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Ray Pride

..Pride Blog ..Movie City Indie

No Sundance predictions for you yet, fella, but some ruminations (but no fulminations) on Match Point, Munich, Caché, Innocence, Runin, and conversations with Marc Levin about The Protocols of Zion and Richard Shepard about the giddy, profane Matador.

House of Woodyness

A very good yet extremely eccentric melodrama about social strivers and sexual hypocrisy, Woody Allen's Match Point (***) transposes the fixations that usually nest in his wealth-centric Manhattan to the upper-crust of London, with intriguing results. While there are fine affinities one might credit to predecessors like French director Claude Chabrol, novelist Patricia Highsmith and the name-checked F. Dostoevsky, Match Point fascinates mostly for its otherworldliness, where behavior and performance is less "bad" than entertainingly strange. The best movies by David Mamet are the ones that are entirely in a unique zone that you could call Mamet-land, movies such as Spartan or House of Games, which are almost lunar in their strangeness. One of the factors in Match Point's compulsive watchability may be Allen's reputed unwillingness to reconcile performances within a film-that is, he casts an actor or actress like Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Scarlett Johansson, Emily Mortimer, Matthew Goode, Brian Cox or Penelope Wilton-and then allows them to do what they do naturally with an extensive supply of rope on hand. Thus, Rhys Meyers' striver, an Irish tennis pro who marries into money, is a cool creep, missing social signals like the King of All Asperger's; Emily Mortimer is flittery-fidgety-charming-insecure, from another world; American bounder Johansson is a husky-voiced lush and harridan in the making, but one that has the actress' customary fire. Like real people, behaviors clash with unexpected sparks; unlike real people, they speak in spurts of Allen's dour, gnomic thought. And then you realize: jeez, these banalities suit them and these performances are out of control within a supremely genteel production. This may not be Allen's intention, but the result is interesting stuff and the spirals of "explanation" toward the end make a pleasing coda. 124m.

Master Shot

In a single masterful stroke, Michael Haneke explains everything in his new movie, Caché (****), or, "Hidden." And the solution is a matter of something being hidden in plain sight. If you are impatient, more than unobservant, you might miss it.

Cruelty and suddenness mark his compelling recent movies, like Code Unknown and Time of the Wolf, exacting essays that have moved beyond the audience-bludgeoning of his earlier sado-media-scorn-porn, near-intolerable films like Benny's Video and Funny Movies. Something's matured in this German-born, Austrian director's work. He's become less the distant, moralizing schematicist than an observant artist, attuned to the quiet river of denial of modern urban life and what the ruptures of its teeming yet placid surface can do to his characters. Stillness must eventually be followed by eruption. Things explode.

Georges (Daniel Auteuil) is a television presenter, an impatient man who does not like being challenged, a Final Cut pro who looks over his editor's shoulder as dry words or dead air is elided from his book-chat show. He sneers at showing weakness with the "politesse d'un con"-"an asshole's politeness." His wife, Anne (Juliette Binoche) works in publishing, frequenting book launch parties where pretentious guests yammer on about someone's work being "chez Baudrillard, chez Wittgenstein." Dinner parties are a large part of their social life. Their home is filled with pricy minimalist comforts, flat-screen TVs, and chockfull shelves that are like fortifications, the translucent dining-room table protected on three sides by tan- and white-spined paperbacks. The house looks ready for any French magazine that would have "Maison" or "Cuisine" in its name. The fortification of home is art-directed in the extreme and signifies wildly: what is up with those three black elephants on a mantelpiece? (The set for Georges' show, amusingly, is a satire of this room: three walls of fake books with blank spines around a glass table.) They're French and they talk about books: Civilized, non?

A videotape arrives in a plastic bag. We see its contents as the movie starts: The credits, small and uniform, pop across the screen in the first image, an innocuous establishing shot of a nice home on a Paris side street, shielded by fences, gates, greenery. After the credits obscure the image, they fade away, leaving us with the same shot. A woman's voice: "Alors?" (Then?) "Rien." (Nothing.) (This framing, repeated later by night, is uncommonly creepy.) Now it rewinds, bands of video noise across the frame: our placid gaze disrupted.

