Glenn Heath Jr.Filed under: Best of the Decade Project | Tags: Maggie Cheung, Tony Leung, Wong Kar Wai
- “The Best of the Decade Project” is an ongoing series of essays written by Match Cuts and The Filmist concerning the finest films of the last ten years.
How did it start between them? Slowly. How did it end between them? It never will. There are only the shared restless moments in the middle, two people wading through time, longing for each other, pressurizing every glance, every gaze, every touch, until the heart can’t take it anymore. So they separate and die a little bit, but still inhabit the same spaces, if not a moment after the other departs. All that’s left are the secrets that shouldn’t be secrets, the memories that shouldn’t be memories.
Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood For Love creates slow love out of thin air, seamlessly drifting through rooms to capture a feeling, a vibe between two people subverting social boundaries and internally eloping together. Mrs. Chan (Maggie Chueng) and Mr. Chow (Tony Leung) are not simply linked by their respective spouses shared infidelities, but by their understanding of the other’s pain, the grass roots of their suffering. One look says more than any three words could, and the film strives to encapsulate the seeping subtext of these character’s actions.
Immediately, Wong connects Mrs. Chan and Mr. Chow while they both try to supervise their respective moves into adjacent apartments, an overlapping sequence of chaotic noise and movement, the most cluttered in the film. Material goods are accidentally switched from one place to the next, forcing the two characters to come in contact with the other in a “neighborly” fashion. Ironically, practical confusion offers the first of many steps toward emotional clarity and torture. These initial scenes are littered with narrative gaps (as much of the film is), and Wong begins to highlight motifs that will compliment the operatic story throughout.
As with any Wong film, vibrant color juxtaposes internal emotions, layering beautiful physical spaces with compelling fits of melancholy and desolation. But In the Mood For Love might be the director’s finest examination of the way color and texture intersect to form hypnotic patterns that compliment character development. Whether it be the deep purple wallpaper in Mr. Chow’s hallway, or the elaborate floral designs of Mrs. Chan’s many elegant dresses, this aesthetic combination allows Wong to transcend traditional narrative devices in favor of a more disjointed, dream-like state. This deliberate usage of the ellipsis never feels complicated or indulgent since the color and texture themselves are telling the story, filling in the blanks. Everything becomes a symbol, and each sequence takes on a life of it’s own.
If color and texture are Wong’s road signs, then Christopher Doyle’s hypnotic camera is his vehicle of choice. Together, these great artists lean heavily on slow motion tracking shots, graceful camera movements floating through rooms, hallways, and streets as if following some specter meticulously haunting each space. Shigeru Umegayashi’s always-present waltz accompaniment takes these fluid sequences to a heavenly level, as every cinematic aesthetic simultaneously brims with heartache. Doyle and Wong also focus on the power of the close-up, filling their constrained frame with the backs of necks, ears, eyes, and hands. They often catch Mrs. Chan’s delicate hand grazing the wall for support, or Mr. Chow’s lips as he smokes a cigarette. In terms of framing, interior shots almost never expand into wide angles, while exterior scenes often cover from the ground up. In the Mood For Love seems to exist head bowed toward the ground, looking up to catch a glimpse around a corner, or from the top of a staircase.
Wong pits his lead characters with a societal and moral conundrum. After finding out about their respective spouses affair, Mrs. Chan and Mr. Chow contemplate their own situation. At one point, Mrs. Chan softly says, “We won’t be like them.” But the truth is far more complex and Wong debates this point for the entire film. What constitutes love? What defines a relationship? How can it be doomed so swiftly? Interactions begin to add up and the close confines of an apartment complex soon produce casual gossip, deadening the purity, lessoning the impact. Wong never gets his answers, and maybe he doesn’t want any. We are left with a beautiful series of moments that speak to the fleeting nature of love. It’s important to note that Wong never shows their spouses faces, only referring to them via off-screen dialogue and through fragments of their bodies. This film is all about honest connection, not the lust spawned by shared boredom.
In the Mood For Love ends with an epilogue of religious solitude at the fort of Angkor Wat in Cambodia, some three years after Mrs. Chan and Mr. Chow see each other for the last time. Mr. Chow whispers his secret into a hole and covers it with mud, but Wong sees this place as a collection of secrets hidden under the stone and rock, representing a host of lost souls abandoning true happiness for pragmatic survival. In this sense, the tragedy of In the Mood For Love can be measured in distance and time, although neither can truly explain the intricacies shared between two people. Memories filtered through a dusty windowpane are incomplete and misleading, but entirely defining and essential, no matter how deep you try to burry them.
