BLOCKBUSTER HISTORY: IT'S ALL IN YOUR HEAD

Every week this summer, we'll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend's wide releases. This week: Pixar's grand return to artistic greatness, Inside Out, goes inside the human brain to take one look at how our minds interact with our memories. Here is another such look.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind has been one of the most highly-regarded films of the 2000s virtually since the moment it first appeared on the scene in March, 2004, and I'm damned if I can come up with a reason to challenge that perception. It is, honestly, an example of exactly the kind of film that everybody wants every film to be. For it is genuinely conceptually audacious, one of the vanishingly minute number of movies made in the past 15 years to be actually, legitimately Like Nothing You've Ever Seen Before. And at the same time, it's so flawlessly executed that it feels less like a brand new idea being worked out for the first time, than a refinement of concepts and techniques that have been kicking around forever, waiting for their definitive treatment.

With any movie that is so generally flawless, it's hard to know quite where to start with it, so let's just start with the two incompatible personalities that met to produce the idea of the film. The story was by Charlie Kaufman, Michel Gondry, & Pierre Bismuth, the last of whom has no other contributions to film worth talking about, so for ease we'll think of this as primarily the collision of Kaufman and Gondry. The former was already the screenwriter of Being John Malkovich and Adaptation., two immaculately over-conceptual metamovies that spoke to an immense well of pensiveness and the terror of being alone; four years after Eternal Sunshine, Kaufman would write and direct Synecdoche, New York, which pretty much confirmed that his major fascination as an artist was the combination of perceptual mindfucking in service to a bleak, almost depressive concept of how the world works. Gondry, meanwhile, had only made one film - the Kaufman-scripted misfire Human Nature - but he had an extensive catalogue of music videos to his name that showed him to be a great visual fantasist with an impressive sense of using camera trickery as a form of playing with the medium, childishly having fun with visual representation almost aggressively disconnected from any sense of emotional rigor.

The combination of abject depression and flighty joyfulness should be baffling as all hell, but Eternal Sunshine profits immeasurably from having those two irreconcilable impulses driving it. Kaufman's morbidity concerning the basic hopeless of romantic relationships provides the emotional spine of one of the most insightfully sad explorations of the human drive for love since Annie Hall concluded that we need the eggs. Gondry's love of showy practical effects and dazzling post-production meant that this exploration could be achieved inside a movie whose insane structure, both narratively and visually, allows it to replicate the fluid, discontinuous process of thinking and remembering like literally no other coherent narrative film I can name

Such a complex topic gets the unabashedly complex treatment it deserves, beginning with a narrative structure that's almost impossible to parse until it's almost over; I clearly remember seeing it for the second time and having one of the biggest "ooooh, that's what that means" moments of my moviegoing life when I realised what the hell the first 17 minutes were all about. They are, for the record, the short story of how Joel Barish (Jim Carrey) decided one day, quite out of nowhere, that he needed to go to Montauk on this wintery day. On the train, he meets a woman with a bright orange coat and bright blue hair, Clementine Kruczynski (Kate Winslet), and they're both positive they've seen each other before. The best they can come up with is that Joel has probably shopped in the bookstore where Clementine works, which clearly isn't a satisfying answer. They enjoy each other's company so much that the return together to Clementine's apartment, and the film segues, invisibly enough for it to be confusing, to another point in time entirely, in the immediate aftermath of their breakup. As we'll eventually figure out, this is in fact a flashback. And we'll never figure out which if any of the film's 17th through 32nd minutes take place in reality, versus the ones that obviously take place inside Joel's memories.

For that is, of course, the film's hook: after two years of dating, Joel and Clementine had a terrible fight and broke up, after which she went to a company called Lacuna, Inc.* which specialises in erasing unwelcome memories. Joel only finds out about this after confronting the couple's friends, Carrie (Jane Adams) and Rob (David Cross), who reluctantly show him a card explaining to everybody who knows Clementine that she has absolutely no memories of Joel's existence, and no-one should ever speak to her about him. Aghast and distraught, Joel signs up to receive the very same treatment, and the rest of the movie, takes place on the night that Lacuna's top man, Stan (Mark Ruffalo), and its clearly not-top man, Patrick (Elijah Wood) come to Joel's apartment to erase Clementine, which he experiences in the form of out-of-order memories coming to the fore and then dissolving, either in clean fades to nothingness, or through perplexing, discontinuous destruction and collapse, as Joel finds that he treasures even his painful memories too much to part with them, and begins fighting the Lacuna techs.

Thus begins quite a hefty meditation on the value of relationships, even toxic and dysfunctional ones, and the importance of strong memories, even painful and humiliating ones. On one level, this is just a puzzle: we see Joel and Clementine's love grow, solidify, and die, all out of order, and the film insists on our actively paying attention to piece it all together and figure out the whys of it. But there are puzzles and there are puzzles, and Eternal Sunshine is absolutely not the sort of movie where the rewards stop the second we crack its mysteries. On the contrary, the very fact that this is all presented obscurely is one of the key ways that the film draws us in. It is a way that we are more tightly aligned with Joel's own feelings about the relationship, since we experience the jumble of memories in the order he does; we are thus placed in the position of trying to figure out what the hell is up with Clementine as well as he does. And yet, because we are an audience in a movie, and we get to be clear-eyed and not so hung up on stupid little nonsense as he is, we can pick up on all the thing she's saying and thinking and feeling that Joel didn't appreciate the first time around. It helps that both Carrey and Winslet give two of the best performances of the 2000s and maybe the best performance of their respective careers, and that Winslet in particular is energised by a vastly more complicated character. She is, after all, playing a woman who deliberately obscures her personality to avoid being hurt, as filtered through the self-centered memories of a man who was already too much of a sad romantic to see her clearly, and she's also providing enough in her body language and tone of voice to let us in the movie see the things that Joel can't. That's the other thing the fragmentary structure does: it demands we think very hard about what we're watching, so we can connect it to other fragments later, which invites us to have a much more sophisticated understanding of Clementine's own insides than Joel possesses.

