SUMMER OF BLOOD: 21st CENTURY HORROR - THIS IS HALLOWEEN

All this happened years ago, and it's long since time to get over it, but it's really and truly baffling that Warner Bros. saw fit to handle Trick 'r Treat so shabbily. Having taken on the feature directorial debut of Bryan Singer's protégé Michael Dougherty (who co-wrote both X2 and Superman Returns), financed by Legendary Pictures and Singer's company Bad Hat Harry, Warner's announced a release date in time for Halloween 2007, only to cancel it at the last minute. That clearly spoke to a lack of faith in the project, though it's hard to say why: the film's December, 2007 premiere at the Butt-Numb-a-Thon festival in Austin was enormously well-received, as was its tour of the horror festival circuit over 2008. The film quickly took on the aspect of a legend, loved by all who knew it and lusted after by those who didn't. And still Warner sat on it. Finally, in October 2009 - two years and one day after its initially-scheduled release date - the company released it straight to DVD.

Not an impressive fate for one of the only obvious instant classics of horror in the first decade of the 21st Century. Trick 'r Treat is not entirely without lumps, but it's a film wherein even the most apparent flaws are so clearly a function of Dougherty's commitment to his muse, a refusal to compromise the personality of the material even slightly, that its flaws simply don't "count". And its strengths are as distinctive and impressive as anything else from its generation of American horror.

This despite having a seemingly insurmountable strike against it from the start: Trick 'r Treat is an anthology film. Anthologies, even horror anthologies, that are uniformly solid do exist, but anthologies with at least one obviously poor segment are much, much more common. Dougherty's script massages things by letting the stories bleed into each other, and he and cinematographer Glen MacPherson do splendid work unifying each of the four stories with an overall sense of thick autumnal night air, while giving each of them enough of a distinct visual style that we can usually tell where we are just at a glance. So it's not as bluntly divided against itself as it might have been, to its benefit.

Taken as a whole, the idea of each of the four segments (plus a prologue is basically the same: obey the traditions of Halloween, whatever "tradition" might mean in a given context, even the traditions that Dougherty appears mostly to have invented on the spot. The spirit of Halloween, present to witness and punish those who transgress against these traditions, is a little boy-shaped thing with tattered orange footie pajamas and a burlap mask that vaguely resembles a face; his name is Sam (Quinn Lord), which I take to be short for "Samhain", the Gaelic holiday retrofitted into Halloween. "Samhain" also appears in dialogue, and I am unduly impressed by the fact that it is pronounced correctly ("Sow-win").

The first thing we see is a snippet of a vintage safety video about trick or treating, that cuts to a glowing jack-o'-lantern smile against a pitch black field. It's as direct a reference to the opening credits of the seminal Halloween as I expect that Dougherty wanted to try to get away with, equal parts "I love you and I want to do what you did" and "okay, I can take over now". That jack-o'-lantern, when we see it, belongs to Emma (Leslie Bibb) and Henry (Tahmoh Penikett), a married couple on their way back from a costume party. Emma extinguishes the candle, over Henry's playful objections, and sets herself semi-indifferently to the task of taking down a few of the sheets from the many ghost decorations in the couple's yard, while he gets a porn video set up. Bloody limbs and creepy figures standing at a distance and staring abound, all turning out to be feints; the actual attack on Emma occurs without any set-up at all. It's mechanically perfect, a dance of false scares that distract us from the real scare until it cuts our throat with a jagged pumpkin lollipop.

Between the graceful staging of the scares, the concise, appealing character relationship established in just a few lines between Bibb and Penikett, and the wonderful visuals made by MacPherson's thick and gloomy lighting of the wonderfully evocative neighborhood location (the production design is by Mark Freeborn and the set decoration by Rose Marie McSherry), we've seen everything, in embryonic form, that Trick 'r Treat has in store, somewhere in this wonderfully self-contained anecdote. The rest is all expansion.

The four stories, in the order that they take prominence, center on Steven Wilkins (Dylan Baker), the principal of the local middle school, whose enthusiasm for the nastiest traditions of Halloween leads him to spike the candy he gives out with cyanide, and even this isn't the bleakest thing that happens when bratty kid Charlie (Brett Kelly) shows up; Macy (Britt McKillip), Sara (Isabelle Deluce), Schrader (Jean-Luc Bilodeau), and Chip (Alberto Ghisi), a group of young friends who play a prank on Rhonda (Samm Todd), an autistic girl, by recalling the grisly local story of how a busload of special needs students were driven into a flooded quarry at their parents' behest, and using this as the basis for a mean joke about zombiefied children; Laurie (Anna Paquin), a college-aged virgin whose sister Danielle (Lauren Lee Smith) and friends Maria (Rochelle Aytes) and Janet (Moneca Delain) try to set her up with a guy for their slutty costume party; and Mr. Kreeg (Brian Cox), who hates children and Halloween, and chases away trick or treaters. For this most singular rejection of the spirit of the season, he is particularly targeted by Sam. The mode is very EC Comics: each of the stories ends with a karmic shocker of some kind, and in one case an out-and-out twist (one that is deliciously foreshadowed all over the place; enough to make my least-favorite plotline on first viewing my favorite on a second). And the point is emphatically not anything deeper than a quick jolt of the creeps, exactly as you'd hope to get if you and three buddies were swapping stories around a campfire some Halloween night.

That's easily the film's greatest strength: it is the most Halloweenish Halloween movie of all (something that even Halloween itself, with its charmingly dubious "California summer in Midwestern autumn drag" looks, could never claim). If there is an aspect of Halloween festivities that's not covered by the movie, I can't name it: children play-acting at spooky rituals, adults dressing in filthy costumes, news reporters dutifully spitting out inauthentically cheery boilerplate about some town's overly enthusiastic embrace of extreme kitsch in pursuit of tourism dollars. And the look of the thing! There's no better depiction of the inky blackness of a fall night punctuated by the warm lights of houses and candles on the books, from the opening scene all the way to a climactic jump scare consisting of nothing but Kreeg's terrified discovery that his whole yard has been filled with flickering jack-o'-lanterns, a shot that's as beautiful in its glistening blackness as it is unnerving.

With such a grand creation of a sustained mood, it's little surprise that Trick 'r Treat is top-shelf horror: if not scary, as such, then admirably suffused with the chilliness and mystery of a good ghost story, crossed with the inventive violence of the better slasher films. The reliance on stillness is a gratifying strength, particularly given the frenetic era of horror that the film was made during: the wide shots of Sam standing and observing, repeated throughout the film, are a terrific way of quietly reinforcing a baseline of ominous calm, and most of the tensest moments in the film are also the slowest (this is particularly true in the fog-coated abandoned quarry of the kids' subplot, from its choked-off sound design to the simple little "bye-bye" gesture at its end). But it's no weaker when it opens the throttle: the most shocking gore effects, which I cannot talk about because they qualify as the film's one absolute spoiler, are extremely impressive and particularly unsettling in both conception and execution, especially given how frequently such effects have gone wrong in other movies. Really, as far as the nuts and bolts of horror goes, the film only commits one enormous misstep: it should never let us see underneath Sam's burlap mask, because the blankness of his expression is worth far more than the frankly squirrelly idea for what we eventually see of him.

Is this the film's only actual flaw? Probably not. Not every performance is equally good, particularly in Laurie's segment, where Paquin significantly outclasses all of her scene partners. And it's not one of those horror movies that allow much room for talking up its fascinating character arcs and social commentary: this really is all about the joy and pleasure of sharing scary stories. That's hardly a little thing; in fact, it is much too easy to overlook just how important it is. And to claim that it's the only card Trick 'r Treat has to play is doing no more than accusing the film of being an exemplary addition to a tradition of hair-raising anecdotes older than cinema itself.

Body Count: 9 in the present, plus the 8 children in the flashback to the schoolbus massacre, plus a number devoured in a murderous orgy whose number I cannot satisfactorily arrive at. But I think "not fewer than 23" is a good estimate.

