This is among the final images of the first episode (the translated title amounts to The Severed Head) of Feuillade's delirious, nearly absurdist 1915 silent epic, Les Vampires.
An assassin dispatched by the criminal society known as The Vampires absconds across the rooftops of Paris after a gruesome murder in a magistrate's antechamber. The sleek, slinky bodies of The Vampires (all clad in form-fitting black ensembles during their criminal exploits) ballet across the screen in marked contrast to frantic clodhopping of the journalists and authorities pursuing them. His prone stance embodies both stasis and action, and the stilled image leaves the speed of his movements ambiguous. The Vampires' violent, if aesthetically thrilling, disruption of bourgeois society is encapsulated in this image of a purely black, cat-like figure stalking across and against a strict geometry.
*Though I'm sure others have done it, I first came across a feature such as this at Glenn Kenny's blog, Some Came Running, and I'd like to give credit where it's due. I think it's a useful way of looking at films. It's admittedly a narrowed perspective, but worthwhile nonetheless, as a carefully selected, isolated image (one not selected by a distributor's marketing department) can speak volumes about a filmmaker and/or a film.
Family Planning as Farce in Sam Mendes’ Away We Go
As Roger Ebert begins his Great Movies essay on Hayao Miyazaki’s brilliant fantasy My Neighbor Totoro: “Here is a children's film made for the world we should live in, rather than the one we occupy. A film with no villains. No fight scenes. No evil adults. No fighting between the two kids. No scary monsters. No darkness before the dawn. A world that is benign.” He finishes by summarizing the film’s appeal: “It is a little sad, a little scary, a little surprising and a little informative, just like life itself. It depends on a situation instead of a plot, and suggests that the wonder of life and the resources of imagination supply all the adventure you need.“ (1)
Sam Mendes’ Away We Go manages a similar trick for a certain demographic of adults by largely portraying a conflict-free relationship between two thirtysomethings on the cusp of first-time parenthood.Mendes follows his Totoros (large, mythical cats in Miyazaki’s film, here an insurance salesman and medical illustrator), named Burt and Verona, as they episodically trek across the United States to find the ideal spot for bringing up a little one and settling down.Verona has a bit of baggage stemming from the premature death of her parents, but for the most part the couple lives in a hermetically sealed, dorky hipster-harmony.Conflict arises only as their bubble runs against the sharp misery of friends and extended families. "Nobody's in love like us, right?" asks Verona in a rare moment of doubt, and there's no doubt about the answer. They are engaged in a safe, passionate partnership, of which we'd all like to be a part, but rarely see borne out in films. Is this relationship any less realistic than your average romantic comedy? Not really, unless your definition of realism is aligned with the exhausted formula of beautiful, savage monodimensionals programmatically fighting and fucking and marrying and procreating.
However, for nearly an hour, Away We Go is itself an insufferably obnoxious, flat and irritatingly hip mess of a feel-bad-then-good movie.In this way it mirrors the couple (played by the The Office’s John Krasinski and Saturday Night Live alumnus Maya Rudolph) at its center: embarrassingly earnest, quirky, navel-gazing and lazily idealized.As a parade of Flagrant All-American Misery crosses the bushy-tailed couple’s path in the form of Faux-Eastern Spiritualism, Suburban Vulgarities and Narcissistic Former Hippies, Burt and Verona cling to each other against the hideous menagerie, their primary concern avoiding a similar fate for their fledgling family unit. But once the film escapes this self-imposed purgatory of misguided and deadening farce, it evolves into a near masterpiece during its final twenty minutes, leaving attentive audiences bewildered and glad they'd resisted temptation to jump ship.It’s no understatement to call this film’s first half nearly unbearable, a failure on almost every level.Its late resurrection (what sports junkies know as a “second-half adjustment”) is so glaring as to give off the appearance of an elaborate joke, though Away We Go’s finale wears a message of sincerity so brilliantly it shames the previous 70 minutes out of memory.