Still, this is ultimately a film about Joel's experience of the relationship, and his experience of remembering the relationship even more. The cinematography (by Ellen Kuras), editing (by Valdís Óskarsdóttir), sound design (by Eugene Gearty), and directing are inseparably intertwined in creating a highly subjective experience, with the film itself breaking down and violating the basic rules of cinematic language in concert with Joel's loss of his memory; long before we know what's happening there are moments where the lighting blanks out and shots are cut together messily, foreshadowing the elimination of those moments, and as the film starts explaining what it's up to, those tricks and far more sophisticated ones pile up. Eternal Sunshine is a hard film to parse, and unlike most films that invents its own language, it doesn't ever have a moment where it explains its rules to us: it simply collapses in on itself, blurring moments visually and aurally, causing us a sense of dislocation as viewers of a movie that approximates Joel's dislocation as one of the core elements of his personality is removed while he witnesses it. It is one of the great marriages of content and style of the 21st Century.

It's so exhilarating to follow along as the film plays with these ideas that it's easy to forget that Eternal Sunshine ever moves outside Joel's head, though it spends quite a lot of time there. Some of this is quite brilliant, like the tiny moment nodding to people using Lacuna to forget children (I think) and lost pets, different traumas that the film acknowledges as equally hurtful to Joel's. Some of it is not; the subplots in which Stan is dating Lacuna's receptionist Mary (Kirsten Dunst), who has an obvious crush on company founder Dr. Mierzwiak (Tom Wilkinson), while Patrick is using his insider knowledge to date Clementine have always felt oddly lumpy to me, an attempt to do parallelism that the film doesn't require and can't do anything particularly useful with (I concede that this is not the consensus opinion). All of it is casual and roughly naturalistic, the better to counterpoint the abstract, imaginative, stylistically dizzy scenes inside of Joel's memories. That contrast between fantastic staging and realistic cinematography is the thing I always think of most about Eternal Sunshine; it is a movie that romanticises love and then views it with blunt clarity, and that mixture is exactly what helps the film to its ambiguously hopeful concluding thoughts.

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NO HAY BANDA

A review requested by Gabe P, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser.

Spoilers are going to be crawling up and down this post like ants. If you haven't seen Mulholland Dr., know that I'd give it a perfect 10/10, and if I were making a list of the films of the 21st Century that are essential viewing for anyone even moderately interested in the art form, this would be jockeying for very top spot.

There was a time when any discussion about David Lynch's magnificent Mulholland Dr. would automatically turn into an attempt to piece out exactly what the fuck is happening within it. Having been right in the thick of the film's original release in 2001, I took part in more than my fair share of such conversations, and I am pleased that, in the interevening 13 years and change, cinephile culture has arrived at two basic groups of theories that represent the consensus "solutions" of the movie's mysteries ("it's all a dream" and "it's two versions of the same story in alternate universes" - I much prefer the former, but the film mostly works the same either way), thus freeing us all to talk about anything else. For I cannot think of a film that more clearly demonstrates the truth of Roger Ebert's dictum that what a movie is about is less important than how it is about that thing. In fact, the how of Mulholland Dr. is almost totally inseparable from the what - it is a film that burns its artistic themes and believes about life deep into the bones of its story structure, its acting technique, its sound design, its editing. Unpack the gnarled narrative, and you find a potboiler about desperation among wannabe actresses. Unpack the aesthetic, and you find one of the best - no, fuck it, the best autocritique of cinema as a medium that has yet been made.

But just in the interest of having something to talk about, let's start with the plot. And I mean "plot" in its strictest sense: what events are depicted onscreen and in what order we see them. "Story" is a different matter. "Story", in Mulholland Dr., is puking its guts up behind the dumpster around back of a little coffee shop. What happens is that a woman (Laura Elena Herring, about as far as you can go on the Prestige-O-Meter from her 1990 feature debut, The Forbidden Dance - though not, actually, giving much better of a performance) survives a murder attempt that's interrupted by a car crash on Mulholland Dr., the cliff road overlooking Los Angeles from the north. She staggers away from the crash without her memory, and finds solace in an abandoned apartment; the next day, she's found by Betty (Naomi Watts, in her never-bettered starmaking role), who was coming to stay there at the invitation of her actress aunt, currently shooting a project in Canada. Betty herself wants to be an actress, but she finds herself dividing her time between job hunting and trying to help this mystery woman - who calls herself "Rita", after spotting the name on a Gilda poster - determine her own identity and figure out whether she's in any danger, as she clearly feels without being to articulate it. Meanwhile, a film director, Adam Kesher (Justin Theroux), is being leaned on hard by a mysterious cabal to cast an unknown named Camilla Rhodes as the lead in his picture, The Sylvia North Story. There are scattered scenes throughout in which characters who seem momentarily important simply evaporate away, sometimes after interacting with one of the two main threads of the story and sometimes not. Eventually, Betty and Rita track Rita's past back to a place called Club Silencio, where notional reality is shown to be a fake, and the film restarts itself as the story of Diane Selwyn (Watts), who is having a very rough time dealing with the fact that her girlfriend, Camilla Rhodes (Herring) has gotten the lead role that Diane wanted herself, apparently by fucking the director, Adam Kesher (Theroux).

