Don't Let's Spoil Everything, We've Only Just Met.

Michaelangelo Antonioni has a Golden Lion (for Il Deserto Rosso) and a Golden Bear (for La Notte), but only one Palme d'Or (from five nominations) for Blow-Up, his first English-language film from 1966. It is also the only film to net him Oscar nominations - two of them, for the screenplay and direction.

The film was quite controversial in its time, especially in the States, where it is purported to be the first film to receive a release despite featuring full-frontal female nudity (I kept my eye out for this nudity, and the only place I could pick it possibly being was so damn brief and improbable that it doesn't surprise me it was not an issue...) Taking place in the drug-fuelled 60s, the film follows a photographer, Thomas (David Hemmings), who, whilst inspecting an antique shop he wants to buy because the gays are moving into the area and he feels he can make a fortune off them, happens up to a park where he takes some photos of a couple cavorting. The female member of this couple, Jane (Vanessa Redgrave), confronts him, trying to get the photos off him, obviously paranoid about what they will reveal.


Jane follows Thomas back to his studio and again confronts him. Thomas is obviously quite successful - his studio is spacious, he has models coming in and out and girls begging to have their photographs taken - and he is not used to being spoken to like this. He hands her a different roll of film and she leaves. He then sets about developing the photos, and as he does he notices that there appears to be a man in the bushes with a gun. Later, with photos he took after the confrontation, he sees what he assumes to be a dead body, lying off in the distance.


Amidst a haze of parties and groupies, he grows more and more paranoid, especially when he returns to his studio to find the prints he had laid out destroyed and the original negatives gone - his whole place has been ransacked. He goes to the park and sees the dead body - he goes to his agent, who is at a party, and tries to bring him along to show him, but the agent is way too fucked to care, and Thomas stays at the party. The next morning, the body is gone - or was it ever there?


It's a hard film to peg down. What exactly is it about? It seems to me to be a riff on the times. Drugs were everywhere, celebrity was everywhere, parties were everywhere. Everyone who did anything and made any money off it was somebody, and that was Thomas. How many drugs had he consumed leading up to the episode of his life that takes place in the film? Who cares. Was there really a dead body? Who cares! What was Jane's motivation? Should it be seen that the burglary of Thomas' home means something untoward did go down in that park? Who cares. Maybe she was just with someone she didn't want to be photographed with. Really, really didn't want to be photographed with. And then maybe Thomas made it all up. But maybe he didn't. What's important is that Antonioni takes us inside this paranoia without resorting to tricks of psychology. He shows it as it is, luring us into a film that may not really mean anything, but by portraying what it portrays, means a hell of a lot.


It bears, I think, resemblance to films like Elephant, in that it doesn't try and explain. What it shows on screen is what it shows on screen. Yes, it tries to delve into what Thomas sees (or thinks he sees), but it never judges, it never tries to come up with reasons. It just is. And it is beautiful for it.


A compelling film, interesting, mesmerising, thought-provoking and intelligent, yet not so intelligent as to be self-indulgent. I'm dead certain it influenced a whole generation of filmmakers in some way, and I'm sure that, provided it is watched, will continue to influence those to come. Like so many of the major works of master filmmakers, the historicism of the film's placement within society is not important, because it is entirely irrelevant. What matters here is what happens between the lights going down and the lights going up, not on screen, but in the viewer. 5 stars.

Some Heavy Shit's Going Down.

I brought up Gus Van Sant's 'Death' trilogy when I wrote about Gerry, and after watching it I couldn't get Elephant out of my head, so I rewatched it. (Actually, in the last week and with another coming up, I've done a bit of rewatching recently. I think it's all these 'Best of the 00s' lists coming in thick and strong at the moment - reminding me of what I've loved over the last decade and getting me craving to check them out again. Hold tight, as I'll more than likely rewatch Requiem For A Dream, Mulholland Drive and Dancer In The Dark shortly. They're all top ten of the noughties for me, I reckon.)

Anyway, Elephant would be right up as one of my favs from the last ten years. I didn't know a great deal about it coming into my first viewing back at the beginning of 2004 when it released in Australia, other than that it had won the Palme d'Or that year. And I was suitably gobsmacked by it. It was, and remains, such an amazingly powerful film, so relevant (and it's sad that it is still relevant today, showing a true ongoing tragedy both in youth, schooling and gun control), so beautiful (something its unofficial and much lesser 'remake' of sorts 2:37 tried to match but just couldn't) and so singularly striking in composition, tone and subject.


Elephant centers around a high school, just your average, run-of-the-mill American high school on an average day with nothing special going on, when suddenly 'some heavy shit' does, in fact, go on. John (John Robinson) is taken to his school late by his drunk father, and gets in trouble with the principal. Eli has been off taking photographs, and goes into the lab to develop them. Michelle has just been blasted by her gym teacher for wearing pants in gym instead of shorts like the rest of them. Nathan and Carrie are checking themselves out of school to, presumably, go for a bit of rumpy-pumpy. Jordan, Nicole and Brittany are stuffing themselves on lettuce before they decide they're too full to continue, and must purge. Eric and Alex and walking up to the school with camo uniforms on and bags full of guns. Just a normal day at school.