With A Serious Man, the Coen Brothers plow fresh ground and operate on a new subtextual level. The filmmakers loosen their noose soaked in dark humor and seriously contemplate a singular incarnation of loneliness, lobbing thematic molotov cocktails at characters consumed by small contradictions and compromises. The duality between man and faith rests front and center in the retrained evolving tragedy of Physics professor Larry Gopnick (Michael Stuhlbarg) and his crumbling suburban life circa 1960’s Minnesota. The Coens even preface this modern story with a Jewish fable of sorts, jaunting back hundreds of years in a daring sequence of self-righteousness and damnation. The two pieces of this expansive puzzle make for something supernatural, a collision of faith and practicality not seen in the Coen’s work before.
After the wacky irreverence of Burn After Reading, the pristine visuals, slow pacing, and somber underbelly of A Serious Man are welcome. The Coens create an entire community from the ground up, meticulously re-constructing their childhood digs and memories with a certain weighted texture, the intricate details of suburbia pinning down the desire for growth. Larry is helpless in almost every respect, but it’s his indecision that continues to box him in. The Coens focus on disputed property lines, antennas, couches, chalkboards, and wires to illuminate the crisscrossing patterns that spell Larry’s emotional and intellectual destruction, all while framing a community at peace with its inanity.
In the brilliant final moments, A Serious Man turns from a potent character study to a full blown masterpiece of menace and comeuppance, refreshing the idea that good and evil, kindness and selfishness reside side by side in the smallest of actions, be it the change of a grade or the snap judgement of another person. No foreshadowing is necessary in A Serious Man, since the very fabric of everyday existence is steeped in the scripture of despair, and time period has nothing to do with it.
Filed under: Best of the Decade Project | Tags: Andrew Stanton, Park Chan-wook
- The following is the third of ten planned online discussions between myself and The Filmist regarding the best films of the 2000’s. These transcriptions have been slightly edited due to length, but the published content remains exactly as written.
Topics: Oldboy and WALL•E
MATCH CUTS: Oldboy is definitely a “moral fable” as you describe in your post, and it’s certainly a tragic film, but the darkness also has a hint of comedy. I didn’t find this mixture in any other Park film. What do you think about his decision to blend tones within such a dark film.
FILMIST: There’s a deep thread of understated humor throughout the whole film – the dumplings, and Oh Daesu (Min-sik Choi) before his imprisonment come to mind particularly. It’s an interesting mixture, and one that’s often not caught the first time around.
MC: Yes, because I definitely hadn’t noticed this trend and I’ve seen the film multiple times, albeit not for a few years.
F: You were talking about lyricism the last time in regards to The Assassination of Jesse James, and I think this film is another great example. Park’s blend of faces, patterns and images, figures moving from one side of the screen to the other in a sea of other guys, all moving in and across each other.
MC: Yes, you mentioned mise-en-scene in your piece, a term that sometimes gets shunned by writers (I really don’t know why), and this film is so wonderfully composed. Every scene feels like a tentacle of the Octopus Oh Daesu eats alive – they could wriggle an turn at any time, full of life, yet completely dead.
F: Yes, indeed. It’s almost musical, in a way. I don’t think there’s any other film I can think of – apart from one that we’ll come to later on in our Project – that embodies the phrase “visual music.”
MC: It also plays into the physicality of the lead performance, the brutality and warmth combining for a very strange acting cocktail.
F: Especially in Oh Daesu, who seems to move from one extreme to another at the drop of a pin. I love those scenes right after he’s escaped from the hotel, where he’s feeling his way around the people in the streets, and he comes to those kids playing around under the bridge. He takes the cigarette and inhales – and just gives off this primal grunt, and falls backward.
MC: And then proceeds to test his methods of violence. The film is very clever in this sense, using wit in even the most violent scenes. It’s what lends the comedy a certain type of danger.
F: Yes, indeed. The black humor is almost blue – when the hotel owner stands in front of Oh Daesu with his golden caps, and hands him the card for the dentist just before beginning to pull his teeth out with that pick.