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THE IMPRESSION OF NORMALCY

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

There are many indisputably great films that it's clearly impossible for any normal audience member to complete unpack in all their nuances without the aid of some highly specialised arcane knowledge, but even then, writer-director Bernardo Bertolucci's The Conformist is a special case. It's the one and only quintessential all-time masterpiece I can name that trades, extensively, on its ideal viewer's knowledge of the history of 20th Century interior design. Cinematographer Vittorio Storaro invariably gets all of the credit, as well he might, given the relatively easy argument that The Conformist is the most impeccably-shot color film yet made. But as gorgeously lit as the film is - and that is much too weak a claim for the stunning compositions of light, shadow, and diagonal lines that dominate the film's cinematography - the engine driving the film's visuals is far less often the film's camerawork and lighting than production designer Ferdinando Scarfiotti and his team's recreation of the Modernist-derived architecture and furniture design of Fascist Italy. There is no film I know that so compellingly describes a link between the design of its world, the mentality that produced that design, and the mentality that is in turn encouraged by that design; that is to say, it is a film about the mindset of a man who wanted very badly to be a totally anonymous, perfect Fascist, and the most important way that it evokes that mindset is by containing it in distinctively Fascist spaces, distinctively Fascist compositions. And this is where I bring us back to arcane knowledge, because the simple fact of the matter is that I don't know a damn thing more about fine art under Fascism than I suppose you do (if you are some kind of design historian, I know infinitely less than you), and while the film allows us to intuit the nature of Fascist design theory, there's an enormous gap between being able to extrapolate a film's intentions versus understanding at a deep level the film's frame of reference.

So now that I've made this sound like the most absolutely staid piece of entertainment you could ever hope to stumble across, let me promise that The Conformist is, in fact, a gripping piece of cinema, far more watchable than any description of its content could suggest. It's kind of a gangster thriller, if you allow that the Fascist party in Italy was kind of a gang, structured around the fluttery thoughts of Marcello Clerici (Jean-Louis Trintignant, who is in this film one of the greatest empty vessels ever performed onscreen) as he rides in the back seat of a fine car one wintry day, being driven by fellow party member Manganiello (Gastone Moschin) on a mission whose exact details only reveal themselves slowly, but which plainly cause Marcello no end of unhappiness to ponder. Over the course of the next hour and a half, this car serves as the movie's home base, while we follow along with Marcello's stream-of-consciousness recollection of his life, which largely centers on his emotionally flat marriage to Giulia (Stefania Sandrelli), a smart choice of spouse rather than a passionate one, as well as his relationship with anti-Facist mentor Professor Quadri (Enzo Tarascio) and his obsession with Quadri's wife Anna (Dominique Sanda).

Viewed strictly as a psychological portrait, The Conformist is fairly blunt, overly Freudian, and not tremendously imaginative. As we see over the course of those chronologically erratic flashbacks, Marcello became aware as a preteen of his homosexual urges, and in particular had a rather ugly run-in with his family's pederastic chauffeur Lino (Pierre Clémenti) that ended with the older man dead by Marcello's hand. Absorbed by guilt and repulsed by his desires, Marcello has since spent his entire life attempting to disappear his own identity into the blank facade of a perfect conformist, behaving in the least aberrant way he possibly can, based on whatever is valued by the social order of the day. And that is, let us be honest, a bit overly schematic and just-so. Films about the sexual hypocrisy of the totalitarian parties in World War II were their own subgenre around this time, and there are those which have distinctly more sophisticated and less hoary ways of approaching that topic than The Conformist's frankly hoary appropriation of homosexuality as a metaphor (for the record, Luchino Visconti's The Damned from 1969 is my personal favorite example of the form).

But who needs crafty, unexpected screenwriting, when you have this kind of extraordinary psychoanalysis through style? This is, in places, massively obvious: the film's opening scene, as Marcello prepares to commit the worst sin he can imagine, finds the lighting from a neon sign outside his room gently washing him with red at intervals. A sequence synopsising the Allegory of the Cave, punctuated with the statement that those in the cave mistake a shadow of a thing for the thing itself, ends with Marcello's shadow against a wall being blotted out by another light source, the most straightforward "his self is dissolving" image that I could imagine. Frequently, the movie is craftier than that: an early scene where Marcello spills his guts and talks about how badly he wants to be normal and nondescript takes place in a dark room, with a window to a bright white radio studio casting into stark relief just how gloomy the world that Marcello wants to disappear into is. Naked, sexualised women are shown twice in the film, both times drenched in garish, colored lighting that renders them as something almost literally inhuman and unapproachable, the feverish dream version of normalised heterosexuality that Marcello reaches for and cannot attain. And the whole movie is dominated to the point of distraction with diagonal lines in the mise en scène and the lighting, imprisoning Marcello, slashing across his world and breaking it into fragments. It is among the most Expressionist films ever made in color, both in the descriptive sense (Expressionism, as a movement, was dedicated to expressing interior emotions through exterior form - hence the name), and in the more nitpicky sense that it uses the actual graphic techniques of German Expressionism: there's a shot of Sandrelli in a striped dress under striped lighting that is the most literally Expressionist shot that I have seen in any film made after the mid-'30s.

One could go through every single frame of the film and analyse how the composition, color, and lighting all reflect Marcello's mind, the dominance of the individuality-crushing cult of Fascism, or very often both. Certainly, it would go for tens of thousands of words beyond the meaningful scope of a "review" for me to fully work through every single image that I'd like to talk about - the one with the Eiffel Tower a hazy shape in the backdrop against a featureless grey sky, that's a profound emblem of isolation! The violet-selling woman singing "L'Internationale" is purposefully murky and blue to contrast against the ungainly brightness of he and his blonde mistress! Holy balls, the pullback to reveal Giulia patiently waiting as he fumbles his way through his first-ever confession to a priest, that's why they invented camera movement in the first place! - so I won't bother trying. There isn't, however, a single frame that feels accidental, anywhere in the movie: The Conformist is a dream movie for anyone who wants to play around with image analysis, just clicking around to random frames and unpack everything communicated by that shot, that pan, that marriage of visual desolation with the exquisite pain of Georges Delerue's great score, one of the best of the 1970s.

It is a greatly, audaciously cinematic movie, The Conformist is, imposingly precise in its arrangement of individual elements, and their collective shaping by Bertolucci into one grand statement about the the way that Fascism preyed upon humans and was created and bolstered by the same humans. Praising it feels a little obvious, like bothering to point out that there's some good stuff on the White Album; The Conformist is so direct and straightforward in so much of its symbolism that watching them feels like the movie has already done your work for you. But there are many layers to it, and they are not all so straightforward; I'll admit that I don't revisit this film as often as other of the great European art house classics of that generation, but every time I do, the film seems fresh and totally new, and that's the best thumbnail description of a masterpiece that I've got.

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BLOCKBUSTER HISTORY: SWAPPIN' CONSCIOUSNESS WITH TARSEM

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: director Tarsem Singh shows us the terrible things that can happen when two personalities are stuffed into one brain in Self/less. In this, he is merely returning to his roots.

When it was new, The Cell was at the center of controversy about its content: is there something wrong and wicked about how this movie used absolutely breathtaking images to depict horrible, violent acts, stripping them of their real-world gravity. How innocent a controversy it was! Back in 2000, when this movie came out, we hadn't even seen Saw yet (a film through which you can draw a surprisingly straight line from The Cell), and we didn't know just how pornographic violence could get. I don't know about you, but if I get to choose between a film that might be fetishising violence and is also gorgeous, and a film that definitely is fetishising violence and looks like it was shot on film stock made of dog turds, I'm not going to have to think very long.