There are a lot of things that the movie can be about, depending on how hard you want to run it through an analytical wringer, but the one thing it's always about is that motions pictures and the industry that produces them are toxic shit-holes of lies. And nowhere is that more evident than in the famously insoluble mystery. It would be trivially easy to re-edit the film using all the footage it contains and only the footage it contains in its present form, basically just swapping the concluding fifth of the movie (where Watts plays Diane) to the beginning, and in the blink of an eye you've made thoroughly comprehensible story: a woman is thrown over by her lover, so she hires a hitman to murder her; the night after the job is done she has a fantastic dream dripping with symbolism, in which she and her now-dead girlfriend lived the exact happy life she wanted, and she is herself a promising, desirable young star, though hints and details of her guilt keep nudging in. Awakening, she is so horrified that she kills herself, and her last thoughts are flashes of that pleasant dream. Now, that does require ignoring the fact that Mulholland Dr. was born a TV pilot for ABC that the network passed on (aghast that they hired David Lynch to make a David Lynch show for them, upon which he did so), which included none of the Watts-as-Diane material. But the film has been re-worked from the material originally worked into that pilot enough to make them distinctly unique properties even in the places where they overlap, so writing off the story's past life seems fair. Even necessary, given the amount of its plot that's all about writing off personal history that gets in the way of a pleasing reality.

The point of Mulholland Dr., of course, is that it does not make this one simple shift, and that proves to be all the difference. Instead of an almost boringly straightforward Freudian psychodrama, the film turns into a morass of almost unnavigable narrative mysteries, breaking down the idea that films represent some kind of Thing That Actually Happened by inviting the viewer to bring together all sorts of details that seem like the must be Important Clews - I mean, if they weren't important, then why would Lynch have included them? - only to find that most of what happens in Mulholland Dr. is baffling nonsense. You can do what I just did, and mentally re-edit the movie, to make it relatively easy piece of dream analysis where we know that we're picking apart the details of a symbolic dream. Or you can catalogue all the places where Rita seems to take over or recede from reality, and use those as evidence for how it's a film she's dreaming into existence in real time. Or you can leave the movie entirely and discard all of the random effluvia as detritus that would have been explored in the full TV series, and Lynch left it in just because it was fun and stylish, in which case you will forgive me for accusing you of being kind of boringly literal.

But no matter how you try to square Mulholland Dr., you're ultimately trying to compensate for the fact that David Lynch has handed you a broken movie. And since we are accustomed to movies being things that aren't broken, but only appear to be in the interests of shocking us, we busily set ourselves to the task of fixing it. This is our habit as viewers trained by Hollywood to watch Hollywood film. But really, isn't Lynch only actually saying, "this thing is broken - I broke it on purpose". Five years later, he'd be more explicit in doing the same thing with Inland Empire, which not only breaks cinematic structure, but cinematic form,* recklessly chopping up hideous digital video footage into a frenzied slurry of anti-cinema. That film took place in Hollywood, too, which is one of the closest things Mulholland Dr. has to a tell. The other is its lynchpin scene at Club Silencio, in which sound and editing march right up and announce themselves: do you hear how a record soundtrack can lie to you, the film asks, and do you see how dissolves can be used to make you think that discontinuous motion is continuous? It is the equivalent of a magician who confidently states "I'm going to trick you now", and then does so.

The two most important developments in the plot - Betty and Rita's sexual encounter, and the unlocking of the blue box that collapses the Betty/Rita plot, by eliminating Betty completely and consuming Rita - are both preceded by moments where the film openly breaks itself, in fact. Club Silencio leads directly into the latter; the former is shortly preceded by a moment in which Rita's panic causes the film image to double and overlap itself, a rupture of reality as intense as any in the 35 years separating Mulholland Dr. from Ingmar Bergman's Persona. And then, in the cheekiest movie reference in a film saturated with them, their lovemaking is followed by a variation of the classic "Persona shot". So it's not like all this is an accident.

Like Persona, Mulholland Dr. isn't just a breakdown of the sacred rule of narrative filmmaking, that the viewer should never realise that they're watching constructed reality. It's a breakdown of form that mirrors the breakdown of personality that its plot - in whatever interpretation or lack of interpretation we want to describe that plot - depicts. The film itself is having a psychotic split from reality, in effect. Whatever that reality might be: there are at least three "realities" in Mulholland Dr., leading off with the banal, cheery reality of Betty's plotline, with the corny dialogue and campy acting that dominate it, the shiny, sparkly clothes she wears, the sexualised parody of the stock "some nobody gives a dynamo reading, is discovered and made famous" scenario, and the fact that her fucking name is "Betty". We know Lynch; we've seen Blue Velvet; we get that he likes travestying '50s tropes by exaggerating them and filling them full of rot and perversity. So the "Betty" third of Mulholland Dr. is easy to read as a joke. But it's maybe not so easy to read the "Adam" plot the same way, with its menacing lighting and quavering Angelo Badalamenti score, its terrifying dwarf puppetmaster played by Michael J. Anderson, whom Lynch employed in Twin Peaks to let us know in the most disturbing way possible that the gum we like was going to come back in style. Since we know that we're watching a Lynch film, we're ready for the darkness, the screeching horror injected into banal spaces, the migraine-inducing flickering light. And Mulholland Dr. comes along and wipes it away just like it does the corny scenes with Betty. And what does that leave us with? The plain style and grit (I gather that the new footage used to complete the pilot was on a different stock for practical reasons, but the texture of the newer material is certainly less polished than the rest, whatever the cause) of the "Diane" sequence, the "real" sequence, the "explanation". Which Mulholland Dr. also includes in its collapse of signifiers and narrative clarity near the end.