The stare, the extended stare, the incessant study of single images: what narrative does an apparently neutral yet taut frame offer the viewer? This is a canny study of the master shot as well, that is, the extended take, from a distance and frontal, unbroken and with no intermediate angles, which suggests the unpracticed eye plopping a camera onto a tripod or a coolly chosen perch for a surveillance camera. What can be revealed in such images?

More tapes arrive. They're increasingly personal. They fear for their young son's safety. Georges starts his own investigation of their "asshole stalker," which causes more damage than the strange, unsettling videos. Of course, the "terror" comes from within, the repression of how one's past leads to one's future. Post-9/11 and Iraq-incursion metaphors range free. And "I lied to save you more stress, has the world stopped spinning?" has an uncomfortable kinship to other blunt weapons of mass media that grow increasingly strident. Georges suspects the grown version of a boy, Majid, an orphaned Algerian who was almost adopted by his mother when his parents disappeared. (Haneke illuminates a nasty slaughter by the Parisian police in the 1960s.) But he will not tell Anne the details, which are exactingly parceled out by Haneke. Fathers and sons share blood and lineage. Things explode.

Haneke does not waste a breath. I hated his early movies, but what he is now capable of is quietly spectacular. If it took those smug horrors to get Haneke here, then that is good, because Caché is a quiet, indelible thriller that no one else could have made.

Many reviewers have insisted on giving away two extremely impressive moments in the movie, especially Michael Wilmington of the Chicago Tribune and Stuart Klawans of The Nation for one, and in three paragraphs, Roger Ebert the other. One wonders: is this a case of attempting to seem smarter than the average viewer, or providing a genuine service, a skeleton key to Haneke's restrained style? In the Nation, Stuart Klawans, who does not like the film, and provides a useful backgrounder on Haneke's compulsions, avers that "the chic European cityscapes and calculating characters cannot redeem the film's shallowness and lack of originality… Far from being an expression of liberal guilt (the charge against which some commentators have defended the movie), Caché is an appeal to liberal self-regard…. And a fancy one at that. With Auteuil and Binoche as his stars, with the best Parisian living spaces as his settings, Haneke strips away only the most chic trappings of bourgeois respectability. The performances: superb. The cinematography: glistening. The directorial skills: worthy of golden palms."

..Munich Review ..Munich: In Sequence

"They're all gone"

Munich (****) is about grief, vengeance, and questions about whether vengeance is appropriate and what remains on a man's conscience after taking a life. (Unless you're reading the attacks on the movie by political columnists like The Washington Post's furious Charles Krauthammer.)

Munich takes more than two-and-a-half-hours, tracking the actions of a fictionalized, illicit assassination squad hunting down men identified as complicit in the infamous September 7 massacre of Israeli athletes during the 1972 Olympics. Much of the world saw the events through coverage from ABC Sports, and much of the opening scenes of Munich are narrated by two dead men - Howard Cosell, Peter Jennings - and by Jim McKay, the host of "Wide World of Sports," whose baritone does not convey his trademark intonation of "The thrill of victory... and the agony of defeat!" but, eventually, the terrible sentence, "They're all gone."

Avner Kauffman (Eric Bana), a Mossad officer who was a bodyguard for Golda Meir, is dispatched to lead a band of mercenaries, played by Kasosovitz, Daniel Craig, Ciaran Hinds and Hans Zischler.

[Many spoilers follow.] Munich is about political differences, and also uses historical events as a parable for contemporary discussions. In some ways, Munich, shot by Steven Spielberg starting in late June of this year, is the closest thing on screens now to a large-picture parable of our times, weighing the pain of terrorism with fiction loosely based on a supposedly nonfiction book called "Vengeance." Munich's thoughtful yet shamelessly speechy script, co-credited to "Angels in America" playwright Tony Kushner and Eric Roth (Forrest Gump), is filled with moments like Israel's premier, Meir, saying "Every civilization finds it necessary to negotiate compromises with its own values." Obviously, that has painful parallels in the headlines torn from today's events in the War in Iraq and the war against dissent in America, even more so with this week's revelation of the President's authorization and proud admission of unilaterally authorizing spying against American citizens. Sounding like a politician invoking 9/11, Munich's Meir intones, "What happened in Munich changes everything."

