In the Fog

Sergei Loznitsa is one of contemporary cinema’s most underrated humanists. The Belorussian mathematician turned filmmaker cut his teeth on documentaries before making the switch a decade later to fiction with the ironically titled My Joy (10), one of the most recent entries in the longstanding Slavic tradition of grim and frostbitten (not to mention long and languorous) parables about endless cycles of violence and the general pointlessness of life. The film earned him just as many accolades (a Palme d'Or nomination at Cannes; director Andrei Zvyagintsev calling it the best Russian-language film of the decade) as condemnations (accusations of everything from self-hating Russophobia to good old-fashioned misanthropy), which proved, if nothing else, its success as a provocation. In the Fog is similar to its predecessor but less extreme, its heavy-handed fatalism tempered by an undeniable compassion for its characters.

It’s also one of the quietest war films ever made, a glimpse at Nazi-occupied Belarus (shot in Latvia) that turns into a slow-moving meditation on morality and mortality. During the 1942-44 occupation, the inhabitants of an unspecified region are locked in a cycle of conflict and cruelty, their loyalty to each other nonexistent thanks to the choosing of sides forced by the war. Rebel partisans attempt to undermine the operations of Nazi collaborators, and vice versa, while the Germans lean back, watch, and enjoy the proceedings, pleased with their ability to turn the peasants against one other. In the middle of it all is the hapless, Christ-like Sushenya (Vladimir Svirskiy), a gleaming beacon of decency in a wasteland of moral destitution. Imprisoned by the Nazis for an act of sabotage he didn’t commit, then released as bait for the partisans while his “accomplices” are hanged, this stone-eyed and stoic family man who is just trying to survive the war is eventually wanted dead by all sides—the reward he gets for his attempt to do the right thing.

Loznitsa uses a roving handheld camera in order to wring as much atmosphere and emotion from the film’s setting, primarily an Auden-esque forest that feels equally lush and Spartan. Every scene is composed of one or two shots, in the manner of Béla Tarr, and the soundtrack is devoid of music, comprised instead of wind in the trees, birds chirping, and the occasional gunshot. The symbolism of the film’s stark imagery walks a fine line between evocative and risible: the pile of bones outside the butcher’s shop on which the camera comes to rest during the off-screen hanging; the lone black horse in a field followed, soon after, by a lone black bird in a tree; the titular fog that eventually swallows the film whole. Yet these effects hang together in an expressive nonlinear framework that fleshes out the characters’ lives and the extent to which their world punishes those (especially Sushenya) who dare to be heroic.

There is certainly some humor lurking in Loznitsa’s slavish (and Slavic) devotion to depicting mankind’s collective heart of darkness, a tragicomic method to his madness. His is a world of heightened absurdity, an atrocity exhibition where noble intentions invariably meet horrific ends and no good deed goes unpunished. Loznitsa is still intent on portraying mankind as a writhing, impotent mass of dubious morality and wretched cruelty—life as one long cautionary tale of human folly with a series of inevitably tragic ends. But with In the Fog, he allows his characters good intentions. The film is the director’s big reveal, a glimpse past the steely façade (one might call it the iron curtain) of My Joy—an expression of his overarching cynicism as a thinly veiled hope for humanity, not a battle cry in favor of its extinction.

Le Sang / Early Works

A recent series at Anthology Film Archives paid tribute to critic, film programmer, festival juror, professor, and cinéaste extraordinaire Amos Vogel, who passed away last April at 91. Founder of Cinema 16, co-founder of the New York Film Festival, and longtime contributor to Film Comment, Vogel is still best known for his hugely influential, woefully out-of-print 1974 book Film As a Subversive Art, which provided the rubric for Anthology’s programs.  In keeping with the book’s preoccupation with radicalism in all its cinematic forms, the two films shown on March 13 constituted an accidental coupling connected by counterculture: Jean-Daniel Pollet’s exceedingly rare 1970 vision of agitprop apocalypse, Le Sang, and Zelimir Zilnik’s pitch-black Communist comedy Early Works, from 1969.

