Loving

Loving (Jeff Nichols, 2016)

A little bit of a reprieve from the political mess that has encapsulated our country over the last two weeks would be easier if cinema, especially cinema of cultural importance, wasn’t inherently political. Yet, I found myself at home in the theater, away from the endless news cycles and back and forth typing warfares of the people I follow on twitter. It’s a miracle, cinema is, because for those two hours I have absolutely zero urgency to look at my phone or read what anyone else is writing about or give a flying crap over what’s “trending”. If political unrest is an inescapable part of American life now, as I have found it is, at least let me write and think about it through the lens of cinema. I am planning on making a concerted effort henceforth of mostly gearing my attention back towards movies, and writing about social and political discourse through the ideas of film and filmmakers. Whether I succeed in this is unknown to me… but let this be a start.

As Lin-Manuel Miranda said in his Tony Awards acceptance speech, using only two words repeated over and over: “Love is love is love is love is love is love”. Such is the plot and focus of Jeff Nichols’ latest story from rural working-class America, Loving. It’s a true story about one of the most famous American court cases (Loving v. Virginia) which ruled restrictions on interracial marriage as Un-Consistutional. The film forgoes the many tribulations that Mildred Delores Loving (played tenderly by Ruth Negga) and Richard Perry Loving (the best performance of Joel Edgerton’s career) must endure before finding any breakthrough in their case, and rather devotes most of its runtime to depicting their family life and their mutual love for one another. This is Nichols’ greatest directorial choice and what sets the film apart from most civil rights motion pictures. There are heart-wrenching moments of course, when Richard and Mildred are woken up in the middle of the night by the sheriff and dragged and locked up in the cell. These work as a shock element, to establish an entity for us to root against. Yet, the most emotional elements of the film, and what makes it resonate on a human level, is the simple moments shared between the couple. When they cuddle on the couch to watch an old TV serial together, or when they’re having dinner with their kids, or when they are simply sitting beside each other on their bed wondering if their love will ever be recognized as real. The appeal court cases are never shown. The faces of the Supreme Court Justices are blurred. The press hullaballoo is limited only to a small gaggle outside the courthouses, who are easily dismissed, and dissenting public opinions are rendered mute. All of this justified, because there isn’t a necessity to establish an “enemy” in human form against the right to marry. The love between the couple shouldn’t require an adversary to justify its truth with us. Even the reaction to the ultimate ruling is simply a smile and a nod because the idea that two people’s love can be considered illegal is in an of itself a ridiculous and unethical notion. Ruth gets off the phone and goes to sit beside Richard as he lays concrete bricks. Whether she tells him the result of the Supreme Court decision or not is besides the point. To them, no ruling minimizes the truth in their love. Even it was ruled illegal, it would still be real.

American Honey

American Honey (Andrea Arnold, 2016)

The after-effects of watching Andrea Arnold’s latest film American Honey made me feel it etched a defining signature for this generation and era of youth the way Bogdonovich’s The Last Picture Show did for the beginning of the 70’s. It’s a real and raw take of the “seize the moment” youth culture that has seeped into the central theme of several coming-of-age films, most of them tawdry offerings like Paper Towns. What sets American Honey apart however is that it essentially treats seizing the moment as a survival tactic for its protagonists in conjunction with its traditional depiction as a rebellious act of pure free will. Star, an 18-year old dreadlocked girl, jumps ship from her borderline abusive boyfriend and two kids who aren’t even her own to join Jake, a young salesman she catches a glance of through a dingy van window. That split-second eye contact was enough for Star to seize an opportunity to join a ragtag group of magazine sellers looking for a quick buck.

Star’s journey ends up being a crossroads of American culture. Opportunistic capitalism meets the self-discovering millennial. The entire film rides an electric current that transfers itself directly from Arnold’s camera. The shaky-cam is a technique many have grown tired of, but its wandering, untamed eye captures the imagination of the film’s characters and their surroundings. Their dance circles bumping to trap songs have the aesthetic of a music video. Every passionate kiss between Star and Jake goes in and out of focus as the camera tumbles along with them on the grass.  Its akin to many of the things that connect directly with a millennial culture that embraces imperfection, and a spontaneous jubilance for discovery.

