My week in film: To the Wonder

Posted on by harrietwarman

After a week in which I didn’t manage to see any non-submission films (due to leaving the house, actually) the prospect of Terrence Malick’s second film in 18 months was enough to fuel my sense of urgency. Following 2011’s The Tree of Life (2011) which saw Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain struggle to find harmony whilst raising three boys in 1950’s Texas; intercut with gloriously bonkers visuals musing on the origin of life, To the Wonder also tackles grand themes via an ostensibly domestic, romantic narrative.  to_the_wonder_7 Neil and Marina (Ben Affleck and Olga Kuylenko) are first seen enjoying the bliss of new love, living in France. Deciding to relocate to the US, they move, along with Marina’s daughter Tatiana (Tatiana Chiline) to a new build housing estate in Oklahoma. When Neil is reluctant to marry Marina, she returns to Paris leaving Neil alone, and for a while he becomes involved with a childhood friend, Jane (Rachel McAdams). When Neil and Jane break-up due to his emotional unavailability, he marries Marina who returns to the US without Tatiana; but the same anxieties persist for them both. Parallel to this, Father Quintana (Javier Bardem) – whom Marina confides in – also experiences a crisis of faith despite his ties to the local community. To-The-Wonder-Trailer8This synopsis might suggest that between the characters, complex feelings and concerns are expressed – and indeed they are – but Malick eschews a reliance of expression through verbal communication, instead allowing only fractions of dialogue to be audible, as though the audience is eavesdropping on intimacy. In fact, Neil is almost never heard speaking, aside from a few French phrases and snatches of reserved sentiment offered to the two women in his life. Instead the oral offering comes in the form of voice-overs from Marina and Jane who describe their feelings for Neil and inner longings. This mainly non-verbal, more gestural depiction of human relationships might sound like an antidote (whether welcome or not) to the kind of fast-paced riffing seen in Silver Linings Playbook, or even the schizophrenic Friends with Benefits – if the Hollywood rom-com is your kind of thing – but Malick’s almost total lack of subtlety in employing such an artistic choice results in almost non-characters; unreachable ciphers standing in for man and woman. The distancing effect can also be attributed to repetitive scenes in which Neil follows Marina or Jane through fields and across beaches or gardens – and I couldn’t help thinking of these as analogous to the experience of the viewer; chasing Malick’s plot and his characters endlessly and never getting anywhere. To_the_Wonder_Terrence_Malick_81This is not to say that there aren’t things to enjoy about the film. Its beautifully shot by Malick’s cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki (since The New World in 2005), which in scenes involving Father Quintana visiting his flock – reveal beauty and experience in the faces of the Oklahoma residents. As a Malick fan however I couldn’t help feeling that with The Tree of Life and To the Wonder, the director is working through ideas in a rush, that perhaps needed another five or twenty years of distillation before making their way to the screen.

If you’re interested in a more positive take on To the Wonder, Guy Lodge loves it and describes why quite elegantly, here.

My week in film: Cave of Forgotten Dreams

Posted on by harrietwarman

50afa903b0e0c.preview-620Now being fully embroiled in festival programming duties, the days of watching ten films as diverse as Innocent Sorcerers and Bachelorette every week are on temporary hiatus until the programme locks in April. For now, I’m trying to fit in at least one film every week that’s viewed just for myself and happily, thanks to the Filmhouse‘s The Third Dimension strand, Cave of Forgotten Dreams was it. A documentary that offers the only footage inside the Chauvet Caves in Southern France, where the earliest examples of drawing were discovered in 1994.

First of all, let me just give a small bit of praise for the projection team, who far surpassed what was offered when I first saw the film at Glasgow’s  Cineworld in 2011, in which the sound was deafening and the light dispersion from the silver screen rendering the image somewhat shallow. The film itself is a true cinematic pleasure as well; director Werner Herzog’s distinctive timbre providing a suitably reverent voice-over as the camera pans across the cave walls, revealing (as interpreted by Herzog), drawings akin to ‘proto cinema’. Accompanied by Ernst Reijseger’s celestial score, to say the effect of contemplating the beginning of art and representation is ‘moving’ would be an understatement. ??????????????????????????????????????????????????