Formally, Munich is Spielberg at his brisk, brusque best. The 1970s Euro-thriller form is economically evoked, the script is effortlessly, unapologetically multilingual, the production design worldly, and the casting of contemporary Continental actors is astute, ranging from turning Amelie's handsome Mathieu Kassovitz into a pissed-off, bearded Horshack, to Mathieu Almalric bringing some of the delicious dance of gaze, the most silken of furtive gestures he has developed in movies by Arnaud Desplechin (Kings and Queen) and Olivier Assayas (Late August, Early September).

Munich works as a political thriller after the fashion of Costa-Gavras (Z, State of Siege). But there is also a canny use of doubling throughout. In the news coverage of the events, which the US perspective is shown by ABC's coverage, the same footage in seen in Israel, subtitled in Hebrew, intercut with cafes where the footage is subtitled in Arabic. There's a breathtaking scene early on, a brilliant coup de theatre, when Spielberg's camera is on a figure inside the athlete's apartment, with balcony door ajar to the right and a television set to the left. The muted colors, the figure's tan jacket, we see move to the balcony and in perfect synchronization, the most famous image of the massacre--a single killer on the angled balcony comes to stark black-and-white life on the TV--the man who has just stepped out.

The most hopeful subtext comes from some of the most explicit sexual content in Spielberg's work to date. Avner, with his pregnant wife (Ayelet Zurer) early on, engages in tender, sweaty, freckled, sustained fucking that may be the most authentic depiction of sex in movies this year. They tease and talk, and the scene ends with a heart-stopping slow-motion shot of a sheet being pulled over the couple. The last ten minutes are filled with bolder gestures than that. We are shown the ultimate slaughter of the captives and captors on the Munich tarmac, as experienced through Avner's tormented imagination. And how do Spielberg, Kushner and Roth indicate that that's what haunts Avner? By intercutting the horrible, explicit events with him atop his wife (also book-ending the sweaty, gentle sex). It's like the murder montage at the end of The Godfather, except Moe Green doesn't die and Munich's protagonist has a torturous orgasm, making the discussions of "family" as primal as they come. The enormous vitality of this crazy notion, to intercut these events, seems at once both profound and risible, something so shocking to most sensibilities that it would likely be the last impression audiences take from this lengthy, daring, exciting, thoughtful thriller, that is, if it were not for the final shot, which, once at rest, the first set of final credits roll atop. Ephraim (Geoffrey Rush), Avner's Mossad controller, tries to convince him that he is Sabra, he is native-born Israeli, he ought to return with his family. Avner says Ephraim should instead break bread at his Brooklyn apartment. Ephraim says no. The camera pans left. Avner walks out of frame. Across New York's skyline, we are left with the mute, tall World Trade Center towers, only just completed at that point of history. Roll credits.

Extreme docs: The Protocols of Zion

Marc Levin's a combative figure, but it took some convincing to get him on camera for The Protocols of Zion (***), in which the veteran filmmaker of Slam takes to the streets of New York to confront and question purveyors of various and sundry anti-Semitic beliefs.

Levin's reluctance began as not wanting to showboat on camera as directors like Nick Broomfield (Heidi Fleiss, Kurt & Courtney, Biggie & Tupac) love to do, but HBO Films' Sheila Nevins told him that if there were any movie that needed Levin's personality, The Protocols of Zion would be it.

Levin's approach is old-fashioned; he tells me he's interested in muscular, confrontational docs, which he calls "Extreme Docs," like athletic "X-games," which I'm fond of calling "WTF Docs," or "What the Fuck?" documentaries, where things on screen are almost too true to be good. "I love that, WTF, What the fuck, that's fantastic," Levin said emphatically when we spoke recently.

