Wild Hearts

Laurence Anyways
2012, Canada/France
Xavier Dolan

Keep the Lights On
2012, USA
Ira Sachs

Laurence Anyways is Xavier Dolan's third and certainly most ambitious film to date, notably so in the fact that he took himself out of the equation this time. In stepping away from the autobiographical, he examines an adult relationship between Laurence (Melvil Poupaud) and Fred (Suzanne Clément) and the ways in which Laurence's desire to live life as a woman affects it. As an actor himself, Dolan has a knack for eliciting great performances, especially from Clément, who won a best actress prize from the Un Certain Regard jury at Cannes last year, and the always reliable Nathalie Baye as Laurence's mother. While Dolan's characters have matured and his scope has broadened, he still employs some of his iffy stylized characteristics that were more forgivable when he used them for angsty young love in Les amours imaginaires (Heartbeats).

Perhaps the biggest strikes against him are the misguided, clumsy bookends to the film. Someone should have advised him against every decision involved in the opening scene, a brooding montage set to Fever Ray's "If I Had a Heart." I'm not certain if fault should be given to Dolan for choosing a song any one of his fans would have already created so many associations with prior (note the spectacular, nightmarish music video by director Andreas Nilsson), but I am certain that the choice was wrong. It looks like a music video, creates a mood that the film never matches, and takes place in an fuzzy, uncertain time in Laurence and the film's timeline. This is a mistake that is repeated a few times during the film. The worst scene in Laurence Anyways could effectively be the best scene in a totally different movie, but as it stands, in this particular film, it feels wholly out-of-place. In what's possibly a fantasy sequence (possibly not), Fred puts on her sexiest gown and floats into a fancy ballroom, all cut to Visage's "Fade to Grey." These out-of-place music video montages don't advance the film in any way or tell the audience anything useful about the characters; instead, they're just mere reminders that Dolan has exceptionally good taste and unfortunate indications of the director's level of maturity as a filmmaker and his inability to self-edit. The film's final scene is a misfire as well, closing a long, vibrant journey on a humdrum note.

However, what Laurence Anyways does best is illustrating Laurence and Fred's explosive relationship. The film itself bares a number of similarities with another of 2012's notable queer films, Ira Sachs' Keep the Lights On (both won the top prize for queer cinema at the Berlinale (Teddy) and Cannes (Queer Palm)). Both films chronicle a turbulent relationship over the course of a decade in a fashion that feels almost fragmented and elliptical, though they're mostly told chronologically. Laurence Anyways effectively loses some of its power and intrigue when the narrative splits midway through the film. Keep the Lights On, on the other hand, restricts its perspective to one half of the couple, Erik (Thure Lindhardt), and we see the relationship between him and Paul (Zachary Booth) through Erik's eyes. The sort of dramatic strengths Dolan reaches in Laurence Anyways can best be chalked up to his decision to step away from autobiography, and on the flipside, clinging to autobiography is where Keep the Lights On seems to get lost. Basing the screenplay on his own long-term rocky relationship with a drug addict, Sachs fails to depict the sort of intensity and obsession that could possibly lead someone to carry on a relationship as destructive as Erik and Paul's. During a conversation Erik and Paul have near the end of the film, one of them smiles and says, "Well, we had some good times," to which a friend of mine leaned over to me during the screening and whispered, "Did we miss that part?"

Keep the Lights On has a few other problems, not least of which the flatness of the supporting characters played by Julianne Nicholson, Paprika Steen, and Souleymane Sy Savane, but it does a commendable job creating and maintaining a mood and tone, beautifully lensed by Thimios Bakatakis (Dogtooth, Attenberg) and featuring just the right amount of Arthur Russell songs for the film's score. As I mentioned before, Laurence Anyways is all over the map visually and tonally, and its near-three-hour running time doesn't do Dolan any favors (though I'd never describe the film as boring). If only Laurence Anyways and Keep the Lights On could borrow each other's strengths and abandon their weaknesses, you'd have two spectacular films instead of two pretty messes.