The idea behind Mulholland Dr. isn't that some movies are realer than others; it's that movies are constructs designed by liars. Ever since he smashed in a TV to kick off Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, Lynch's movies have all been some kind of commentary on the unreliability of classic cinematic forms - yes, even the sedate The Straight Story, which depicts all the moments that most movies cover in a dissolve or montage, and barely cares about its nominal dramatic stakes - it's just that Mulholland Dr. is the one where he actually did it in the context of movie stars and movie-making. The film's slantwise namesake, Sunset Blvd., made waves in 1950 by reveling in the fact that the people who made movies were selfish, greedy, arrogant pricks; a half-century later, that baton had been picked up by many people in many places, but virtually nobody had ever done a better job than Lynch and his note-perfect crew of extending that bilious observation to the movies themselves, which are here supposed to be nothing but the natural extension of the broken minds involved in making them. It's there in the soundtrack, full of misleading and confused audio cues; it's there in Peter Deming's intense cinematography that's all shadows and sugary sunlight, pushing our mood in directions not determined by the script; it's there in Mary Sweeney's elusive editing, stitching together moments with the illusion of connectivity; it's there in Jack Fisk's romanticised and patently artificial production design.

In Mulholland Dr., a movie can be a comforting and optimistic lie; it can be a horrifying and upsetting lie; it can be a sad lie; it can be a confrontational lie designed to make us furious at the pretentious dick who made it just to mess with our heads. But it cannot not be a lie. That is its essential nature. And the film's beauty, its intellectually gripping complexity, its slippery and unpredictable performances, all make it a pleasure to have it lie to us, to calmly assert how much more intelligent it knows itself to be than we are.

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TARR BÉLA HAS A WHALE OF A TIME

Funny to say about a movie whose immensely cryptic plot can best be summed up as "humanity dances on the brink of cosmic destruction and lashes out violently in desperation", whose characters are almost all nameless townsfolk except for the protagonist who becomes more unknowable the longer we spend time with him, and whose average shot length is a dumbfounding 3.7 minutes - that's a minute long than Sátántangó, y'all - but I'm pretty confident in saying that Werckmeister Harmonies from 2000 is Tarr Béla's easiest movie to watch and process. Which is not something that most people coming blind to the film would be prone to say; indeed, it was not at all the thing I said some years ago when Werckmeister Harmonies was my own first encounter with cosmically-minded Hungarian with the fetish for glacial pacing and languid camera movements.

The thing is, though, and this is easy to lose sight of in conversations about tracking shots and pointedly empty acting and symbolic cetaceans, is that Werckmeister Harmonies is - or can be, rather, if you let it - an extraordinarily pleasurable experience to watch. Not unlike Sátántangó itself, the way it's structured is so modular, with every new shot functioning as a mini-movie (some of which, you understand, are still ten minutes long), it begins to build a kind of fever-dream, anything goes momentum which makes it skim by faster and in a shorter feeling time than anything this slow and long (nearly two and a half hours, with either 37 or 39 shots - I forgot to count for myself) should remotely be able to achieve. Meanwhile, those individual marathon-length takes tend to be so complex and involving and engaging, they somewhat cease to register as as singular tracking shots that therefore insist upon their own length; it's more like being plunged into a vibrant, tremendously present human moment. The film's setting is vague, but the way Tarr and his six camera operators (including his frequent cinematographer Medvigy Gábor; this would be their final collaboration) frame the activity as immediate and active leaves the film feeling like the director's most emphatically present-tense piece since his early social realist projects, though it is of course in a vastly different form than those.

Whether any of that holds true at all, the film does at least begin with a grand gesture of liveliness and creativity that ranks among the most addictively kinetic moments in Tarr's filmography. In the main bar in whatever beaten-down town in Hungary this is, the drinkers enthusiastically greet the arrival of Valuska János (Lars Rudolph, one of three Germans in the three most prominent roles - make of that what you see fit), who will help to explicate something that the men have apparently been confused about. János, apparently more educated than most of the town (though he makes up for it by being impossibly naïve and slow-witted as events progress), is happy to show of his knowledge, and he takes one burly drunk and sets him directly under a light bulb in the center of the room, waggling his fingers, to represent the sun. Another barfly, spinning around as he moves in a circle around the first, is Earth; yet another is the moon.* Once these three boozy celestial bodies are in play, János slips imperceptibly from the language of science to the language of poetry, explaining the phenomenon of an eclipse using heightened and virtually allegorical descriptions of light and dark. Triumphantly, he sets the spheres back on their paths, bringing the whole room into a dance of balletic orbits not usually found in the drunken inhabitants of a small town in Hungary late at night; but such vigorous dances are of course an important thread found in most of Tarr's films.

