Elena (Thursday, May 3, 2012) (44)

Andrei Zvyagintsev's Elena is a quiet psycho-sexual drama reminiscent of films by Hitchcock, Hawks and Wilder. That's a hell of a group to compare any contemporary work to, but this is no ordinary film. The story revolves around the title character Elena (Nadezhda Markina), a woman in her late-60s who works as the caretaker/housekeeper for Sergei (Aleksei Rozin) a millionaire in Moscow and is also married to him. She lives in separate, modest quarters from him in his modernist condo flat, wakes him in the morning, makes him food and sleeps with him when the mood is right (in the middle of the day).

She's from a poor suburb where her grown son and his family still live in a housing project. They are struggling to get by and rely on money she brings them when she visits them by train several times a month. Her son is unemployed and claims he can't get a job, but she believes he's not trying hard enough. She asks Sergei for help in getting a letter of reference for her grandson to go to university, thus avoiding military service, but the old man is not interested in helping her.

He doesn't see why he should help her family. She feels like he's being too rigid and points out that Sergei takes wonderful financial care of his own daughter, a twenty-something clubgirl who has never worked a day in her life. When Sergei says that he's going to change his will to leave her and her family out in the cold, Elena realizes she's running out of time and running out of options, and that she might have to murder him before he gets to talk to his lawyer.

The film is very serene and deliberate. Elena and Sergei, both older and in no particular rush in general speak to one another respectfully and carefully. The beautiful cinematography, by Mikhail Krichman, washes the interiors in a cool blue-gray that makes everything seem peaceful (if a bit morose). This is a psycho-drama in the grand tradition of the genre, with the action taking place much more in Elena's head than on screen in physical action.

On top of this, for the score, Zvyagintsev uses a Philip Glass's 1995 Symphony No. 3, a very typical minimalist work that is slow and easy. It's an interesting choice not only for tone, but because it, like most of Glass' music, is as much about the space between notes as it is about the sounds themselves. This creates a lovely parallel between Elena's anguish and the score.

The curious relationship between Elena and Sergei is unsettling and interesting. It is clear that they are married, however they share almost no bright, outward love together. They clearly care for one another, but she really does feel more like his nurse and housekeeper than his wife or lover. It seems in this new Russia -- where a man can be a millionaire and lives in a beautifully appointed building, whose wealth comes from some unknown, possibly unethical business -- people are separated from their natural state of family and love. Both characters seem to be stretching traditional family life to its extreme in this inhuman world. As much as this post-Communist world has freed people to do and think as they wish, something has been lost as people become isolated and relationships are formal and unfeeling.

There are not a lot of moving parts to this film. It is very efficient, though never seems rushed. It is sympathetic to both Elena and Sergei, even considering their opposite goals. Near the end of the film, we see Elena's newborn grandchild laying on its back in the middle of a bed. It looks helpless and isolated in a sea of bedspread. This baby is who everyone in this film is: somewhat immobile, unable to help himself, in a desperate struggle to make the next move.

Stars: 3.5 of 4

Keyhole (Tuesday, April 10, 2012) (35)

Guy Maddin is the most interesting and best Canadian filmmaker working today and easily one of the best filmmakers from any region. I have a never-ending respect for David Cronenberg and Atom Egoyan, two directors whose work in the past has been spectacular, but Maddin has eclipsed them and developed a new style and visual language along the way. His films fall somewhere between narrative and experimental works on a filmic spectrum, frequently using documentary elements and always dealing with nostalgia and subconscious through a Brechtian formalist language. He walks the line of being fun and funny, but also uncanny, sometimes uncomfortable and frequently difficult.

His latest work, Keyhole, is all of these things. It's not really a linear narrative film, not totally experimental (despite being commissioned by the Wexner Center for the Arts at Ohio State), but also totally weird and unsettling. All the while it's thrilling, exuberant and firmly sarcastic. It is a film told in a "fugue state" style, making elements disconnected, obscured and abstract. It is wonderful and fascinating.

The story of the film is really secondary to the formalism and thematic content, but deals with a noir-like plot involving a man named Ulysses (Jason Patric), who returns to his home after a botched job with his underworld lackeys. He brings with him a young beauty, Denny (Brooke Palsson), and a bound young man, Manners (David Wontner), who seems to be his son. In the house on the upper floor is his wife, Hyacinth (Isabella Rossellini), and an old man who claims to be her father, guardian of all memories in the house. This geezer walks around, out of shape, in his underwear, dragging with him a heavy chain that seems to keep him tied to the building itself. Ulysses must struggle to get to his wife, deal with Old Man Memory and figure out what to do with his two prisoners.

As a dream-essay, the film doesn't move along in an A-to-B fashion, but jumps from one thing to another in a sometimes bizarre or difficult way. Characters don't seem to be really alive or dead, but suspended in mid-flight between two places (waking and sleeping, still and dynamic, past and present). Just like a dream, there are small circular stories connected with other circular stories, making the film slightly more difficult to follow... though if you sit back and enjoy it, everything becomes clear. (Part of this structure is that there is a somewhat Marxist element of having no internal dynamism, making it hard to know what is next or when it will end. This is certainly a challenge, but a thrilling and, ultimately, a rewarding one.)

