyed pervert who can barely use his words. It’s indicative of a cartoonishness that permeates Fire Walk With Me and the worst parts of The Return (Dougie Jones, anyone?). There’s a sense that Lynch finds this all disposable. It is just television, after all. How else to explain the chintzy slow-mo effects or his reliance on the jazzy posturing that seemed so hip and fun in the orginal series but just seems perfunctory here? Fire Walk With Me is paving the way for the near self-parody of Lost Highway.

Which isn’t to say there is nothing good. Were the first chunk of the movie, with Chris Isaak as Agent Desmond, shaved off and turned into its own thing, Lynch might have had the makings of an interesting modern crime flick. And while seeing Laura’s last days doesn’t shed any light on her character, we do see different sides of Bobby (Dana Ashbrook), James (James Marshall), and Donna (a miscast Moira Kelly), showing how at times they are nearly as close to the edge as their friend.

It’s not enough, though, and those that would contend that a longer director’s cut would maybe solve these problems need only look to The Missing Pieces to see that this would not be the case. It doesn’t take much to see that, with the exception of the portentous scene with Doc Hayward, there was nothing essential trimmed out, it’s just more of the same.

When I expressed disappointment over the conclusion of Twin Peaks: The Return, a friend pointed me to this excellent clip of Siskel and Ebert arguing over Blue Velvet back in the day. There is something to be said for Ebert’s reaction against how Lynch sometimes treats women, but also much that is right about Siskel’s contention that the director evoked from Roger exactly what he wanted, that he played him like a violin. While I believe that to be the case for the David Lynch they are debating, I’d contend that Fire Walk With Me marks the artist beginning to lose control of his instrument. I wonder if our willingness to fill in the gaps for him, to rationalize the missteps of The Return or even some of the unfinished threads of Mulholland Drive, is us giving the man too much credit (as I likely did in my review of Inland Empire), and by turn, his being lazy. I’ve heard arguments that the best thing about older Lynch is he doesn’t take the audience into consideration and just does what he wants, but at the same time, art is about communication, and even though it is the audience’s responsibility to do some interpretation, it shouldn’t be our job to do the actual writing or to build with tools that aren’t provided for us (no matter how much we may want to). Or invent meaning where there is none. If Fire Walk With Me is where David Lynch stopped giving us consideration, how is it that we still give so much to him? Particularly here, where the brilliant flashes we see in both Mulholland and Twin Peaks: The Return are absent.

Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me? More like Just Walk Away. Don’t @ me.

OSLO, AUGUST 31 - FILMSTRUCK/CRITERION CHANNEL

This review originally ran in the Portland Mercury in 2012.

There’s nothing inherently special about the date August 31. For some, it might represent the end of a season, signaling a life change. As Anders, the main character of Joachim Trier's Oslo, August 31 points out, it's the day before the city drains the public pools. In other words, it's Anders' last chance to sink or swim.

Oslo, August 31 is a quiet movie. Anders (played by Anders Danielsen Lie, who was also in Trier's wonderful Reprise) is a 34-year-old junkie with two more weeks in rehab. On August 30, he is given leave from the facility because he has a job interview. (Had the treatment center known he tried to kill himself that morning, they might not have let him go.) Oslo follows Anders over the next 24 hours: he visits old friends, misses a connection with his sister, blows the interview, and ends up at a party. His temptation threat levels keep escalating.

Trier's film is an honest, unsentimental portrayal of the fallout of addiction. Anders spends most of the movie talking. He tries to explain himself and own what he did. He never makes excuses, but he still wants to manage how people react to him. The weight of his past is a burden and far more difficult to shrug off than the people in his life think. Trier assembles his story as a series of scattered moments, repeated exchanges, and overlapping experiences. The opening montage of faceless voices sharing their memories of Oslo places Anders within a larger narrative: He is one of many who have called this place home. Yet, the devastating impact of Oslo, August 31 is how, ultimately, Anders is just a single individual, all on his own.

BEDLAM/I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE - FILMSTRUCK

These reviews were written in 2005 to cover the Val Lewton boxed set and published in my now-defunct column "Can You Picture That?" It is adapted here now that several of Lewton's productions have been added to Filmstruck for Halloween.

Val Lewton started off as a pulp novelist before being hired by David O. Selznick to work as part of his production team. RKO eventually snatched him away to try to revive the studio after the Citizen Kane fiasco of 1941, and Lewton created a roster of efficient craftsmen to start cranking out B-movies for the studio. The result was some classics of the genre, famous for their sense of invention. Lewton had to work quickly and with little money, so he developed a style that used economy to its advantage. The stories were tight, usually preying on the imagination of the audience by keeping much of the macabre violence offscreen. Lewton realized it was better to make you create your own impression of the horrible things that happened, to make you a part of the experience, flying directly in the face of the Universal monster fests that had been on top of the horror heap for quite some time. 