A key eccentricity in Herzog’s documentaries is the way he extracts tangential anecdotes from his subjects, one particularly delightful example here being the archeologist who’s prior career involved circus entertainment. Herzog’s inquiry into the past of his interviewee occurs naturally when said juggler turned archeologist describes what it is that fascinates the viewer of the Chauvet cave drawings; they are all that’s left of a people who lived thousands of years ago – we can only imagine the lives they lived and the thoughts they had. The way that our lives change – sometimes serendipitously in the twenty-first century – may be easier to document, but what makes us human is our expression of feeling, or thought, creatively represented through art, be it oral or visual. In an age of constant communication, Cave of Forgotten Dreams reminds us of the importance of private thought and considered creativity – revealing via a three-dimensional cinematic experience, what we can never see unmediated.

My week in film: Zero Dark Thirty and McCullin

Posted on by harrietwarman

The Hurt Locker, McCullin, Zero Dark Thirty: this week has been all about war and its representation. Each film addresses the impact of war on the individuals that fight them and in the case of McCullin, the devastating burden of memory that comes with bearing witness to the atrocities of combat. Watching The Hurt Locker again I was surprised by how straightforwardly it makes its argument for war as a drug – the first time I saw it I took this single-mindedness as a sign of focus that serves the tension in the film very well. On second viethe_hurt_locker28wing, there seemed to be moments of narrative emptiness – or at least that the trajectory that central character, James (Jeremy Renner) is on, naturally involves lows as well as highs and that this occasionally results in watching a character that is hard to engage with.  This focus pervades Zero Dark Thirty as well, as CIA agent Maya (Jessica Chastain), following 9/11 becomes obsessed with finding and killing Osama bin Laden; at the cost of any friends, family connection or personal relations at all. The screenplay not having included a romantic/parental guilt subplot is not just a welcome relief; it also provides the moral, human critique that many of the films’ detractors have said it lacks, by showing that the efforts of Maya to achieve hers and the governments’ goal don’t solve anything, or justify the war, let alone release Maya from the weight of her obsession. Maya’s emotional numbness; her blank expression on seeing the body of bin Laden represents perhaps a most disturbing judgement of torture that suggests its use has lead to an anticlimactic nothing – a truly chilling notion. zero-dark-thirty-trailer-final

Its problematic that screenwriter Mark Boal and director Kathryn Bigelow didn’t choose to emphasise the enormity of the moral outrage and complexity surrounding the use of torture by the CIA, instead portraying it as one method of getting information, that is then replaced by others, such as bribery. However the result is a film that allows for ambiguity – for the viewer to think and engage critically, not just after, but also during the film. Even as Maya is portrayed sympathetically – grieving for the loss of her last ‘friend’ and colleague – she remains somewhat unreachable; unsympathetic; pushing her team to the limits – perceiving that bin Laden’s death will somewhat correct the imbalance caused by the enormous US and UK death toll from terrorist attacks. This distance allows for a viewing that at every turn, can consider what the impact of her actions really are, on her colleagues, the economy, the public perception of the hunt, and most importantly, for the victims of torture. esq-thirty-1012-xlg

The raid scene itself rewards the procedural approach of the preceding hunt, delivering palpable tension as the SEAL team approach, broach and invade the ‘fortress’ in which their target is concealed. Using an aesthetic most closely akin to video games, and utilising the inherent eeriness of night vision POV, these scenes put the viewer in the midst of the action, following the soldiers as they move up each level – a moment given to dwell on every life taken.

mccullin-northern-irelandLives taken feature heavily in McCullin; David and Jacqui Morris’s documentary portrait of war photographer Don McCullin, who, over three decades covered conflicts the world over – Biafra, Vietnam, Northern Ireland, Cambodia – with an unflinching, yet sympathetic eye. Paced steadily, with a solid, if unimaginative chapter-like approach, McCullin traces its subjects’ career, placing the photographs themselves at the heart of each tale of brutality and violence. McCullins’ images, most poignantly described by the man himself – show the humanity that is being lost in times of conflict, or with regard to one devastating account – finding dignity in a place where it would be least expected. Some of the most tragic and heartbreaking moments in McCullin however, are those in which his articulate testimony, without visual representation, conjure a vivid image, allowing the viewer a means to imagine what horrors still haunt the great man.

Also watched, in the Filmhouse Polanski season: Cul de Sac – a delight.