From one scene to the next, Ulysses goes from hard-boiled B-movie noir star to a nervous everyman dealing with his memories and his demons. The house becomes his subconscious, his journey though it, like his classical namesake, becomes his psychoanalysis. The eponymous keyhole in the door to the upstairs bathroom (where Hyacinth and Old Man Memory seem to live) serves the purposes of being a small view into a distant recess of memory as well as a hole through which Ulysses can pull threads (literally). The reason the story feels choppy, difficult and strange is because it's Ulysses' therapeutic journey. My shrink father once said that psychoanalysis is the act of taking down a wall, brick by brick, and then rebuilding it slowly with better mortar... that seems pretty apt here in the case of this house.

Aside from all of this elegant presentation and plot, what makes Maddin's films so clever and enjoyable is how technically interesting they are. He's a master of juxtaposition, editing and pacing. Images are frequently on screen for seconds or only several frames, signaling something in our brains, but remaining distant enough that we feel we are just short of making a connection. Characters come and go through dark canals and obscured spaces, making the act of watching one of his films (this one in particular) a game, but one with no rules that are easy to win. It's a new kind of filmmaking, a doorway to more avante-garde material, reminiscent of the work of Bruce Connor, but shown through the prism of something almost familiar and narrative. It's difficult to define, but thrilling to behold.

Stars: 4 of 4

Bullhead (Saturday, February 18, 2012) (13)

I'm not really convinced that the story told in Michael Roskam's film Bullhead is at all scientifically possible, but it's a pretty enjoyable one, if a bit silly. The film opens with Jacky (Matthias Schoenaerts), an absolute hulk of a Belgian man, posing naked in the mirror after a shower. He has muscles everywhere. He then goes to a mini-fridge and gets vials of some drug and takes out a syringe. We then jump to an exchange between a group of Flemish cattlemen talking about how the cops are arresting some of their brethren who use hormones to increase the size of their cows.

We then see a flashback to how when Jacky was a kid his father bought growth hormone for his cattle. One day, the daughter of the hormone dealer caught Jacky's eye and before he could make a move on her, her brother, chased Jacky away and ended up effectively castrating him with rocks (ouch!). It seems that from that point on, Jacky was injected with growth hormone (human, we have to assume, rather than bovine) until he got to be the enormous size he is in the present.

Now, years later, the girl who once interested Jacky as a kid is his main fascination. He begins to stalk her (somehow she doesn't know who he is) and as the cops begin to figure out that he's involved in a massive cow doping cartel, the woman finds out who he is as well.

One interesting aspect to the story is that the setting is some place right on the Flemish and Wallonian border and we see clearly that the two peoples hate each other. Only a few of the Flemish speak French and only a few of the Walloons speak Flemish (Jacky is Flemish and his lady obsession is Walloon). I feel like we don't see this schism in film very frequently and it's interesting. Both parts make the whole, but they don't trust and resent each other. This brings up a clever link between the split duality of Belgium and, of course, the duality of testicles (ooof - that's a bit silly, isn't it?).

There is a great Belgian look to the film that I love. It has the stark reality of blues, grays and browns that have become synonymous with other Belgian filmmakers, like the Dardenne brothers, or the blessed Chantal Akerman. I guess it's this natural quality that is most compelling about the film, but also it's biggest problem.

In the end, the film is a rather over-the-top light action flick, certainly with more ennui and more pathos. Many details of the story fall apart because they seem like deus-ex-machina devices rather than plausible elements (such as how Jacky's childhood bully is now in a hospital mostly paralyzed and unable to speak due to an accident or how the grown woman doesn't know who Jacky is). The story begins to fray at the edges with all these silly parts.

I like this film, but I admit it has some problems. It's a pretty good story and the idea of a man-giant being ball-less and miserable because he's less of a man is interesting. Perhaps the bovine and human hormone link is too neat and tidy for me. Still, it's well made and has some compelling moments.

Stars: 3 of 4

Sleeping Beauty (2011) (Wednesday, January 25, 2012) (145)

Julia Leigh's sex rompy Sleeping Beauty should not be confused with Catherine Breillat's politico-Freudian film The Sleeping Beauty (the definite article is very important). The two films have very little to do with one another, aside from both having female protagonists. In the Leigh, Lucy (the super fetching Emily Browning) is a college student who works several odd jobs to make her way. She does medical experiments, works as a copy girl in an office, waits tables and turns tricks in nightclubs and for private clients.

One day she is hired by a fancy lady for a strange and secretive group of rich men in some elite and sex-focussed supper club. She's told to strip down to her underwear and pour wine in the fancy dining room, for which she's paid very well. The next day she is served a sedative and asked to lay down naked in bed while one of those old men uses her (with no penetration, leaving no scars, of course) until she wakes up. It's not clear what this sexual servitude means or what exactly happens, but, again, she's well paid for her work.