MC: The ending sequence is quite something for me, that last interaction between Oh Daesu and his tormentor, Lee Woo-jin (Ji-tae Yu), there’s a connection between the adversaries that transcends revenge. Woo-jin has connected them in such a disturbing way, and Park shows this through his visuals.
F: That faint air of sadness that Woo-Jin has throughout the entire scene that comes to a head in the elevator.
MC: He’s not your typical villain, in that he comes out and tells Oh Daesu mid way through the film to find out “why”, not just who. This makes Oldboy very complex, that need for recognition, watching someone realize why you are torturing them.
F: The way he looks down at him as he grovels around his legs like a dog – he has a kind of faraway look, a slight smile. And, I think what really carries this forward is his final line to Oh Daesu before disappearing into the elevator: ”My sister and I learn to love each other. Can you and Mido do the same?”
MC: Yes, a challenge that Oh Daesu cannot imagine completing. As witnessed in the final scene where he undergoes hypnosis.
F: I still can’t fully decide which implication is more interesting – that he’s completed his hypnosis and goes on living in a relationship with his daughter, or that he doesn’t – as indicated by the smile that we see all through the film, and all that kind of thing – and he remembers everything, but he can’t say anything about it. I seem to switch on rainy days.
MC: The optimist in me thinks the hypnosis has worked, but your could certainly make a case for the cynical side of the ending. There’s so much style in the film that you sometimes forget of the human lives being dissected by the narrative. These people are literally being torn apart by revenge, guilt, and trauma. Probably why the film focuses on pulling teach, stabbing an ear, and slicing with a broken CD.
F: Or, cutting a tongue out with a pair of scissors. Speaking of style, that hallway sequence may get my vote for the most carefully constructed action sequence of these last ten years. It’s – so, beautiful.
MC: Yes, that action scene is something else.
F: Yes, there’s a real kinetic rhythm to the film, with that scene and the two others being the prime examples. And, it also reminds me of just how hard it is to actually make your audience fully believe a character is “bad-ass,” a label that I think has been downgraded recently, but I’m pretty certain Oh Daesu could be categorized under, despite his lack of social skills and brillo-pad hair.
MC: He is certainly one of those characters, all because of the performance. He’s not a muscle bound action hero, but a tormented, conflicted, raging maniac. And we related to him.
F: Yes – and, that’s one of the reasons the ending works so well, because he’s torn down so completely after being on this rampage.
MC: Well, we couldn’t have picked two films that contrast more in style and tone, but yet WALL•E and Oldboy strangely share the idea of isolation, as you mentioned on your site. What gets me about WALL•E, is the pure joy that it gives the viewer. The brilliant, audacious filmmaking aside, it’s got more heart than any Hollywood film in the past decade.
F: There is a real sense of bouyancy throughout the whole thing. Even in the beginning, when we’re presented with a context that, in something like Shane Acker’s 9, would be presented as depressing and even imminently foreboding, we can’t help but follow WALL•E more than the landscape, and be taken in by how at home he seems.
MC: And it’s because he appreciates the little things, even amidst the apocalypse. He’s pure of heart, yearning for something that even he doesn’t understand until he sees EVE. Andrew Stanton and his Pixar team really simplify everything down to the necessities of character. They don’t need dialogue to tell a story, they don’t need conflict to make a robot feel human.
F: It’s purely visual story-telling up until the second hour, and you can really feel the constant influence of Chaplin and, to a lesser extent, Keaton on the whole thing. I mean WALL•E is, in a lot of ways, the Tramp with tractor-wheels for legs.
MC: For sure, we inherently understand him even though there aren’t any words spoken. I also love the attention to the courting process of WALL-E and Eve. What starts out with a laser gun defense, turns to dismissal, then to curiosity, then to devotion. It’s a startling evolution between characters who shouldn’t have this sort of relationship, at least logically.
F: What was surprising to me was how well Pixar had fleshed out the internal logic behind the film, which I hadn’t realized at first. Much like Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales (ick) there’s a wealth of extra-filmic material that kind of adds to what’s been seen in the film. And, there’s a large deal made about the evolving AI in robots. Not really anything to do with the film as a film, but that was interesting, to me.
MC: Yes, you get that when they reach the Axiom as well.
F: The entire Axiom section of the film is really what takes the cake, for me – despite the overall success in pure, visual storytelling in the first half, there’s a real sudden urgency to the film that pops in, and Pixar’s new emphasis on cinematography really takes the stage. What with Roger Deakins and the constant use of idiosyncratic shapes and lines in the makeup of the ship and the bulk of its passengers.