The film takes places with tremendously long tracking shots following each character or character set individually, watching as they cross over and move into their days. Harris Savides controls the light perfectly, rendering stunning images as the camera moves from inside to outside, room to room, character to character, slo-mo to real-mo. It's truly astonishing work that I can't begin to describe adequately so I'm going to leave it there. the performances from the primarily amateur cast are astonishing, creating characters that you know and understand (because they do entirely work off stereotypes, something entirely necessary when you're dealing with such tragedy and so many people in such a short space of time) in a very short space of time.


Despite the short space of time, Van Sant manages to explore many themes about and directed at youth, many elements troubling them. Michelle is clearly plagued with body image issues. Ditto Jordan, Nicole and Brittany. John is struggling with personal family problems that he doesn't really seem to be able to talk about. And then Eric and Alex - well, none of what you might think apply. Alex plays classical piano. They read. They joke around. Yes, they watch a documentary on Goebbels and the propaganda movement in Nazi Germany, but they also make out in the shower on the day of the shooting. There are no judgement calls here - nothing they do (short of ordering guns online - how is it that they're able to do that? And how can a delivery man just ask a kid to sign for something obviously not ordered by him? - and then shooting them) is really different to what so many kids their age would be doing in their spare time. Van Sant answers no questions - he just shows it how it is.


I think the most moving part of the story for me is the truncated episode starring Benny. He only appears right at the very end as the massacre is under way. We follow him curiously wandering the halls, apparently ignoring the fleeing students around him. He helps a girl out of a window and then keeps exploring, not a word spoken, before he is finally shot. It simply reinforces the horrific randomness of incidents like this. We hadn't seen him before, and he's shot suddenly and without thought. It is true tragedy.


5 stars all round for this film. It's one of those perfect moments of cinema where everything falls into place to create something to effective, which remains effective time after time and years later. Hats off to Van Sant.

Between The Walls.

The Cannes Film Festival, and its principal prize the Palme d'Or, is one of the most prestigious prizes handed out. Different to the Oscars, it doesn't reward box office, or promotion, or celebrity. Films are selected for the French festival, determined as to whether they will compete for the main prize, and a jury of esteemed filmmakers from around the world convene to decide upon a winner. Sometimes these winners match up with major critical and commercial hits (generally when it comes to English-language titles such as Pulp Fiction and The Piano), but more often than not they are small films, sometimes by recognised auteurs, but often not (think 4 months, 3 weeks, 2 days or even Gus Van Sant's Elephant.)


Interestingly, for a festival set in France, they don't often award the Palme d'Or to French films. In 1987 it was won by Sous le soleil de Satan, by Maurice Pialat, who had been in contention for the prize twice before and was up for it one time after. That was the last time a French film (though not a French-language film) won the award until 2008 when Laurent Cantet picked it up for his The Class (Entre les murs.)

Like the Dardenne Brothers' The Child three years earlier (a French-language Belgian production), the film is a naturalistic look at a segment of society that might be deemed 'less fortunate' than others. The Child was an examination of a relatively unsympathetic homeless couple, while The Class looks at an inner-city Parisian school populated by those from a lower socio-economic bracket, many of them immigrants or children of immigrants, and their teachers, particularly their French teacher François Marin (François Bégaudeau.) Marin is passionate about trying to help these children achieve, but he is constantly confronted by their own lack of drive, their lack of discipline, their self-destructive self-importance, by the fact that they are growing up far too quickly and he has no way to stop that. His frustration with their lack of discipline creates in him his own lack of discipline - he finds himself engaging in arguments that, in my mind at least, should not be engaged in by a teacher with his students. His language is inappropriate, his hostility and often his comments are inappropriate, but at no point do you judge him for it - he is forced to the juvenile level they are inhabiting in order that he might have some hope of identifying and communicating with them. Sadly, as mentioned the children have all grown up too fast, and are not going to accept this, leaving him out on a limb that it is fairly well impossible to climb back from.


Bégaudeau is a teacher in real life. In fact, all of the teachers featured are teachers, and the story is built from their own experiences. I did, in fact, think it was a documentary for a while (going back a ways - my understanding of the film around the time of its Cannes win was that it was a documentary, quickly corrected) as the elements (right down to naming the characters after the actors - also employed to a large extent in the aforementioned Palme d'Or winning Elephant) combined to give the strong impression not of being naturalistic, but of being real. This reality on the part of the performers imbues the film with a stark reality. No one is a hero. No one is an antagonist. Everyone features parts of these archetypes within themselves. When you think all hope is lost, a student shows promise, and then just as quickly discards said promise to return to their comfort zone. When you think Marin is making some headway, is possibly going to win over his students to inspire greatness, he loses it, gone as easily as it was gifted. 