Mark Robson, a former editor who collaborated with Lewton, directed Boris Karloff in 1946's Bedlam, the second film the pair made together, and it has a similar center to their first team-up, Isle of the Dead: a malignant force trapping people in one place to serve his own ends. In this case, however, Karloff’s apothecary, Master George Sims, doesn’t see any greater good the way Isle's General Pherides becomes misguided in trying to preserve his army. Sims is only trying to preserve himself and maintain his position as the head of the infamous 19th-century mental hospital.

Based on engravings by William Hogarth, Bedlam is gruesome and macabre. It’s not a traditional spookified frightfest, but instead uses its medical setting and the sociological conditions for a little psychological horror, playing on a rather common fear: being wrongfully committed to the madhouse. When Sims locks up Nell Bowen (Anna Lee) for opposing his cruel tactics, it can stand in for the anxiety any of us would feel in a situation we can’t escape from. It’s survival against malicious forces beyond our control. Ultimately, Bowen’s kindness does exactly what Sims fears: the lunatics take over the asylum. 

Jacques Tourneur’s 1943 film I Walked With a Zombie is easily a standout of the genre that takes us to the West Indies where voodoo is alive...and so are the dead!

Tourneur creates a gorgeous setting for the story: the tropical estate of the Holland family, long-time exploiters of the island people. Amidst the lush foliage is a statue of Saint Sebastian, the namesake for the island, pierced with arrows, his body arched in pain. When the rain falls over its torso, the statue appears to bleed. Frances Dee plays Betsy Connell, a nurse hired to come to the island and care for the catatonic wife of Paul Holland (Tom Conway). No one is exactly sure what happened to the woman. One explanation is she caught a tropical fever that wiped out her mind, and another--one popularized in a local song--says that when Paul found her canoodling with his half-brother, he persecuted her into insanity. The locals that make up the servant class on the Holland estate believe something different, that she is no longer alive at all. She is the living dead!

I Walked With a Zombie works along many parallel lines. In one sense, it is an indictment of imperialism, decrying the wounded state of the oppressed people. The citizens of Saint Sebastian were brought over on slave ships, and they are so distraught over their non-lives, they cry when a baby is born and laugh with relief when one of their number dies. Their state of living decay is beginning to affect the Hollands, and the family is falling apart. The dominance of the now indigenous culture is also a victory over the oppressors’ science. Mrs. Rand (Edith Barrett), the Holland matriarch, is a doctor, and she has invaded the voodoo ceremonies to sneak a little medicine into suspicion. Yet, there is nothing she can do for her daughter-in-law, and as the voodoo priests call the zombie out into the sugar fields, she begins to believe there is something beyond what she can understand or control.

The mixture of science and magic holds very real consequences that are analogous of the ways we interact with each other. The infidelity of the Holland family has destroyed their grasp on their opulent life. Only Betsy’s goodness pulls Paul out of the abyss. The same cannot be said for his brother. Unable to let go of the feelings he has for the zombie woman, he ultimately meets a dire end, finding the relief in death that the islanders have promised. Fittingly, he and his absent lover are chased to their doom by the only other zombie in the movie--a towering island man who has come to claim the woman so she can be put amongst his people, where she now belongs.

Tourneur’s direction is lyrical, using the natural surroundings of Saint Sebastian to their full effect. This is a story about nature winning out, after all. Amusingly, the film was based on a tabloid story about a woman’s love affair with a dead man. Lewton was often given very little to start his films with, sometimes just a title. The triumph of I Walked With a Zombie is that of creative men taking small beginnings and making something bigger out of it. 

Martin Scorsese has said that film fans that don’t like horror movies can’t be real film fans. Horror films are movies at their most visceral, playing with our bodies and our minds, provoking reactions. In these splatter-filled days of ridiculous curses and unrestrained gore, horror films don’t poke at our imaginations the way these older movies did. In the end, their endurance is evident of the lasting scares they inspire. Even their lack of color gives the viewer something spookier, something culled from the terrors of the night. Pass on the latest remake making a box office grab and go to your local video store for something with a little more power, and then get ready for a scary Halloween.