But even that's begging the question. To be clear, no, I don't think that The Cell is a fetish object for anything, outside of perhaps the impossible fantasy costumes (Eiko Isihioka and April Napier share costuming duty; I'm going to assume without any real evidence that Napier is responsible for the clothing that looks like what human beings wear, while Isioka's contribution were all of the gilded parade floats with space for people's legs at the bottom). In fact, of all director Tarsem Singh's movies - this was his first - it strikes me as the one where style is most clearly used as a function of the needs of the story and the rather horrible psychological depths that story plumbs (his sophomore effort, The Fall, strikes me more as a story built more to facilitate style than the other way 'round; not that I feel for The Fall anything less than total love).

That said, style is still a very, very important thing; style muscles its way to our eyeballs right from the opening, while the story is still deliberately keeping itself hidden. In the beginning there is desert: shattering orange sand and glowing blue skies, the undiluted colors of the very concept of The Desert of legends and myth (this sequence was shot in Namibia, which would, 15 years later, provide the same uncompromising primary colors to Mad Max: Fury Road). In the desert is a woman all in beautiful, flowing, feathered white, looking like a dove come down from heaven - we don't know her yet, but she's Catherine Deane (Jennifer Lopez), a psychologist. And we don't know this yet, either, but this desert is all in the mind of Edward Baines (Colton James), a boy of about 10. Deane is a member of a team working on an extraordinary technology to treat extraordinary mental disorders: she can literally enter another person's headspace and interact with their consciousness directly. Edward is suffering from a coma triggered by psychological trauma, and his well-to-do parents have sponsored the development of this extraordinary technology under the hands of Drs. Kent (Marianne Jean-Baptiste) and Cooperman (Becker).

I'm in awe of this opening for reasons that have nothing to do with its literally awe-inspiring scenery and the exquisite costuming. By the ten-minute mark of The Cell, Tarsem and screenwriter Mark Protosevich have told us exactly what their movie is going to be and how to watch it: there will be beautiful tableaux, framed with a sense of painterly composition by music video veteran Tarsem and music video cinematographer Paul Laufer (who shot only one other movie in his career) that is far more attuned to the rules of graphical art than traditional narrative cinema, and is meant to be read accordingly. These images are the expression of moods, and the moods moreover of very specific individuals: tell a sullen 10-year-old to think of a "desert", and it is very much the desert that we get in the opening scene that he'll probably have in mind. So the first thing we learn is to read the images as essential concepts, and not as narrative spaces. The second thing we learn is that we're either on-board with a device that lets a psychologist mind-meld with comatose patients suffering from transparently made-up mental conditions, or we are not. And the film makes its technology as unreasonable as it can: the rig is some kind of fantastic open space where the participants are suspended in mid-air on many fine wires, while wearing suits that make it look rather like they've been skinned alive, which cannot possibly be an accident given the film's eventual fixation on torture and murder. Basically, I mean to say, the opening ten minutes find the movie putting everything on the table: if we aren't on its side, we never will be, and I greatly admire a film that certain of itself.

The plot pretty clearly situates The Cell at the end of the big wave of film's cribbing from The Silence of the Lambs: there's a serial killer, see, who drowns women in an implausible elaborate automated drowning cube (the glassy set for which vividly predicts Saw and its sequels and their theatrical murder boxes), and then bleaches and paints them to resemble porcelain dolls. Catching this repugnant creature has become the fixation of FBI agent Peter Novak (Vince Vaughn, in what is by an enormously exaggerated margin my favorite of his performances), who has finally scraped enough evidence together to catch the killer, Carl Stargher (Vincent D'Onofrio), right in his house. The problem is, Stargher's kill factory isn't in his house. And Stargher is currently suffering from another made-up psychological coma, meaning that Novak and his team only have about 40 hours to find, based on no leads at all, where the killer's present victim has been imprisoned, before she drowns. And there follows the one piece of contrived screenwriting that I can't bring myself to overlook, out of the whole lacework of contrivances that makes up the first third of The Cell: Novak is somehow aware of the experimental dream-sharing machine, and he wants Deane to go hunting in the hideous reaches of Stargher's subconscious to find any scrap of evidence for where he might leave his victims while they die.

The thing that The Cell transforms into at this point is damned near impossible to describe - certainly, even attempting a verbal sketch of the imagery is pointlessness itself. Tarsem, along with Ishioka and Napier, production designer Tom Foden, set decorator Tessa Posnansky, and art director Geoff Hubbard, create mental worlds in this film, both Stargher's and eventually Deane's, that are without specific precedent, nor can I offhand name anything that has copied them since. A few points along the way, though: the film is not quite as straightforward as "the inside of a serial killer's mind is like this" symbolism, though that's enough to get by. Beyond that, it's a synthesis of imagery from European and at least South Asian artistic traditions, as well as American pop culture, and what this suggests within the film itself is not just "let's make the most horrifying hellscapes possible by drawing on multiple sources". Instead, it suggests that Stargher is himself making the same synthesis that the filmmakers do, pulling together fragments of remembered images to construct a worldview. Setting aside its applications to the film's deep wells of horror, this is a tremendously effective way of cinematically visualising the process of how human personalities are built out of piece of memory, whether from personal experience or appropriations of fantasies, stories, and the background radiation of culture. And of course, since this is horror, the personality we need to be chiefly concerned with is one dominated by suffering, directed inward and directed outward and even freestanding representations of pain and death that simply exist, independent of who caused the pain or who receives it.

Importantly, this all applies not just to Stargher, but to Deane herself (at which point I think it deserves saying: Lopez is better in this role than she gets credit for, a placidly calm presence whose relatively simple and straightforward way of presenting the character's beatific sensibilities starts paying considerable dividends when that simplicity runs into the dense imagery), who defines her inner life with signifiers of goodness as soft and generically calming as Stargher's are specific and increasingly draining to watch. The design is no less striking, for being less cruel; Deane's get-up like a cherry blossom that became a nun is among the film's boldest costumes. This is not about reducing the film to a Manichean good/bad framework, though the implication is certainly that Deane thinks in those terms. What it's about is providing a counterpoint to the inside of Stargher's head, while making the same point: we mentally visualise the world in terms of broad signifiers which we then decorate with our own reference points, and that process is called "having a personality". A variation on it is called "consuming art, up to and including the movie titled The Cell", and that's maybe the most cunning thing about the film: it contains within its own structure the expectation that we will be effected by what we're watching. If we are healthy and know that's what we're doing, we can leave the movie having broken down its enormously memorable visual setpieces into our own personal library of reference points. If we are not healthy, well, the movie has some very imaginative ideas about what happens to people whose personality-construction goes awry. The point being, though, that the film is one of the boldest depictions of how external stimuli are transformed into internal narrative, for good or otherwise, that I know the movies to have attempted, and that's rewarding even beyond the shockingly bold images that almost exclusively make up the film's final hour and change.

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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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OLD SOLDIERS NEVER DIE

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

The body of work created by the filmmaking team of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger (credited equally as writers, directors, and producers, though it's generally understood that Powell was more the director, while Pressburger was more the writer and producer) is arguably the high water mark of all British cinema, and their 1943 collaboration The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp is maybe the most essentially, urgently British of the 21 films they made together. It is probably the most epic and ambitious in scale and intention: it's a World War II propaganda film with a real message on its mind other than the usual "We can do it if we stick together!" cheerleading typical of its generic bedfellows, that bases its analysis of what the people of the British isles could and should do to stave off the Nazi threat in a long-form study of military history spanning nearly half of a century. It does this in the body of one immaculately conservative soldier named Major-General Clive Wynne-Candy (Roger Livesey, flawlessly playing a brash youth and a puffed-up old man so distinctly that it's almost difficult to believe that they were both a 37-year-old actor), inspired in his personality and appearance by Colonel Blimp, the star of a satirical comic strip by David Low, but infinitely more expansive in personality; and it does this in the form of what must absolutely be the most excitingly shot British production I can personally name up to that point in history, the moment that Powell's directorial style snapped into focus and provided a visual means of expression that's neither exactly Hollywood nor exactly European. It would not, for my taste, remain the best production released under the banner of the Archers (Powell & Pressburger's independent company, through which they'd make all of their films until 1957), with their post-war efforts A Matter of Life and Death and The Red Shoes eclipsing it in stylistic and structural complexity, and overall excellence, respectively. But it's more radical than they are, inventing out of thin air what they (and the rest of the Archers' output) would thereupon refine and build from.