The 35mm print of Le Sang that was exhibited is the only one in existence, and the screening marked only the second time the film has ever been shown in North America (and perhaps the last).  The tale of a band of quasi-hippie nomads and their odyssey through a post-something wasteland in search of the sea, Le Sang is Pollet’s perverse take on the road movie, and an example of his tendency to make poetic films that prize visual impact over all else. Vogel in Film As a Subversive Act classifies the film under “Trance and Witchcraft,” calling it “an almost completely successful example of visual cinema at its finest.” Set in a barren landscape of sand, stone, and the occasional open field, that suggests Philippe Garrel’s Inner Scar as much as it does a bad peyote trip, it’s like a more laconic El Topo, with numerous scenes of veritable animal slaughter that make the notorious bull beheading of Apocalypse Now look like Bambi.  But despite the film’s hallucinatory visual imagination, its frustratingly abstract vision of a dehumanized future remains emotionally hollow.

Pollet and company obviously fancy themselves revolutionaries, though their precise target is unclear.  Dialogue among the motley characters is comprised of screams, grunts, and warbles, occasionally punctuated by calls to arms and provocative sloganeering that often break the fourth wall to berate the viewer.  (One particularly graphic animal throat-slitting is accompanied by the statement, “All the boars drugged and killed for the image, by the image, will start a rebellion,” which is soon followed by “Why always corpses on screen and never in the theater?”)  The film keeps up appearances of raging against everything, taking visual potshots at religion and embracing primitivism in defiance of modernity, while grabbing every opportunity to offend its audience’s sensibilities by way of grisly animal sacrifice. All of which doesn’t  cover up the fact that it is an exercise in artifice—phony subversion in the service of nothing.

Early Works, which won the Golden Bear at the 19th Berlin International Film Festival in 1969 before fading into obscurity, presents its themes of revolution and dehumanization far more literally and effectively than its French counterpart. The film, Zilnik’s first feature, exemplified the main tendencies of the Yugoslav Black Wave—the political film movement then at its artistic and commercial peak and initially established by such filmmakers as Dusan Makavejev (writer-director of W.R. Mysteries of the Organism, a still from which graces the cover of Film as a Subversive Art), Zika Pavlovic, Sasa Petrovic, and Mica Popovic—and prompted Vladimir Jovicic to write “The Black Wave in Our Cinema,” the 1969 article that marked the beginning of the country’s official counterattack. A deft satire of the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czeckoslovakia, Early Works uses its loose plot to allegorize Communism’s dark side, here presented as the tragic outcome that inevitably arises when the idealism of high-minded ideology is betrayed by the reality of fallible human nature.

A road movie of a different sort, Early Works chronicles the maladroit misadventures of four young revolutionaries, three boys and a girl named Jugoslava, who leave home to become political missionaries.  They wander across the countryside, pick cabbage, shoot guns (inaccurately), make Molotov cocktails (poorly), and spread the revolutionary gospel (only to be met with a lack of resources and dispiritingly poor morale), all in a failed attempt to awaken the conscience within the working class and peasants.

A sharp tonal shift follows, however, as sexual politics come to the forefront and the proceedings turn from humorous to disturbing.  The boys fall in love with Jugoslava, who rebuffs each of them in turn (as she is still entirely consumed by the political fervor that initially set their journey in motion), resulting in an increasingly tense love quadrangle.  In the startling climax, the boys’ emotions triumph over their political ideals, and they punish Jugoslava for not “sharing the wealth.”  They attempt to rape her, she resists, they shoot her, and, in a grand ironic expression, throw a Communist flag over their handiwork before blowing it up with their first successful Molotov cocktails of the film—dignifying their base, human aggression by dressing it up as a revolutionary act.

Artifacts of a time and place long gone—a Europe variously excited and repulsed by revolutionary possibility—the two films are emblematic of the zeitgeist from which they were born.  Yet, in their zeal, these revolutionaries also sow the very seeds of their movement’s decay and demise.  In Le Sang the radicals’ nihilism drives the spirit of revolution into its grave; Early Works uses the literal rape and murder of Jugoslava as a thinly veiled metaphor whereby revolutionary love of one’s country serves not to awaken the nation to a higher political calling but actively destroy it.
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(Originally published on Film Comment's blog HERE)

The Berlin File

The opening scene of Ryoo Seung-wan’s new spy-thriller The Berlin File is, for better and worse, an apt introduction to the film. A confusing arms deal involving North and South Korean, Russian, and Arab agents goes spectacularly awry, somehow entangling Israel and America in the process and sending North Korean super-spy Pyo Jong-Seung on the run, the victim of an elaborate plot that has framed him as a defector and left him wanted dead by all sides.  A mosaic of action- and espionage-film clichés, yet bearing its share of novel qualities, what follows is equally lithe and languorous, light-footed and heavy-handed, and entirely frustrating.