DON'T LOOK NOW - #745

What surprised me the most when the film came to an end was how much I cared about the main characters of Don’t Look Now. In the final moments of Nicolas Roeg’s 1973 supernatural drama, a rapid montage of Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie as the movie’s central couple quickly summarizes all that we have seen over the previous 109 or so minutes, and I was strangely moved. For a movie I didn’t really enjoy, I shouldn’t have had that much of a connection, but turns out, I did.

Credit is likely due to Sutherland and Christie, who excel as John and Laura, a British couple on a working holiday in Venice, where the memory of their recently drowned young daughter haunts them. As far as Laura is concerned, quite literally, too. After a clairvoyant blind woman tells her that she has seen the lost child in their midst, and that the girl is happy, Laura is both freed of her grief and newly obsessed with the loss. John, on the other hand, is weighed down further by this revelation--both from worrying over his wife’s alleged delusions and the warning from the psychic that Venice will harm him somehow.

And so it is that eventually we realize that this is a couple who is not really together, but moving in separate directions, divided by emotions that should otherwise bind them. Tragedy can have this effect, though. Grief is personal, and though the husband and wife are processing the same events, they do so from two different vantage points. John literally pulled his daughter’s body from the water, while Laura only witnessed the aftermath. And though they both wonder “what if?” in relation to their kids going out to play that day, John has the added regret of being the one who encouraged them to venture outside. Thus, it’s even more resonant when they hear of their young son having an accident back at school in England, which serves to pull them further apart, both literally and figuratively, and kick off Don’t Look Now’s final movement.

Roeg’s nimble visual touch serves him well here. The swift cutting he and editor Graeme Clifford (McCabe & Mrs. Miller [review]) employ to toggle between the two characters, as well as past and present, serves to keep the viewer disoriented, often almost like we are opening and closing one eye at a time, back and forth, getting two skewed versions of the same picture. Sutherland flourishes in this oddness, his congested delivery transforming his character’s sadness into a kind of wet, physical symptom he can’t dislodge. He is a man trapped in a narrative he can’t seize control of--which is ironic, since we are led to believe he is a little psychic, too, but yet he can’t sense his own impending doom.

Don’t Look Now is based on a story by Daphne Du Maurier, a favorite of Hitchcock, whose Rebecca [review], Jamaica Inn, and The Birds all draw from her source material. Unlike Hitchcock, though, Roeg doesn’t manage to extract much suspense out of the writer’s tale. Even as Roeg uses the criss-crossing Venice canals and roadways to get John lost, he doesn’t manage to create much sense of peril. I can’t believe I am saying this, but I actually wonder how much better Brian De Palma might have handled Allan Scott and Chris Bryant’s script. The mistaken-identity ending could only be more De Palma-esque if either Sutherland or Christie woke up in bed, having dreamt the whole thing. (Note: Composer Pino Donaggio also scored De Palma’s Dressed to Kill [review] and Blow Out, but his work here is often too erudite, and tends to detract rather than add, most notably the cheesy classicisms of orchestration during the infamous sex scene. Despite all the visible flesh, one must assume that Donaggio and Roeg don’t want us to find it even remotely erotic.)

Perhaps, though, I am looking at this all wrong, and not examining how Don’t Look Now appropriates the cumulative effects of grief. If we go back to my opening statement, despite not being particularly engrossed or engaged, I still somehow found myself having an emotional reaction at the finish, one of sadness and pity for a couple I had come to...not really identify with or like, but get used to? In his own weird way, Roeg managed my experience, massaging my sentiments, and got me exactly where he needed me to be. Now the question becomes whether I’ve become attached enough to want to revisit John and Laura and see if, knowing what I know now, feeling what I feel, Don’t Look Now plays any differently. It’s not something I’m compelled to do immediately, but maybe one day....

3:10 TO YUMA - #657

Based on a story by Elmore Leonard (Justified [review]), 3:10 To Yuma is a tight little thriller of a western. Shot by Delmer Daves a year after he made Jubal [review], it flips the script on that earlier morality play. Though don’t be fooled by its stripped-back cast and lack of color, 3:10 to Yuma is anything but simplistic or black-and-white.

Glenn Ford returns to Daves’ set, but this time as the bad guy. Outlaw Ben Wade gets himself into trouble when he uses a farmer’s cattle as a roadblock to rob a passing stagecoach of its gold. Little does he know, this careless act makes a reluctant hero of Dan Evans (Van Heflin, The Prowler), who just wants to keep his home intact until the longstanding drought breaks and gives his farm life again. Echoing Heflin’s role as the father in Shane [review], Dan’s inaction during the initial robbery causes two separate reactions in his sons: the older sees the sense of avoiding a gunfight with a dozen crooks, his youngest son thinks his dad should have taken them out singlehandedly.

