Gravity

The images are of astonishing beauty. The first 15 minutes of this film fill you with wonder.  You are witnessing, almost experiencing what it must be like to be in space; in joy and terror. Sometimes you remember to ask yourself what the hell you are seeing: you do an internal double take, a swift reality check to remind yourself that Sandra Bullock and George Clooney are not floating around in space. It is a feat of human ingenuity to put those two huge Hollywood stars in such a backdrop and still create the successful illusion that they are actually there.  
Gravity is a spectacularly beautiful, thrilling and wondrous feat of artistry and craftsmanship. It works wonders in 3D and I assume that it's even better in IMAX.
I say this every year, so here it is once more, with feeling: If cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki doesn't win an Oscar (his umpteenth nomination) this time, there is no justice in the world; hell, in the entire universe. He is the undisputed master of point of view, as he has amply shown in movies like Tree Of Life. And more: the way the camera captures everything both in outer space and inside the modules, everything we see is stunningly, delicately, magnificently gorgeous. His camera and his light are sensual and sensitive, even in space. The camera moves like nothing you've ever seen before. It is astonishing, as are the special effects and the art direction, all of which should swipe every accolade and award.
Sandra Bullock gives a fantastic performance as Dr. Ryan Stone, in a very basic story of survival in space. She is very good, and George Clooney is his usual charming self. Both command the screen even when encased in astronaut gear. Somehow, they are not dwarfed by the surrounding cosmos.
So why does the heart sink, why does everything come crashing down to earth like a merciless meteorite? It pains me to say this, but the writing is terrible. Everything is weighed down by triteness. That Bullock and Clooney are the chosen vessels to conduct the corny dialogue is fortunate; they pull it off with great panache. Actors of less stature would make the flimsy writing even more glaring. Bullock gives her all to impart weight and feeling to her predictable, utterly needless lines. And Clooney brings his reliable Clooneyness to his character Matt Kowalski; you truly feel that you are in good hands with him, as an actor and an astronaut.
Yet I was praying that at some point the words would stop. I wish Cuarón had heeded the example of Theodore Dreyer in The Passion of Joan of Arc (or, closer to home, Stanley Kubrick and 2001) and stopped the script from blabbing. Everything we need to know and feel is in Bullock's face and in her breathing. She doesn't need to talk.
I also thought of The Hurt Locker as a great example of how an action movie can have existential heft by stripping the dialogue to its barest bones. In that movie, the soldiers, when confronted with lethal danger, use words only when absolutely necessary, for the most basic instructions; yet somehow this imparts the movie with gravitas and existential meaning.
I get it: if you are alone in space, you talk to yourself. I know I would. You are not suddenly going to become Schopenhauer. But in Gravity, the dialogue is jokey, and hokey and disappointingly trite. There is no irony. There is no edge to the humor.  Ryan's painful past seems manufactured by the Hollywood trope factory.
Nobody expects philosophical pontification in a movie that is clearly designed to be a thrill ride, but one knows that Cuarón has done and can do much better. It's as if he and his son Jonás, who co-wrote the film, were abducted by the Hollywood shitty one-liner squad, and this sinks the movie. I don't mind Kowalski's garrulousness. Even though Clooney does not really give it that nuance, it is obvious that he fills the void of space by talking a blue streak. But when he asks Ryan what she loves most about space, and she answers "the silence", a good zinger and a heartfelt thought, why is there soaring music in the background? Why is there a fear to let the audience experience that silence? Some gravity is in order. I loved the ominous, abstract music by Steven Price at the beginning. Did it have to bring in the weepy, epic string section towards the end?
The writing ends up relegating space to a backdrop, instead of using it to investigate how we measure up against the universe. How far we've come, how remarkable and insignificant we are. That's what space is for. Instead, we get stuff more suitable for a Lifetime TV Special.
It is hard to reconcile the facile, sketchy writing with the painstaking artistry of the rest of the film. I wanted to leave cheering. I left pondering why a movie that is such a magnificent achievement in so many levels is so careless and unsophisticated with something so essential. Gravity could have been a masterpiece. It is just a fantastic entertainment.