Then there is of course, the money aspect. Star’s new job and love are hampered by the presence of Krystal, the leader of the magazine business, and much to Star’s devastation, the one who Jake answers to beck and call. In a pivotal sequence in the film, we see Star on the verge of losing her job and forced to watch Jake apply lotion to Krystal’s bare thighs. As their conversation goes on the sound of skin slapping and lubricant sliding grows ever louder and Star’s body begins to shake with ruin. It becomes clear that the newfound freedom still has its strings. At the heart of the film, thumping on the blood pumped through a carefully meditated playlist of songs including Rihanna’s “We Found Love”, Mazzy Starr’s “Fade Into You” and Raury’s “God Whisper”, the film depicts a camaraderie of a generation, all searching for an individual goal but finding solace in a companionship between equally lost and wandering souls. Despite the fact that their “job” is a sham, that Krystal’s grip of money and power may dampen what should be free enterprise, and Star’s own rollercoaster of falling in and out of love with Jake several times, the characters who populate Arnold’s remarkable story hang their hopes on a feeling, one they get from each other and through the film’s music.

Call it a musical, a coming-of-age drama or even a road movie, but American Honey is a generational film, one which drips with the feeling of growing up in this era, seizing a moment, a glance through a dingy window, riding in a packed van with misfits, never knowing where you’ll end up next, but knowing that they are there, and just as lost as you.  

From What is Before

From What is Before (Lav Diaz, 2014)

In continuing with my series on Lav Diaz, a filmmaker who I have just begun to discover and now revere as a modern giant after having seen Norte The End of History, the next film I decided to embark upon was the 6 ½ hour historical epic From What is Before. A solid two hours longer than the already lengthy Norte, this Diaz feature was a bit sparser, a little more dependent on sound and atmospherics of a geographic location and a cultural “whole” than an individual character study. Nonetheless, this film was yet another entrancing offering from Diaz, and his ability to weave so much unspoken socio-political density and insight through silent static imagery of the Filipino countryside, this time in gorgeous and haunting black and white, is something that rivals the cinematic artistry Bela Tarr (who I can only assume had at least some influence on Diaz’s career).

The exploration of The Philippines as a nation, politically, socially, and religiously continues here, but now from a historical context: The year 1972, when military dictator Ferdinand Marcos initiated Martial Law onto the nation. Much like Norte, the specter of political corruption and brutality existed during this time, but we don’t really feel it until we get towards the end of the film. Instead, the Philippines which exists for majority of the movie seems like a relic of the ancients. A hunter-gatherer society, only gradually showcasing its ties to the more modern world with, amongst other things, a saleswoman pitching mosquito tents and electronics, and the small technological gadgetry in the village shacks like a coffee maker and an iron. But this is still a place where clearly, the metaphysical and the spiritual phantoms of a pre-colonial era Philippines that once existed permeate through every frame of the film, be it figuratively through the pitter patter of the rain in the ominously dense and barely inhabited or disturbed jungle, the more reactionary death of livestock and unknown villagers automatically deemed an act of dark magic, or the literal shamanistic chantings of what seemed to me at least, a female witch doctor.

The characters in the film can be thought of as moving parts connected by a singular rural organism, similar to the communal farmers in Tarr’s Sátántangó. They live, move, and die together and their actions are wholly dependent on the fate of the land they reside in. Several actors from Norte make up the caste here as well, but in very different roles. Sito and his mischievous son Hakob try to make a meager living tending to buffalo for a landlord. They fall on even harder times when some of the buffalo are found dead and Sito is wrongfully blamed. Itang is a hard-working but naïve young woman who is burdened with tending to her mentally disabled sister Joselina, who she believes has the power to cure peoples ailments. She gives people in the village medicines and “magic” from Joselina’s powers to help cure them in exchange for money. The livelihood of the Philippines rural community, throughout the film, is self-sustaining, and although there are clear hardships and deprivations for many of the people there, they still seem to gravitate towards its comfort and a routine way of life they don’t mind living.

