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Our Song (2000)
A quietly great coming of age story
`Our Song' gives us the lives of the three teenagers Lanisha, Maria and Joycelyn - best girlfriends hanging at the end of summer. Adolescent summer - even if we don't know the signals and landmarks of this particular terrain, Crown Heights, Brooklyn - is/was the same for us all. A lazy respite from the pressures and tumult of school. Welcome heat and idleness.
But if this experience of adolescence is universal, the inner city of the 90s is a different place than most of us know - maybe as foreign a country as any. Young bodies carving new silhouettes...beckoning new territory...the maze towards adulthood. The young mind coming into itself, speaking for itself, saying this is who I am, this is who I want to try to be. It is/was always thus. But this is how it plays out in Brooklyn in the late 90s.
Jim McKay is the writer/director of this film project but he acknowledges all who have shouted suggestions at him. The opening title slide `A film by' seems to list everyone in the universe. It's a gesture but by the end of the film, we know it to be a genuine one. [The closing titles also have some of the most on-the-money and appreciative credits I've read.] The vivid sound recording by Jan McLaughlin deserves to be especially noted. McKay's a modest leader who knows who is telling this story - it's his three graces Lanisha, Maria and Joycelyn. They're the real thing, their interactions have the fire of real friendship and the focus of reality. This ain't no music video shorthand telling of teenage life. It has the seriousness of the long unblinking stare.
Hanging out with them, we don't quite feel included but we do feel privileged to be listening in. These are real voices speaking with plainness about the crises and dullness of daily life. We are witness to the modern math of teenage life - how its problems are interpreted, calculated and summed and solved. Small scenes illustrate large thoughts throughout. Lanisha hangs with her dad at his security job - it's the only way she gets to spend time with him. We see the love that exists between them but also the failures of family and fatherhood. In a connected scene, Lanisha defends her dad to her mom, and we see how desperately she needs to love them both and for them to love her in return. Later, the three friends lay in the dark sharing visions and dreams - and we remember how crazy/funny kids are and more tragically, how realism hammers idealism these days. And at the end, Maria simply walking down the street is a short story in itself. We see her gather up the courage to hold all her fears and doubts at bay. She demonstrates for us the strength one needs to have to be able to embrace the fragility that makes life livable.
`Our Song's greatest gift is that we really feel deeply the terribly ephemeral nature of friendship - how, one day, alive and enlivening, that intimacy can, in the next, just turn and drift away. It's awful, but that's just the way it is, isn't it?
Yi ge dou bu neng shao (1999)
Zhang Yimou at his best again
6 March 2000
"Not One Less"
It's the first great film of this year for me. `Not One Less' is storytelling at its dead straightest - most like the work of the contemporary Iranians Makhmalbaf and Kiarostami but also directly connected to the great Neorealists DeSica, Rosselini and Bunuel. All revel in telling culturally specific stories that reflect universal human experiences that are resonant across all time and place. But as I sat there, freshest on my mind was David Lynch's `The Straight Story.' Both Lynch and Zhang take us on a small journey that reflects a world's worth of living. Both show us that harrowing experience and heroism, seemingly small scale in their films, can be writ in large and commanding script across the lives of ordinary people.
Shi Xiangsheng's script is a rural fable based on his own story set in remote China, Hebei - the dry high plains, an undoubtedly stiffening existence. It's shot as beautifully as any of Zhang's films - he's a deft colorist, one of the great painterly directors in cinema (see `Ju Dou' and `Raise the Red Lantern'). The children are crimson-cheeked with complexions warmed and toasted by the unfiltered sun - but they will surely, eventually become worn and parched like their elders, Teacher Gao and Mayor Tian. We see an honest poverty here in great detail. The film's camerawork lets every detail seep into us, allowing us to feel the film's atmospherics and making us thirst in its arid heat and dust. (When the 26 children share 2 cans of warm Coca Cola after a long and hard day, we, too, want to get in line for our sip.)