Narcissistic yet uncomplicated, beautiful yet average-looking, worldly yet innocent, Burt and Verona serve as the ideal for the This American Life crowd. Their unironic embrace of irony-drenched objects, activities and fashions (tube socks, aviator goggles, mittens, beards, whittling, Buddy Holly specs) would be the envy of every hipster unable to be appear so effortless in his or her appropriation of yesterday’s ephemera.Even the contrast in their names, the exotic and ethnic Verona, the prosaic Burt, projects a graceful intermarriage between the poles of hipsterdom.They are who’d you like to be, or, at the very least, who you’d like to know. The fantasy is that these people might exist, and you could befriend them, and maybe they'd rub off on you. They exist for MFA’s and graphic design grunts as Totoro does for kiddies. Which is not to criticize either the portrait or the aim, because both fantasies are ultimately harmless, equally capable of expanding one’s horizons and indulging the prospect of a better self. If one is to take umbrage with an idealizing fantasy, there are far more toxic, larger targets.
During his relatively brief career in Hollywood so far, Sam Mendes has made one vastly overrated film (the eventual kitsch-classic, Oscar Winning American Beauty in 1999), two vastly underrated films (the near-masterpiece Jarhead [2005] and 2002's enjoyable Road to Perdition), along with what is perhaps the most offensively grandiose work of Oscar-bait this decade (last year's slimy Revolutionary Road), so any film with his name on it could go either way.Cursed with the inability to transcend mediocre or vague source material, Mendes is natural visual stylist without much in the way of subtlety or originality.He has failed at sober-eyed critique and farce alike, resembling a blunt-toothed shark circling the American Dream, laboriously nibbling at it, but unable to bring it down. That he is British, yet all of his films concern Americana in its most grotesque forms, does little to propel him to the upper ranks of Hollywood Artists, his clear aim.Consequently, over the course of his first five films there has risen a consistent equation detailing the relationship between the grandness of his vision vis-à-vis The American Character and his effectiveness as a dramatist: as his ambition soars, his films sink in an equal and opposite reaction.
A great relief it is that Away We Go is much less extravagant in its sweep of the American Dream than previous efforts, especially in its splendid final reel.Aided by the brilliant director of photography Ellen Kuras, who admirably dampens his penchant for visual excess, Mendes starts off charting the revulsion Burt and Verona experience as they visit a series of friends and family that offer horrifying visions of family life. As the successive exemplars of maturity grow muted in behavior during the picture’s second half, the story’s, and Mendes’ own, better qualities emerge.Burt and Verona come across as hopelessly narcissistic and righteous when placed early on in sharp contrast to the aging slut and her basket case husband, or the anti-stroller Eastern Spiritualists. Their humanity emerges later on, when a visit to a set of ostensibly happy, Toronto-dwelling friends reveals, with utmost subtlety, unseen traumas that are neither exploited for shameless emotional punch nor parlayed into numbing farce.Similarly, the film’s final chapter, an unexpected emergency visit to Burt’s bereaved brother (played by the always-brilliant Paul Schneider) digs at deeper truths with a deft, sober humanity.The schematic of a film’s ending unintentionally humiliating the rest of its running time is a novel concept for a quirky indie comedy, even if it’s more or less expected from most quirky indie thrillers boasting lame shock endings. But the final leg of Away We Go more than justifies the price of admission.Accordingly, skipping all but this graceful stretch wouldn’t amount to tragedy. There's plenty one can do with seventy extra minutes of free time.
In a career-first, Mendes’ weaknesses and those of the script (by the presumably real-life Burt&Verona, novelists/journalists/activists Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida) are complementary, and a modest dialectic emerges: the heaviness of his hand, and the self-involved, breezy flow of the script conspire to create a middle-ground synthesis that settles into a warmly restrained portrait of capital-A American Adulthood without forsaking the capital-I Idiosyncrasies of its central characters.The story of love between Burt and Verona predates and outlasts the film, as we slowly begin to feel as though we’re not witnessing their best years, a notion as refreshing as it is unfortunately unique. Essential to the veracity of Totoro, as well as Away We Go, or even Star Wars, for that matter, is the completeness of a world that doesn’t cease to exist as the film closes.Vida and Eggers should be applauded for their aversion to screenwriting contrivances, having breathed life into a humble, if initially muddled, fantasy.
Away We Go / USA, UK / 2009 / Color / 98 min. / Directed by Sam Mendes / Written by Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida / Starring John Krasinski, Maya Rudolph, Carmen Ejogo, Catherine O’Hara, Jeff Daniels, Allison Janney, Jim Gaffigan, Samantha Pryor, Conor Carroll, Maggie Gyllenhaal and Paul Schneider
Notes:
1 – Ebert’s discussion of Totoro, also a very good, concise explanation of Miyazaki’s overall appeal, can be accessed here:
A stark counterpoint to Inglourious Basterds, Quentin Tarantino’s utopian fantasia of messianic cinephilia, this bit of Chilean miserablism (hopefully no longer a pejorative descriptor) burrows underneath the intersection of motion picture idolatry and fascist art making. What emerges is a harrowing masterpiece.
