Saw 2 films I thought I’d shout about here.
Everyone likely knows of Jeff Nichols’ Take Shelter, which traces a good family man’s increasing dread and derangement. It sports two of last year’s most amazing performances–Jessica Chastain is a restrained wonder as the wife struggling to understand then to address her family’s deterioration. And Michael Shannon…. whoa. He conveys a calm, a peacefulness so naturally in the film’s early scenes and then carefully reveals–in big moments and even more in the small touches, in the shift to grief and despair in a slight tilt of his head–the increasing frantic despondency. Curtis sees visions of a coming storm, of violence, and yet he’s terrified that it is mere pathology. The film runs on a long fuse, a slow burn that, in meandering, evokes a dense lived-in realism that makes the visions and Curtis’ horror all the more unsettling and uncanny. I was breathless at times, the sense of impotence–the inexorable creep toward everything being shit. Read it as an apocalyptic thriller done au naturel, or as an acute study of illness, or a metaphor for a pervasive cultural dispossession and paranoia.
But the ending fucking sucks.
Jiang Wen came to my attention in reviews of his just-released Let the Bullets Fly, all of which discussed the new film’s misanthropic bleak humor as a return to the director’s earlier masterpiece. Devils on the Doorstep is set in 1945 north China, under Japanese occupation. Village schmoe Dasan Ma (played by the director) is handed two hostages–an aggressive cockerel Japanese sergeant and a Chinese translator/collaborator–by a mysterious outsider. Ma is advised to keep the hostages safe; the captor will return for them. Ma fumbles about for help, enlisting neighbors–and starting a protracted, ever-worsening set of community negotiations over what to do. The film has the crisp architecture of farce, defining conditions and characters, and each sequence winding the spring ever tighter, events spinning further and further from control. It is often very funny, and its glee at foolish behavior is offset–or complemented–by a grim(acing) assessment of the high stakes, the ease by which folly turns to fury and woe. It is shot in a lovely black-and-white reminiscent of both Renoir and Kurosawa, and as in those directors’ work the bite is not mere bile. It’s amazing. (Wen apparently ran afoul of the authorities, as the film’s intent didn’t track neatly into official history or contemporary politics. He didn’t make another film for a few years.)
I’ll follow up my lonely post with a lonely comment. Saw Jiang Wen’s Let the Bullets Fly, and encourage folks to see it, with a few caveats. The film opens with an eagle soaring above train tracks, in what seems an explicit nod to Jee-woon Kim’s The Good, the Bad, the Weird, and this cue threw me off a bit. Bullets *is* like that earlier (wonderful!) film an extravagant near-absurdist operatic western. But its homage is less on the action end, ‘though it features many showoff set-pieces and a ludicrous quantity of bullets (flying). It’s more opera. And Chinese Opera. Its influences aren’t so much action cinema as the satire of villainy and come-uppance. It’s got a sensibility steeped in Tsui Hark, in quasi-fables, in Kurosawa’s Yojimbo. So it took me…. oh, fifteen, twenty minutes before getting the film’s sensibility straight; assuming I was going to see outsized, well-choreographed violence, but instead seeing outsized, well-choreographed exaggerated performances. Chow Yun-Fat has glorious fun as the baddie (and as a beleaguered body-double), and Jiang Wen is perfect in the Mifune role. Fun.
Less fun, but damn good, is Gerardo Naranjo’s Miss Bala. It, too, has the trappings of a crime thriller: a young woman (Stephanie Sigman) from a poor settlement in the Baja peninsula heads into the city to get herself into a beauty contest. She ends up entangled with a major drug-running gang, its sinister cucumber of a leader Lino (Noe Hernandez), and corrupt police. Naranjo films with a chilly detachment — he loves deep wide-angle landscapes and patient tracking shots; every scene seems so precisely composed as to create a formal estrangement from the visceral “immediacy” often promised by the plot. I’m not quite sure it adds up to a substantive political critique, but its aesthetic is compelling, incisive, cuts against habits of viewing, has a social edge. The film provokes enormous empathy for the brilliant, horribly beset Laura–trapped in a kind of reactive mode that is nonetheless never passive; you can see her struggling to understand, to find a path out, to move forward. The film closes somewhat in limbo, as she is–for about the billionth time–thrown into a new situation. She stands up, steels her gaze, sets her sights down the street, and moves away from us, the camera tracking along behind her.
in the middle of watching Take Shelter, as impressed as you are. the spartan way in which it’s shot and organized is really striking. drab colors, extended scenes of moonscape-ish drilling sites, empty supermarkets, midwestern dinners of mashed potatoes, mayo and iced tea. grim, man. i’m half-way through so don’t have much more to say, except that it’s good (for me) to take this film in small doses. the tension, as you say, is thick. also, SO SORRY to hear that the end sucks. i was imagining the correct end, praying for it, but now i know it won’t happen.
and we should talk about the deaf kid.
Oh, yeah, the kid….and the cure narrative… that is a smart observation….