SEPTEMBER VIEWING: THE GREATS - The Tree of Life (2011)

The Tree of Life

There’s something tremendous about experiencing a great artist swinging for the fences – even if such a gesture doesn’t result in an inarguable triumph. While some might bristle at the prospect of a mid-century, middle-American family bearing the weight of the cosmos, the representation of ordinary domestic dramas unburdened by the usual tiresome ideological critiques or sentimental valorizations is a blessed relief. To suggest that the film offers a simple-minded cosmology of “nature vs. grace” is to overlook the carefully structured narrational framework: Malick is not advancing a Christian worldview here, but instead filters The Tree of Life’s action through the consciousness of characters who are devout and/or struggling to contend with this simplistic polarity. It is an extraordinary humanist riposte to 2001: A Space Odyssey in which Malick movingly hypothesizes that human evolution might be driven by a yearning towards transcendence rather than the brute assertion of will.

Rating: * * * * *

SEPTEMBER VIEWING: THE GREATS - White Material (2009)

White Material

While not as well-acquainted with Claire Denis as I ought to be (The Intruder did not motivate an intrust in Jean-Luc Nancy, but 35 Shots of Rum was a warm and moving family study), White Material strikes me as a near-masterpiece. Isabelle Huppert is typically ferocious, but the film’s incendiary post-colonial politics provides a valuable focus to her rage (usually internalized in icy psychodramas). The final climatic moments arrive with the impact of shotgun blasts, with Huppert’s act of patricide undertaken in a burst of overlapping editing and violent disruption of the 180° rule. Such unexpected stylistic bravura is an inversion of the great burst of revolutionary fervour in The Battleship Potemkin – which initially explodes in the celebrated plate-smashing montage. Here, instead, the abrupt murder of the plantation’s patriarch provides no possibility for liberation, but instead seals Huppert within the vindictive cycle of violence rippling outwards throughout the country. A staggering exemplification of the psychology and politics of racial conflict.

Rating: * * * * *

SEPTEMBER VIEWING: THE GREATS - California Dreamin' (2007)

California Dreamin’

Cristian Nemescu’s untimely death was an unmistakable tragedy as California Dreamin’ is an extremely confident debut. Most impressive are the juxtapositions of historical memories of past political failures – beautifully rendered in black and white – and present day yearnings for restitution (idealizations that remain unrealized). The promise of America as imagined by Romanian villagers – by turns hopeful, opportunistic, and resentful – is presented as a bathetic rural pageant that degenerates into violent betrayal and desertion. Never a simple-minded indictment of Yankee opportunism masquerading as Democracy-Building, the film surprisingly depicts the intermingling of diplomacy and hostility as emanating from mutual exploitation. One of its most memorable visual rhymes involves a closeup of tiptoes: the first image occurs when the rebellious Monica raises herself up to share a kiss with Sgt. McLaren – an amorous investment that she hopes will propel her away from her father, Doiaru, a despotic (but complex) figure in the village. Nemescu employs the same framing again as Doiaru is killed during the villagers’ vindictive uprising: as he dies in his daughter’s arms she props herself up on her toes to bear his weight. Thus, a trajectory from idealism to disillusionment is traversed with brutal economy.

Rating: * * * *1/2

SEPTEMBER VIEWING: THE GREATS - The White Ribbon (2009)

The White Ribbon

A great leap forward after the regressive and pointless remake of Funny Games. Haneke’s moralism has a much more ambitious scope – the kindred relations between fascistic and religious thought – but its precision is razor sharp. One of its central images chillingly articulates the single-minded purposefulness of rationalized brutality: the camera follows a farmer’s son from behind as he methodically plows through a landowner’s plot of cabbages with a scythe. Haneke holds at length on the rather banal act of vengeance, and its straightforwardly presentational destructiveness anticipates savageries that are perpetuated later with an equally perfunctory fervour. Particularly nightmarish is the mathematical precision by which a pet bird is placed dead centre on a pastor’s desk – a pair of scissors protruding from where its head should be. While one might find Haneke’s claim that the film addresses “the origins of terrorism” to be unconvincingly grandiose, The White Ribbon still remains a frightfully convincing representation of the ease by which cruelty can be cultivated and perpetuated within insular communities.

Rating: * * * *

SEPTEMBER VIEWING:THE GREATS - If.... (1968)

If….

Crackling with anarchistic fervour, Lindsay Anderson’s assault on English traditionalism still surprises over forty years after its initial release. One of the definitive works of the late 1960s, its measured buildup to the blackly comic assault occurring in its final minutes exposes the “countercultural” tendencies of contemporaneous films like Easy Rider as exercises in unfocused hedonism. And the so-called “sexual frankness” of the New Hollywood renaissance is revealed as just so much heteronormative prudery next to If….’s explicit homoeroticism. Situating queerness as an instrumental component of the youthful overturning of a moribund class system (the gymnastics sequence is particularly memorable), If…. anticipates New Queer Cinema’s explosive pop politics. Avoiding the easy polemics of “conservative teachers” vs. “liberated students,” Anderson’s masterstroke is to situate the senior prefects – the abusive Whips – as the principal antagonists, demonstrating how the sins of the Fathers are so readily taken up by apt pupils. It’s easy to appreciate how Malcolm McDowell’s cocksure smirk – held even as he anticipates a lashing – served as the performative kernel of his turn as a dandyish thug in A Clockwork Orange. But there’s purposeful steel in his impudence, evident in the film’s powerful final closeup of McDowell machine-gunning the figureheads of a tyrannical education system.

Rating: * * * *