The movie begins and ends in 1942, where Wynne-Candy is an old and slightly ridiculous ex-Army figure, spending his retirement advising and training the Home Guard. He's introduced as the butt of something halfway between a prank and a political demonstration: the evening afternoon before a war game is meant to start at midnight, brash young lieutenant "Spud" Wilson (James McKechnie) breaks into the Turkish bath where Wynne-Candy and many other old Army outcasts spend their hours, capturing the old man and winning the war game before it begins. This triggers a spirited argument between the two warriors, Wilson insisting that old, traditional conservative men like Wynne-Candy aren't merely out of touch, but acutely dangerous in this new sort of warfare. Chastened and annoyed, the old man finds himself drifting into an extended flashback that rewinds to that same Turkish bath, 41 years prior, when he was just Lieutenant Clive Candy, on leave from the Second Boer War - the flawlessly-executed trick by which a youthful body double substitutes for Livesey in his old age makeup while the camera manages to get slightly too far ahead of the character is the first of many coups du cinéma in the film, seamlessly blurring past and present into one discontinuous chronology that doubles as the first leg in the filmmakers' argument about the way that the past informs the present.

The remainder of the film is largely concerned with three movements, one during the Boer War, one in the days immediately following the First World War, and one in the early years of the Second World War, bringing us finally back to the morning of the day on which we met Candy. In each of these segments, we also see Candy's developing relationship with Theo Kretschmar-Schuldorff (Anton Walbrook), a German officer with whom Candy duels in 1901, while he's in Berlin on an unofficial mission to defuse an anti-British propaganda effort. And we see as well his encounters with three young women who all look exactly alike, for the good reason that they're all played by Deborah Kerr: Edith Hunter, an idealist who obviously loves Candy but ends up marrying Kretschmar-Schldorff; Barbara Wynne, a pragmatic nurse who marries Candy despite his being much older; and Angela "Johnny" Cannon, who serves as his sharp-tongued assistant and driver as he works with the Home Guard, and ends up helping to bridge the gulf between the honorably conservative Brit and the honorably conservative German while their countries prepare to go to war.

While each sequence is hung on a single driving narrative spine, the overall impression is of a movie that meanders its way through history over the course of two hours and 43 minutes (the film was cut twice before being restored to its full length in 1983; a more thorough clean-up job restoring the vivid colors was completed in 2011), and yet never feels like there's a single sagging moment or unnecessary layover. The script is thoughtful and decisive, crisply marking down character beats for the actors to later flesh in, and presenting symbolic conflicts which feel so personal in their execution that the degree to which this is all a metaphorical satire of British military etiquette hardly gets in the way of what a perfect study of individual lives it is as well. And I will give it this above even A Matter of Life and Death and The Red Shoes and all the rest: it is very possible that this is the best-written of the Archers' film, structurally, psychologically, and thematically. As it cycles back into 1942 and presents its message that men of Candy's era, for all their dignity and experience and intelligence, aren't equipped to fight a war against the systemic evil represented by Nazi Germany, the film generates a fierce passion about its topic mixed with affection, deep and rich and abiding affection, for the characters it's consigning to history. For something with such a serious subject, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp moves forward with enormous generosity and a great deal of fresh, bubbly humor - indeed, it is as much a comedy as otherwise, growing gradually darker towards the end.

The beautiful writing goes hand in hand with exemplary filmmaking technique that draws it out and works it into the visual bones of the movie. It is supremely well made, and not always because it draws attention to itself: one of the most perfect sequences in the movie consists of a camera staring at Walbrook's face as he quietly delivers a deep, probing monologue, pushing into a close-up, and then backing away again. It's so simple as to be virtually anti-cinematic, but it's exactly what the movie needs, both for the integrity of the monologue, and the place it occupies near the very beginning of the 1939 sequence; it promises the seriousness and mournful intimacy that the rest of the film will largely concern itself with, in opposition to the more bright material of the first two-thirds.

Frequently, though, the style is so great precisely because it makes itself felt. There is the comic audacity of the first transition from the Boer War to the First World War, a montage of mounted animal heads representing Candy's somewhat bloodthirsty approach to leisure time until he can get back to business (ending with the nihilistic joke of a Germany army helmet with the descriptive plaque "Hun - Flanders, 1918"); there is the bleak poetry of the second transition from the First World War to the Second, with the Wynne-Candy family album skipping through blank page after blank page following the newspaper clipping of Barbara's death. And there is the richness and moral complexity of the individual images, shot in glowing Technicolor to accentuate the vibrancy of military uniforms and upper class splendor in sharp contrast to default setting of drab earth tones, suggesting throughout (but especially in the Boer War sequence) that the pageantry of the British military and the pride of men like Candy, however handsome and captivating, is also chintzy and surface-level, all glamor without soul. Or consider the way that Powell presents the duel that takes up a huge portion of the first act: the opening preparations are contained within a hollow wide shot of a gymnasium, like a dead cathedral of Continental honor; the actual duel starts during a high-angle crane shot that backs away as Allan Gray's jaunty score kicks in, suggesting a perverse ballet, all part of the theatricality of the lives it presents, before dissolving into a snowstorm.

The visuals are, throughout, sardonic and witty, detached with just enough ghostliness that they feel appropriately out of time and yet anchored by the superbly expressive faces of Livesey and Walbrook that the immediate feeling of the characters' lives is always front and center. The images are satiric while the script is utterly sincere, and the structure is moody and weary while the energy of each scene and each performance is fiery and urgent, communicating with an intensity that could only driven by enthusiastic and greatly concerned patriots in a time of war. Of course the film hasn't aged well: this is carbon-stamped to 1943 as firmly as a movie could possibly be. And yet its insights into how history moves and what role people occupy in it are utterly timeless. As a time capsule and as pure cinema, this is as as essential, enjoyable, and challenging as the movies can get.

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THE RULES OF THE GAMINE

A second review requested by Brian Malbon, with thanks for contributing twice to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser.

Concision is nice and all, but it's hard not to be jealous that in 2001, those of us in the English-speaking world got a movie with the blunt, sensible title Amélie, while in France, where the film was born out of the fertile mind of Jean-Pierre Jeunet, they had the enthusiastic The Fabulous Destiny of Amélie Poulain. Which is absolutely more in line with the movie as it exists out in the wild.

The movie marked Jeunet's return to France after his abortive one-movie layover in Hollywood, where he caused the frantic, kaleidoscopic Alien: Resurrection to happen into the world. That experience, of course,didn't go well for anybody (least of all the audience), but it seems to have been of some use to Jeunet, for his next feature is a pretty perfect hybrid of the delirious fantasies he directed with Marc Caro in the 1990s, Delicatessen and The City of Lost Children, and the glossy high-tech sensibility of a Hollywood production. Amélie is impossible to have without CGI, which meant something a lot different in 2001 than it means now.

It's also true that, compared to Delicatessen (a vicious dark comedy) and The City of Lost Children (a demented Surrealist nightmare), Amélie is vastly more audience-friendly, though I cannot say whether this is because Jeunet was infected by the American film industry, or simply because everything dark and warped in the firs two movies was the responsibility of Caro. At any rate, it is effervescent and cheery; maddeningly, toxically cheery, if you're not on its wavelength, and I've always been surprised by the number of people I've met who were absolutely not on that wavelength.Certainly, I can see where the film would become thoroughly enervating if you don't find a way into its style: everything about the design, the dialogue, the acting, and especially the cinematography (by my beloved Bruno Delbonnel; this is the movie that put him on the map) and score (by Yann Tiersen) is utterly artificial and unrelenting. In fact, I should underline that again: especially especially the score. Tiersen's music, which I find utterly beguiling, is jolly, robust, and feels like it belongs under a circus tent in some overheated Epcot Center version of France as foreigners imagine it. It hits the ground running before even the puckish, detached narration delivered plummily by André Dussolier has found its footing, and it tells us all we ever need to know about Amélie: you're about to watch a carnival in the guise of a romantic comedy about a young Parisian woman doing good deeds.