In a watch-and-follow handheld aesthetic – shot on Super16mm with a color palette reduced to a pasty shade of mortar – sophomore director Pablo Larrain’s camera stays closely behind Raul (co-writer Alfredo Castro, who from the three quarter view recalls a Panic in Needle Park-era Al Pacino, all eye sockets and fierce Latin angularity. Shot straight on, he’s Lou Reed at his most disconcertingly blank), as he pursues the monomaniacal quest to become Augusto Pinochet-era Chile’s foremost Tony Manero (John Travolta's iconic character from Saturday Night Fever) impersonator in the waning days of disco.
A local television station holds weekly contests to determine the Chilean equivalent of a rotating cast of American celebrities – at the outset of the film Raul mistakenly shows up at the Chuck Norris lookalike contest – which gives Raul a way of parlaying his Saturday Night Fever fixation into national notoriety and artistic legitimacy. Concurrently, he’s been managing a group of amateur dancers in a series of painfully mechanical reiterations of Fever’s key sequences for paltry, drunken crowds. The Manero character’s effect on Raul’s world is total, bringing him to tears at its tender moments while also inspiring him to commit a string of impulsive, remorseless killings.
Devoutly, studiously attending screenings of the film (his plastic-wrapped imitation of Fever’s iconic white suit takes up the adjoining seat), Raul sets about internalizing each detail and nuance of Travolta’s performance in an effort to assimilate the character entirely. Accurate impersonation is no cheap endeavor, and the jobless Raul shows no mercy in brutally slaughtering innocents who can provide him with the gold chains, television sets and dance floor panels capable of legitimizing his apery. Nor is his masquerade profitable: the television’s grand prize is a scant sum that would scarcely cover the cost of the accoutrements required for Raul’s ardent verisimilitude. There is no benefit to this charade but the opportunity for control.
Lest we entertain the notion that the obsession is with Travolta himself, as a performer, the local theater swaps out Fever for Grease one afternoon (with an uptick in attendance), provoking Raul to throttle the owner against the projector and thieve the cash register. To the aging Raul, Manero represents the immortal, an attainable, perpetual youth. When the permanence of his idol’s grace is threatened by the theater’s crass acquiescence to fickle popular demand, that is, when the constituents of his own identity are exposed as mere pop culture artifacts, Raul can only compensate with violence in an effort to keep his carefully composed self from disintegrating.
“How the financially pinched 70s generation that grew up on TV attempt[ed] to find its own forms of beauty and release,” was how Pauline Kael perceptively described Manero’s original appeal to American audiences (1). In Chile, however, Manero’s pursuit of release and freedom becomes Raul’s template for merciless control and two-bit fascism. Twentieth century despots are famous for their cinephilia, and Raul, underneath the umbrella of Pinochet, parlays his cinematic fantasies into fascistic impulses on the grandest stages available to him, first a decrepit theater, then, briefly, a claustrophobic soundstage (2). Pinochet is the lion and Raul is the termite, but the film makes explicit the mutuality of their gluttonous ambition. Both Larrain’s photographic schema and Raul’s broken features recall cornerstones of Italian Neo-realism, and, most perversely, Tony Manero’s protagonist functions as the Fascist Everyman.
Paradoxically, the more avidly Raul consumes the film, the more carefully he notes the Saturday Night Fever’s most quotidian details, the more he’s unable to comprehend them accurately. A few running jokes have characters arguing with him about the number of buttons above Manero’s zipper or the color of the heroine’s dress in a key sequence. The pathetic equation of Raul’s life: the more firmly he impresses himself upon the film, the greater is his rejection from it, the distance between the two increasing upon every viewing. As he closely inspects a filched 35mm print of Fever, isolating each move and scrutinizing each successive image as a translatable code, the two younger members of his company intrude upon him and introduce an original number they propose to feature in the performance. Disinterested, Raul removes his eyes from the stilled Manero only once, to say that their efforts were wasted, as their steps are “not in the film,” that is, not fit for inclusion because their genesis lay outside of the sanctioned fantasy. Susan Sontag defined the fascist aesthetic as one that “… flows from (and justifies) a preoccupation with situations of control, submissive behavior, extravagant effort, and the endurance of pain; they endorse two seemingly opposite states, egomania and servitude.” (3) Fittingly, Raul’s life is one of performance – embodiment is his art – and his servitude to the idea of Tony Manero and his total control of others encapsulates Sontag’s conception of a binary fascist aesthetic, which in Raul’s case is noxiously based on a misguided ideal of freedom and grace.