MC: Yes, the movement within these sequences, the idea of pre-determined lines of movement, breaking these small boundaries begin to destroy the apathy on a very instinctual level. WALL-E brings the AI’s control crashing down, with even the smallest actions of free-thinking.
F: It’s strange – despite the overall originality in the story, this also seems to be Pixar’s most reference driven, although not without cause. The constant references to 2001, and so on.
MC: And WALL•E shares that film’s sense of unmeasured mystery. The opening shots of space, with the Hello Dolly music, is a direct reference to the space stations flying through space. It’s endless out there, but the personal expressions of love are evident, even in this vast hopeless universe. I think one of the truly wonderful aspects of this film is the end credit sequence, the cave paintings, the sketches of the world coming back to life. It’s something that doesn’t get utilized very often, using the end credits to advance the story beyond the film, allowing the audience to get an idea of the impact the film has had on the characters.
F: Oh, indeed. And, it’s even more interesting when you keep in mind that we’re watching what is, essentially, a backward-forward progression of humanity over the course of 700 years. There’s a quite scope to that last scene that I didn’t notice at first, probably due to Peter Gabriel, that bastard. Going back to the film’s visual storytelling in the first half, the way Stanton fleshes out the two characters through pantomime and the slightest hint of audio identity, and the way these things alternate and move around, is masterful.
MC: It’s definitely a lost art, which is probably why we were so taken with it. The idea that the special effects only help and expand the story, definitely out of style in our modern Hollywood. I can’t wait to see how Stanton brings this approach to John Carter of Mars.
F: It’s going to be interesting to see how an animation director makes the leap to live-action, in contrast to a live-action director jumping into animation with the same veracity. Ideally, I think he’s probably the best in Pixar’s stables, and with a real command of his work - but then, I would have said the same thing about Martin Rosen, and look at how Stacking turned out.
MC: WALL•E ranks up there with me as probably the most intelligent children’s film ever, it doesn’t try and push its message down your throat, just allows you the see the world for what it might become, it’s almost horror film in that respect.
F: It’s certainly one of the better ones of the decade. Also an interesting example of some of the kind of leap in storytelling veracity that we’ve seen a lot of, even among established directors.
MC: This film just feels bigger than anything Pixar has done, like they’ve finally recognized their own importance and influence and decided to evolve exponentially, approaching serious themes in an invigorating manner.
F: I think Ratatouille did the same thing to a certain extent, as there’s a big degree of difference between something as – well, let’s say it, bad – as Cars was and that film. Also, Up – although, I wasn’t as impressed with Up as I was with this film, it really shows that they’ve decided on a new direction to head in, and it’s getting more and more interesting to watch.
MC: For sure, Cars is a blatant dumbing down of the story element behind Pixar’s success. I think Ratatouille is marred by a disjointed script (great beginning and ending, mediocre middle), but with WALL•E and Up, Pixar has taken to these small stories framed by gigantic, expansive universes.
F: Yes, Ratatouille’s middle does kind of meander without cause for a little while, but it does show the same kind of drive that these latter two films do, I think.
MC: It will be interesting to see Brad Bird develop another one of his original ideas as opposed to taking over a film from another director. Well, no matter what direction Pixar goes in, they will always have WALL•E, which will be the brightest jewel in their crown for a long time.
F: This is true.
A tragic comedy without laughs, Steven Soderbergh’s The Informant! purposefully poses as a genre film to shroud the multi-faceted character study hiding at its core. But what genre exactly is indeed a tough question to answer. Lead chameleon Mark Whitacre (Matt Damon), a scientist/VP for a giant corporation now turned whistle-blower, fuels this battle between surface and subtext, perception and reality with his relentlessly shifting personality. This is best represented by a stream of consciousness voice over vitalizing the sense of random purpose inherent to the man’s personal self-worth. For Whitacre, playing coy and deceiving is his equivalent to James Bond’s lethal PP7.
The rise and fall arc never achieves a grandiose sense of emotion, and it’s not supposed to. Soderbergh deliberately manipulates the viewer throughout with fascinating asides, overemphasized scenes of dialogue, and cunning moments of action, allowing Damon’s layered performance to reveal itself slowly and surely. He frames the entire film within a blinding yellow haze of a world, a purgatory of sorts between the economic hell of one decade and the expansive globalization of the next.