Two things have just happened. One is that we've been exposed to a profoundly magnetic piece of cinema, reducing human bodies to their most essential qualities as abstract objects in motion, with Vig Mihály's vivid, intense music adding to the sheer joy of watching movement in the gorgeous monochrom that Tarr employed on this movie (it utilises every hue of grey possible from stark white to jet black, and to significant effect, as we shall presently see). The other is that we've just been handed the answer sheet, so we don't have to spend all of Werckmeister Harmonies puzzling what it means: indeed, for a film where so much of the plot takes place on an entirely non-representational level, it's almost dismayingly easy to say what it's "about". Simply put, it is about the conflict between lightness and darkness, both as literally qualities that duel across the film's grey-soaked frames, and as the expected metaphor for how human beings are capable of great savagery and great kindness alike, though kindness does certainly get its ass handed to it in Werckmeister Harmonies. It is also about human beings as inhabitants of the whole cosmos: we are on the one hand immodest specks that can barely be picked out on the planetary scale, let alone the universal one, and yet we're also the only thing that makes up the universe as we live and experience it - in one brazen gesture, that opening dance suggests both the enormity of planets and stars relative to our lives, but also makes human beings the literal equal to planets and stars.

So that, in brief, is Werckmeister Harmonies: how we live in the universe. The title itself is in reference to the German musicologist and composer of the 17th Century, Andreas Werckmeister, whose writings and calculations form the basis of the 12-tone system used by most Eurocentric musical traditions of the last 300 years; it is based in Werckmeister's belief that properly-divided octaves could function as a musical representative of the harmonious, well-ordered structure of the celestial bodies. He is also regarded within the film, by János's uncle Eszter György (Peter Fitz), himself a composer and apparently the most moral man in town, as a perverse adulterer of the true purity of music, and a philosophical criminal. Tarr and his co-authors - Krasznahorkai László, co-writer and author of the source novel The Melancholy of Resistenace, and editor Hranitzky Ágnes, both of them given the usual credit that implies their contribution to be indistinguishable from Tarr's own - don't take sides on this point, but the question of whether or not the universe is in harmony with itself or not is central to the film's subsequent plot, in which György's ex-wife Tünde (Hanna Schygulla) browbeats him into signing off on her unpleasantly small-minded and authoritarian desire to purge improper behavior from the town, signified by the arrival in the black of night, like a shadow swallowing the whole town, of a carnival whose sole apparent attractions are the shadowy, charismatic Prince, and the corpse of a great whale, kept safe in a massive trailer. The whipped-up conflict between two sides that don't seem to even bother defining themselves is certainly a sign of disharmony, as is the final disposition of the whale, rotting and savaged in the morning mist in a crude parody of the inexplicable mystery and majesty it represents when János first enters the trailer to see it. And yet the fluid motions of the camera, blending gracefully with Vig's best score for a Tarr film, certainly puts the stamp of a weird kind of harmony and beauty on even the most brutish events.

It is a film that doesn't bother trying to answer anything, because it is so invested in raising issues and asking questions of the broadest, most sweeping kind: it is the culmination of Tarr's focus on ever more cosmic films, and while it is neither as overwhelming nor as flawless on a moment-by-moment basis as Sátántangó or, I'd argue, Damnation, it still feels like the culmination of what they were driving for. It is a work of stupefying ambition, overreach, and maybe pretension, though I prefer to reserve that word for people who ask the Big Questions without earning the right to talk in such lofty tones as Tarr does in the meticulous evolution of his film from one scene to the next. It is a film one watches to be forced into a state of reflection and contemplation that has nothing to do with plot or theme, but with consciousness, knowledge and its absence, and humanity. I treasure it as much as I treasure any work of cinema.

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ALFONSO CUARÓN: CHILDREN OF MEN (2006)

An earlier version of this review can be found here.

A couple of years ago, I encountered the argument somewhere on the internet - I cannot find it again, alack, for it is a difficult thing to search for and not encounter porn - that long tracking shots are an inherently masculine act of cinematography. Essentially, that the complexity involved, and the invariably showy results, are nothing so much as dick-measuring by male directors and male cinematographers who want to prove how tough and awesome they are to other males. And certainly, if you look at the many epic-length shots in the career of that great chronicler of American maledom, Martin Scorsese, or the works of such male-centered directors as Brian De Palma and Paul Thomas Anderson, there's something to it..

If this theory holds any water at all - and I think it does, though not in the necessarily reductive form in which I've just presented it - then Alfonso Cuarón's 2006 message thriller Children of Men is the thickest, veiniest, most throbbing erect cock in the history of cinema. Its greatest takes are not merely long, they are marathons; they do not merely track, but go in and out and around structures and vehicles like they were made of rice paper. I have at multiple times, and in complete earnestness, described it as a movie primarily about camera movement, production design, and the relationship between the two. Which has not been very helpful to the people asking me what the film's plot contained, but that's just how I see it: any ol' movie can be a "what if?" investigation into an especially original post-apocalyptic scenario, but only Children of Men is about the physical world where that scenario plays out, as depicted by the single best act of cinematography of the 21st Century. And not just because of the long takes, though one in particular is potentially the most technically sophisticated shot of the decade. As is is wont, Emmanuel Lubezki does good things with the lighting and color palette creating an overall tone of "decaying yellow" that suits the film just fine.