Impossibly reticent, the only sound he emits is the shuffle of his footsteps as he ambles through depopulated slums, occasionally stooping to avoid the eye of patrolling military goons. The famous opening of Saturday Night Fever has Travolta’s boots strutting down a Brooklyn sidewalk with The Bee Gees' disco anthem “Stayin’ Alive” on the soundtrack. Tony Manero is without non-source music; consequently, Travolta’s silenced footsteps are translated to the hard grind of Raul’s shoes against gravel roads. Music dominates all the dance sequences of Fever, eliminating all sonic evidence of labor or strain, but Larrain never forgets Raul’s feet and muscles. The ersatz Manero’s attempt at providing the appropriate disco soundtrack to his company’s performances is undermined by the blaring, graceless clapping of their feet against the splintered wooden floor. In keeping with a fascist preoccupation with tightly organized (controlled) bodies, the dancers’ rote memorization of Travolta’s steps renders each performance a perfunctory march.
Pinochet’s coup was CIA-sponsored, and the film contains the implication that Saturday Night Fever itself is also exemplary of American meddling and imperialism. The murderous fascism of both the dictator and the dancer is propped up by the monolithic United States, but Larrain is careful not to suggest that U.S. hegemony manufactures such tyranny outright, at least in this instance. The relationship is instead one of facilitation, not construction, and a less nuanced film (and certainly one by an American filmmaker) would not have realized this. Larrain thus creates a narrative successful at both the interpersonal and political levels while tangibly, though subtly, articulating the interplay between. In fact, the film’s calmest moment – fleeting as it is – features the troupe relaxing after a performance by listening to traditional Chilean music. The sequence quickly devolves into a sex scene of Tarr-ian alienation in which would-be lovers are reduced to masturbating side-by-side and passing out, but the respite of Chilean culture registers with the characters strongly, if only for a moment and followed quickly by further misery wrought by their leader.
The respective realms of lion and termite eventually converge as the two insolent dancers bent on inserting original passages into the performance become budding anti-Pinochet activists, simultaneously wrenching themselves away from two forms of concomitant fascism, the artistic and the political. Raul’s nervousness around the authorities (always crouching, always ducking, always avoiding scrutiny) is never fully explained, but it’s worth asserting that the lion need never fear the termite, but the termite would be advised always to fear the lion, regardless of their commonality. The film ends as the authorities descend upon the theater to interrogate (and presumably execute) the young lovers for the subversive behavior – they’d been finked on by the girl’s mother, who was jealous of Raul’s attraction to her daughter. Blessed with a rat’s sense of impending trouble, Raul slips out the back door in his Travolta garb, headed for the television station.
Tony Manero / Chile, Brazil / Color / 98 min. / Directed by Pablo Larrain / Written by Alfredo Castro, Mateo Iribarren and Mr. Larrain / Starring: Alfredo Castro, Paola Lattus, Hector Morales, Amparo Noguera and Elsa Poblete
Notes:
1 - Collected in 5001 Nights at the Movies. New York: Henry Holt, 1985 2 - Despots seem particularly enamored with movies (or at least we’re enamored with the connection). Kim Jong-Il’s fetish for James Bond is well documented, as was Stalin’s fondness for musicals. Hitler preferred Chaplin until The Great Dictator. The connection between artistic fantasy and political fantasy must be tempting, and these dictators being at the helm of state film industries must make those two arenas less distinguishable. An interesting, cursory overview of Stalin’s command of state cinema (certainly the most prolonged and strongest of a tyrant over a major film industry) can be found at:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/3618310/Why-Stalin-loved-Tarzan-and-wanted-John-Wayne-shot.html. 3 – Sontag’s essay, “Fascinating Fascism,” from which these quotes were taken and which is more than anything a far-reaching discussion of Nazi documentarian Leni Riefenstahl’s work and legacy, appears in her collection:
