COLD HEARTS

There's no good in hiding the obvious: director Nuri Bilge Ceylan's seventh feature Winter Sleep, winner of the 2014 Palme d'Or, is three hours and sixteen minutes long, with most of that time given to people talking. This is a shallow observation, but the film emphasises the weight of its running time to an extreme degree even for the 3-Hours-and-Over club; it has an inexorable quality, marching towards its destination with slow, heavy steps, all the better to focus our attention on the unyielding psychological gamesmanship at its center. You feel that 196 minutes, but the film is not trying to prevent you from doing so.

We are all friends here, so I will risk coming off as a philistine by floating the possibility that Winter Sleep doesn't really earn that running time. It hasn't any denser conversations, nor is it more reliant on making the audience feel duration, than the director's last picture, Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, which winsomely clocked in at just 157 minutes (and, for good measure, it's the more interestingly shot of the two films with much fresher and more challenging themes, but if we start playing the "you won the Palme for the wrong movie" game, I might as well give up on the review now). Its repetitions are hardly pointless - they're designed to show how the characters can fail to observe their own behavior and therefore fail to take steps to correct themselves - but they are, nonetheless, repetitions, and it is a lot of movie, when all is said and done.

Anyway, let's meet those characters. Aydin (Haluk Bilginer) is our protagonist; he owns a hotel in a remote, hilly part of the Cappadocia region of Anatolia in Turkey, as well as several properties he rents out to local farmers, he writes an editorial column in the local paper, and he clearly supposes that all of this makes him the hottest of shit. We're invited to see through this pretty quickly in moments that reveal him to be a little bit pathetic: the way he allows his assistant Hidayet (Ayberk Pekcan) to deal with his irate tenants, the fatuous way he has of talking to the guests at his hotel, and his genial bullying demeanor to everyone, whom he plainly regards as the intellectually diminished serfs inhabiting his remote fiefdom. Though most everybody appears to regard him as something of an ass, the only people who call him on it are the women sharing his home: his recently divorced sister Necla (Demet Akbag), and his young-enough-to-be-mistaken-for-his-daughter wife Nihal (Melisa Sözen), who each get their turns in the film's longest individual scenes to try and talk him down to size, to which he responds with some withering erudition of his own; in a movie dominated by slow moments and conversation, these two epic-scale dialogues count as the biggest setpieces.

The script, written by Ceyland and his wife, Ebru Ceylan (this epic-length study of a strained marriage in its death throes must have been the funnest family project ever), plays a lot more fair than just painting Aydin as as blustering know-it-all who needs to get knocked down a peg. It's quite free with observing, in a very subdued and entirely nonjudgmental register, the ways in which all of its characters act with a degree of unthinking arrogance, relative to their position. Nihal may be uniquely capable of outflanking Aydin, but one of the film's strongest individual moments finds her repeating his smugly patriarchal tendency to look down on the poorer classes as things to be attended to, not humans to be engaged with. The film's not merely an indictment of blind male authority, or the assumption of power by the educated and moneyed classes, though both of these things are primary targets. Overall, though, Winter Sleep sets its horizons much broader than that; it is, fundamentally, about disconnects between people, born in arrogance that takes all sorts of different forms, not just the overt ones represented by Aydin. Though he is certainly the most openly self-deluding member of the cast, able to skillfully argue about religion, morality, relationships between people, and all the other things discussed at length throughout the movie, but always more for the sake of arguing than because he clearly understands or cares for what he's talking about.

In telling this story, Ceylan situates his characters against a nearly primordial landscape of enormous rocks against which human dwellings nestle incongruously, as the titular winter lays a chilly grey pall over everything even before the snow falls with its metaphoric inevitability. It is a world in which human concerns are weirdly out of place, making the doggedness with which the characters pursue and relentlessly define those concerns, seem even more self-defeating. Aydin's disregard for everyone he claims as his inferiors, and their disregard for him, are mirrored in the way that the landscape seems utterly indifferent to everyone in it. Tellingly, the exteriors are almost always wide shots, stressing the openness of the scenery and minimising the humans in the frame, while the interiors are all closed-in and boxy, giving no sense of the geography within the buildings they occupy; the human element of the film is always conditional in a way that the natural setting isn't.

