August 20: Mood Indigo/L'Écume des jours (2014 -- Michel Gondry)

★★★★

Mood Indigo is a visual treat that aims no further than its visual inventiveness.  It has the completely predictable narrative of an opera – boy meets girl, they marry, she dies – but if the focus of opera is music, the creativity here is visuals.  It’s a thrill to watch how Gondry embellishes this thin story line with outrageous creativity.

A lot of the visual strength here comes from Gondry’s ability to violate categories and scale.  In Colin’s kitchen, Nicholas cooks from a video cookbook, but when the right ingredientss aren't available, the video chef’s hand emerges from the screen and hands them to Nicholas.  Video in Mood Indigo doesn't remain a series of stimulated pixels but becomes physical reality.  And there are other wild kitchen fantasies, too, including meals that assemble and dissemble themselves as well as eels coming out of faucets.  Gondry’s visuals can have a logic of shape and form rather than reliance on typical cognitive categories.  The same categorical violation lets Gondry invent Colin’s pianocktail. which translates music to mixed drinks, and it's behind the weapons manufacturing that requires nude men to incubate the guns.

Another part of Gondry’s inventiveness comes from his ability to play with space and scale.  The man in the mouse costume is the size of a mouse we'd see in everyday reality, a cloud-car can tour Paris, and there’s a car race to the altar for the wedding of Colin and Chloé with little automobiles racing through church stairwells and up walls to get to the altar.  And in all this fantasy, Gondry is still happy to throw in some very recognizable barbs at the venality of the church.

There is also a lot of recognizable play with materials here.  Feathers float as snow but act as feathers when they land, and amid all the hard surfaces of Mood Indigo’s world, Gondry chooses soft yarns when the camera goes into Chloé’s body and we see her vulnerable organs.  After their wedding, the newly-weds leave the church dressed but floating in water with bubbles around them.  Throughout the film, a textural richness amplifies the creativity of its images.

There is also multi-leveled self-referentiality at work in Mood Indigo.  The film opens with a view of rows of people on typewriters, the typewriters moving along each row from one typist to the next.  This scene suggests Brazil and evokes the complexity of Terry Gilliam, whose inventiveness would be quite at home in this film.  There’s no manifest causal link between the story of Colin and Chloé, though viewers are clearly invited to try to make one, and the possibility of such a connection is completely void when we see Colin himself trying to type, apparently wanting to save Chloé by writing.  The mise en abyme here is a purely aesthetic pleasure.

Viewers wanting character arcs and plot twists are certain to be disappointed in Mood Indigo because Gondry has little interest in these elements of cinematic storytelling.  Instead, this film is an intense imaginative engagement with a series of poses, poses which follow the most basic of narratives.  For viewers inclined to marvel at ingenious visual creativity, Mood Indigo will be a treat.  And at moments, it can even touch the fragile heart in us all.  

August 9: Sorcerer (1977 -- William Friedkin)

★★★

If this had turned out to be the film that Friedkin intended, it would have been fantastic.  Unfortunately, Sorcerer has many problems, and the coup de grâce is that it never approaches the quality of Clouzot’s cover of the same material, The Wages of Fear.

In Clouzot’s tight film, the opening section sets up a world whose values inform the subsequent road adventures.  These values – pessimism, opportunism, amorality -- heighten the suspense as well as give us an investment in the characters.  Friedkin might have been trying to do the same in the opening section of Sorcerer, but the film rambles into a two-stage opening that neither creates a sustained mood nor establishes characters that we care much about.  In the first stage, we meet the characters on their individual home turfs as assassins, robbers, terrorists and con artists; after this extended section on four continents, we then see these characters for a while in a small, Latin village.  This extended introductory section of the movie has so much sprawl that we have no time to connect with any of the quartet; worse still, the information in this section is only modestly important later in the film.  While we eventually have the Palestinian bomber, Kassim, blowing a fallen tree out of the road, the Frenchman Victor’s fraud is irrelevant to the rest of the film, we learn so little of Latin Nilo in the intro that he’s even hard to recognize when he arrives in the village, and the calm efficiency we see of the American Jackie in the introduction has little take up in the rest of the film.  It feels as if Friedkin is aiming to recreate the pervasive existentialism of Clouzot’s opening, but Sorcerer instead gives us a long, diffuse introduction to some bad guys who inhabit a world that isn’t necessarily corrupt.

When the trucks finally get rolling, so does Sorcerer.  While there are several fine action and thrill scenes in the film, the best by far is the scene of the trucks crossing the rope bridge in a storm.  As the trucks lurch and lean, it’s only the most jaded of viewers who won’t gasp and wonder how Friedkin created the effects.  But such action sequences aside, the other elements of the film are sour here.  We are most attached to Victor through the introductory section, but his role is diminished in the travel section; conversely, the man we see the least in the introduction, Nilo, becomes one of the most important characters on the trip.  As Nilo becomes the coward we recall in Clouzot’s Jo, we are far less disgusted here because we don’t know much about him and we don’t see the hypocritical contrast between the gangster poseur and scared weakling Nilo soon becomes.  And one of the strangest transformations is when a shot of the grimly determined Jackie cuts to a shot of Jackie having a hallucinatory nervous breakdown.  And that in a desert that has suddenly replaced the rain forest.  Such contrastive cuts can have an effective role, but in a film that doesn’t use this technique for the first two hours of narrative, it feels more like bad film-making than innovative styling.

Friedkin’s ambitions are evident here -- grand existentialist statement, explicit anti-Americanism, intertextuality with his earlier Exorcist success (witness the title, flashes to pre-Colombian masks, and the menacing grill of one of the trucks).  But Friedkin’s failure to focus and his lack of control prevents Sorcerer from delivering on any of them, and there’s not even enough excess to provide the kind of pleasure we might get from a similar effort by a director like Herzog.  Sorcerer delivers us some grand action scenes in the middle of muddle that neither achieves the profundity it aspires to nor satisfies our desire for a tight aesthetic experience.