"Carnivalesque" is a lazy word to describe Jeunet's aesthetic, but it has the benefit of being exactly correct. The thing unifying all of his films made without Caro is that they're populated by elaborately fanciful and quirky characters who nevertheless feel like they could somehow manage to exist in the real world (something that's certainly not true of the fanciful cast of City of Lost Children), they move through brightly colored spaces at a high energy, and they and the movie containing them always feels profoundly giddy and delighted at the raw possibilities of moviedom. They are garish celebrations of vitality. Now, in a science-fiction/horror movie about biological nightmares, or a romantic drama about World War I, that's not the most natural fit in the world, which is why neither Alien: Resurrection nor A Very Long Engagement can necessarily be defended as unambiguously great cinema (though I've always very much liked the latter film and have come around a great deal on the former). The reason Amélie is such a great triumph - the best film of Jeunet's career, solo or as part of a team, and one of the most deeply pleasurable French films of the 2000s - is that it's the perfect marriage of aesthetic to narrative content. For the script itself is exactly the same kind of celebration of life in all its kooky back alleys that the director's style turns itself towards regardless of what story is being told.

The narrative is so straightforward that it's hard to imagine it can get all the way to two hours, let alone two hours that never feel even a bit laggy: Amélie Poulain (Audrey Tautou) is a waitress at a café in Montmarte, and on the day of Princess Diana's death in August, 1997, she finds a small chunk of tile on her wall that can be pulled out, revealing a cubbyhole with a tin of various scraps of paper and toys that a boy in the 1950s might have considered his most important treasures. She tracks down the owner of this box, and he's so moved by this injection of his past life, he immediately sets to reconnecting with his estranged daughter. This gives Amélie such a rush that she immediately sets herself to the task of doing good for as many people as she can find, be they strangers, friends, or family. And one particular recipient of her care, Nino Quincampoix (Mathieu Kassovitz), catches her fancy as more than just a charity case. But on top of all her very lovely characteristics, Amélie is cripplingly shy, and it's easier for her to construct an elaborate game to flirt with Nino than to come anywhere close to letting him know who she is.

There's a lot to say about Amélie, but what trumps everything is that this is a really fucking nice motion picture. It's trite to say, but most movies that can be described as "great" - those made with high levels of craftsmanship and artistry, anxious to demand a lot from the audience, and polished at every level of their production - are usually about grave topics. There really aren't all that many movies made at Amélie's level of achievement whose subject matter and tone both support the idea that the world and the people in it are basically good, and it's possible for a driven, dedicated individual to make everybody's lives better, including her own. It's shocking how little actual conflict exists in the movie: two male characters are presented as abrasive and unpleasant, but one is generally redeemed over the course of the movie, and neither of them represent any kind of block to Amélie herself. The only tension that actually exists in the film's two hours are whether or not this endlessly upbeat character will be able to overcome her retiring personality to do something actively nice for herself. Which is a conflict, to be sure, but so internalised and abstract as to be almost totally non-cinematic.

So instead of being driven by story, Amélie is driven by its light tone, and its abiding love of its characters, whom it happily spends long, lingering moments with. It largely abates in the film's second half, but a very large amount of the running time is given over to parenthetical moments and asides dedicated to fleshing out the characters, including Amélie herself - even including her mother (Lorella Cravotta), who dies in a freak accident before the movie has even really gotten around to starting. In one respect, this is a straightforward evolution from City of Lost Children, which sketches out its profoundly bizarre cast at the level of attitude and imagery; Amélie backs off slightly from that film's storybook grotesquerie, but uses much the same technique to quickly establish characters while digging much deeper into their hearts and minds.

Meanwhile, it's style is bulbous and bright, with lots of wide-angle lenses used to make the main character literally wide-eyed. Jeunet and editor Hervé Schneid trot out a great many fun tricks for colliding and overlapping shots to suggest the characters' thoughts spilling out into the world; Delbonnel's heavily processed cinematography (over-reachingly declared the best of the decade by American Cinematographer in 2010; I'm not even certain that I'd call it Delbonnel's own best work in that span of time, but it's undeniably lovely and came with a high degree of difficulty) bathes the whole movie in a warm coating of yellows and occasional greens that give it an unabashedly nostalgic glow - the film exactly sets itself to the late summer of 1997, but it has the faraway visual texture of something set at least before World War II - and ramp up the friendly, happy energy. It's sunshiney, that's what it is, with a great many bright exteriors shot in a cartoony register to make them seem even lighter.

The result is a movie that's extraordinarily likable and overwhelmingly generous. It's not blatantly unrealistic - suffering and exploitation exist in the world. But it's one of the great cinematic depictions of optimism that we are capable of beating those things down. And it's a remarkable, tender, and entirely honest (despite all the cartoon borders) portrayal of crippling introversion being gently, steadily massaged into something more productive and rewarding. This is one of the most uplifting movies of the 21st Century in every way, and certainly one of the most artistically complex and intelligent movies on such apparently simplistic, cheery themes. It's a happy, guileless masterpiece, and there simply aren't enough of those to go around.

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IT IS A VERY PLUM PLUM

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

The big problem with The English Patient isn't even its fault: the problem is that Elaine Benes fucking hated it, and nobody who saw that 1997 episode of the sitcom Seinfeld before they caught up with the Oscar-worshiped romantic epic could possibly avoid hearing any echo of Julia Louis-Dreyfus's passionately anguished delivery of her character's rants. "Sex in a tub! That doesn't work!" or the incensed "Quit telling your stupid story about the stupid desert, and just die already! Die!" I will confess that, years and years before I first say the movie in the mid-'00s, I was prepared from that one line to find it unendurably stretched-thin and pokey, on top of already having my knives out from the film that swept the Academy Awards for 1996 when, if the universe were just, Secret & Lies and Fargo would have fought it out for all of the trophies everywhere. Is it any wonder, then, that it met my expectations?

Revisiting the film twice since than has softened me towards it, though I still can't say I love it; of director Anthony Minghella's picture postcard literary adaptations, I would rank it behind The Talented Mr. Ripley in every respect. It is, after all, quite a lot of movie, two hours and 42 minutes' worth, and the more movie you have, the greater the chances that not all of it will work equally well. I've found, generally speaking, that people who like The English Patient but don't adore it tend to cluster into two camps, based around which half of it is better: the "present day" plotline, or the "flashback" plotline, with the tacit implication that it would be better for all concerned if it could have gotten by without necessarily having to spend so much time on both of them. I happen to be a member of the "present day" camp, which is in no small part because I am also a member of the "Juliette Binoche is the best actress of the 1990s, and I really like you, Kristen Scott Thomas, but I'm sorry, just not that much" camp.

As adapted by Minghella from Michael Ondaatje's novel, The English Patient, broadly speaking, tells two love stories that play out during the Second World War, one in the beginning of the war, the other in its waning days. The action radiates backward from an Italian monastery that barely remains standing after years of fighting, currently serving as a field hospital. Here, Québécoise nurse Hana (Binoche) tends to a terribly burned English patient (Ralph Fiennes), who remembers neither his name nor his story. But as he slowly doles out what he does know, to Hana and to David Caravaggio (Willem Dafoe), another Canadian recuperating in the area, he learn the full version of his history, the one he either does not or cannot access himself. He is, it turns out, the Hungarian Count Laszlo de Almásy, and at the time war broke out in the late 1930s, he was mapping the Sahara Desert for the British government, alongside an Englishman named Madox (Julian Wadham). Their expedition is joined by the married Cliftons, Katharine (Scott Thomas) and Geoffrey (Colin Firth), and Almásy and Katharine soon strike up a love affair that ebbs and flows during those tense times in North Africa. Back in 1945, while Hana tends to Almásy and hears his story, she meets Kip (Naveen Andrews), a Sikh engineer in the British Army, and has a much less torrid, heaving, and sandy affair of her own.

