Gary Dretzka
Noah Forrest
Leonard Klady
David Poland
Douglas Pratt
Ray Pride

September 15 , 2003

Time to digest

I'm longing to read the articles about the movies that were at the Toronto Film Festival; in the midst of it, I feel like I've seen nothing but meta-meta-meta articles. Does it mean the movies were bad or the journalists or jaded? In a couple of days, I'll file a few notes on films and trends from the festival, and in upcoming columns, some impressions of other, smaller film festivals and why their allure grows. I'll also weigh in on the new edition of Kieslowski's Decalogue and Criterion's release of Fassbinder's own late trilogy of Lola, Veronika Voss and the magnificent Marriage of Maria Braun. First, some words on the lovely Lost in Translation and the wan Once Upon a Time in Mexico.

Empire of designs

"Beauty is more valuable than science," Oscar Wilde supposedly observed, "for it requires no explanation."

A movie like Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation resists explanation, its magical, melancholy moods a a triumph of image, music and performance, with plot and suspense a distant, superfluous concern. The writer-director's second feature is a feat of levitation, contemplation, mood and love, love, love--a playful, romantic meeting of two lonely souls of different generations (Scarlett Johansson, Bill Murray), lost in Tokyo, deprived of their indifferent mates, adrift in an empire of signs without meaning.

There's a vernacular grace to the pair's wanderings across the gaudy topography of Tokyo that's reminiscent of the best of Wim Wenders' work, in which a scene could take place only in a particular room or street, or against a particular dazzling yet puzzling urban backdrop. Lost in Translation has the dreamy pace of memory as well, as if only the most heightened sensations are recalled and the boring bits fall away. Murray plays a fiftyish actor, whose career and marriage are in decline, being paid $2 million to perform in a whisky ad; Johansson is the tagalong wife of a photographer on a shoot who likely neglects her even at home. Adrift in Tokyo's Park Hyatt, with a dark yet glittering view of the city starkly reminiscent of Blade Runner, they meet. They flirt, cajole, play. Murray is at his most melancholy, his most delicately funny. It is a quietly stunning performance that you don't appreciate until the story's done: he's that good, he's that effortless of a performer. And their meeting is not a May-December romance, but something more elusive, more transient.

"Their relationship was more like a friendship. I didn't want it to be a typical kind of cliche," Coppola tells me one afternoon in Chicago as we have drinks at a different Park Hyatt overlooking a different landscape. Lost in Translation has a quiet authority, much like the filmmaker in person. The 32-year-old writer-director is tiny, incredibly soft-spoken and resistant to describing her work. Yet she has the sort of presence you want to trust implicitly. She describes the movie's genesis as trips she took to Tokyo, first as a tourist and then promoting her successful Milk Fed clothing line, which is sold primarily in Japan. In terms of style, she says, "The starting point was the impressions of being there, the blurry neon. The music helps--kind of dreamy--it's like you're on another planet. And I wanted something that I thought was romantic, not something that was supposed to be romantic. Like, a lot of movies that are supposed to be romantic are kind of corny." Thematically, "Being at that point, in your early twenties," Coppola says one asks oneself, "'What am I going to do with my life, what kind of person am I going to be?' That confusion is amplified by jetlag in this really foreign culture. Your visual impressions in a half-awake state are just not the same as your reality."

The movie is similarly jetlaggy. "We were never precise about what day we were on. It's like when you're on a trip or you look back on a week in your life where all this stuff happens, it's a blur. Was it three or four days? I wanted to be impressionistic."

The image-rich editing reflects that choice. "I don't think it's a conscious thing. It's an idea about fleeting movements, moments that can be enchanting or beautiful but part of what makes them great is they don't last." There are shots that are technically "incorrect," but are lovely in their own right, such as a scene both hilarious and touching, when Murray does karaoke to several songs, including Roxy Music's "More Than This." "Yeah, there are other shots, like at the end, where she's out of focus, and that's the nature of how we were shooting. I was inviting it to be a little homemade or sloppy; it was more about the feeling. Instead of losing a moment by being precise, I wanted to capture what was going on."