It's powerful stuff, no two ways about it; and yet, I left Winter Sleep feeling a bit detached from it. The sheer volume of film has a lot to do with that, of course: conversations that are all individually interesting and enlightening both about the human condition and the mental state of the persons having those conversations get a lot less interesing and a lot less enlightening when they wear one down through sheer glut. It's also hard to shake the feeling that it's a decisive step down from Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, which used lighting, framing, and editing with a consistent precision that isn't nearly so true of Winter Sleep. It is bold filmmaking and screenwriting, beyond a shadow of a doubt, with at least two absolutely terrific performances (Bilginer's and Sözen) rising out of a top-level ensemble. But it's tinged by the disappointment that comes from a work of art that's so close to greatness that its failure to quite bridge that last little gap is all the more frustrating.

8/10

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HOLLYWOOD CENTURY, 1970: In which an old curmudgeon jumps in with the young turks, and brazen experiment can also be popular entertainment

The New Hollywood Cinema was largely a young man's game, with most of its leading lights part of the first film school generation. Francis Ford Coppola, Peter Bogdanovich, and Michael Cimino were both born in 1939; Brian De Palma in 1940; Martin Scorsese in 1942; Terrence Malick in 1943; George Lucas and John Milius in 1944; Paul Scharader and Steven Spielberg were the babies, born in 1946. We start to creep older with Warren Beatty (b. 1937), Dennis Hopper (b. 1936), Robert Towne (b. 1934), Bob Rafelson (b. 1933), Robert Benton (b. 1932), Mike Nichols (b. 1931), and eventually we land at editor extraordinaire and underappreciated director Hal Ashby, born in 1929.

There is one great outlier, not just in age, but in experience: his career had begun in industrial short films a full 20 years before the New Hollywood found him and gave him a chance to explode as one of the most creative, challenging filmmakers of his generation - well, not of his generation at all, of course. The '50s and '60s found him cranking out TV episodes by the handful, and out of all the names I have dropped thus far, he'd be the one who, from the vantage point of 1970, was most clearly part of The Establishment; though he'd do more to demolish The Establishment from inside out than any other American auteur in the most radical decade of American cinema. The man I'm referring to is Robert Altman, not quite 45 years old when he dropped a bomb called MASH on the cinematic landscape.

I'm going to get the ugly part out of the way, so we can get on to ignoring it: I'm not terribly fond of MASH. The most impressive things about it were all re-done to better effect and with more sophistication in Altman's later work throughout the decade, and without MASH's conspicuous flaws of snotty, juvenile humor and a real sense of needless cruelty, both of them typified by it's most signally obnoxious scene, a cheap joke built around the sexual humiliation of the movie's most important female character. It's crude and shaggy and smug, absolutely impossible to square with the wide-open appreciation of humanity's warts and strengths in Nashville, or the complex, ghostly depiction of people outside of the mainstream of self-described Civilisation in McCabe & Mrs. Miller (made just a year later!). As far as depictions of sloppy, self-congratulatory masculinity, The Long Goodbye is infinitely more rewarding.

Of course, Altman could have made none of those films without MASH paving his way, both aesthetically and commercially. He got to make the film almost entirely without oversight, while 20th Century Fox was far too busy fussing over the more expensive war films Patton and Tora! Tora! Tora! to give much of a shit about the ramshackle little Korean War comedy that the TV director was making with a bunch of nobody actors from a Ring Lardner, Jr. script that he was constantly changing. And he ran with it as far as he conceivably could, making a movie that broke rules, invented rules, didn't give a shit about the rules, captured a specific moment in the Zeitgeist as perfectly as it could be captured, made a huge pile of money, and gave him a blank check to pursue bizarre personal indulgences for years. Glancing over his filmography, it apparently wasn't until the very visible collapse of his film of Popeye, a full ten years later, that he finally ran out of post-MASH goodwill from the big studio moneymen.