Thirteen-year-old Wei Minxhi is dragged along by Mayor Tian to the village' s ramshackle one-room schoolhouse to meet Teacher Gao. She is to become the school's substitute teacher for one month while Gao leaves to tend to his ailing mother. He can't in good conscience leave this child to shepherd his children but he is without a choice - it's the kind of hard rationalism that is part of everyday life here. Before leaving, he counsels her sternly and provisions her with only a ragged lesson book and one stick (and only one stick) of chalk for every day he will be gone. He shows her the narrow bed in the adjoining room that she will share with 3 boarding students.
Teacher Gao is an old man who has suffered a lot of dedicated and dictated poverty in order to improve the lot of his village's children. We come to know his commitment to his work even at this stage of his life when he warns her that conditions are hard in this village and that the vicissitudes of life weigh very heavily on the children here. When he says he has already lost 10 students you know he has felt the loss of every single one. He commands her to keep the body of his school together and that when he returns, he wants to see every one of his students present - and not one less.
`Not One Less' is about young Teacher Wei's struggle to meet his simple challenge. We see immediately that she has more reluctance than skill or gumption for this task. But in a culture that expects obedience, she has no recourse. And nowhere else to go. She is more like a sullen older sister than a teacher. And because they are children, the students begin to test her a little. They aren't bratty kids, just rambunctious and resistant to the discipline of schoolwork. She hasn't a clue about how to make them work, so she just writes the lesson on the board and posts herself against the door, barring any escape. Her handwriting is neat and orderly but as the film progresses, we come to see that Teacher Wei is only a little more schooled than her charges.
The great thing about `Not One Less' is its unstinting perspective on the innocence and naiveté that only a child lives in. Teacher Wei and these children are completely guileless, without a window on the wide world, and have none of the knowledge or calculation for the simplest complexities of modern life. The film's crisis is that the class troublemaker, eleven-year-old bumpkin Zhang Huike, leaves unannounced for the city so he can earn money for his destitute family. Wei feels the absolute fear of her failure to keep her pledge and is desperate to go and find young Zhang. Figuring out how to get to the city to find him - for her and these children, it might as well be a search for the Holy Grail. It seems as fraught with myth and legend. Yet she, in her naiveté, is undaunted. Many schemes are attempted and when each fails, she just begins walking, having no idea how far it is or how long it will take her or what lies ahead when she gets there. She just knows she must find him.
Her journey is the quest of her young life just as Alvin Straight's is the culminating quest of his life. It is a defining act for both. There are no earth-shattering twists of plot to keep from you. It is the unfolding of a redemptive story, a boldly honest portrait of a world away from our experience and a young girl's attempt to navigate it with all her will and perseverance and naiveté - and only that - to sustain her. In the end, we feel we have been somewhere we've never been before and, perhaps, learned something that we had long forgotten. It is the singular power of cinema to transport us this way, to jack us directly into a net of experience we can feel so deeply in our hearts.
J'ai pas sommeil (1994)
A small miracle of filmmaking
"I Can't Sleep" opens with a shot of policemen laughing in a helicopter above Paris, a scene Denis says has no narrative function. The helicopter doesn't blow up or crash (as we half-expect, so Hollywood-trained we have become). We never learn why they are laughing, and it never comes up. but it immediately sets a tone of ordinariness about something that is so freighted with allusion - that police work is all dark violence and angst and frayed tension. Police work also includes ordinary moments between two people.
"I Can't Sleep" follows three sets of characters who come to be loosely linked. First is Daïga (Katerina Golubeva, an unknown with an exotic resemblance to Michelle Pfeiffer) who drives away from Lithuania and into the Paris ring in her boxy, smoking car. She has only vague ideas about what she wants other than to let Paris wash over her life. for the time being, she finds a tenuous niche in the émigré community working indifferently as a maid in a second rate hotel. Among the hotel's residents is Camille (another unknown, Richard Courcet as a drag hoodlum with a brooding boredom) who, with his friends and lovers, leads us through the gay subculture. And there is Theo, Camille's good brother who struggles the struggle of the unFrench emigrant class in neoconservative France. As we stay with these characters, we see a Paris that isn't a backdrop to romantic comedies like "Forget Paris" or "French Kiss." In the course of "I Can't Sleep" we get a sense of the shape of some of the other kinds of lives that are lived in Paris. We begin to move to the film's rhythm. At intervals are arresting set pieces that attenuate reaction. These subtle departures don't break the film's basic form, but they do break the mood of the expected. We get to laugh and be aware that we are laughing. We marvel at small things and know we are marvelling at them.