When Wade ends up getting himself caught stopping for a little romance in the nearby town, the local marshal (Ford Rainey) and the owner of the stagecoach (Robert Emhardt, No Time for Sergeants [review]) concoct an elaborate plan to distract Wade’s gang while Dan and the town drunk (Henry Jones) sneak him to Contention City (what a name!) where they can put their prisoner on the titular train to Yuma. Spoiler alert: things don’t go as planned.

3:10 to Yuma has plenty of shootouts, but the real thrust of the story is the dynamic between the two men, between the family man and the outlaw. Though their lives are very different, at the core, they are essentially the same, they just made different choices. Both abide by their personal sense of right and wrong, which is largely defined by their isolationism. Sure, Wade steals from other people for a living, but he’s mostly willing to leave anyone alone who leaves him alone. The cash his action brings him would solve plenty of Dan’s problems, and Wade uses that to lean on the farmer, to try to bribe him into undoing his handcuffs. At the same time, Wade sees something peaceful and honorable in the family life Dan has chosen. It’s a different type of security than money can buy, though for Dan to have his ideal and take care of his family with no outside help, it seems money is necessary. The tensest scenes come when the pair is locked in a hotel room, watching the clock, and the slick criminal is working on his captor’s conscience.

Ford strikes me as a better heavy than he is a straight leading man. Here he is confident and charismatic, aware that he is the smartest man in the room, and yet rarely showing that conceit to any of his marks. As the villain in this piece, he is defined by two conflicting actions: shooting his own man at the stagecoach rather than see the heist go south, and wooing the barmaid (Felicia Farr, also playing the opposite to her Jubal character, trading her blonde hair for dark) with what appears to be genuine affection. The cold first action is what heightens the urgency of the manhunt, and the warm second is what brings that hunt to a close. One can surmise that the dalliance with the girl was worth it, though one is also sympathetic to her poor decision. Daves chooses to film them after the deed in an uncomfortably close two-shot, Wade’s face partially obscured, hers fully exposed so that we can see she is at once satiated and broken-hearted, knowing that there is no tomorrow for this one-night stand.

On the other end of things, Dan’s thoughts are all about tomorrow. If he gets through this, he can get enough money to purchase temporary water rights from his neighbor. At the same time, he holds out hope that the rain will come, that a man will be rewarded for doing the right thing, that he won’t need to indebt himself to another. Though religion never really comes into it, not even in the tangential way it influences Jubal, Dan’s is the plight of the religious man, with his sons representing the angel and the devil on each shoulder, pride and reason, and his wife (Leora Dana) providing the center. She makes her own dumb choice in the final third of the film, but at the same time, it’s one motivated by her dedication to her marriage, and one that fortifies Dan’s resolve, even as most of his allies desert him.

Of course, this isn’t a true religious parable, nor does man need religion to adhere to an ethical code--something a lifetime of westerns and noir will teach any cinephile. The action here is all ground-level, and the temptation earthly. There is also a fundamental plot that is so pure here, James Mangold barely messed with it for his excellent 2007 remake [review]. That last rush to the station is still a rush! When it comes down to it, it’s all about keeping on the right path, about getting the bad guy to his destination regardless of the obstacles that appear in front of you. Thus, if Wade is the true devil, he offers Dan true redemption, even giving his own helping hand at the end.

FILM SOCIALISME - FILMSTRUCK

This review was originally written for DVDTalk.com in 2012, and sometimes refers to features on the DVD release.

Jean-Luc Godard's 2010 cinematic essay, Film Socialisme, his first major new work since 2004's Notre Musique [review] (and, of course, followed several years later by Goodbye to Language [review]), opens with the image of a roiling sea. The water looks black, almost like oil, a visual juxtaposition that is clearly intentional, as the first subtitled narration is three choice words: "Money Public Water." It's an intentionally vague statement, a provocation from a master provocateur. But as where that term has become a negative referring to empty sensationalists, the great French filmmaker is working on a whole other level. He wants to stimulate political discourse through cinema. He is poking at your brain, not at your libido.

The darkened ocean is not actually the first image in Film Socialisme. That is actually the short flash of two brightly colored parrots that appear just before the start of the credits. This is likely meant to be a joke, Godard the prankster poking fun at the chatter that is to follow. Film Socialisme is not a narrative film, not in any conventional sense. It's also not a documentary. It's more the latest fruit born of an ongoing experiment that the director has been engaging in since his first feature, Breathless [review], more than 50 years ago. Godard structures Film Socialisme as a three-point argument. The first segment takes place on a European ocean liner, with Godard's camera following passengers, young and old, on their journey of never-ending pleasures, from buffet to nightclub and back to the buffet again.