Also similar to Sátántangó is the sense of impending doom that that gradually starts to grow more and more real as the film goes on. What is unique about Diaz’s narrative is how our perception of this village community as isolated and in a sense “pristine” in its lack of shackles to any of our modern political weights changes to a realization that even this dense jungle of folks does not go unnoticed for possible blackmail and slaughter by a borderline tyrannical government. In a sense, visually, Diaz forms a timeline throughout the film that slowly shifts from pre-industrialization into a political military state. This seismic shift hits us without our knowing (in six and a half ours, the movie works in small increments like the changing of the hour-hand on a clock), and much like the villagers, it devastates our souls once we realize what has happened. Then, all of a sudden, in one sequence, it is slapped across our face. Just like in Tarr’s film, the nasty schemer Irmiás drops a hammer on the villagers in one devastating scene at a funeral, Marcos’s military encroachment is unveiled in a speech by a lieutenant who implores the villagers that what Marcos is doing is for “the good of the nation” (a claim that we can automatically assume means the opposite).

Diaz is as searingly unforgiving in this film as in Norte, but he is giving us a real context here. For those who don’t know the history of the Philippines, we get a sense of understanding through the fading of village life into a military-controlled hell that there is much suffering amongst the people of this nation that has not yet washed away. Sito is the only villager at the end of the movie who refuses to leave the village, staying in its dense jungle as a lone hermit, a Thoreau for who the Philippines that once was is his own personal Walden to which he is latching on for dear life. Lav Diaz, with From What is Before, makes his case for holding on as well.

Norte, The End of History

Norte, The End of History (Lav Diaz, 2013)

A disclaimer to start off:

I have personally become disillusioned with the American critical stance of films having to have a certain time-frame of “watchability”. I don’t get that. To me, a film’s “length” being indicative of its watchability only really depends on the seriousness of the filmmaker. If there is, in the filmmakers judgement and intellect, truly a necessity for the runtime he has allotted for his film, then I leave that to his discretion. The nonsensical argument that a movie lasting more than 2 or 2 ½ hours is one which is poorly edited is a myth, and it’s a myth which has ruined films like Ridley Scott’s Kingdom of Heaven, forced Tarantino to chop Kill Bill into two parts, and made the 4 ½ hour version of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King be restricted to DVD instead of where it really belonged: in the theater. Yet, evidence exists everywhere of films with lengthy run-times that have gripped me far more and relentlessly than even 90-minute features.

One of them, Lav Diaz’s 4 ½ hour Norte, The End of History is in a word, incredible. Incredible to behold in not only its cinematic scope of location, camerawork, and time, but equally in the density of its core, packed with so many discussions of socio-politics, religion, and the fight between immorality, innocence, revenge, and love so jam packed one after another with so many ideas and insights into the film, that its 4 ½ hour runtime doesn’t feel even a millisecond “too long”. There wasn’t a moment of this movie which made me check what the time was, on my watch or my phone. I was glued. From the opening scene discussing a provocative conversation of nihilism, dictatorship, we are automatically drawn to the upstart law student Fabian, who’s radical ideologies, Marxist level of disdain for the economic and social state of his nation, The Philippines. This may not seem riveting to the average film-goer, but I am a sucker for philosophical discussion, especially one in which fervor and anger take central stage, because it displays the passion for socio-politics that I think everyone in every country could benefit from in a knowledge standpoint and one of inspiration.

Diaz is clearly speaking to the effects of the nation on its populace and in turn, the reaction of its citizens throughout the film. While Fabian’s disillusionment leads him down a dark and horrifying path of self-hatred, poor construction worker Joaquin and his family (wife and 2 kids) lead a life of quiet desperation, going about their daily chores, living hand to mouth, not saying much because they don’t have the power nor the energy to do so. The two threads that made up the quilt of Norte are weaved in the winding lives of Fabian and Joaquin. The distinction between their two lives is important, the former a brilliant prodigy of the law student praised by his teachers as an “outside thinker” and the other a low wage worker at the bottom of the totem pole, a mule of the economic system. As Fabian commits a gruesome murder, one sparked by both a sense of righteousness and blind hatred, Joaquin is the one who bares the brunt of the blame, a perennial scapegoat of the corrupt, a “disposable entity”.