NYFF 2013: Club Sandwich

Fernando Eimbcke's third feature is a wry, sharp, sweetly funny coming of age story with a twist. Héctor (Lucio Giménez Cacho Goded) is a chubby, awkward teenager on vacation with his young mom, Paloma (the spectacular María Reneé Prudencio). They are staying in a deserted hotel in Puerto Escondido, Oaxaca, which seems suspended in time. In fact, time seems suspended in time, since nothing much happens. At the beginning, we are not even sure if they are mother and son or brother and sister, such is their rapport. They apply sunscreen, they lie like lizards by the empty pool, they play rock paper scissors to see who takes a shower first. Paloma has an eyebrow piercing, tattoos and an attitude. Héctor is mutating into adulthood, which means he is a sulking, monosyllabic teenager with secret desires. Their chummy relationship is clearly on the cusp of changing. They bicker over their choice of underwear, and there are times when Paloma can feel his awkwardness shutting her out, as he starts objecting to the status quo.
One day, a family arrives. A chubby teenage girl, an old man in a wheelchair and a nurse who looks like a cross between Nurse Ratched and Chloris Leachman in Young Frankenstein. The girl, Jasmín (Danae Reynaud), sees Héctor by the pool and avoids him at first. But then, as she sees him baking like a lobster under the sun, having clearly disregarded Paloma's sunscreen instructions, Jasmín wakes him up and invites him over to his room to slather Phillips Milk of Magnesia on his back. Love, or something like it, ensues.
By now, Eimbcke has established a sparse, still style. His camera never moves. It observes the characters up close or from afar and stays out of the way to allow us to see how they move, mostly internally. He is so skilled a writer/director that one doesn't miss the moving camera. His framing is never boring. One welcomes the beautiful compositions, the almost theatrical, yet fluid, organic staging. Nothing else calls attention to itself, but the characters and their moods and gestures.
The movie seems suspended in amniotic fluid, but Eimbcke has a mischievous spirit and he shatters the stillness of this family's cocoon with a couple of fantastically disruptive visual gags. And there is nothing superfluous in his writing. A seemingly tangential trip to grab a bag of chips from a vending machine at the beginning of the movie is used for a beautiful turning point towards the end.
Not much action, not much dialogue, and still, tectonic shifts are taking place. Héctor discovers sex, but most importantly, and here's the twist (because how many times have you seen a teenage coming of age story?), it is Paloma's coming of age as well. Hers is the ruder awakening, as she suddenly realizes that the exciting tiny new bristles over Hector's upper lip are the harbingers of his impending independence from her; that from now on, he will divide his love for her with someone else. It's the dawn of a new, scary era and her ambivalent, shocked, confused, and unprepared reaction to it is hilarious and deeply moving.
We learn that "there is no dad" for Hector, which explains his strong bond with Paloma. Jasmin knows every detail of her conception. But Paloma doesn't remember how Hector got made (she slept around). That is, she is as far from the stereotypical long-suffering Mexican mother as anyone has ever been in a Mexican film, a feat for which Eimbcke should be named national hero. Paloma is independent minded, a single mother, fiercely loving but not unduly smothering. She is bracingly unsentimental. She is jealous and suspicious of the angelic-faced yet sinuous Jasmin, and just as she exhibits behaviors unseemly for a mother in their wounded competitiveness, in the end she rises quietly to the ocassion with a simple, unobtrusive, selfless act of enormous grace.