The travelers are of every stripe and every nation, the cruise ship is world culture in microcosm, bringing us all together (a major theme of Film Socialisme), even if it's just for banal synchronized dancing. Shot in digital, the images range in quality from beautifully realized high-definition to cheap and pixilated. Godard and his team both observe the unaware and track specific characters, all the while using their monologues and disconnected voiceover to cover a range of topics, largely centered on the self-absorption of modern culture, sins of the past (Germany, Moscow, and Israel/Palestine are regular targets), and the role of popular art in curtailing man's self-destruction. Amongst the invented personas are also real people, including musicians Patti Smith and Lenny Kaye and economist Bernard Maris.

This initial portion establishes Film Socialisme's difficult aesthetic. It's not just the images that are disjointed--there is no such thing as a "complete" scene here--but also the spoken word. Or, more specifically for English speakers relying on subtitles, the written word. Godard has chosen to make Film Socialisme even more challenging for his Western audiences. Rather than subtitling every word you hear, he has chosen to translate the material into "Navajo English." The name is a rather risky joke, referring (one assumes) to the style of broken English spoken by Native Americans in old Westerns. Thus, something like, "I am hungry, and I want to eat" will instead be "Me want food." While Kino Lorber has offered a fully translated subtitle option on their home video release (as well as the choice of none for those who speak the multiple languages heard onscreen), to go with those almost seems like a cheat, like watching Memento in its chronological order. Film Socialisme is a leading puzzle that beckons the viewer to follow the fractures and divine his or her meaning from the clues left along the way. The incomplete subtitles add another layer to what is being shown. The combination of words can be perfectly clear at times, but they can also be laced with a double meaning, loaded with ironic context or sharp political rhetoric.

The second part of the film leaves the cruise ship and goes to a small, family-run gas station that is struggling to survive in the lopsided world economy. The politically minded nuclear family is being visited by a film crew who are, for all intents and purposes, shooting a film within a film, though often to the reluctance of the subjects. Some of what they capture is "documentary," some of it is purposely staged; yet, Godard suggests that all culture is now imitation. The young son of the family is a bit of a precocious prodigy, mimicking orchestra conductors, blowing his straw like a saxophone, and painting his own version of Renoir masterpieces from memory. While his family worries about money and the possible change in public policy due to an upcoming election (one which family members are also candidates, so threatening domestic policy, as well), the boy worries about not revealing where his talents come from. That, and the camerawoman's posterior. (Oh, Godard, you rascal.) Social change and governmental policy are all theatrics; there is no longer a line between the authentic and the contrived.

The last third of the film shifts completely from any pretense of traditional storytelling and becomes full-on collage. This, one could surmise, is really the meat of Film Socialisme. Godard begins the segment with footage of the cruise ship landing, as if to suggest that we, as an audience, have finally arrived at our destination (being, of course, all in this together; entertainment is the truest form of socialism in current times). Using archival footage from news networks, historical records, and old motion pictures, Godard lays out a history of war and oppression, touching again on Palestine and Nazi Germany, as well as military dictators like Stalin and Franco, not to mention dialing all the way back to the origins of civilization itself. Title cards and an alternating male/female narrative team (those parrots from the opening?) explain, in their way, what we are seeing, working with the visuals to build to a crescendo of stimuli. The last words of the movie are "No Comment." Again, this is loaded with meaning. It could be that Godard has no more to say and no intention of explaining himself, or perhaps it's really a comment on the film audience at large. We passively view our blockbusters without ever asking what price we pay as a species by not demanding more of what is easily the most influential and potent art form of the past 100 years.

Make no mistake, Film Socialisme is not going to be to everyone's liking. It's intentionally hard work, and it requires the viewer to accept and go with its strange and often maddening flow. The closest thing I can liken it to in recent memory are the seeming tangents of Malick's Tree of Life [review], the segments showing the universe being born and developing that on first blush might come off as the worst kind of self-indulgence. In both cases, however, for those who want to give it a go, there is far deeper and satisfying treasures to be found by jumping in and digging through the primordial ooze. You might not "get" either the first time--I just wrote 1,000 words about Film Socialisme and I don't even really get it--but nothing that is truly enriching ever really is. Getting there requires a little faith in the artist, and also in yourself.