The irony at face value of course is that in his Raskolnikovian guilt and shame, Fabian lives in his own prison outside of the bars, while Joaquin in jail is shown to grow as a person and his kindness succeeds in winning over even the coldest of hearts. But Diaz’s commentary goes a bit deeper than this, as a 4+ hour film should. We realize that Fabian’s existence as a disillusioned youth was his prison, and his murder was already a murder committed behind bars. For him, the Philippines itself was the prison, a nation which, from the beginning of the film itself, was at the precipice of complete hopelessness according to Fabian, one where every transgression deserved a murder, every political lie deserved torture. His anger at the socio-political turmoil which surrounded him infiltrated his mind and ignited the fire of a young would-be dictator. One teetering between the heart of a good kid wanting so much better for the people of country (he gives up all his saved money to Joaquin’s wife for her to keep and raise her kids with), and a madman who’s helplessness in the grand scheme of things leads him to violent insanity.

To me, Diaz’s ultimate message in this film was that the oppression and neglect of a ruling government can be directly related to rise of violent and immoral individuals. The lack of power, the lack of solutions, and the continued boiling anger of a population can produce a Fabian, and it can also hamper a Joaquin. There is unforgiving heartbreak, death, rape, and torture which is peppered throughout the film, but none of it is disingenuous, or manipulative, or politically preachy. It is showcased as a happenstance of life in a country where Diaz clearly believes so much to be morally wrong. A country where the populace is devoted to God, where Jesus and Catholicism and priesthood are such a prevalent part of the culture, yet, Godless acts seem to occur, without much mourning.

Readers know from a few of my previous articles, that I am very averse to labelling a film a masterpiece because I always feel like I’m short-changing the power of that word. We use it so loosely (just like everything else today) and freely that I feel the need to be even more strict with my usage of it to counter the complete liberal abandon with which it is being flung around nowadays. But I thought about it, I pondered it, and I spent the better part of the last month letting Lav Diaz’s Norte, The End of History sink in. I am at a loss for another word to describe my experience with this movie. Masterpiece, it is.

(Suffice to say, I will be watching more Lav Diaz in the coming months, starting with From What is Before…. Stay tuned!)

 

 

Airlift

Airlift (Raja Krishna Menon, 2016)

I’m going to place a disclaimer here for myself from the get go of this review because I grew up in the United States and was raised mainly on American cinema despite being born in India and being of 100% Indian heritage. Perhaps it is this qualifier that will help the reader gain some perspective as to where I am coming from when I say that Raja Krishna Menon’s Airlift is a film with many opportunities to evoke emotion through its inspirational story, but systematically rejects said opportunities and aims only for the low hanging fruits of cheap melodrama.

Melodrama as a means of rendering emotion within audiences is a trope of Indian cinema which has existed since time immemorial, sometimes to its brilliant benefit (Guru Dutt, Ritwik Ghatak, Raj Kapoor, early Mahesh Bhatt) and many times its colossal detriment (too many to name). But through different cultures, the ways of portraying emotions from pain, to joy, to anger are shaped not only by the culture of the people within that nation, but of the reception and communicative value from screen to audience that speaks the best. Perhaps it is the condition on which I was brought up as a filmgoer and film admirer, that makes it hard for me to take a film like Airlift seriously, when every sequence meant to depict the helpless tragedy and senseless death of those Indians and Kuwaiti’s trapped in Saddam’s hellfire, is a slow-motion shot of people crying or Akshay Kumar looking longingly in a very awkward stance with chest almost jutting out of his sleek dress shirt, or diatribes by characters one-upping each other with moral statements as if they were carefully written political speeches meant to stir a nation to their feet. These moments are nice as nationalistic set-pieces, and clearly by box office and critical raving, the Indian populace has been won over by them, but they hardly evoke more than an eye-roll and a sigh from me.

Perhaps it is growing up with American cinema that turned me away from such direct melodrama. American cinema has had its share of it sure, but at least since the era of my childhood, it has either been considered completely passé or, in the case of Douglas Sirk, looked upon through cinematic nostalgia as a classical relic of one auteur’s signature style (implemented in films like Far From Heaven not as actual tool for evoking feeling, but as a tool for remembrance of cinema that once was). In Indian cinema, it seems to be the easiest and thus, most utilized way to evoke emotion and its done in most instances where I expect more tact, effort and subtlety.