After 9/11, Levin was astonished to find the number of street preachers in New York who still hawked "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion," a notorious Tsarist-era forgery that purports to be the secret plans for Jews to take over the world and which Hitler and many others have drawn from in the century since. His first encounter after the WTC attacks with resurgent anti-Semitism was with a taxi driver, an émigré from Egypt, who offered the claim that Jews were warned not to go to work on that bright, clear morning. "It's all written in the book," the cabbie told him.

It's vision and revision: how can any rational person in contemporary society believe such things? What makes such falsity plausible? "I remember I was in Toronto, I was executive producer on a TV series, Street Time on Showtime. I went and saw Bowling for Columbine. I loved it, I was like, 'Oh my God, documentaries, they're finally in theaters, people are lining up, it's changing the perception of what a documentary film is. Michael Moore. I was like, what am I up here doing a TV series for? I started in documentaries, I love documentaries, I got to get back to what I love!"

Levin's eyes were opened this summer, "just walking down the streets in New York City, and seeing Enron, and Murderball and Aristocrats and Mad Hot Ballroom and The March of the Penguins and Why We Fight. I mean, these are the films that interest me. One thing that's fascinating is that we live in a world where you have 500 cable channels, you've got twenty all-news channels, you've got the web. Who would have thought that the marketplace would open up for the point-of-view, idiosyncratic, indie filmmaker? But there's such a hunger for what the fuck does it mean? You don't get that on TV. With all the all-news channels, it's just the same infotainment. Some news, but you're barraged. There's no such thing as 'meaning' because you have to have counterpoint. You can never synthesize. On the web, it's an overload--what's information, what's disinformation, what's real?"

What's real is appetite. "Somehow, at least in this unique moment, the marketplace has opened up [for] people who say, `I still hunger for meaning.' And somebody to tell me at least how they put it together, to have an authentic voice and not something that's prefab like reality TV. Quirky. But it can be entertaining. Involving. The documentary has stepped forward and said, right now, we're going to do that. It's very exciting. I see the other side. Some people criticizing me for making [this film] too 'WTF,' not enough scholars. It's like the critic who said about Capturing the Friedmans, 'Where are the psychiatrists?'" You see it for real, you judge for yourself. Not just the Sunday morning [pundits], the academics, or the politicians, the theologians. I hope that you're right. That the WTF form, which has proved it can make it in the market, can be a way that different people from different points of view can say, 'Hey. This is what I think is going on.'"

Worldly: Innocence

I cannot tell you what the movie Innocence (****) means, and I suppose you wouldn't be able to tell me. But the first feature-length film by Lucile Hadzihalilovic, who has collaborated as editor and muse to her partner Gaspar Noe's films (I Stand Alone, Irreversible) is that rare movie which thrills by uncommon obstinacy. Deeply unsettling, based on an 1888 novella by Frank Wedekind ("Pandora's Box"), Innocence follows a Moebius strip of rituals performed by the girls (and older, superior women) at a strange school in the middle of a forest, a seeming mix of brothel and convent, with a look visually indebted to Magritte. "As a spectator, I like films that take you into a particular physical world," Hadzihalilovic is quoted in a recent Film Comment appreciation, "by playing on sound and sensorial perception." Her craft is undeniable. Down to the very last image, which suggests a return, riverrun past "Finnegan's Wake," to the first image of the film, Innocence resists every sort of archetype you might try to impose upon it. "There are no answers to the questions, there's no moral to the story," the director says.

Primal: Runin

Eiji Okuda's 2004 Runin (Banished) (** ½) is an ambitious attempt to examine primal forces at work on the remote, feral exiles' island of Hachijojima in 1938, and cinematographer Hirokazu Ishii's alternately lush a nd fierce images are up to the story. Director Eiji Okuda (Shoujyo: an Adoldescent, 2001) doesn't attain the levels of undomesticated wildness and weirdness of similar material tackled by his countryman Shohei Imamura, whose Eijanaika (1981) or The Eel (1997) are similar, much more sustained exercises. Perverse sexual complications and desperate sacrifices are the order of the day, along with a strange form of execution called the "roll-off," in which the crème-de-la-criminals are bound inside a wicker ball and cast down a long mountainside off a cliff and into the sea. 149m.