The Informant! is a deceptively poignant film, tough to pin down in many respects as it peels away the personality of man protected by a thick wall of lies and compromises. Even if the extremely ambitious story structure and critique of big business are not always successful, Soderbergh’s strange and hypnotic film is about as audacious as Hollywood comes, challenging the viewer at every turn to unravel an anti-mystery worth solving and contemplate what kind of man and system would allow such folly to exist.
Over at Gone Cinema Poaching, I consider Antonio Campos’ startling debut Afterschool, a layered horror film for the modern technological age. It’s really something, and if you have On Demand Service through Cox, the film is available in stunning HD quality.
Filed under: Best of the Decade Project | Tags: David Cronenberg, Viggo Mortensen
- “The Best of the Decade Project” is an ongoing series of essays written by Match Cuts and The Filmist concerning the finest films of the last ten years.
For David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence, the Western code of protection hasn’t died as much as it has transformed into something far more complex, deceptive, and selfish, defining a modern world strictly divided by outward appearance and connected by interior conflict. In the film’s hypnotic opening long take, two men exit a motel room, gaze up at the sky then proceed to “check out.” The camera follows closely, oozing with menace but never confirming actual danger until Cronenberg cuts inside the motel office, revealing pools of blood and two dead bodies. When one unexpected survivor appears, the killer’s action is deliberate and swift. These men are “bad men”, plain and simple, unflinching and brutal in every respect, and they aren’t singular figures. Cronenberg’s universe is chalk full of them.
The whimpers of one doomed child lead to the screams of another, a young girl who awakens from a bad dream to the support of her family. Father Tom Stall (Viggo Mortensen), mother Edie (Maria Bello), and son Jack (Ashton Holmes) encircle the little girl like covered wagons protecting a train of travelers, reassuring her that monsters don’t exist. Oh, but they do, and this dichotomy shows how action and violence transcend physical boundaries, slowly creeping along a landscape where safety is a myth and violence is a certainty.
Like many revisionist Western heroes, Tom Stall is a family man of good standing in his small town community, the owner of a popular establishment and well liked by his peers. His family represents the American dream – a caring, devoted wife, and two seemingly innocent children. But something about the exaggerated locale and people feels forced, off-putting almost. Can it be this simple? Of course not, and when the two men from the first scene enter Tom’s diner, we know what to expect from them. What isn’t expected is Tom’s pinpoint deadly reaction, dispatching both men with a proficiency that calls into question his background. While certainly self-defense, Tom’s actions are too swift, too effective, and seem completely out of place on the homestead.
Cronenberg evolves this uncertainty of character throughout the rest of the invigorating narrative, forcing Tom and his family into a direct confrontation with the ugly reality of past events, furious demons rearing their ugly heads demanding payment in full. Each scene uses modern locales to confirm the Western iconography at their core. A shopping mall turns from a place of consumerism to a desperate stand off between mother and villain, and a school hallway illuminates a concise burst of unexpected violence between young men. Cronenberg complicates our expectations at every turn, most notably focusing on Tom’s eyes as they slowly change from simple hero to conflicted anti-hero, caring father to deliberate killer.
The film infuses a brilliant third act with dynamic clashes between family, acts of retribution that clarify Cronenberg’s deconstruction of Western archetypes. Husband and wife contradict a previous act of love with an uncomfortable, loveless sex scene. Tom and his gangster brother (William Hurt) work out decades of repression and subtext in one bloody set piece. Finally, the traditional American family sits down together for one last supper, broken, changed, and warped by the reality that their exterior selves hardly match the brewing infusions of hatred and fear simmering inside. Their inability to look each other in the eyes becomes complimented by an ensuing dread of moving on together, in this house, as a family built on lies. But that might be better than nothing.
A History of Violence is a nightmarish walk down memory lane, where characters compromise, murder, and deceive in order to protect an image of family, a shadow of togetherness. Surnames hold so much history, even when that history is built on fabricated versions of reality and dead bodies. Cronenberg dissects this idea with a razor sharp attention to human interaction, peeling away the layers of a man yearning for something more than murder and death, but dependent on it all the same. You can’t deny your true self, and Tom’s atypical homecoming holds none of the joy or celebration it should.