There’s a good film lurking somewhere inside The Berlin File. The actors do what they can with the script, turning in strong performances of which the film is almost undeserving. Ha Jung-woo (known to American audiences as the hapless cab driver-cum-hitman of 2010’s The Yellow Sea) injects his character with staggering pathos and emotional complexity, as the North Korean agent on the run after being caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. Ryoo Seung-bum (the director’s brother and longtime partner in crime) is gleefully deranged as a sadistic North Korean operative/psychopath with an agenda of his own, sent to Berlin to clean up the mess. Playing the characters’ South Korean nemesis, Han Suk-kyu is a walking contradiction, both amused and horrified by the absurdity of the bloodshed he stumbles into.

The Berlin setting, though ripped from The Bourne Supremacy, is rendered unfamiliar enough to imbue the film’s borderline-potboiler tale of international espionage with an air of exoticism, and parallels between the Cold War and the contemporary situation in Korea emerge. But the film’s ending—a moment of unveiling in which Seung-wan shows his hand—is as predictable as it is disappointing, suggesting The Berlin File wasn’t made to stand alone. Beginning as a surprisingly moving tale of an unlikely protagonist and his quest for agency in an emotionally and politically convoluted world, the film forfeits most of its emotional impact when its conclusion evokes nothing more than the first installment of a new franchise.

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(Originally published on Film Comment's blog HERE)

A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III

Roman Coppola’s new film, A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III, finds Charlie Sheen in the role of the titular protagonist: an endlessly narcissistic and inexplicably famous graphic designer whose two main loves (aside from himself) are women and booze.  Though he is ostensibly acting, those traits, combined with the character’s name—almost identical to the actor’s own—make it impossible to watchSwan without feeling that Sheen is playing anyone other than himself, as made notorious by his most recent stint in the headlines. 

But how interesting is it to see Charlie Sheen play Charlie Sheen? Engaging in an admirable yet ultimately unsatisfying discourse with reality, the film boils down to little more than an extension of Sheen’s recent one-man show.  In this way, the film is inherently flawed and hopelessly misdirected, a snake swallowing its own tail. The actor and director's lifelong friendship is the entire reason for the film’s existence (Swan is even more disappointing once you consider the fact that the result of the two men’s fathers’ collaboration was Apocalypse Now), yet as presented in the film, Sheen is nowhere near compelling enough to justify the muse/star treatment.

Swan feels like an inside joke, meaningful only to the filmmakers, a Playboy-chic fantasy far more impressed by its own intimations of psychodrama than any viewer will be.  An attempt at a tale of profound existential woe, Sheen’s character is left by his girlfriend, sending him into a downward spiral of self-pity and hollow introspection, his dealings with his friends and family interspersed with numerous live-action enactments of his daydreams and fantasies. This promises insight into Charles Swan and, by extension, Charlie Sheen, but the façade wears thin, almost immediately devolving into glad-handed wankery that becomes downright exhausting.

There are no surprises, no revelations and almost no fun.  In their place is forced, painfully self-conscious quirkiness and a bounty of neuroses that ring false. Coppola—who co-wrote both Moonrise Kingdomand the Darjeeling Limited—comes off like a second-rate Wes Anderson. Jason Schwartzman (Coppola’s cousin), playing Charlie’s comedian/musician and best friend, is once again typecast as a vaguely eccentric mensch, while Bill Murray, his manager, successfully keeps a straight face (much to the actor’s credit).  Liam Hayes’ Seventies-inspired soundtrack comes off as variations on a theme: the same tepid, retro-worship indie schmaltz done over and over again.

There is, however, an undeniable kinetic energy to the proceedings, a visual inventiveness to the flamboyant pop art mélange that defines the mise-en-scene.  Still, Coppola can’t art-direct his way out of a lousy script.

Swan is the latest development in Sheen’s very real attempts at public redemption and personal catharsis, turning the baring of his soul into commercial fodder.  The film’s attempts at ironic distance—elements of innocuous mockery such as the character being perpetually clad in a pair of purple-tinted sunglasses—indicate a newly acquired, if dubious, self-awareness on the part of the actor; a moral engagement that he believes will make him a more sympathetic character in the eyes of the public.  He may very well be on a quest for self-discovery, but the film definitely isn’t going to convince anyone of that.  Now that Sheen seems to care about the consequences of his actions, the question is, why should we?

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(Originally published on Film Comment's blog HERE)