Anyway, having confessed (and felt kind of shameful about it) that I'm no particular fan of the film, I nevertheless admire what it does and what it represents, and I can admit that some of the things I like least about it - it's almost complete shapelessness, for one - are exactly why it made such a tremendous impact in '70. MASH is not just a mere comedy, not even a mere anti-war comedy - which is all the very long-running, equally iconic TV spin-off is, for all that I prefer the small-screen M*A*S*H to its cinematic big brother - but an entirely self-contained anti-Establishment weapon of mass destruction. It's not enough to mock the serious people who were seriously running the war in Vietnam in to a very serious quagmire: the very object that MASH is functions as a "fuck you and the horse you rode in on" to the nice, sensible, moderate people who form the Establishment's backbone. The film is laconic and flippant, but mostly it is pissed: it's just that the anger doesn't express itself through the characters and scenario (as the TV show played it), but through the way that the film has been constructed. The messy, busy, discontinuous aesthetic of the film, and its completely ragged non-plot, are acts of aggression against normalcy, suggesting that the world of '69 and '70 were too colossally fucked-up for normalcy to keep going on. Honestly, of all the major early works in the New Hollywood Cinema, it's probably the most important for this reason, along with Easy Rider: plenty of films argued that "This isn't working" and proposed a change socially; these two films were far and away the most prominent and successful attempts at making the same argument cinematically.

It gets there through somewhat less chemically-induced means: the most immediately noticeable thing about the film, even before it's raggedy, extravagantly European editing scheme (credited solely to Danford B. Greene, though Altman was also in the room), is its legitimately revolutionary sound recording and mixing, the most exciting upheaval in Hollywood sound aesthetic since Howard Hawks realised that movies were funnier and more exciting if people's lines overlapped. The sound, by Bernard Freericks and John Stack, is jaw-dropping, and even the refinements made to it by Altman and others (it reached its apotheosis in Nashville) haven't robbed MASH of its sonic audacity. Offscreen noise is omnipresent, we have to parse two, three, four speakers involved in different conversations simultaneously, and one of the film's most vivid and memorable characters is the P.A. announcer played by David Arkin, who also wrote the pedantic, weird, dreamlike announcements that he speaks in a confused, harried tone, cutting through the action with erratic non sequiturs regularly throughout the movie. Combined with the graceless cutting, which snaps the ends off words and jams scenes together so artlessly that it starts to take on its own internal logic, the overwhelming impression MASH leaves is that of chaos. It's legitimately edgy in a way that most films that more openly court edginess through sex and violence wouldn't know what to do with, suggesting that war, and society, and human life, and the whole damn thing are messy, inexplicable, and confusing, and coming at a moment of such widespread dissatisfaction as America was feeling in the turnover to the 1970s, it's little wonder that the film grabbed the mood of the nation in a big way.

And that, again, does serve to inoculate the film against the easiest criticisms against what look like enormous problems: I could write hundreds of words about the football game that takes up the last quarter of the not-quite two-hour movie, complaining about the abrupt shift of tone, the hash it makes of at least one character's internal logic, and the weird shift from sly, sardonic hang-out comedy to big goofy antics, but of course MASH can come right back at me and demand, well, why not end with a ridiculous comic football scene? The Marx Brothers did it, and they were dangerous cinematic anarchists working in a time of mass dissatisfaction too. And while this doesn't make me like the football sequence any more, it certainly makes it impossible to objectively argue against it.

The broad strokes of the film (structure, sound, tone) are so compelling that it's easy to overlook the smaller elements, though only in a film like this could I use the phrase "smaller elements" and be referring to things like the actors, story, and theme. The first of Altman's films with an enormous ensemble, MASH boasts an extraordinary ensemble: Sally Kellerman, Bud Cort, Michael Murphy, Rene Auberjonois, Tom Skerritt, Robert Duvall, just right off, with the whole thing headed up by Elliott Gould (the closest thing to a big name at the time, on the strength of Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice) and Donald Sutherland as two anachronistically counter-cultural surgeons in a surgical camp in a Korea that Altman was hellbent on convincing us was actually Vietnam (the studio forced him into an opening title card to clarify things, but the intent remains clear). It's a heavily improvised film, setting a standard for Altman films that would continue to the director's death; the result is less a story about character arcs than a collection of events that cause people to react to them, and it's tremendously impressive how well the actors, down to the smallest roles, inhabit their roles with such organic naturalism that it seems right describe it as "people reacting" and not "characters doing X" or "actors doing X". Punctuated with harried, gory scenes of wartime surgery, so the film can give propriety one last smack in the face (it's also the first American studio film with the word "fuck" in its dialogue).