The English Patient is a film of particular bigness, as Minghella splashes all the grandeur of the Sahara and North Africa across his screen in dauntingly orange landscape shots and more domestic scenes that lovingly foreground Stuart Craig's heavily detailed, lived-in production design. And it is also a film of great and subtle intimacy, relying extensively on close-ups of Fiennes and Scott Thomas. This mix is the film's biggest aesthetic strength, putting it somewhere on the spectrum of great psychological epics on the Lawrence of Arabia model, movies that successfully use an enormous canvas to paint a human-sized portrait (there are few of these that are genuinely good than you might hope for). But if I allow my inner Elaine to pipe up, it's also monotonous: there simply isn't much incident to stretch out to 162 minutes. Individually, many of the component scenes of The English Patient are miracles of mythic filmmaking: the sequence in which Almásy carries Katharine from a plane crash to the safety of some distant caves is Epic Cinema 101. But these great moments are separated by longueurs that do absolutely nothing but restate things we already knew, and though Scott Thomas was never better at inhabiting the space in front of the camera with casual sensual force than she was in this production, any movie that consists for seemingly half of its running time of watching two people smolder at each other is a movie that needs to answer some tough questions about its priorities.

That's part of why I prefer the framework with Hana and Kip and David: it feels more consequential, more rooted in historical context, and more driven. None of this is accidental, mind you. An important part of Minghella's strategy in the film is to contrast the relatively straightforward, plain, and tangible "now" story with the heated, highly subjective and abstracted "then" story, which is meant to work as a hazy dream of physical memory and emotional states - it is an impressionistic approach rather than a narrative one, nimbly aided by cinematographer John Seale and composer Gabriel Yared, the most important members of the filmmaking team for helping to construct that kind of detached High Romantic atmosphere of feeling rather than observing. And I admire this. But I would admire 50 minutes of it every bit as much as I admire two hours of it.

The Italian framework, meanwhile, is much less showy, but for my tastes, much more meaningful. While Scott Thomas and Fiennes are stuck playing concepts of erotic psychology, Binoche simply gets to play a human being, and she's better in her role than either of them (Andrews is the best member of the cast every time he opens his mouth, but in a limited part that has been weirdly slashed down from its importance in the source novel). And instead of the heaving visual overstimulation of the Eternal Desert, it takes place in a perfectly realised, deeply physical space, one in which the use of color and framing and slowness do a superb job of evoking the feel of cool, damp air, and the rough texture of ancient brick and stone. If the romantic flashback segments of film are an evocation of the way we remember places and physical sensation, the framework evoke feeling things and being in places right now. And coupled with the more down-to-earth characterisations and performances, I find all of that to be more satisfying.

That all being said, The English Patient is exactly the kind of movie that feels like it ought to have an enormously passionate fanbase - it is an intense, lush experience that hits right in the gut, while the films I will eternally check it against, Fargo and Secrets & Lies, take dead aim at the brain and allow the libido to shrivel up unattended. The English Patient is utterly gorgeous, and it's lusty and sexy in a very literate, classy way - the R-rated Miramax equivalent to the star-studded, posh European superproductions of the 1960s. There's a lot to be said for that, even when the results are the kind of half-baked and over-baked confection that this particular film turns out to be. I do find it all a bit tiring rather than exhilarating, and I can't imagine that's what the filmmakers had in mind, but I absolutely do respect the top-to-bottom commitment to making this movie the most fleshed-out version of itself possible. It's an enormous, indulgent beast, but it's completely honest about it.

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RIPLEY AND ME

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

Writer-director Wim Wenders's The American Friend is, arguably, not a very good adaptation of Patricia Highsmith's Ripley's Game at all: it backs off on the thriller elements considerably, alters the tone, jettisons important plot details and changes the ending in tremendously significant ways, and makes the American friend of the title, Tom Ripley (Dennis Hopper) more of a selfish but charismatic scalawag than the manipulative urbane psychopath of the novels. It backs down enough on the traditional characterisation of English-language fiction's best charming monster that "Ripley's Game" wouldn't be a remotely satisfactory title for the movie. It is far more interested in the relationships between people and the manipulations that happen on a smaller scale, between all of us, psychopaths or otherwise. Which is why it's actually a really great adaptation of Highsmith, whose books' crime trappings are the sugary coating that hides how much they're all basically about interactions between people who want to get something out of one another. Absent Alfred Hitchcock's sublime Strangers on a Train, it's maybe the best Highsmith adaptation, in fact, or anyway the best film sourced from her work.

The title might be in reference to the talented Mr. Ripley, and Hopper might be the top-billed, but the film is actually more interested in Jonathan Zimmermann (Bruno Ganz), a picture framer in Hamburg. Zimmermann and Ripley come into contact when the former insults the latter, knowing the American to be deeply involved in an art forgery ring; in retaliation, Ripley passes Zimmermann's name on to Raoul Minot (Gérard Blain), a French mobster looking for a hitman. Zimmermann is no hitman, of course, but he has a wife, Marianne (Lisa Kreuzer), and child whom he dearly loves. It takes surprisingly little effort for Minot and Ripley to use faked medical tests and innuendo to convince Zimmermann that he's dying of a blood disease, and with the promise of having a nest egg to leave his family after he dies, Zimmermann falls for Minot's plan with hardly a second thought about the grisliness of the job. Meanwhile, Ripley has started to befriend Zimmermann, who knows nothing of the American's various manipulations; and cold-blooded bastard that Tom Ripley surely is, he's not necessarily keen on turning any poor innocent fella into another one of himself.

Giving more away would spoil all of the fun and give the very wrong impression that The American Friend is a conventional thriller that pushes the viewer hard through a series of twists and turns, of crimes and psychological breaks. It does not do this, to a conspicuous degree. Sure, it's generically a thriller, and Wenders isn't above putting the characters through sequences of admirably high intensity - there's a longish sequence in the film's middle, set on a train, that's a terrific daisy chain of laugh-out-loud dark comic beats and dreadful tension, that's the most memorable element of the whole movie and, in fact, one of the most baldly delightful, entertaining genre moments in the New German Cinema. But that's not at all where the film lives. This is a buddy film, in its damned peculiar way; Ripley is a nasty piece of work and Zimmermann is a personality fracturing before our eyes, but they serve as the foundation for a greatly touching depiction of friendship and mutual support - contrary to my expectation headed into the film, there's nothing ironic about the title The American Friend. Ganz and Hopper, even as they're creating edgy, bleak characters, strike up rich, meaningful camaraderie, and the movie ends up working much less as a story of crime than of how crime impacts the private lives of criminals.

With its focus on the insides of its characters heads, the film serves as a kind of updated version of noir, and it's frequently described as such. I'm not wholly inclined to that reading, though at least two truths are undeniable: one is that the film has the heavy urban atmosphere that typifies noir as one of its most characteristic elements. The other is that Wenders is eager to remind us of of American genre film, casting as mobsters the directors Nicholas Ray and Samuel Fuller, two of the most beloved American outsiders to the various European New Waves, and it's impossible to suppose that a working knowledge of noir doesn't inform the way the film's plot works and how it relates to its characters. At the same time, the film's look is as far from noir as it gets: the great cinematographer Robby Müller shot the film with potent colors, brightly shouting out from the limitations of '70s film stock and lending a vibrant liveliness to the movie that cuts through the grottiness of the setting and scenario. This a movie that practically glows, it's so bold and pretty. That's a stark contrast between visual style and content, and it does a great deal to shift the film's energy away from anything that a plain recitation of its plot would suggest. Keeping in line with the reality that this is Zinnemann's film above all, the very particular look of The American Friend, with its pop-up colors, works in a way to evoke the very keen awareness of what things look and feel like that might occur to a man convinced he's in the last stages of his life, and being thrust into experiences far beyond anything within his sphere. It's an intense-looking film to suit the intensified perception of its protagonist, I'd argue, and a tremendously lovely one at that.