Escaping movie jail: Matador

For better of worse, Richard Shepard’s gritty, genially outlandish middle-aged-assassin-on-the-ropes tall tale, The Matador (***), is going to be known as the “Pierce Brosnan walks across a Mexico City hotel lobby in only a black Speedo and cowboy boots slurping a Modelo” movie. But it’s also a movie that wound up getting the enthusiastic writer-director out of “movie jail.”

PRIDE: What’s the quick version of your career that you were ready to make something for a quarter-million dollars that’s just flat-out, balls-out goofy like this?

SHEPARD: I’ve had such an odd career, Ray. When I was very young I had an opportunity, when I was like 24, I made a $3 million movie, called The Linguini Incident (1991). Which was a romantic comedy, neither romantic nor funny. It’s not good. I was in over my head, I didn’t know what I was doing, the producer was MIA, it was a mess. It just stopped my career. It stopped it, it stopped it right when it should start. It’s much easier to get a movie made if you’ve never directed anything than if you directed something that was bad. That movie was bad! I knew it was bad. It was so bad I couldn’t even show it as a sample of my work. It’s really terrifying. ‘Cos you don’t get that many opportunities. David Bowie was in it, people knew about it in Hollywood. But I got sent to movie jail. I couldn’t do any work. I got depressed. Finally, I was like, I’m gonna go back to New York, where I’m from, and make a little $50,000 movie. This script I’d written. I’m just going to make it on my own. I got a lot of my friends to give me 2,500 bucks each and I was able to go and make this movie called Mercy, with Sam Rockwell. It was a little thriller, but finally I had something I was proud of. I’d actually made something which was good, good for me, at least! We sold it to HBO, we made our money back.

PRIDE: That was good.

SHEPARD: That was also good. Then I made this little movie called Oxygen, that Adrien Brody and Maura Tierney were in, a million-dollar thriller. I was managing a career, I produced a movie called Scotland, PA and I’d done some TV. Still, nobody knew who I was in the movie business but I was able to have my own life, live in New York and do what I want. And I really came to the belief that there’s a lot of joy making a movie, whatever budget you have. Clearly, with a bigger budget you have a chance to reach a bigger audience, and that’s incredibly important. But the process of making a movie is fun. When I wrote The Matador, thinking that no actor would want to play this part, it was freeing, to not be worried about writing something that was going to sell. I had always envisioned we could get money. Having done it now for so many years, I was such the realist, well, no one’s ever going to do this one. I was able to write it freely and there’s nothing more empowering than the belief that you can do it yourself. Everyone tells you no in the movie business. It’s so hard to get a movie made, especially a movie that’s halfway interesting or halfway different. You know that the filmmaker, the group, the producer, everyone went through hell to get it made. It’s hard!

PRIDE: There are a hundred lost John Ford short films from before he was anywhere. Nobody gets that luxury to be under the radar anymore.

SHEPARD: I know, I know. It was perfect timing when Matador came around, because Pierce was able to look at Oxygen, and see that I could direct. Ands I was mature enough at this time to figure out really what I needed to know, that I could do a good job, that I could fight for the things that are important and hold my ground.

PRIDE: Early references to the storyline of Greg Kinnear’s nebbish and Brosnan’s failing assassin have been to the murder-swap of Strangers on a Train, but it has more of a continent-jumping, digressive feel like Wim Wenders’ The American Friend.” And there’s the great line in your movie, “Aren’t we fuckin’ cosmopolitan?”

SHEPARD: [Laughs] I like The American Friend. Y’know, I wrote the movie not knowing how it was going to end, I wrote the characters. That the movie makes you think of [those two films], or Man on the Train, or The In-Laws, I love all those movies. They’re part of my DNA as a filmgoer. You’re just influenced by the things you’re influenced by. If anyone ever mentions the In-Laws to me, it is the funniest American comedy ever, flawed and a little dated, but hysterical.

January 14, 2006

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