This film is what happens when someone only looks at Pasolini's Salo from a superficial perspective. In fact several of the set-ups seem to be taken directly from that film (particularly the post-dinner brandy session where two women curl up on the floor showing their anuses). I have to admit, I don't really get this film or what it's trying to say. Unlike with the Pasolini, there doesn't seem to be a strong political underpinning to the narrative, although the supper club members are clearly super rich and powerful. It seems that Leigh blushes a bit too much and doesn't go as far or as strong as PPP went in his film, as she shows only fleeting nudity and tries to remain decent as much as possible (though I'm sure Browning's contract also had something to do with that).

This is a lightly erotic film, but really only inasmuch as it shows a young woman with a tiny body in little or no clothes doing some near-sexual things (there's really no fucking, per se). This is yet another example of how filmmakers trade ellipsis for meaning, hoping you'll do most of the heavy lifting on your own. The problem here is that the story is so incomplete there is no way to fully understand it.

We can guess that the men in the supper club are rich masters of the universe and they have these strange interactions with young girls as a way of disproving their mortality, but we really have nothing to base this idea on aside from circumstance. Furthermore, as much as these men seem to be bourgeois and monied, Lucy and her peers are economically unknown, so there's not really a full Marxist argument being made.

Technically this is a totally gorgeous film (aside from Browning's own technical gorgeousness). The cinematography by Geoffrey Simpson is crisp yet dreamy. The costumes and production design (by Shareen Beringer and Annie Beauchamp, respectively) are perfect for the content (or suggested content) of the film and create lush and glamorous interiors.

I feel like Leigh is on the edge of having a very good movie here, but there is just too much left untold.

Stars: 2.5 of 4

The Skin I Live In (Saturday, October 22, 2011) (92)

This is a very nice film, beautifully executed and directed by Almodóvar and a real pleasure to watch. I think it's about the creation and consumption of art as much as anything. It's a loose update of the Frankenstein story, but as a contemporary psychodrama. The narrative gets a bit lost in the middle act, but it all ties up nicely. I like how it functions as an exploitation film, a virtual ode to Val Lewton, and I don't really think it has much more depth than that. It's a bit of a trifle. I think it's Almodóvar's best work since some of his early films, possibly because it's so uncomplicated by other noise his recent works have been surrounded by. Overall a very good, but not perfect work.

Stars: 3 of 4

The Housemaid (Saturday, January 22, 2011) (3)

The Housemaid is a weird movie. I have come to expect from contemporary Korean films that the directors sometimes like to shock and surprise us, but this movie takes that idea and really runs with it. At times I felt like writer-director Im Sang-Soo was telling an interesting psycho-sexual drama and at time it felt like he was poking fun at us for thinking it was serious, while he made a silly drama similar to a soft-core porno you'd see on late night cable. This isn't to suggest the film is pornographic, but the dramatic plot line was silly and forced throughout.

Hoon and his wife Haera are super rich and have a gigantic house. They have one old housekeeper, Nami, and are looking to hire an assistant for her to help with things around the house. They find Eun-yi, a young woman, and hire her to help out taking care of their young daughter and do smaller tasks like taking food and wine to different parts of the home (because when you're rich you hire people to do that for you). In a short time Eun-yi and Hoon are having an affair. Nami, never happy with her young assistant, finds out about the affair and tries to let Haera know about it in the most dignified way possible. All hell breaks lose when Eun-yi gets pregnant and Nami and Haera's plans crumble as Korean family pride (and blackmail) becomes more important than anything else.

One thing that Sang-Soo does very well here is that he creates a beautiful world of unparalleled luxury with gigantic spaces (in the enormous home) decorated in the finest woods and marbles. The interiors are sumptuous and the costumes work with them beautifully. At times I was reminded of the richness of the rooms and spaces in Luca Guadagnino's recent I Am Love. At time same time, though, there is a coldness and antiseptic quality to the cleanness of everything - which, of course is important here as we realize this rich family is much more superficial, fragile and even toxic than we had originally thought.

There has been a recent trend in the past few years of movies about maids (well, maybe it even goes back to Mary Poppins) and how powerful and manipulative a force they can be. They are like domineering mothers, but are not part of the family and are paid to be there, or not be there. They know all that goes on in their houses, generally don't meddle with the family business, but can find out important information by simply doing their normal job. In many ways Nami is reminiscent of Catalina Saavedra's maid character in Sebastian Silva's The Maid. She wants to be part of the family and thinks of herself as such, she's reluctant to admit she needs help and is such a master of the home that she knows how to control people who step foot in it.

This film is about how maids have become Freudian nightmares. They are motherly and caring (assuming you pay them), but also can be sexual or sexually threatening. They are uber-mothers - not part of the family (and you can have sex with them if you want), but are hard to get rid of if you don't like them.

The finale of this film goes much too far and involves flames and high-wire hijinks (almost literally). It is a shame this happens as there is a lot of interesting stuff to go through in the film about male-female relationships and the cost of companionship and love. Sang-soo goes for a rather big, cheap spectacle at the end (and throughout, really) and undermines the good stuff that we saw before. This is a shame because this could have been a very interesting and beautiful film otherwise.

Stars: 2.5 of 4