It's crafty and beguiling and unexpectedly smart about people, and the only shortcomings I can spot within it are those of context. This is not, to be horribly blunt about it, a particularly special film within the greater world of New German Cinema, nor Wenders's own career: very good, but also kind of ultimately normal. It's the first utterly "Americanised" film of that generation's self-described most Americanised filmmaker, which isn't a necessary problem. Though the director who had just completed his Road Trilogy - Alice in the Cities, Wrong Move, and Kings of the Road - moving right into a genre riff couldn't help but feel like a step down. The American Friend is a very good movie that a lot of people could have made in a lot of places - Wenders, in West Germany, in 1977, doesn't leave the kind of stamp on the film that would have made it truly great (it is, however, quintessentially and irreducibly European in a way that no other Ripley film I've seen has been - but I have not seen Purple Noon). Still, not every auteur has to be turned on 100% of the time, and The American Friend is absolutely worth treasuring: a gorgeous, taut movie with vivid characters on impressively complex journeys, one of the most humane and cinematically articulate thrillers I've seen from that era.

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THE MAXIMUM FORCE OF THE FUTURE

Overhype is a deadly thing, and I don't want to contribute to it. So let's just leave it at this: if you're on the fence about Mad Max: Fury Road, I think you should see it. Go now, and do not be overhyped. If you're sticking around to find out why I think you should see it, one reason is because it's got some really lovely landscape photography of the Namib Desert, standing in for the post-apocalyptic Australian Outback. Another reason is because it's the best action movie since - if I'm trying really hard to be conservative - Hard Boiled in 1992. The second reason, I concede, is probably the more compelling one.

This is, maybe, the film that George Miller was born to make. Oh, sure, Mad Max 2, AKA The Road Warrior, is flawless, divine masterpiece, but it didn't cost a titanic sum of money. Fury Road did, and Miller and crew made every penny count to the utmost. This is what happens when you take a man who spent the early years of his career creating entirely new ways of doing action cinema on a shoestring, provide him with 30 years to think about what he wanted to do next, and then give him all the budget he could require to realise it. Seeing scrappy, ingenious filmmakers make a whole lot of practically nothing is inspiring and exciting, but seeing them make a whole lot out of a whole lot is absolutely mindblowing. And also inspiring - in an age when sums of money that could buy and sell whole nations are used to produce nice and safe popcorn movies that feel very much the same as a dozen other movies that cost equally as much, it's close to a sacred experience to stumble across a movie that wants to use all those limitless resources to do something that we have never, ever seen before in a movie, and which most of us, I'd wager, couldn't even have imagined in the first place.

The film has characters, and a plot - eerily fucking good characters, and a plot that gets all sinewy and dense when you start to pick at it - but mostly, it has an overwhelming, damn near unendurable sense of momentum (it's the most active, physical viewing experience I've had in a very long time, with the short lulls in the action invariably leading to a long slow release of breath and the relaxation of muscles I didn't realise I was tensing up). The film opens with a slow, steady shot of Max Rockatansky (Tom Hardy) staring off at the desert in what used to be Australia, intoning in ragged voice-over the minute amount of backstory selected from the first three Mad Max pictures we need in order to know what's going on - Max was a cop before the world ended, and now he's roaming the wasteland trying to survive and forget - and after he kills and eats a two-headed mutant lizard, he hops in his V-8 Interceptor and starts the engines. The one in the car, and the one in the movie, which immediately turns into a chase and does not cease to be one until its second-to-last scene, though there are variations in who is being chased by whom and for what reason vary from moment to moment, and there are pauses throughout the narrative when the people giving chase are far enough in the background that they're not an immediate concern.

The main object of the chase isn't Max himself, but Furiosa (Charlize Theron), an Imperator in the army of Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne, whose colorful villain credentials include the psychopathic biker Toecutter back in the original Mad Max), leader of the Citadel. It's one of the three human outposts in those part - Gas Town and Bullet Farm are the others - centered on a warrior death cult that Joe has derived and made himself the center of; and among the seemingly inexhaustible charms of Fury Road, one that makes me happiest to contemplate is the developmental arc it continues to form with the original trilogy. The Road Warrior shows post-apocalyptic world where the brightest light of civilisation is a disorganised, survivalist community a step above hunting and gathering; by the time of Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, humanity has rediscovered towns, economy, and a cursory form of government; and here in Fury Road, religion has re-asserted itself, with the hierarchy and ritual attendant on those things.

But back to Furiosa. For reasons of her own, which are teased out throughout the movie, she has agreed to smuggle out five of Joe's "wives" - "breeding slaves" is rather more to the point, but religious despots have the luxury of defining terms - and bring them to safety far to the east of the region. Max, having already been captured by Joe's pasty white "war boys", is dragged along by one particularly zealous soldier named Nux (Nicholas Hoult), currently relying on Max as a blood donor to replenish his mostly exsanguinated, corpselike body. So Max is right at the heart of the Furiosa hunt, not that he gives any kind of shit, and as soon as he, the Imperator, and her five charges find themselves the only apparent survivors of a freakishly huge sandstorm, he's willing to abandon them to their doom, as long as he can get the hell away on Furiosa's heavily-armored war rig, a beastly hybrid of a semi truck and God knows what else. The only problem being that without her, he can't operate it, and she's not moving anywhere without the women he's protecting. So Max reluctantly becomes one half of the superhuman team trying to escape the combined military power of all three settlements, along with the nomadic terrorists who guard the canyon that's the only way deeper into the east.

Simple, pure, and responsible for the most crazed, beautifully-conceived, flawlessly executed car stunts in... ever? Probably ever. Any attempt to describe what happens across most of Fury Road, the first English-language movie I have ever seen that's more than 50% action setpieces, would quickly turn into tedious recitation of "this cool thing happened, and then this cool thing happened". Any attempt to describe how the filmmakers carried it off would quite stymie me, because I don't know, and "probably a fucking wizard" isn't a real answer. But it's flawless action, edited by Margaret Sixel to perfectly emphasise continuity across a whirlwind of shots from every angle as literally dozens of vehicles tear through the Namibian sand, with a simply phenomenal sound mix calling attention to every different component of every vehicle, and to Junkie XL's raging drums-and-guitar score, which is as rousing and intensifying to the viewer as it is to the characters onscreen (I'm going to allow myself one "this cool thing" aside: the giant truck of drums and a flamethrower guitar, present to arouse the war boys into a heightened state of bloodlust, and cunningly woven in and out of the film's soundscape, is pure popcorn movie pop-art genius). The film starts from the most outrageous concepts for staging fights, and only gets more and more involved and seemingly physically impossible as it goes along, with second unit director and stunt coordinator Guy Norris flinging human bodies and elaborately over-designed cars and trucks around the screen like the juggler of the gods. Meanwhile, John Seale's cinematography goes overboard on the boldest colors in the crayon box, leaving to one of the most potently saturated movies in recent memory, however limited its overall palette; at times it feels like Miller was answering a dare to prove that shooting a movie in almost nothing but the dreaded orange and teal could be uncompromisingly beautiful and absolutely essential to the creation of a particular mood in which the harsh sky and empty desert dominate every exterior moment.