The film opens with a dreamy, provocative shot: a horizontal frame of Johansson's lower back, in translucent panties pink like cherry blossoms. It almost seems a provocation as well, like "Hey, look, I'm not a guy directing this, I can do this..." "And you can't?" she finishes the sentence, laughing. "I never thought of it like that. I just wanted to have a moment, a flash of her femininity before you get into his story, to hint at her. Coppola discovered a photorealist painter she admired, whose work is "of all these butts in underwear and when I saw his book, I said, that would look good as a title sequence.

"And I always liked the Lolita title sequence, just her foot. [So it's] abstract and iconic and feminine. And later you see her hanging out in the pink underwear. It's just supposed to be an impression of her, if [the film] is all memories. I thought it would just cut nicely--to see pink underwear and then neon. These movies are collages. I didn't really have an intellectual reason. You just do what you like and not think about it too much."

Going south

With Once Upon a Time in Mexico, the grown-up Rodriguez lovingly, shamelessly embellishes the mythology he forged in the no-budget El Mariachi, a $7,000 super-8 movie that cost $1 million to blow up to 35mm for theaters. Even after the more controlled Desperado, he remains a post-Spy kid at heart, indulging in all manner of explosions, blood spatters, slaphappy editing, Johnny Depp improvisations, cynical repartee and unfashionably juvenile trash talk. Plus, on the ambitious size, political subtext that could seem incendiary to those who look beyond the plentiful pyrotechnics.

The plot starts as a simple matter of revenge. Antonio Banderas lost his one true love--a silent, if butt-kicking Salma Hayek--to a man who now runs a drug cartel pitted against Mexico's president. Is he a legend or a real man, wonders an eyepatched Cheech Marin, recounting the legend of El Mariachi (or "El," as he is known), while CIA agent Sands (Johnny Depp) marinates himself in tequila and roast pork.

Sands is a one man Spy-vs.-Spy, a roach of a mole pulling the strings to make things go boom. The distributors were probably wise to wait until after seeing how Pirates of the Caribbean might perform. With its second-highest gross of the summer, more and more people are surely drawn to Depp's memorable theatrics. (His turn as an undercover agent--at one point, he's walking down a village street with a T-shirt emblazoned "CIA"--has some of the same ironic calm as George Clooney's spy-turn in Confessions of a Dangerous Mind.)

Funny hats, goofy T-shirts and a bland, bland voice are what Rodriguez allows Depp in terms of cartoonishness. The bad attitude of his character, however--craven, demanding, cocky beyond boundaries--becomes more and more a commentary on U.S. arrogance in its behavior below the border. How does a superpower overpower adversaries? Make note of when Sands indicates his readiness to whip off Marin's patch and to insert a portion of himself into the socket; it's characteristic of the script's crudeness with purpose. A game actor, a lousy line, a guilty laugh. Followed by a political aftertaste, and by the movie's cascade of climaxes, a payoff straight out of the Oedipus story. "How blind can one nation be?" Rodriguez's symbols bluntly ask amid the fusillades and detonations.

Rodriguez has another affectation about eyes. Banderas, along with many of the other actors, suffers from Rodriguez's own high-definition video cinematography. Brooding nicely, with a thick mop of long black hair, Banderas is memorable although you can't see his eyes in many daylight scenes, nor those of his opponents. Stylization or is it DIY proponent Rodriguez taking on too many tasks?

Rodriguez awards himself many credits, as he did with the last two Spy Kids installments, including that he "shot, chopped and scored" this "Robert Rodriguez Flick." Flick is a word that I've always disliked, but it may be the best encomium for this mad mix of Mad magazine craziness, critique of American interventionist foreign policy and big, bad blow-em-up. Rodriguez's many action set pieces are "chopped" with heedless passion. While Once lacks the stately beauty of the pacing and framing of Sergio Leone's spaghetti westerns or the magical absurdism of Alejandro Jodorowsky's cruel fables, there's a fury here that's like someone compulsively wrecking and cleaning up their own messes after themselves.

The movie's finale is its most touching and pointed, an image of weight. (You may want to stop here if you haven't seen the movie.) Having vanquished all the varmints and politicos, taking the long, deserted highway out of the poisoned `ville like the nameless narrator at the end of Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest, "El" marches purposely along the long, long road, the colors of the Mexican flag furling around him as the embodiment of the nation itself. Cheeky mythmaking from a Spanish-born actor and an Austin-bred director.

Email Ray Pride