NYFF 2013: Stranger By The Lake

A mesmerizing, if hermetic film by Alain Guiraudie, it comes preceded by its notorious sexually explicit gay sex scenes. It's supposed to be a thriller, but if so, it is more concerned with the mating habits of gay men cruising by a remote lake, than by the typical plot machinations of murder mysteries. I found Stranger By The Lake mostly tedious and repetitive, and I desperately wanted it to cut to the chase promised by the promise of a thriller, but it does have an obsessional quality that is hard to shake off. It's as if the film is like its characters, obsessed with the cruising ritual, dispassionate about meaningful emotional connections. 
Guiraudie comes back again and again to the starting point. The first images are lovely and bracing. Franck, a very handsome young man, arrives in his car to look for men to fuck. There are naked men at the beach and naked men coming out of the evergreen woods as if they were creatures grazing in their rightful habitat. The leisurely scenes of nature, of naked men at ease, reminded me of earnest animal life documentaries without the voiceover.
In a few economic strokes Guiraudie introduces a small cast of characters. There's the guy who loudly asks where are the horny women, the paranoid guy who is obsessed with privacy, the nerdy perv who likes to watch.  Yet there seems to be no real connection or camaraderie other than getting each other off and exchanging pleasantries. Even in the heat of Summer, and considering that they are there mostly for sex, the place seems oddly muted and cold.
An event stands out. Franck strikes up a conversation with Henri, a chubby loner who likes to sit away from everybody. Through the course of the movie they develop a friendship; the only relationship that has emotional dimension in the movie, and not coincidentally, one where there is no sex involved. But Franck has a crush on Michel, a textbook beefcake reminiscent of Tom Selleck, so hirsutely handsome as to be borderline ugly.
The problem with Guirardeau's dispassionate approach is that despite the scenes of graphic sex, which did not seem to me any different from run of the mill porn, we never really remotely feel Franck's longing. He claims to want this man but we don't see it happening. I thought of In The Mood For Love, a film that is about nothing but longing, and in which nothing happens, yet the feeling of repressed desire is intoxicating, because it is shown in myriad gestures. Here it is the opposite: every desire gets easily fulfilled, but the whole thing is as sexy as a piece of cardboard. Granted, I am not a constituent, but I'd be curious to know if gay men find this movie erotic. I found it anything but.
Because we never experience the frisson of Franck's obsession, and because the object of his affection is emotionally unappealing, I found it hard to relate to what happens next, which is an intellectual illustration of amour fou.
Guirardeau's conceit is that the fear of intimacy, the denial of an emotional bond between these men, the strict emphasis on sexual desire, results in behavior that is far more shocking than the sex itself. Suddenly a young man is gone, his towel and sneakers and car sit abandoned for days, and no one at the beach bothers to ask. Franck is more interested in having Michel all to himself, in spite of knowing that he is extremely bad news. 
Guirardeau takes forever to sprinkle plot into his observational perch, but when he does, it comes in a few bold, effective strokes. A detective shows up, asking questions. Franck understands that his life is in jeopardy and still proceeds to engage in reckless and ultimately self-destructive mind games. He too, comes back again and again to a place of great risk, but he can't help it. He is head over heels, perhaps in love with desire itself, in love with danger, and with death itself.

NYFF 2013: Like Father, Like Son

Hirokasu Kore-eda's devastatingly tender film centers on an unthinkable family nightmare. Imagine you get a call one day that informs you that the 6-year old boy you have raised all his life was switched at birth at the hospital. Your son is not your son. Your actual son, as defined by blood lines, is living with a different family.
You think your kid takes after you or his mother, in his personality and his quirks. But Kore-eda shows that the kids are not so much products of genes but of their family lives, and that this harks back generations, just like genes do. If your dad was stern and absent, chances are that you will be too. Is this the fault of genes or behavior, or both? The director does not intend to preach an easy answer. He unspools his tale with such careful, heartbreaking observation that the audience, like the parents in the film, goes through every human emotion in the space of two hours.
The only way I can describe this movie is as an infinite, rippling spiral of love and loss. What do you do? The instinctive reaction is to leave things as they are for the sake of everyone involved, particularly the children, since everyone seems happy. But the idea of blood being thicker than water still holds powerful sway in people's minds, and perhaps more so in a traditional culture like Japan.
To compound the deepening complexity of the matter, one of the boys, the elfin Keita, is the single child of an affluent young couple in a big city, whereas the other one is  brother to two feisty tots and the son of a goofy, struggling electrician in a small town. The contrasts in their lives are enormous.
The movie starts with tiny Keita being grilled by two stern adults for his entrance exam to a prestigious school. Keita is obedient to a fault, takes piano lessons, and is calm and polite, and you don't notice he leads a boring, circumscribed life until you meet the other kid, whose days are an endless string of carefree, raucous play.
We are outraged at the immediate assumption by the decision makers (the affluent dad, the hospital functionaries, lawyers - all men) that the kid who was raised poor will benefit from switching back to his blood parents, that he will profit from every opportunity of advancement. And that returning the kids to their rightful owners will somehow make things right. But it is Keita who has more to gain: he is to nestle in a happy, unstructured life of modest means; rich in devotion to his present childhood, not to his future success. Meanwhile, the other boy is to live in a spiffy condo with all the warmth of a hotel room.
Kore-eda does not use a parallel structure. He focuses on Keita's dad, an ambitious workaholic with perhaps antiquated notions of blood and duty, and the product of an unhappy childhood. Through his ordeal, which he encumbers and worsens for everybody, every step of the way, we get a meticulous view of the contrasts of family life in Japan. At times you want to strangle him, but Kore-eda makes him empathetic precisely by showing him as a product of nurture as well. He is trying, as all parents, to be a good dad in the way he knows best, which is what he learned from childhood.
Kore-eda elicits incredibly natural performances from the wonderful children in the movie and spectacular acting from the adults. Masterful writing, direction and command of tone, which weaves warmth, gentle humor, quiet defiance, and unimaginable irony and despair, won this film the Grand Jury Prize at Cannes. No surprise: Steven Spielberg was president of the jury. Dreamworks is already working on a remake. I'll be damned if they get it right. Like Father, Like Son is not to be missed. Just bring a crate of tissues.