In "I Can't Sleep," newspaper headlines scream about a sociopath who is going around murdering and robbing solitary old women (based on a true case). Denis illustrates for us what we know to be true - that mostly people are unaffected. Everyone's lives continue to be lived routinely, each with their own personal life traumas that fill their days. By chance, the murders intersect our characters' lives and we see their reactions to it. There aren't any obvious cues for us. We watch Daïga as she learns who the murderer is. What she does and what happens as a result is less important than the almost wordless scene they share when she follows him. Something essential passes between them, but what that is is up to you. It's as much based on the experience you can bring to it and what abstractions you can add to the moment. Likewise, Theo's face is a dispassionate mask - it begs us on to project our reactions to his life circumstances.
This is a tenuous connection, a lot for Denis to ask of her audience, and it may not engage many or even most of those sitting out there. In a way, you have to have a ready state of mind to watch it. It reminds me most of Kryzysztof Kieslowski's "Red" and the conversations I had about it. More than a few friends said they couldn't suspend their qualms about the believability of the relationship between Jean-Louis Trintignant's character and Irene Jacob's. It was too far from convention (age difference) and lacked a believable basis (he was just a weird old guy, and what did they share anyway?). But for me, I loved it because his character seemed the tragic sum of all the characters I have seen Trintignant play (especially in "A Man and A Woman," "Z," "The Conformist" among others). Here was the same good man, now ruined at an advanced age, and I was meeting him again. I felt I understood him fundamentally, knew what he had gone through to reach this sour moment in his life and because of this, it was easy for me to project my understanding onto Jacob's character. I thought, "Of course she loves him."
Anyway, "I Can't Sleep" is, at its best moments, a collage of sometime odd elements that is somehow perfectly composed (like in "Paris, Texas" and "Wings of Desire," and in Kieslowski, especially, "Red" and some of the Dekalog episodes like "Thou shalt not bear false witness"). One can't explain why it seems right, but everyting certainly does feel just right - the film is conjured from single notes that together comprise a whole score. There is what seems like extraneous stuff in there. You wonder how it fits, what it really means. Yet, it nevertheless feels right once the whole has been digested.
La vie rêvée des anges (1998)
An elegiac view of the nature of friendship
At last night's preview screening for its members, the pre-festival opened with Erick Zonca's "The Dreamed Life of Angels." It's an elegiac view of the nature of friendship that Zonca's filmmaking juices up in a fresh way. The film's two friends, Isa and Marie, meet at their McJobs as seamstresses and become friends haphazardly, without real connection or emotion. As they strive to survive - sometimes with urgency, more often with ennui - small dependencies form between them. At first, Isa lives out of Marie's hand for the simple necessities of food and shelter, but eventually it is Isa who gets a grip on the situation and tries to sustain Marie through the emotional turmoil of her life. It's not the storied stuff of soulmates finding their missing halves, but it has the feel of actuality, a much more hard-won narrative achievement.
Isa [a definitive performance by Elodie Bouchez, who we may barely recognize from Andre Techine's attentive study "Wild Reeds" and Yolande Zauberman's bleak "Clubbed to Death"] is the one with the history and experience of the road behind her. With her pack on her back, she looks toughened but not defeated. She seems to have taken the road's lessons well and it gives her a spiritual beauty that radiates through her chopped hair and scrubbed face. Marie [Natacha Regnier] has never left wet, grey Lille and has barely thought about doing anything about that fact. She has a soft physical beauty she does not recognize or care about. We don't know what she cares about. Life has shrugged her off so far and she is no aptitude or inclination to fight back - it has only taught her to hide. She's not an innocent but she has only a scattershot anger in her defensive arsenal, an anger that she turns on the world, on Isa and eventually on herself. She reminds me so much of Vincent Gallo's Billy in "Buffalo '66."