I always find myself questioning why filmmakers like Raja Krishna Menon feel compelled to spell everything out so obviously through melodrama, and use their camera to make sure absolutely nothing loses our sight and every proverbial socio-political stone is turned so that we don’t have any gray areas to discuss after the film is over. Airlift is the kind of film that, upon returning to a second time, there will be nothing that we discover anew that wasn’t seen upon first-time watching. To compare this film to an Argo and even more egregious and insulting, a Schindler’s List, is to say that this movie riveted or disturbed us in a way those films did, using similar effect to those films to depict the selflessness and sacrifice of individuals to save those less fortunate. But that’s not what I got. I’ve seen Argo, Schindler’s List, even Hotel Rwanda and the basic structural premise, stretched a bit, is all I could say with a straight face was in common between those three films and Airlift. If your thoughts right now are, “well it’s so unfair to compare Airlift to Schindler’s List” you’d be 100% correct. It’s horribly unfair, yet, a good amount of Indian critics have already done it.

Airlift is based on a story that screams for a film adaptation, and in our politically volatile world, a renewed Indian patriotism movement, and turmoil in the Middle East, it seems the right time to create a movie like this. To Menon’s credit, there are some sequences, especially the phone communications between Katiyal and the foreign ministry back in Delhi that ring not only true, but powerful in their criticism of bureaucracy. We see as the desperate calls keep ringing in the Ministry, employees start leaving for lunch. As one worker reaches for the phone, his friend, carrying a tiffin, juts him away signaling to him not to bother because they are officially on break. It’s these types of visual moments, unfettered by any overpowering cinematic music, or dialogue, or overexpression from actors, which make the best moments of Airlift… but they are few and far in between. The rest of the movie is rife with the same ingredients picked from numerous disaster films, aided by a hokey film score to pair with pained closeups of actors faces and the helpless lost look of children in their mother’s arms. Had no context been provided for these scenes, I’d have thought they were part of some NGO or Red Cross outreach infomercial asking for dollar-a-day donations.

Visaranai – Praise and Perspective

Visaranai (Vetrimaaran, 2015)

As far as police corruption stories go, Vetrimaaran’s Visaranai (English: Interrogation) brings the good cop bad cop dichotomy to a full circle of suspicion, where the first half of the film is such an exhaustive and tragic hour of torture and manipulation in the Telugu lock-up, that we subconsciously see the second half of the film completely through the eyes and emotions of the three helpless Tamilian victims at the story’s center. Vetrimaaran has us self-guessing the intentions of even the well-meaning cop Muthu and his assistants and as we enter a new set of interrogations within the second police station, this one in a safer Tamil Nadu, we hardly have a chance to breath as everywhere our three protagonists wander, cleaning bathrooms and sweeping offices in the station, they are confronted by police. If there is anything to say about the success of this film, it’s that it really grips at our own fears of authority through its viciousness and in some senses, also confirms our distrust in the way that it shifts between brutality and kindness of its police officers.

The movie may have fallen victim for me at least, to the knee-jerk, hyperbolic culture of film journalism in India, where “independent” films or social films, ones which don’t fit into the mold to the typical mainstream entry, are in their own way now being poorly analyzed through overreacting praise. One quick scroll through twitter’s Indian film critic sphere will be filled with words and phrases like “fantastic”, “masterpiece”, “mind-blowing”, “encore”, “take a bow”, “superb” etc and surrounded by other characters totalling 140 which treat every non-mainstream film as a once-in-a-century golden nugget. There are even anniversary celebrations being had for films which haven’t even scratched a year into film lore. I am already very selective in the Indian films that I choose to watch, and when there is such a sugary jubilee celebration for even average “indie” films like Piku or Sairat, how is something like Visaranai ever going to properly evaluated and placed amongst the lot? If every one of these films is a “masterpiece”, then how can we build any semblance of perspective between qualities of a Visaranai or Njan Steve Lopez or a Court? So let me not get carried away by calling Visaranai a blinding masterpiece, or a ‘monumental’ film, or tell Vetrimaaran can “take a bow”. Vetrimaaran can do better, and the almost-greatness of Visaranai, which if our film critic culture ever had the balls to cut down a few notches for its shortcomings (questionable camerawork in many sequences, unfocused narrative arcs, a few bits that should’ve been left on the cutting room floor), is an opportunity through some real perspective and fair analysis, to dare Vetrimaaran to making his next film a film truly worthy of the word masterpiece, if we haven’t raped that word of its exclusivity already.