Adapted by Cuarón and a small army of screenwriters from P.D. James's novel, the film takes place in 2027, in London, 18 years after the last human was born. With human fertility having mysteriously blinked out of existence, the species has been plunged into a world-wide depression that served to intensify all the worst tendencies of life at the time the Bad Thing happened, which primarily means for our purposes that Great Britain has turned into an all-out police state, and on the lifeless November day that it opens, the government's plan to remove all foreign-born refugees is in its last stages. This has met with some pushback from the handful of people with enough optimism left to give a shit about maintaining human dignity and freedom, with the biggest anti-government group in the country going under the name of "Fish", and perpetrating - so the government claims - a series of terrorist bombings. One of these occurs in the movie's opening scene, minutes after the announcement comes along that the 18-year-old youngest human being alive was stabbed to death, and seconds after a particularly given-up sad-sack named Theo Faron (Clive Owen) exited the coffee shop where the bomb exploded.

I'm disinclined to go any deeper than that, because if you've seen it, it would be redundant, and if you haven't, A) fucking go do it, and B) there are fun surprises in store. Also, I will be littering this review with spoilers. Let us be content to suggest that the film is about the restoration of hope and faith in a world where those things are in short supply, and in the particular figure of a man who especially doesn't have either of those things. In 2006, it was an outright commentary on the encroaching authoritarianism being felt in America and Britain in the middle of that decade, but as time has gone by, far enough that the movie's biggest single prediction has obviously failed to come true, a lot of what comes out most strongly is the film's impossibly rich emotional landscape; as a friend of mine recently suggested (and this is a PARTICULARLY HEFTY SPOILER, BUT WHY HAVEN'T YOU SEEN THIS MOVIE YET? GAWD), it's the happiest ending any film could have in which you can see the protagonist's corpse in the final shot.

Incredibly, I find that familiarity and some time away (this was, in fact, the first time I'd watched the movie since its 2009 deadline passed) have convinced me that Children of Men is even deeper and more complex and vividly humanistic than I'd given it credit for when it was new, and that was a hell of a lot of credit. The reveal of the pregnant Kee (Claire-Hope Ashitey), executed with a long hold on Theo's dumbfounded face as non-diegetic symphonic music flows up and down the soundtrack, is an overt heartstring-puller, but it works, dear Christ, it works so well. And of course the ending, with its sad and hopeful gestures pulsing in tandem, and that wonderful little snippet of children laughing over black; it leaves me a wreck. It has always left me a wreck.

Also it reminds me that this most profoundly visual of movies both opens and closes with audio over a black screen, and this is particularly cunning in the beginning, as the film unrolls its cavalcade of the very best world-building in the last 15 years of cinema. Children of Men takes place in an incredibly specific reality, and one that could trigger a lot of bullshit alarms, what Cuarón and company do to usher us past the suspension of disbelief traps is to show us the world working, and pitching information at as from the side, frequently not commenting on some very important details and trusting that because those details are in frame or on the soundtrack, we will become aware of them. Even the central idea of infertility is played off this way: first we learn that Baby Diego was the world's youngest person. Then we learn that he was 18 years old. The script lets us put two and two together, not explicitly stating "people can't have babies" until a crackpot old hippie played by Michael Caine says it in the context of a joke. It does this visually, too: the incredibly precise production design is full of rich details that are right there for the picking, piles of dead cattle, worn-out technology, a lack of new artwork, and signs of barely visible police surveillance all around.

And so we come back to the camera movement, and to my notion that Children of Men is chiefly about marrying that movement to production design; and saying it that way makes it sound shallow and spectacular, like a downer Avatar, and that's not so at all. For one thing, the physical space, the story, and the themes are all inseparable: in order to make a film about the triumph of hope, it is necessary to establish hopelessness, and this is something that Cuarón, Lubezki, and designers Jim Clay and Geoffrey Kirkland do incredibly well. Any given set in Children of Men, worn-out, jerry-rigged, and crumbling, instantly communicates the idea that the people living in it have completely given up hope.

To fully communicate what they want to, the filmmakers have to immerse us deep into their film, and that's what makes this such a tremenous achievement: the way that the constantly moving camera, crossing through doors and gazing out car windows, creates a sense of total spatial unity, emphasising how all of the elements of the mise en scène exist in a connected, organic way (oddly, it's the exact opposite of what the car window shots did in the director's previous Y tu mamá también, where the point was to stress the characters' isolation from the world around them). This is the main purpose of the first of the film's three most showy tracking shots, the one that opens the film and goes inside, around, from close-up to wide, and all in a way that tells us so much about the tenor of this society just by the way it's laid out. There's also plenty of clever storytelling done with the camera movement: a woman in a black hood is carried off screen left by the tracking movement, which proceeds to cross over several dead bodies laid neatly in a line, a sickening but hugely successful visual punchline.

I mentioned three great showy tracking shots; the other two are a bit more well-known and frequently-discussed, but let's just touch on them. To end with, there's the legendary 6-minute "shot" (stitched together digitally; you can tell when because drops of stage blood on the lens disappear), which carries us into the depths of a collapsing slum during a firefight, in which the constant movement and our awareness of it plays into the sense of chaos and danger, making for one of the most breathlessly exciting action sequences of the last ten years (so it's not all brainy shit). The middle one, and my favorite, starts inside a car and ends up outside of it, with quite a lot of ridiculously specific choreography dribbled in, and what I love about this is that unlike the other camera movements in the film, this isn't about unity of space, but unity of time; we're seeing, without the cushion of editing, how a situation can turn from neutral to warm to panicked to tragic in just a handful of seconds, and it is, if anything, even more tense and heightened than the six-minute tracking shot through a gun battle.