This film is not Dangerous Minds. There is no happy ending here, not for anyone. Despite all of the in-class drama, the closing scene of the teachers playing the students in a football match at the end of the term shows us that this is all par for the course. Another year over, and the teachers are no closer to realising that grandiose dream of reclaiming their pupils from the heady lost world around them, but that isn't any different from the year before. As a student tells Marin that she has learnt nothing over the last nine months, upset and fearful that this shows her somehow deficient, his response is not overly sympathetic - presumably, he has heard it all before.


The problems that plagued The Child with its naturalism are to a lesser extent still visible with The Class, as far as engagement with an audience are concerned. There is a lot more to dig your teeth into with this later film, but without any truly sympathetic characters it does once again become a study of failure, or a look at the notion of failure and one's own definition of it. As such it is a very valiant effort, and a step in the right direction, but still not as compelling as one might hope. Perhaps hype also has something to do with it, though it does fare better than The Child. 3.5 stars.

Make Me A Dirt-Mattress.

Gus Van Sant's Death Trilogy is, with von Trier's Golden Heart Trilogy, probably my favourite film trilogy ever. Probably. I think it helps that neither of these are trilogies in the sense that they are a single story told in three parts, instead being a thematic trilogy exploring aspects of humanity and life. Until now, however, I'd never seen the first installment in Van Sant's trilogy, Gerry. Someone, a long time ago, told me it was a pile of crap, not worth looking at. Oh how wrong I have found them to be.

Two best friends, both named Gerry (played by Matt Damon and Casey Affleck, so from hereon in, if I refer to a Gerry I will in fact be referring to them by actor name - Damon or Affleck. Please try and remember that this is Casey, not Ben, though. As no one really wants to think of Ben unless they absolutely have to) decide to go for a walk. They are in a huge wilderness reserve, and very quickly get lost whilst on their way to the 'thing', the big thing, whatever it is, that makes going to this park worthwhile. They in fact decide this thing is not even worth seeing, but by then they are hopelessly, hopelessly lost. The sleep a few nights rough, they climb hills and mountains to try and find some semblance of civilisation, they trek in search of water (they have none, and find none) and food (they have none, and find none.) They do this across desert dunes, salt flats, dry rolling hills, shale deposits - every barren and hostile environment you can imagine. And do they find anything to aid them? No. They do not. They walk and they walk, for the most part silently, and they never find anything.

I must say, this sounds on the surface like one of the most unequivocally boring films ever in the history of the world. Two grown men go into the desert, get lost, and walk around for a bunch of days without really saying or doing a great deal. Woohoo! Quick, get me two tickets to every remaining session! I must carve the title into my forearm to declare my anticipation to the world!

The film is far, far more than that. It is an incredible and moving insight into the minds of these two men, the depths of their friendship. This is something that is very rarely seen on film. The two Gerrys have obviously known each other for a long, long time. They almost have their own language - it's discernable for us, but primarily in context. If you said 'dirt-mattress' to me out of the blue, I would have no idea what you were talking about. Ditto 'rock-marooned', or 'shirt basket.' Damon and Affleck have been through much together, and they have created their own way of understanding each other.

Their ability to be silent together, but to still let you know how they are feeling, is another astonishing aspect of the depth of their friendship - because not once during the film do you get the feeling that they are playing for the camera, but simply that they are playing for each other. Their silences speak so much. Some of the shots of them just walking, slow tracking shots through nothingness, are so powerful. So much is spoken between them, you can feel them emanating emotion at each other. It's astonishing.

And, like I said, this kind of male-friendship film is very rarely seen. It is entirely non-sexual, it is not a buddy road movie, it is just a couple of really good friends, going for a walk, and having to deal with the unexpected serious consequences. It is a true insight into the minds of men, without any bells and whistles. When the shit hit the fan, they just went about getting stuff done, and put to one side any real feelings of animosity or blame, because that's what friends like this do, right? When you're stuck in the desert with no food or water and no way out, who cares whether it was Gerry's fault? You just care about getting the hell out.

Harris Savides lensed Gerry (as he did Elephant and Last Days, the other two parts of the trilogy, as well as Milk), and he did a stunning job, languidly following the two guys as they... walked. He never hurried them, he never changed them, he let them lead the way, and then did beautiful things with the frames they fell within. In a diverse desert there are of course plenty of opportunities to create some stunning images, and Savides doesn't disappoint. It is an incredible looking film.

There isn't a great deal else to the film. There is very little music, the sound all works (and I assume a significant portion of it was post-added, as it would have been exceptionally difficult to capture much of it), and the editing (by the two stars and the director) is perfect.

In short, this film is amazing, and it really made me want to go away and watch the other two parts of the trilogy again. I think I will. I still think Elephant is my favourite overall, but Gerry... well, it's given it a run for its money. 4.5 stars. Everything was pretty much perfect, but there was a tiny bit of magic missing somewhere to really leave me gasping. Though I'm still thinking about it, so maybe that magic will come later. It's definitely a film, I think, whose images will stick with me for a long time.