Aligarh

Aligarh (Hansal Mehta, 2016)

Director Hansal Mehta seems to have found a new calling of Hollywood-esque social message cinema after starting out directing a broad pallete of commercial attempts from the by-the-book romantic music comedy Dil Pe Mat Le Yaar! to a by-the-book thriller Woodstock Villa. It’s a career filled with safety-net cinema similar to what Tigmanshu Dhulia was doing before he broke out with Paan Singh Tomar. Hansal Mehta’s newfound invigoration with social issues in India was no doubt ignited through his short hiatus from filmmaking, in which he declared he would travel, explore his other passion in life of being a foodie, and start working on things which truly mattered to him.

This culminated in his befriending of Rajkumar Rao, a relatively newer actor who gained some acting praise for his sidekick role in Abhishek Kapoor’s Kai Po Che. Mehta and Rao’s collaboration for Shahid struck a sort of mini-Gowarikar-Aamir Khan spark, where a film’s critical and international success lead its director and actor a path of cinema much higher than what they were previously doing.

So now, we arrive at the third film in what I’d call Mehta’s career rebirth, Aligarh. Many people consider Shahid to be the film in which Mehta really came into his own, but I think Aligarh speaks much more to his handling of social issues and his confidence in his direction. Shahid, while accessible, played out in a familiar fashion to most routine biographical films, a series of tick marks on a timeline that make for an easy scene-by-scene structuring of a film. It undermines the narrative creativity which can put a biopic over the top and instead reduces it to a History Channel Sunday Night Special. While Mehta was tackling more important issues in Shahid than in his previous films, his manifestation as a by-the-books safety net director still hung with him. He found something more meaningful but was stuck in the routine trappings of his early-career unimaginative commercialism.

Aligarh on the other hand, is his real breakthrough. The casting of Manoj Bhajpai (solidly reliable performance) in the lead role was an inspired first step to success, and the film’s aim to place S.R. Siras’s own beliefs, interests, and his moral character at the center of the film is commendable. Many directors would be too eager to use a media entity like Rajkumar Rao’s character Deepu as the noble cipher of the film, investigating and exposing further details of the case. Instead, Mehta is equally critical here of the overzealous liberal media as he is of the overzealous conservative religious. Siras is stuck in the middle only left to continuously recall the awful moments of the night where is homosexual relations were ripped from their innocent privacy into a world of contempt and unrelenting shaming. The actual issue surrounding Aligarh may end up being less about gay rights, and more about how clashes of media and social politics hardly ever end with the outcome of a winning side. It’s a testament to the volatile global culture of “us vs. them” which is a sensation created by people who feel strongly without much perspective. The use of the word “gay” is consistently put down by Siras himself:

“How can you reduce how I feel to just three letters”? The media sensationalism and talking points are also equally frustrating to him:

“I hate that word, lover. Do you even understand love? Love is such a beautiful thing. You people make it sound like a dirty thing.”

A seminal moment in the film, when Siras’s lawyer makes a compelling argument which ultimately wins the case, he turns back and Siras has his head leaned against the wall, snoring away. For him, his rights and his life are so deeply felt, so personally experienced, he cannot fathom such political diatribes, media talking points, liberal and conservative scuffles and monotonous proceedings of the Supreme Court being needed to justify himself as an equal person with equal beliefs.

The film isn’t quite as harsh or unforgiving as Tapan Sinha’s Ek Doctor Ki Maut, and Mehta certainly falls a few times into the over-explanation trap, where visuals of the violent invasion of privacy cannot be left to our own sick minds and must be shown exactly how they happened, something I felt completely chopped down the brilliance of the opening sequence, like a demented Rear Window sequence, with us in Jimmy Stewart’s shoes. But it is a testament to Mehta’s confidence as a filmmaker. He may never fully let go of his commercial roots, his safety net which even the best filmmakers sometimes cling to in momentary lapses, but he is certainly forging ahead on his journey he carved for himself, and Aligarh is a milestone which he may look back to as the moment he made a film which really mattered to him.