The brilliance of Children of Men isn't its technical accomplishment, though. Nor is it the way that the scenario tells a richly involving emotional story, nor the cutting political commentary and demand that the audience seriously considers what kind of world we want to live in. It is the way that it cannot be anything of these things without being the others as well, and how the piercing emotional highs of the film could only be created by this cut to that beat of acting, which is captured by this close in on that part of the scene. It's a perfect movie. There. Done.

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ALFONSO CUARÓN: Y TU MAMÁ TAMBIÉN (2001)

It is not an unnoticed fact, but one still worth mentioning, because it is fun, that the career of Alfonso Cuarón repeated itself in a weirdly specific way. First, in 1991, he made Soló con tu pareja, a Mexican film with political overtones, that features a lot of sex. Then he went to America and made A Little Princess, a kids' movie based on a well-liked work of children's literature. He then made Great Expectations, a film for adults adapted, very loosely, from a novel.

In 2001, he made another Mexican film with political overtones, that features a lot of hugely explicit sex. Then he went back to America and made a kid's movie based on the most popular work of children's literature in the world. He then made a film for adults adapted from a novel so loosely that it barely counts any more.

The moral of the story: fuck you, Gravity.

So let's now turn to that Mexican film with political overtones and sex. The second one, I mean. It is a certain Y tu mamá también, and it's the film where Cuarón first gained acclaim in and of himself, rather than as the very sincere and talented journeyman director of A Little Princess (Soló con tu pareja not being widely available outside of Mexico until deep into the 2000s, and Great Expectations being largely disliked). Not coincidentally, it's also the film where Cuarón really turned into the specific auteur that we are inclined to describe him as in a post-Children of Men world, which was a deliberate act of will. The filmmaker hasn't exactly trumpeted the story, but he's not ashamed to tell of it either (the timing's too perfect not to share this recent interview), that making Great Expectations was not a good experience: he was not terribly enthusiastic about the results, and for his return to the mother country, made a conscious choice to open up his aesthetic and make things in a way that the Hollywood apparatus would have made difficult.

The results are revelatory. Let's not mince words - revelafuckingtory. In all the ways I can think of, Y tu mamá también is a monumental, transformational motion picture, challenging the viewer and changing the way you think of movies being put together, the stories they can tell, and the ramifications of those stories. To begin with, it has what might well be the single best depiction of adolescent sexuality in any film of the 21st Century, treating with candid humor and perfect seriousness one of the subjects that is quintessentially Off Limits. For all that sexed-up teenagers being horny is a commonplace occurrence to the point that it's just wallpaper now, grappling with teens as psychological actors ho have sexual urges and needs, rather than wacky boner jokes. It even depicts, with jaw-dropping plainness and documentarylike accuracy, the physicality of teen sex, requiring the viewer to consider with non-prurient interest the fact that 18-year-olds (the actors, of course, were all legal adults) do in fact do these things: they perform and receive oral sex, they ejaculate. Oh, how they ejaculate, in what is unquestionably the most shocking scene of the film, all the more so because the film itself isn't looking to shock us, but simply present the characters' reality.

While we're still on sex: Y tu mamá también is, if anything, even more transgressive and shocking for the way that it discusses and analyses gendered approaches to sexual pleasure. The very first line of the film finds an 18-year-old boy in the midst of sex staking a claim on his girlfriend's body, and viewed from the right angle, the conflict for the rest of the film is predicted on unconscious male privilege in a macho society finding itself at odds with strong, self-directed female self will; after the legendary masturbating-into-a-pool scene,the most commanding and sexually blunt scenes in the film involve a 30-ish woman giving instructions to teen boys ten years her junior as to how to best please a woman sexually, finding their clumsiness charming right up until she abruptly and angrily finds it selfish and cold.

That is, mind you, the conflict viewed from the right angle. From a slightly different one... oh, let me just write a damn plot synopsis already, so I can start using specifics. Best friends Julio Zapata (Gael García Bernal) and Tenoch Iturbide (Diego Luna) have just barely graduated from high school in Mexico City, and their respective girlfriends, Cecilia (María Aura) and Ana (Ana López Mercado), are traveling to Europe for the summer to celebrate, leaving the boys to do absolutely nothing. Just hang around, jerking off, smoking pot, eschewing responsibility. It comes to pass that at a wedding in which all the important members of Tenoch's father's political party are in attendance (the elder Iturbide is a high-ranking politician), they meet Luisa Cortés (Maribel Verdú), the Spanish-born wife of Tenoch's writer cousin. With the horny certitude of 18-year-olds, the boys try to flirt with her by inventing a fantastic, pristine beach far away from the city, though the woman very coolly and wittily shuts them both down.

A little while later, her husband confesses that he's been having an affair, begging forgiveness. Stunned and mad, Luisa immediately contacts the boys and agrees to go on their trip. The facts that the Boca de Cielo beach doesn't exist, and that neither of them knows much about the world outside of Mexico City, are of minimal concern to either of the young men, what with a smoking hot older woman willing to spend five days alone in a car with them, and so, with the world's shittiest route planned out, the three plunge in to the Mexican countryside, and it's here that Cuarón and his screenwriter brother Carlos get to explore all kinds of fraught interpersonal relationships and sociopolitical concerns, in ways that never stop seeming supple, complex, and sophisticated, no matter how many times you see it.