In memory of my dear Aunt Dora, devoted reader of this blog, who was passionate about movies, and would have loved this one.

The Grandmaster

I may be the only person in the world who does not like Wong Kar Wai's In The Mood For Love. I like seeing it. I like being mesmerized by Christopher Doyle's cinematography and by those amazing silk dresses on Maggie Cheung's body, and I dream of eating noodles in that steamy joint on the corner, but all that aesthetic refinement, all that excruciating longing seems too deliberate and artificial, and it bores me.
Feel free to sue me.
The idea that a stylist like Wong Kar Wai can execute a beautiful martial arts film sounds great on paper, and The Grandmaster has some gorgeous scenes, but, even aesthetically, it disappoints. Wong's stylistic choices are puzzling. Martial art movements are like ballet. Fights are choreographed. As in dance, you want to see the whole movement, the entire bodies in motion (think of Fred Astaire: full frame), you want to understand the physical sequence and geography of the fights; but the director chops up most of the action into pretty close ups of sliding feet and chopping hands and he uses a blurry slow motion that muddles the action. The editing is frustrating. When people are not fighting, the camera never sticks around long enough to let us drink in the beauty of the frames. Phillippe Le Sourd's cinematography is at times ravishing and at times tacky. And the storytelling is choppy and stilted. At the beginning, the movie looks like a graphic novel; you can clearly see the storyboards. Then either one gets used to it, or it relaxes, paradoxically, into a slow movie with choppy cuts, both epic and intimate.
As for the story, it is all over the place. The hero is Ip Man (the unflappable Tony Leung, a dead ringer, at times, for Barack Obama), and he is at the center of a contest between the martial arts schools of the south and of the north of China at the time of the Japanese invasion in the 1930s. Ip Man trains to duke it out with his northern rival and this is a pretext to give us all a crash course on the different schools and styles of martial arts, from kung fu to tai chi. Some of this is fascinating, as Chinese martial arts have this wonderfully cryptic philosophical bent. Which -- sidebar -- led me to ponder that our current warmongers could use a bit of the Chinese element of surprise, instead of announcing to the world that they are going to war any minute now. Perhaps Obama and his fellow gung-hoers should watch this film; they might learn something about smart strategy.
Kung fu aside, this being a Wong Kar Wai film, The Grandmaster is really a movie about longing, as are all his films. The longing in question is between Ip Man and the daughter of his northern nemesis, the gorgeously steely Zhang Ziyi, who is a martial arts whiz herself. They have a wonderful fight, falling in love as they try to kill each other, but they can't be together. None of this quite jells, but somehow the movie's stilted rhythms have a mesmerizing effect, a trance-like quality. Some of it is reminiscent of old-fashioned martial art films, with exaggerated, theatrical acting.
Ip Man's story is told like a legend, even though he is a real character of the modern era, which is very cool, a continuation of the legacy of martial arts culture almost to this day, but because Wong is interested more in the idea of longing, The Grandmaster is, like all his films, heroically, even perversely anticlimactic.