August 7: The Wages of Fear/Le salaire de la peur (1953 -- Georges Clouzot)

★★★★★

This movie just keeps thrilling.  Deservedly famed for its suspense, Wages of Fear doesn't draw on sudden surprises and camera cheats.  Instead, its bleak, existential world wrings out of us all hope of anything good happening to the characters, and we expect its world of material determinism to ultimately punish the quartet of risk-takers at the center of the film.  After the happy achievement of the men blowing up a boulder that had blocked the road, a rock that was dislodged by the explosion tumbles down the hill toward a jerry can filled with nitro.  Given the world of the film, we don’t really know whether or not the rock will hit the can and destroy the men and their trucks.  In this case, it doesn't, but later in the film, a happy achievement will be quickly followed by a devastating one.  Because the world of Wages of Fear is so bleak, we watch it in continuing expectation of something bad happening.

Many elements of Wages of Fear create this world, but the oft-criticized, but its long set-up is one of the most important.  Love, friendship, fairness, honesty, and decency have a place in this world as a group of expats jockey with each other for advantage.  In the opening of the film, we see kids playing with roaches whose legs are tied together, a bleak symbol of the world here (and one Peckinpah references at the opening of The Wild Bunch).  We soon see Mario mistreating Linda and pragmatically shifting his friendship from Luigi to Jo.  Meanwhile, Linda’s boss uses her sexually, and flaunts it to Mario, while she sees her situation as part of the deal.  The unscrupulous O’Brien won’t help his former friend Jo and recruits expats for the suicide job of transporting the nitro because they're so readily expendable.  The situation is so bleak that the despairing Italian kid hangs himself…at a shrine to the Virgin.  Introduced to a world like this, we don’t expect happy things to occur when the men finally take to the road, so we watch, expecting the worst at any moment.

The existential emptiness here becomes more obvious later.  Age, in the character of Jo, has neither wisdom nor respect.  Despite all his tough guy posturing early in the film, Jo is stricken sick with fear as they start transporting the nitro and is later beaten by the younger Mario, who explicitly says physical strength shouldn't be a determiner but is.  Injured and reminiscing about a high fence he’d never looked behind as a kid, Jo dies saying “there’s nothing there,” a somewhat on-the-nose summary of the film's philosophy.  And after we get to know the amiable Luigi and Bimba, Clouzot kills them in an explosion we don’t even see.  A flash of light interrupts the conversation of Jo and Mario, and we hear an explosion.  Clouzot then cuts to a column of smoke in the distance.  There’s no drama or heroic struggle when we lose that truck; instead, the two men just vanish without meaning or significance.

The bleakness, which creates so much of the suspense of the film, is not without its moments of beauty.  At one point, Clouzot’s camera captures a family of rainforest Indians watching the oil well burn, and there’s memorable beauty in the oil-filled crater left by the truck explosion; the rhythmical pumping of oil from the pipeline is like a heartbeat as gushes of black oil slowly fill the crater.  It’s the ruptured artery of the film’s dark world.  And there’s a strong, graphic shot of Mario looking at the lattice of beams holding up the turn-around platform on a curve of the road.  The beams cast an imprisoning shadow over Mario as he walks around outside the platform.  With the help of cinematographer Armand Thirard, Clouzot manages to find dark beauty in Wages of Fear.

This film is a bleak thriller that gets no small part of its life from its pessimistic worldview.  Hitchcock may thrill with bravura, panache and psychology, but as Wages of Fear shows, Clouzot can thrill with philosophy.

August 3: Insomnia (1997 -- Erik Skjoldbjærg)

★★★★

Here is an unusual, engaging crime procedural that depends way more on atmosphere and psychology than on the case details that are slowly revealed to us.  Insomnia’s cinematography creates a world of flat, unexceptional interiors made of the mundane, baseboard heating and spare, functional furnishings.  The film’s high key lighting banishes shadows and contributes to the sense that the light in this town of the midnight sun fills every space.  And when when we're in Insomnia’s bright, flat interiors, every window shows us a burned out exterior where the light is so strong that no detail is visible.  The light in this film is a character, and it is an important factor in the increasing psychosis of the chief investigator, Jonas Engström.

From the time our we first meet Engström, we have the sense there is something wrong.  He’s on a plane with Erik Vik, his fellow investigator, when the pilot announces they've crossed the Arctic Circle.  The dozing Vik rouses a bit, and then we hear the exact same announcement again, as though Engström’s mind has momentarily slipped a notch, missed some information, or lapsed into a daydream.  It's not clear exactly what happens here, but we quickly realize that Engström’s mind is working in a way slightly different from ours.

We’re soon following the sleepless Engström as he tries to solve the murder of Tanja but accidentally shoots Vic.  The detective then begins to build a web of lies to frame Tanja's murderer, Jon Holt, for Vic’s death, but the lies becomes more and more complicated, and Engström finds himself both the object of a police investigation and victim of blackmail by Holt.  And as Engström increasingly struggles to create a coherent story to account for the facts, director Erik Skjoldbjærg also mixes in a couple of uncomfortable scenes charged with sexual energy between Engström and local women.  And all the while, Engström is unable to sleep because of the harsh, omnipresent light in Tromsø, and his psychology, fragile at the beginning of the film, shows more and more signs of strain.

Skjoldbjærg's achievement here is that the details of the crime are not the focus of interest in Insomnia. Instead, we have an edgy, fascinating, detective improvising an increasingly complex and increasingly high stakes network of lies while he is on the verge of cracking in this environment that would stress even a sane person.  And that is what we watch with fascination.