Waking Life
This unexpected treat is rambling, colourful and trance-like. It's a pilgrimage through a world of half-formed ideas. It's also highly observational: loosely shot on digital camera before animators added their own visual ideas and notes, building on the reality in front of them, making everything more subjective.
Director Richard Linklater is fascinated with the relationship between gestural talkers and attentive listeners. If we share this, Waking Life is rarely dull, despite its lack of narrative drive.
His other themes include consciousness, the passing moment and dreaming versus awakeness. But what really involves us is never being sure, from one scene to the next, whether we're being enlightened or led down the garden path.
posted on 4/30/2002 03:54:00 PM
The Lady and the Duke (L'Anglaise et le duc)
The octogenarian Eric Rohmer's latest is based on the memoir of Grace Elliott, an aristocratic Englishwoman who lived through the French Revolution.
Rohmer uses deliberately artificial backdrops for all exteriors, allowing us to keep in mind that this is a reconstruction. He obtains a very lively and memorable performance from Lucy Russell, playing Elliott herself.
The fate of the Duke of the title, Philippe d'Orléans (Jean-Claude Dreyfus), an Anglophile and pragmatist, is seen largely through Elliott's eyes. Despite the fact that his end, as a member of the French rather than the English nobility, is more arguably more central to the story of the Terror than hers, we easily find our way into his situation through their believable relationship.
Despite the bold use of digital backdrops, this is far from being a gimmicky piece of work. Rohmer is entirely at home with the material, which through one individual's story cuts freshly into the social, political and philosophical problems of the period.
posted on 4/30/2002 03:53:00 PM
Damnation (Kárhozat)
Any description of Bela Tarr's 1988 epic set in his native Hungary will make it sound like a parody of an art film. It goes on for two long hours, it's in black and white, it's full of long takes. It's set in a rain-lashed industrial landscape.
The plot is fairly thin. It turns around a fairly unsuccessful sexual affair. More importantly, the lead character skulks in run-down streets among scavenging dogs and ends up informing for the police, while the skyline is dominated by huge buckets of coal being carried along between oppressive pylons.
The film assaults our ears with remarkable sounds. They may be the strange dirges of traditional musicians in interminable bar scenes. Or they may be clanging mechanical rackets in the background, that recall David Lynch's Eraserhead.
Atmosphere is everything in Damnation and it's an atmosphere of drunken exhaustion and pointlessness.
One of the most purely enjoyable films that
the somnabulist has seen this year.
posted on 4/09/2002 04:59:00 PM
The Deep End
This thriller could be described as experimental because of its particularly unusual set-up. Margaret Hall (Tilda Swinton) is protecting her seventeen-year-old son from an ongoing blackmail threat. She's keeping him blissfully unaware of this. She also keeps the blackmail a secret from the rest of the family: her husband (away at sea), her two younger children and their live-in grandfather.
In the first of several twists, each one of which is more impossible to believe than its predecessor, one of the blackmailers becomes so sympathetic to her family life that he'd rather take her side than grab her money.
The kicker is that Margaret insists that picking the kids up from ballet leaves her no time to raise blackmail money. She must not only protect against violence but also maintain an illusion of perfect normality. It's a picture of motherhood verging on the surreal.
Swinton's performance is as rock-solid as the image the mother presents to her family. At the same time, she's entirely there, and a million miles away.
The film's look is strongly conceived. The colours are faded out marine hues. Again and again, images of underwater confinement return. The mood achieved is as familiar and yet as strange as finding yourself under the sea.
The basic failure of the story to convince seems as remote as dry land - almost too far away to register. In fact, the way in which the film's failure fails to count against it is what makes the film memorable.
posted on 2/20/2002 05:11:00 PM 