Broadly, Y tu mamá también is about class and gender, both of them awfully large terms, which makes it all the more impressive how very much the film is able to get to in its jam-packed 106-minutes. There are all sorts of nifty divisions between the characters: Luisa is European, where Julio and Tenoch are Mexican; Tenoch is upper-class, Julio is lower-middle-class, Luisa has risen steadily from isolated poverty to something that can easily inhabit the upper class without being part of it. With the film depicting a specific, greatly significant moment in Mexican political history, it's this latter division that especially drives the movie, which, viewed from the other best angle, is about how class divisions that seem totally frivolous in adolescence start to fester and become big and nasty the more of an adult you become. It's not prescriptive: though there seems little reason to doubt that the filmmakers are sympathetic to the underclasses and the leftists (there's a haunting little aside involving a fisherman stripped of his livelihood that's one of the best criticisms of capitalist progress ever filmed), but that's not really the focus. Instead, it's on how class represents not just having and not-having, but an entire code of thinking about the world, and one's place in it. The jealousy and self-abnegation on Julio's side, and the superior contempt on Tenoch's, are very slowly teased out across the movie, in any number of ways, from screaming match where both boys use class-loaded words, to the narrator's blithe comparison of how the two boys use the toilet at each other's house: Julio lights a match to make sure that his stink doesn't hang around, while Tenoch raises the seat with his foot, to avoid touching it with his skin. It's a brilliant line: entirely illustrative of the exact point the Cuaróns want to put across, while feeling quite authentic to the experience of the two scatologically-obsessed characters.

Oh, and the narrator: mustn't forget to mention him. Voiced by Daniel Giménez Cacho in the crisp, impersonal tones of a newscaster, the narration in the film is its quintessential formal element, offering up a thick slice of ironic distance between us and the action (every time the narrator speaks, the ambient noise cuts out completely; frequently, this is as jarring to the film's created reality and narrative momentum as '60s-era Jean-Luc Godard at his most caustically formalist), dashing the idea of the film's realism even as it incalculably deepens its world. Frequently, the narrator has nothing to say about the plot at all, but to call our attention to some aspect of life, or some political event, that the main characters do not notice or care about, creating the sense that there is a bigger world than what is depicted in the film and emphasising the small, trivial focus of the protagonists on nothing bigger than their own impulses and urges.

Still, artificial or not, trivial or not, the three leads of Y tu mamá también are an especially rewarding set of characters to spend time with. They're not always likable; they're typically not likable, in the case of the boys. But they are powerfully authentic, they exude vitality, they have the ability to think, even when they're thinking about how to justify not thinking. Their behaviors are both heavily laden with symbolism about age, gender roles, and the political history of Mexico (the character names are pointedly metaphorical: Tenoch, a 14th Century Aztec ruler - ancient tradition, conservatism. Zapata, the 20th Century revolutionary - class awareness, radical leftism. Cortés, the Spanish explore - the European who vitalises the Mexicans at the cost of destroying them), and the filmmakers are overt in linking the boys' coming-of-age to the 2000 elections that radically shifted Mexico's political fortunes, but they also seem like exactly who they are: two cocksure teen boys and one increasingly regretful adult woman, playing each other against one another, so wrapped up in their little drama that a transforming Mexico passes them without their noticing. The performances are so complete and natural and lived-in that it hardly seems possible to talk about them using the vocabulary of acting. Luna, García Bernal, and particularly Verdú are so confident in their bodies, clothed and unclothed, active and passive, that even while they've all become much more famous in the years since the film was new, there's literally not a single scene where I'm thinking about the construction of characters, just the characters themselves.

The film is about the characters and the world and the way they interact with it and each other; and so it is right and good that it should boast such keen visual depiction of that flow between person and space, in the most stylistically radical by far of all the movies that Cuarón and cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki had made to that point. Look at the handheld camera and graininess, and you would say that they were going for a kind of documentaryrealism; you would be right. Look at the way that Lubezki films landscapes and cityscapes (and there are many of both in this film) with a bleeding-out mistiness, and you would say that they were going for romanticism or impressionism; you would also be right. Look at the frequent long takes, particularly the ones that glide along invisibly as the car drives endlessly down the highway, or the fantastic one near the film's end where Luisa steps over to a jukebox and the camera follows her, at which point Verdú looks straight into the lens and walks the camera back, and you would say a lot of things, maybe; "what sort of eldritch geniuses came up with that shot, culminating in the jackhammer-like impact of that three-way hug?" is one of the things I said, the first time I saw it. Oh, I'm lying, every time I've seen it. But the long tracking shots that only now firmly assert themselves in Cuarón and Lubezki's shared toolkit are absolutely essential to Y tu mamá también; they create its sense of flow, of forward momentum, of a continuous space (call it the world, call it Mexico, or just call it the the unified space between these characters), and of a passionate, probing desire to explore that space. It's positively Renoirvian (Renoiresque?) how the filmmakers use the camera to not depict the characters, but to wander around their homes and the places they find themselves, telling us so much more about how the world works and how people live by soaking in details indiscriminately than could ever happen with just another conversation in two-shot.

Basically, this film is a masterpiece: a sexual masterpiece, a social masterpiece, an aesthetic masterpiece, a psychological masterpiece. And yet it's not, because "masterpiece" implies that it wasn't ever topped, which totally happened, when next Cuarón and Lubezki trained their camera on a world of people in transition and turmoil; but let's not get ahead of ourselves. Y tu mamá también is flawless if that word applies to anything in art, and just because the director made another flawless film, that takes away nothing of the achievement of this one, his coming-out party as one of the most interesting and vital international filmmakers of the brand new century.

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