Marie is housesitting a flat for a mother and daughter who are in the hospital after a car accident. This is a mere detail to Marie - she has no curiosity about them or their fate. It's just a housesit to her. Isa finds the young daughter Sandrine's journal and while reading through it, finds herself becoming closer and closer to her as she and Marie slowly drift apart. She finally goes to the hospital to visit the friend she was never met and finds Sandrine lying comatose. There's really nothing Isa can do for her. They have nothing between them except what Isa understands about Sandrine from this journal. Yet, we know there is more than that superficiality that connects them. Sandrine and Isa are lost girls, just as Isa and Marie are a different kind of lost girls. It comes to Isa to continue the journal for Sandrine
and for herself. It is the film's spare gesture of hope.
While Isa fights the existential battle to stay afloat and improve her lot bit by tiny bit, Marie's life begins to crumble - first, at the edges and then wholesale. She just drifts without a plan. Her anger is her keel through the employment world. Accidentally, she meets the spoiled Chris [one of my favorite young actors, Gregoire Colin], a careless big fish is this Lille pond. It's obvious to Isa [and to us] that he is just going to use her up and toss her aside, but Marie's infatuation is blind to this reality. Marie should know better. Initially, she does know better. But she can't resist Chris. Charly, her menacingly large but sensitive other man, shows her a kinder face of love but Marie any of us for that matter] can't help herself. You can't resist it - The Other who makes your heart beat faster. It's the kind of love we hope is saving
but often is not.
It's a fascinating portrayal of a friendship's beginning, its growth and its end. There is something unmistakable French about it and, at the same time, unFrench. It's full of space; its pacing is devoid of the rhythm of American films and is opaque in that patented French way. But we are drawn in too - we are not just observers here. It's beautifully shot by Agnes Godard, Claire Denis's cinematographer on "I Can't Sleep" and "Nenette and Boni" among others. Her camera is so alive; she has the knack of capturing the interior quality of a character as well as anyone I can think of. I think it's in how she lights the scenes. Her films are subtly bright but still natural [maybe only a stop or a stop-and-a-half over] - so evenly lit that there is hardly a shadow, and certainly no dark places to hide. Zonca and the actors must know that every nuance is being recorded and that they have no choice but to find their character's souls in the frame. It's a stunning achievement for a first film.
Mizu no naka no hachigatsu (1998)
A quiet and assured vision of the end of adolescence
I don't want to overpraise 'Fishes in August' because I know this film won't reach everyone -- even if it should. But those of us who love it will love it in an absolute way. Its central character Kenji is so tenderly drawn -- it's as fine a portrait as there is of that awkward moment when an adolescent is trying so hard to attain his adulthood. 'Fishes in August' is quiet and well observed. You may not have lived the moments in your own life that unfold up on the screen, but the reality that the film creates comes very close to feeling like a fully inhabited experience.
Kenji is a quiet, solitary kid growing up in Chiba, in the industrial outskirts of Tokyo. His neighborhood and his family are likewise on the margins of the culture. They live a looser kind of life there - it is not the rigid, formal society we project as typically Japanese. In his 18th summer, Kenji seems to have done a good job of bringing himself up. His mother is no longer on the scene and his father, though respected, is nearly as nonexistent in his life. He seems to have grown up well despite a lack of help or guidance. But he has reached the age of adulthood without the skills to navigate it. He is adrift. He seems to know no other way but to live a fateful kind of life, a life of passive waiting, a waiting for his life to unfold. For now, he has somehow retained an innocence he no longer has any use for. He knows that it's time for the dissolution of his adolescence but has no idea how to go about it. He is a lamb. Or maybe a fish. He swims when he is confused or lonely. It is THE dependable calm in his life.
Kenji has too much time and undirected energy on his hands and has no idea what to do with either - except to burn them up swimming or riding his bike. His emotional maturity is emerging without his knowing what to do about it. He has a crush on Reiko but is helpless in Love's face. It's not so much that it is painful to watch his yearning and his attempts to express his emotions. It is that we know the pain of it too well ourselves, and it is with this knowingness in our deepest hearts that we watch him as helplessly.
First-time director Yoichiro Takahashi has such command of every element of every frame that you can't help but feel exhilaration at his filmmaking. You marvel over and over at how he is able to create a visual metaphor that echos the emotional moment of the scene. This is not decorative filmmaking. Takahashi composes scene after scene that is so fully realized...you thrill at seeing someone working at this level of accomplishment.