That MASH is so much of its moment doesn't mean that it's aged poorly. In a lot of ways, frankly, it's brash enough and inventive enough to still feel like a work of radicalism, more than 40 years on - except in matters of social mores; the sexism feels all the more disconcerting for how otherwise contemporary the style is. And the iconic theme song "Suicide Is Painless" - written by Altman's teenage son, and oh, how very teenaged it feels - is unabashedly dated. But these are little things: MASH is still a wildly alive, rampaging piece of cinema, whatever my own measured response to it, and essential viewing for anyone who cares even slightly about the history of American cinema. Nothing I nor anyone can say makes it less of a milestone or less of a triumph of getting away with it, right underneath the studio's nose.

Elsewhere in American cinema in 1970
-Love means never having to say you're sorry for ruining an entire generation with the treacly bullshit of Love Story
-The Maysles brothers and Charlotte Zwerin's documentary on the Rolling Stones, Gimme Shelter, films the exact moment when the '60s counter-culture implodes
-Hot young film critic Roger Ebert and tit fancier Russ Meyer collaborate on Beyond the Valley of the Dolls

Elsewhere in world cinema in 1970
-Chilean-French director Alejandro Jodorowsky makes El Topo in Mexico, the first of his major spiritual-surrealist epics
-Dario Argento's stylish thriller The Bird with the Crystal Plumage kicks the Italian genre of the giallo into overdrive
-Michael Lindsay-Hogg's documentary Let It Be, shot for British TV but released theatrically, documents in excruciating detail the in-group hatreds that would eventually break up The Beatles

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CHICAGO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL '13: BLUE IS THE WARMEST COLOR (ABDELLATIF KECHICHE, FRANCE)

Screens at CIFF: 10/12
World premiere: 23 May, 2013, Cannes International Film Festival

The Palme d'Or winner for 2013, Blue Is the Warmest Color, comes with some serious baggage attached. More than most Palme d'Or winners, I mean.

First, the running time: it's a "lifespan of a romantic relationship" drama that is great at three hours, and would probably be just as great and in the same ways if it was, say, two hours and a half. Two hours and a quarter, even. Maybe I'm wrong about that, for certainly the grand scale of time the film covers justifies that kind of epic treatment, but there are a lot of small moments that are… fine, but the difference between a movie that needs to be three hours long and a movie that needn't aren't a plethora of "fine" moments.

Second, the sex. The explicit, barely-simulated lesbian sex. I am not now and have never been a lesbian, so I really shouldn't pretend like I have a meaningful opinion on whether the sex scenes staged by a straight male director and two straight female actors are meaningfully true to the lesbian experience, but I'll say that the complaints by Julie Maroh, author of the source material, that it's very male gazey seem pretty much spot on, and anyway when a lesbian author looks at the adaptation of her lesbian lovers and tells the world, "that's not how we do it", I'm inclined to at least give her the benefit of the doubt.

What I am is a seasoned film-watcher, and in that capacity, I can say this about the sex scenes: there are too many of them, and at least two of them are too long. Which gets back to the three-hour running time, because if there's one outrageously obvious place to start backing off on that, it's one of the real-time sex scenes that, by expanding to ten minutes instead of just two or three, only really informs us that Adèle Exarchopoulos and Léa Seydoux are good sports, without actually communicating anything about how sex is experienced by humans that wasn't already clear. I can think of one plausible justification for this, which I'm going to hold on to for later.