Like all of the Mad Maxes, Fury Road's exposition happens at slantwise angles to the actual script, leaving us to collect data on the fly as the film goes along, and this time, we have to do it while the whole movie is moving at something close to the speed of sound. It's marvelous, not just because it frees the film up from having to slow down for talking, but because it permits the movie to shockingly dense with commentary about its society and our own, all of it explored so invisibly that it never for a fraction of a moment appears that the movie has anything else on its mind but adrenaline. But that is surely not the case: it's a study of women actively defying the patriarchy in the most literal possible meaning of that word, of the way that vague religious promises can be used to placate and control people, of the way that personality cults can shore up a totalitarian system of central control and make the exploited feel like they have a rooting interest in their exploiters. Miller and Brendan McCarthy and Nico Lathouris's script dribbles out the necessary details to see these themes play out all out of order and in random places - the nature of Immortan Joe's death-and-rebirth religion especially shows up only when the characters would need it to - so it feels profoundly natural and organic, more a side-effect of the movie than the rhetorical justification for it.

And yet it's so deep in the film! It results in Fury Road boasting not just one of the most completely realised worlds in recent genre cinema, but two of the most complicated and interesting characters in Furiosa and Nux, the first combining raw feminism with a quiet self-loathing for all the good he hasn't done, the latter completing crisis-of-faith arc that is absurdly ambitious and unexpected for somebody that starts out as a thuggish sidekick. With the two chewiest parts, Theron and Hoult give the two best performances in a cast where nobody's less then strong; they, the cluster of actors playing the escaped sex slaves, and Hardy's more muted and soulful Max, far less detached and mythic than Mel Gibson's original take on the character (I do not know whether I think this works exclusively to the film's favor), give Fury Road the strong human spine it needs for its gonzo action to be emotionally involving on top being already quite exhilarating.

Providing spectacle of an unprecedented sort in the midst of one of the most fully fleshed-out artificial worlds in memory - here I am at the end, without even touching on Jenny Beavan's costume design and Colin Gibson's production design, despite those being two of the most important aspects of the whole movie, giving it the visual anchor it needs to feel real - Fury Road would already be quite a masterpiece of shallow entertainment, action with no purpose other than the sheer joy of movement and kinesis. But the sneaky intellectual depth of it, hardly the stuff of a philosophical text but impressively nuanced and complex for a movie that's devoting so much energy to expanding the vocabulary of movie action sequences, that's enough to put it on a level above even such recent instant-classics as The Raid, a film of pure genius that feels like cotton candy in comparison. Fury Road is a perfect action movie, and an improvement on the seemingly unimprovable Road Warrior, and one of the best films I've seen all decade.

10/10

Reviews in this series
Mad Max (Miller, 1979)
Mad Max 2 AKA The Road Warrior (Miller, 1981)
Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (Miller and Ogilvie, 1985)
Mad Max: Fury Road (Miller, 2015)

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I CAN'T SEE ME LOVING NOBODY BUT YOU

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

If there's one big, unanswerable complaint to be made against Wong Kar-wai's 1997 romantic tragedy Happy Together, it's that three years later, Wong made In the Mood for Love, and in the process made the earlier film feel like a bit of a test run. That's a manifestly unfair standard to hold against anything; In the Mood for Love isn't merely the best film of the director's career, it's one of the very best romantic dramas in all of cinema, and you can't start using absolute perfection as the gatekeeper to what movies you deem acceptable or not. It's just that even by the standards of Wong's deliberately redundant career, full of movies that feel like they're in conversation with each other, Happy Together has a lot of overlap with the latter movie. But it also got there first, and deserves tribute for its primacy, above and beyond the simple fact that everything Happy Together does, it does superlatively well.

Structured more as a series of impressionistic memories than a narrative, Happy Together is, generally speaking, about a relationship that's not working and the enormously "big" attempt the participants make to keep things together, more out of habit and a belief in romanticism than anything that could possibly be defended as good sense. We mostly get the story from Lai Yiu-fai (Tony Leung Chiu-wai), recalling how he and his boyfriend Ho Po-wing (Leslie Cheung) threw caution to the winds and skipped out on Hong Kong to visit Argentina with nothing more than hope and a desire to see the Iguazu Falls, which they know only from a tacky little animated lamp. Very nearly the first thing they do upon arriving is to break up, at which point the film flings itself into severe, high-contrast black and white, and for some time thereafter, the penniless exes cross paths, reunite, and relive the same pattern of manipulation, strangled intimacy, emotional abuse, break-up, and then regret for having broken up. At a certain point, Lai finally makes an honest accounting of himself and his needs, and decides to return to Asia, at last snapping the cycle, to both men's private sorrow.

In other words, not much "happens" in Happy Together, but it not-happens in the most delectable way. Wong's filmography leaves him more open that almost any other great contemporary filmmaker to charges that he favors style over substance, but nothing else in his career, not even In the Mood for Love itself, so clearly depicts how his movies use style as a means of charting his character's emotions. And not just in the incredibly obvious ways, like how the film uses black and white cinematography to mark out the characters' first break-up, jumping back into color when they're back together, but also for a few insert shots of objects and moments that represent a sort of idealised romantic potential for them in their loneliness. That's fine and clever, if a bit blunt. Far subtler is its range of colors when it's actually in color, as Wong and his indispensable cinematographer Christopher Doyle (for proof, look what happened in both men's careers after they dispensed with each other) click from the sallow yellows of urban night into a much harsher, metallic array of muted colors, and then into a softer, more saturated palette, a series of shifts that don't map onto the narrative in any clear one-to-one fashion, but still describe a fluctuation of emotions that may represent what the characters feel in the moment but surely represent what they feel about it later on, when they're in our position of revisiting a story that's all taking place in the past tense.

What makes Happy Together truly great, though, isn't even its visual panache, which it after all largely inherits from Wong and Doyle's earlier work (where, in faith, it is perhaps better - ask me whether this film or 1994's Chungking Express is the more compellingly shot, and I'll eventually, if reluctantly, side with the earlier film), but in its powerful formlessness, its most distinctive legacy for In the Mood for Love, and the one that matters most, above things like a lingering sense of moody romance and the way that the latter film revises the southernmost lighthouse in South America into ruined wall in Angkor Wat. The most distinctive thing about both films, within Wong's career and generally, is their almost dreamlike texture, and that emerged fully formed and virtually perfect in Happy Together, a movie veritably constructed from ellipses and implications. When the director and editors William Chang and Wong Ming Lam suddenly throw in an unexpected insert shot or two, when the action stutters into a random piece of slow-motion, when scenes glide together along the spine of the voice-over narration despite the images not linking up in any normal way, we're seeing a film work towards building its characters' psychologies into its structure, not by depicting what they think and feel in terms of story and performance. Indeed, it takes two absolute powerhouse performances by Leung and Chung to sketch out who Yiu-fai and Po-wing are beyond the most superficial elements of "the one is kind of mean and likes sex, the other is moody and insular". And they are both magnificent - Leung's work in Wong's films represents the strongest collection of performances in Hong Kong cinema that I've yet encountered, and this is probably the best of it all - playing the characters with more depth than the series of essentialised poses that the script requires them to be, without bringing so much realism to bear that it threatens the dreamlike structure of the whole movie.

Still, what is best and most moving about Happy Together is not the way it works as a pair of character sketches about two particular people, but the way it reduces two particular people into states of being and feeling. It's all tremendously abstract and conceptual, but to a certain degree, that's the way the characters exist in the world anyway; the film's repeated invocation of Iguazu Falls makes it very clear that it exists as the ultimate expression of non-specific exoticised, hopeful romanticism for them (when it finally appears, Wong and Doyle let the water drench the lens and distort the picture into a literally impressionistic collection of colors and amorphous lines, and in so doing permit it to remain romantic), while the presentation of Argentina as a cacophony of unfamiliar spaces and noisy Spanish strips it of the concrete physicality that lends weight and gravity to the similarly fluid Chunking Express or Days of Being Wild. It is, ultimately, a film about two lovers invested in the textures and feeling of love, instead of the specific realities of it, and it indulges them by transferring their impressions into its own form. That is what leads them repeatedly and inexorably to tragedy, but it's also what makes the film an outstanding artistic triumph.

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