Laurence Anyways
With: Melvil Poupaud, Suzanne Clément, Nathalie Baye, Monia Chokri, Yves Jacques, Catherine Bégin, Sophie Faucher, Guylaine Tremblay, Patricia Tulasne, Mario Geoffrey, Jacob Tierney, Susan Almgren, Magalie Lépine Blondeau, Emmanuel Schwartz, Jacques Lavallée, Perrette Souplex, David Savard, Monique Spaziani, Mylène Jampanoï, Gilles Renaud, Anne-Élisabeth Bossé, Anne Dorval, Pierre Chagnon, Éric Bruneau, Alexis Lefebvre, Denys Paris, Vincent Davy, Vincent Plouffe, Alexandre Goyette

Keep the Lights On
With: Thure Lindhardt, Zachary Booth, Julianne Nicholson, Paprika Steen, Souleymane Sy Savane, Miguel del Toro, Justin Reinsilber, Sebastian La Cause, Maria Dizzia, Ed Vassallo, Chris Lenk

Best of 2012: Grimes - Oblivion

Over the next few weeks, I'm going to be writing about a number of my favorite things of 2012, as opposed to doing my usual Top 10 list. This will cover films, albums, songs, music videos, performances, or whatever else that pops into my head.

Though I'm never current when it comes to music videos, I can say without any hesitation that the best video of 2012 is Grimes' "Oblivion." The first single off her widely lauded LP Visions, "Oblivion" finds the artist in several different sporting locales: a monster truck rally, the stands of an arena during a football game, two different locker rooms (one with toweled men lifting weights, the other with shirtless men moshing), the concession stand, and some bro-ed out tailgate party. If the video were trying to be ironic, it wouldn't have worked, but there's a certain charming authenticity to Grimes' music, her persona, and especially this video. She feels a bit more genuine than the oddball girl in your middle-school class, who was likely just trying to be "weird." The video, directed by Emily Kai Bock, really begins to stand apart (and above) most of the videos I've seen this year when a girl runs up behind her, pulling her hood up. It certainly feels like a spontaneous moment, and once you see Grimes usher a fan to run across the screen as he politely waits offscreen for them to stop filming. The video is dynamic, surprising, bizarre (without looking like its trying to be), cute, sexy, homoerotic, and endearing. It's a shame then that the best track on Visions, "Genesis," would have such a mess of a video to go along with it. Video below.

Official Submissions for the 2013 Best Foreign Language Oscar

 

71 countries will be competing for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film at next year's ceremony, setting a new record. A number of heavy-hitters will be vying for the award, from festival darlings to crowd-pleasing local hits. Each of the top prize winners at the three major competitive film festivals–Berlin, Cannes, and Venice–will be representing their respective countries. Paolo and Vittorio Taviani's Golden Bear winner Caesar Must Die (Cesare deve morire), which is set in a men's prison where the inmates are preparing a performance of Julius Caesar, was Italy's submission. Michael Haneke's Amour could earn the director his second Academy Award nomination just as it claimed his second Palme d'Or, following The White Ribbon (Das weiße Band) in 2010, though Amour will be representing Haneke's native Austria instead of Germany, which laid claim to his previous film. South Korea chose Kim Ki-duk's Pietà, this year's Golden Lion winner at the Venice Film Festival, as their submission.

 

In addition to Caesar Must Die, five other films from the Berlinale competition back in February made the cut: Christian Petzold's Barbara for Germany, Ursula Meier's Sister (L'enfant d'en haut) for Switzerland, Kim Nguyen's War Witch (Rebelle) for Canada, Nikolaj Arcel's A Royal Affair (En kongelig affære) for Denmark, and Benedek Fliegauf's Just the Wind (Csak a szél) for Hungary. Japan's submission, Yang Yong-hi's Our Homeland, and Uruguay's, Rodrigo Plá's The Delay (La demora), screened as part of the Forum section at the Berlinale, and Morocco's submission, Faouzi Bensaïdi's Death for Sale, played in the Panorama section.

 

Amour will be joined by six other films from this year's Cannes Film Festival: Cristian Mungiu's Beyond the Hills (După dealuri) for Romania, Benjamín Ávila's Clandestine Childhood (Infancia clandestina) for Argentina, Pablo Larraín's No for Chile, Joachim Lafosse's Our Children (À perdre la raison) for Belgium, Michel Franco's After Lucía (Después de Lucía) for Mexico, and Aida Begić's Children of Sarajevo (Djeca) for Bosnia and Herzegovina.

