Glenn Heath Jr.
If La Cienaga abstracts Lucrecia Martel’s obsession with sound and space by exploring menacing, dynamic open areas, her second film The Holy Girl compartmentalizes and purifies these same aesthetics within a confined, suffocating locale – a bare-bones Argentinean hotel. Martel shows there’s no escaping the inevitable bursts of energy when bodies in motion collide, when a gaze turns into so much more than a connection, but a deception of intent. Religion and natural selection battle through every room, between young and old, as characters either settle for stasis or attempt to fill voids created by past failures.
Amalia (Maria Alche), the young teen at the heart of Martel’s guise, takes her fascination with an older doctor as a god-given evocation, albeit one initiated by an earlier moment of perversion. Her confusion, excitement, and disappointment create an unsettling conflict between weakness and morality, one that ties in brilliantly with Martel’s continuous use of the close-up. These shots display faces barely obscured, favoring ears, lips, hair, clear incarnations of sensory build-up, never allowing an easy recognition of place.
Martel’s style is both distancing and fascinating, connecting characters through meticulous framing while separating their ability to communicate with jarring uses of off-screen sound. It seems all of Martel’s films, especially The Holy Girl, demand multiple viewings to break down the director’s layered environments and ambiguous characters. But on first glance, it feels like a tragedy unfolding in the sparest of decisive moments, ones most directors ignore far too often.
It’s strange to think of a time when the Internet was a relatively new phenomenon, a global foreign language residing on the fringes of our consciousness, seemingly hiding infinite creative and economic possibilities beneath a spectre of community. Kiyoshi Kurosawa sets Pulse during this enigmatic timeframe, marking the Internet as a dangerous breeding ground for apathy and isolation, a perfect recruitment office for ghosts looking entice living souls to the dark side. As with his haunting serial killer yarn Cure, Kurosawa builds tension through visual and audio fragmentation. Characters are positioned on the edge of the frame as if seemingly cut in half and diagetic and non-diagetic sound effects overlap until their layering bursts open. These aesthetics create a shifting mood and atmosphere, breathing horror into every dark corner, behind each doorway, finally revealing the human need for palpable connection. Pulse sees the human world as a crumbling facade of expectations and longing with the Internet as the final platform for ultimate self-destruction. By looking into the monitor, we see our own death broadcast for everyone to experience, and the ghosts have been screaming all along.
Through the relentless use of constricting ambient sounds, Lucrecia Martel creates a smothering atmosphere in the opening sequence of La Cienaga (The Swamp), beginning a long and winding road toward a particularly devastating sudden death. But Martel’s emphasis obviously lies in the process of suffocation, symbolized by a dead cow stuck in an ocean of mud, a stagnant pool cloudy with dirt and grime, and the countless interior shots of people lounging, sweating, and sleeping away time. La Cienaga charts the long summer days of one wealthy Argentine family anchored in quicksand by an alcoholic matriarch and an almost inconsequential male presence. Martel offsets this brood with a working class parallel, a family who comes from the city to spend time at their friend’s countryside villa, one flanked by endless foliage-topped mountains and swamps. La Cienaga visualizes some damning social critiques, the centerpiece being an obvious tension between the lighter skinned upper class the the darker toned “Indians” on the fringes of every scene. These conflicts often break out suddenly, leaving the viewer to piece together the altercations during the submerged moments of solace after the fact. Even though her style seems at first heavy-handed, Martel is an obvious talent, someone eagerly committed to challenging the realms of cinematic sound and space and their direct relationship to character.
Ousmane Sembene died in 2007, and Moolaade was his last feature film as director. Above all things, the film is an engaging final statement on women’s equality and rights by an artist who’s been dealing with the subject for almost 40 years. Set in a rural but modern African village, Moolaade uses the vibrant colors of the locale to heighten the unsettling attitude many of the male inhabitants have toward tradition and hierarchy. This contrast in tones and textures becomes a key motif. Sembene sees his female protagonists, who decide to give asylum to four young girls fleeing the “purification” ritual (female circumcision), as a collective heroine, a group given strength and focus by the deafening pride of their elder male statesmen. In the face of complete unrest, these women stand aligned not because of gender, or skin color, but because of a desire to protect their children, and in turn their future. In the final sequence. Semebene cuts from an image of an Ostrich egg atop a Mosque to a large antenna, finalizing a shift into the age of information and education that’s been building the entire film. It’s a brilliant match cut worthy of Nicolas Roeg, and Semebene’s firm grasp on the staggering relationship between moving pictures and moving characters will sorely be missed.
The slow long take that begins Claude Chabrol’s The Flower of Evil turns out to be a sly flash forward, setting the dire mood of the film beautifully. Yes, this will be another Chabrol exploration of the devastating ramifications human weakness has on the modern French bourgeoisie. Chabrol unravels the inevitable dirty secrets and family skeletons precisely, setting in motion a series of events that seem altogether destined and cyclical. But The Flower of Evil doesn’t pack the punch of the other Chabrol’s I’ve seen, possibly because the snooty characters revel in their own seediness without much care for the outside world, ultimately understanding that their guilt and panic are worth subverting as long as the cars, power, and money keep flowing in.
A film of glaring ambiguity and power from independent filmmaker Ramin Bahrani. Man Push Cart and it’s beautifully simple title proves those who occupy the undesirable jobs of everyday capitalistic society are anything but simplistic. Reminiscent of the best Italian Neorealist films.