There's a third thing, one that isn't a talking point like the first two, probably because it's kind of petty and dumb on part to even bring it up: for all that Blue Is the Warmest Color is a handsome title, mysterious and poetic and well-grounded in the film's visual schema, the French title, La vie d'Adèle (The Life of Adèle), is better. It sets up, much more clearly, what the film is actually about - since, unlike you've probably been led to believe, this isn't actually three hours of lesbians fucking, but a bildungsroman about a lesbian woman who, during her life, has sex - while also being well-grounded, symbolically, in the film's screenplay.

That's a whole lot of words to say, basically, that BITWC has flaws, and those flaws aren't tiny, and it feels like one of those Palmes that was given out for reasons somewhat larger than the movie itself. And I say all of this in the hopes of augmenting your expectations better than mine were augmented, for I had some timorous hope based on the hype that this might end up being one of the great films of the modern day. It's not at all, but it is awfully fucking good, and now I'm done saying bad things about the movie from here on out.

The fact is, BITWC is a depiction of adolescent and young adult psychology, primarily as it focuses on romantic relationships, of unyielding intimacy and comprehensive scope. Its protagonist, Adèle (Adèle Exarchopoulos) is explored through some exquisitely tiny acting and strictly focused directing by Abdellatif Kechiche, whose previous films I have not seen, and so I cannot say if these very close stories of the way that people behave are characteristic of him, or not. What I can say is that in this particular case, Kechiche's relentless closeness, bordering on invasiveness at times, in depicting Adèle's life in its big moments and its little ones results in a particularly novelistic sort of character study, where we get to know the character more through the accumulation of moments that feel, all by themselves, quite insignificant, rather than any that strike with big, momentous "let me now demonstrate who I am" declarations. Exarchopoulos's performance follows suit, underplaying so much and residing for so much of the time in a register of inarticulate reacting that it's easy to think that she's simply not up to the task of carrying a movie, particularly with Léa Seydoux ripping the film apart with sweeping, huge emotional states as Emma, the blue-haired girl that awakens Adèle to her own desires and identity.

Two things become clear that belie this impression: one is that the more time we spend with Adèle, the more we find that we've already learned about her without realising it: and this is a huge credit to the writing and to the performance, both of which have to proceed extremely delicately to allow this kind of subliminal character-building. The other is that the film is told from an extremely subjective point of view that is disguised by Kechiche's apparently godlike camera view (I can't recall if there's a single scene told without Adèle in it, or even a conversation that she wouldn't be able to hear), and the degree to which Seydoux's Emma simply seems more alive and complete than Exarchopolous's Adèle is in fact a reflection of how the character herself views their relationship. To Adèle, Emma is a life force that brings color (literally; consider the English title) to her world, the source of everything vital and feeling. It would make sense, from that perspective, that Adèle would be plainer and less fully-formed; that is how she considers herself. This, incidentally, is the single justification I can think of for those marathon-length sex scenes: they are dramatising Adèle's own response to the events, which are of such enthusiasm and pleasure that she would linger over each detail in her mind, as long as possible (compare her single onscreen heterosexual experience, skipped over by a hasty edit almost the second it starts).

The ways that the film present this all-encompassing relationship are fascinatingly done. Most notably, there is a jump near the middle of the film that skips over years of life, including Adèle's entire university career; it is the time when, we can assume, the women are at their happiest, for when the film lands, the blue that has, to this point, defined all of the imagery of happiness and comfort has been replaced by reds and yellows, including Emma's hair; the relationship has changed considerably, and this being a French movie, we can be sure it's for the worst. The huge gap is easily the most interesting part of the movie, because it allows us to quickly track the way that the characters have changed (and failed to change, as applicable), and to very immediately compare the heady emotions of new love with the straggling desperation of a relationship on its last legs. The actresses go to some impressively bleak places in this back portion of the movie - Seydoux to some extravagantly mean ones as well - and the results are impressively raw and hard-won, leaving a film that effectively puts the viewer through the same emotional wringer (and perhaps this is a reason that the film deserves to be so long).

Based on recent interviews, everybody involved with the production seeming to hate it now, but it was worth whatever misery it took to get there. The life of Adèle is a richly-detailed one told with vivid, contagious empathy, and for all its questionable storytelling choices, it is an excellent work of emotional realism, and as exhaustively thrilling a love story as cinema has lately produced.

9/10

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