 

Rounding out the rest of the notable contenders: Oliver Nakache and Eric Toledano's box office hit The Intouchables (Intouchables) for France; Chen Kaige's latest Caught in the Web, which recently played at the Toronto International Film Festival, for China; Cate Shortland's German-language feature Lore for Australia; Johnnie To's Life Without Principle for Hong Kong; Baltasar Kormákur's survival drama The Deep (Djúpið) for Iceland; Rama Burshtein's Fill the Void, which took home the Best Actress prize at Venice, for Israel; Annemarie Jacir's When I Saw You for Palestine; João Canijo's family drama Blood of My Blood (Sangue do Meu Sangue) for Portugal; Pablo Berger's Blancanieves, a 1920s-set silent film likely hoping to attract the attention this year's big winner The Artist received, for Spain; Pen-ek Ratanaruang's thriller Headshot for Thailand; and Lasse Halström's The Hypnotist (Hypnotisören), the director's first Swedish-language film in over twenty years, for Sweden.

 

A full list of the submissions can be found at this link, via Alt Film Guide. It's also worth noting that Iran, who won the previous Best Foreign Language Film Oscar for Asghar Farhadi's A Separation, has officially boycotted the Oscar race. For those in the US, both Life Without Principle and Headshot recently became available on Netflix Instant. As in previous years, the Academy will narrow the list down significantly before announcing the five nominees on January 10th. The 85th Academy Awards will be held on February 24, 2013.

Not If You Were the Last Woman in Gotham City

The Dark Knight Rises
2012, USA/UK
Christopher Nolan

There is no shortage of ways in which the conclusion to Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy, The Dark Knight Rises, sucks. For starters, despite its disguise as a loud Hollywood action film, it's pretty boring, which is, I guess, how you can tell they were making a "serious film." This can easily be blamed on Nolan's notoriously exhausting spouts of exposition, which reached a comical level in Inception, the film he made in between The Dark Knight and his rousing. While I tend to be a bit more forgiving of the absurdity in Inception, the exposition in The Dark Knight Rises isn't used to explain complex, made-up ideas and rules that govern its film universe; it is instead used to pander to stupidity of its audience, which – judging by the lengths the screenplay requires the characters to ridiculously expel Wikipedia entries about the background of the film's villain or, worse, verbally explain the subtext of what is unfolding before them – Nolan presumes is bountiful. This however is more telling of Nolan than his audience. One could grumble about the jumbled action sequences, the over-editing, or downright silliness of most of the hand-to-hand combat, but in Nolan's defense, he's come along way since Batman Begins in that regard. But where The Dark Knight Rises, and really the entire trilogy, is most reprehensible is in its depiction of women (and lack thereof).

After Rachel, Bruce Wayne's love interest (and not much more), gets a change of actress and a "surprising," mid-film demise in The Dark Knight, Gotham City is left with a critical, though never addressed, problem: how can the city continue its legacy if its only woman has perished? Thankfully in its opening moments, The Dark Knight Rises introduces us to two additional birth canals: jewel thief Selina Kyle (Anne Hathaway) and philanthropist Miranda Tate (Marion Cotillard). Though it's very possible (I'm not totally sure) that the women never share a frame in the entire film, it becomes clear in the film's final third that the women's actions have been governing the other's for the duration of the film. This may not have been so glaring if it didn't take Nolan three films to introduce a woman who actually had things to do or if the whole trilogy wasn't so over-saturated with men.

Now with Selina Kyle, or Catwoman as we know her best, Nolan tried something I wasn't expecting. When Selina is longingly embraced by her partner-in-crime, played by Juno Temple, it appeared as if the film suggested that the feline metaphors didn't stop at "cat burglar." This is hardly an original notion, as the lesbian undertones were anything but subtle between Halle Berry and Sharon Stone in the joyless Catwoman movie, but it was something that genuinely surprised me and actually provided a deeper layer to Selina's otherwise thinly-drawn character. Like in Catwoman, this all proves to be nothing more than a tease, as this trait only aligns with Catwoman as a "bad guy," something that is forced to shift once the secret of Miranda Tate's dark identity is revealed.

I suppose Nolan assumed that since two women finally moved into Gotham City he didn't want anyone to think he was making a generalized statement about all women. After all, most of the vindictive women in Nolan's movies have a counter. In Memento, Carrie-Anne Moss has Guy Pearce's martyred wife. In Inception, Marion Cotillard, playing a character whose made-up Gallic name directly translates as "evil," has a sexless, brainiac Ellen Page. For The Dark Knight Rises, the two women keep each other in check. Just as Catwoman begins to feel bad about leading Batman to his doom, the coast is clear for Miranda to begin her nefarious plans, after "fooling" everyone with her clean energy initiative. Nolan makes the sanitization of Catwoman even more vile by ignoring the obvious hints he made to her sexuality, writing her girlfriend out of the film, and ultimately placing Batman and Catwoman in a heterosexual happily-ever-after paradise. It would be one thing if Nolan just simply didn't know how to write female characters, but he takes his inability to a whole new level of shittiness. Hey, at least all the girls of Gotham City got to make-out with the caped crusader...

With: Christian Bale, Tom Hardy, Gary Oldman, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Anne Hathaway, Marion Cotillard, Morgan Freeman, Michael Caine, Liam Neeson, Alon Aboutboul, Ben Mendelsohn, Cillian Murphy, Nestor Carbonell, Tom Conti, Matthew Modine, Juno Temple, Daniel Sunjata, Aidan Gillen, Thomas Lennon, Robert Wisdom, William Devane, Brett Cullen, Josh Pence, Burn Gorman

(You're Not) Rid of Me

After just over two years of hibernation, I've finally decided to reemerge from the volcano. A lot has changed over that time of radio silence – most of which doesn't pertain to matters at hand, but for the first time in my life, I've found myself living in a "film city." San Francisco, to be precise. It's my understanding (and correct me if I'm wrong) that here and New York City are possibly the only US cities where going to the cinema to catch John Huston double-features or a bunch of Curt McDowell shorts is commonplace. Like a wide-eyed, paler-skinned, hopefully-less-uptight Mary Ann Singleton, I moved to the The City by the Bay, with its rich and strange film history (from The Maltese Falcon on down to Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit), which has been my home for just over a year.

So if you're wondering where I disappeared to, there's one answer. I've appreciated the e-mails some of you have sent during my absence. But what took so long? I rather fool-heartedly assumed that I would return when the "time was right," when the desire to write would be so consuming I wouldn't be able to stop my fingers from running wild across my keyboard. Of course that never happened. It wasn't that I didn't wish to write any longer; I've done plenty of writing in my free time. It was that, among other things, I wasn't sure what I was doing with the blog any more. Although, truthfully, I just didn't like what I was doing with it. In the same way my fingers didn't start writing on their own, a clear idea of what I did want to do with the blog never came either, and its absence just gave me another excuse to delay making a decision about whether to return to the blog or bid it a fond farewell. I'm not sure what finally got me to realize that, if the universe had anything to say on the matter, it probably wasn't going to tell me in the ways I had been waiting for. So I stopped anticipating, and started to listen to the encouragement I'd been given by my friends, and now here I am.

As I mentioned earlier, I still don't have a vivid image of what direction I want to take the blog. My interests and attention have shifted over the past couple years, away from DVD and Blu-ray release dates and studio acquisitions. There are plenty of resources out there for those things. I've also lost the desire to try to see as many films in a given year as possible (particularly with regard to the Academy Awards and my prior attempts to see all of the nominated films... what a colossal waste of time that was). Somewhere along the line, I started to understand the value of time (with regard to watching films, that is; I still have plenty of other ways to carelessly waste it) and the rising number of films I'd seen over the years whose existence has nearly (or completely) vanished from my memory.

I would like to, instead, spend my time writing about films that are bold and that I think are important, worth my time and yours. And, of course, there will likely be some words and time dedicated to garbage like The Dark Knight Rises (the film's dumbest moment – among many – is pictured above) Midnight in Paris, and Shame, so I can spew my venom onto the page/screen instead of in the ears of my friends. And then again, in trying to resurrect my blog, I might find that it was better off dead.

If you're in dire need of some film suggestions, the four best films from 2011 that I saw are as follows: Kenneth Lonergan's Margaret, Bertrand Bonello's House of Tolerance (L'Apollonide (Souvenirs de la maison close)), Andrea Arnold's Wuthering Heights, and Nadav Lapid's Policeman. And if you're looking for House of Tolerance in the US, note that IFC Films re-titled it the more crudely "provocative" House of Pleasures.