Sunset Song

Sunset Song (Terence Davies, 2016)

From its golden sun-dipped wheat fields, wood-walled enclosures, and stone laid exteriors surrounded by green gardens and beautiful forests, Terence Davies film Sunset Song, based on a famous Scottish novel, evokes a longing, a warming nostalgia, and a terrifying remembrance of time and place none of us have ever experienced in our lives, yet can feel deeply. That is really the underlying power of any great filmmaker. His ability to bring forth emotions and connections for something we have never truly known, yet, begin to understand and empathize with so deeply, on a purely human level. When Chris Guthrie the main character and daughter of the family, sits by her bedside consoling her older brother’s red bleeding marks from father’s belt beatings we can all recall the vile wrongdoings of certain family members and the kindheartedness of those closest to our hearts. When Ewan gets drafted into the war, we can remember the parting of someone we cared about and the fear of never seeing them again. When Chris folds her belongings in paper and as she notes they are memories “laid to rest forever”, we all remember the moments when we changed as people. These are hard moments, they are memories and times which make us reflect with deep difficulty because they are things we would rather forget.

It’s hard to even call the film merely a romantic period-piece because it doesn’t dwell much on its setting or its time-period as a major factor for the relationships of its characters. Yes, there is a war, and its clear its the Scottish country-side, but people can experience what Chris Guthrie goes through in almost any time period. Enduring the abusive relationship with her domineering father, the death of her mother, falling in love, having her loved one changed from the inside-out by war. Davies turns Sunset Song into more a film of human emotion transcending time and place, but the pre-war Scottish countryside adds the nostalgia by channeling a near fairy-tale like setting, but bombarding it with a devastating story filled with every bit of the harshness of real life, but also the warmth.

Why So Pretentious?

Sátántangó (Bela Tarr, 1994) – another classic punching-bag of a “pretentious film”

What is the point of a movie that is 3 or 4 or more hours long and is really slowly, methodically paced? Don’t these people know we have lives? Don’t they know that the point of a movie is to keep people’s attention? Where do they get this self-indulgent mentality to act like they deserve our viewership for that long? Every time a movie is made up of slow meandering camera movements, features minimal dialogue, completely immerses itself in its own unhurried aesthetic, or concentrates on an object, landscape, or character which seemingly has nothing surface-level going for it, I can hear the thousands of people who go to the movies for their supposed money’s-worth entertainment say to themselves “what pretentious garbage”.

But what does pretentious even mean? It’s a word that gets thrown around at the drop of a hat lately. The direct easy-access, low-hanging fruit of a pickup for the lay film-goer to act like his/her inferiority complex is completely justified because the cinema they don’t have the patience to give a chance is there for no other purpose than as a high-brow exercise in showing off artistic ambiguity. Films beyond easily digestible fast-food drive-thru offerings of Michael Bay and Colin Trevverow exist solely to make us feel inferior, right? Like if we don’t “get” them, then automatically we’re deemed as lesser people. That’s clearly got to be the filmmaker’s motive right?

You don’t understand the point of Terrence Malick forgoing much of the blood and carnage and “war is hell” obviousness of Oliver Stone’s Platoon and instead trying to toggle with less obvious themes regarding soldiers in war, not as a collective, but as individuals with their own personal thoughts  in The Thin Red Line. It’s pretentious, you say, because it doesn’t play to the tunes of what we know or expect, it doesn’t give it to us straight. Instead of displaying soldiers as a singular entity or “one hero” each character has a wildly different view of their place in war. Nothing in Malick’s film is offered as an answer. If you notice, the voice-overs of the soldiers in the film are not statements, but questions.

Questions? Why are we asking questions about war, when we should be giving people answers. Because Oliver Stone’s cute little tagline on the DVD cover of Platoon, “The first casualty of war… is innocence” looks so good on a poster. It looks so good as a singular black-white umbrella term for his anti-war cinematic movement (furthered by Born on the 4^th of July) that can be shared across social media by millions without anyone really thinking about it. It’s a one track mind, which is perfect because it means we have now formed an identity against war, from this one simple banner phrase. But this is true pretentiousness is it not? Applying grave importance and merit to a single sentence, an overarching term which really doesn’t mean anything but sounds like a totally solid slogan: “The first casualty of war is innocence.” Put that on a baseball cap or T-shirt and parade it around, man. You’re gonna look so insightful and provocative!

But really… The Thin Red Line is the classic example of  what the internet would deem “pretentious cinema” though, because it lasts 3 hours long and is comprised of extended sequences of soldiers questioning their own participation in the Battle of Guadalcanal. Blood is at a minimum, we don’t have scenes of a soldier screaming for his mother trying to stuff his intestines back in his lower abdomen like in Saving Private Ryan. Malick isn’t milking anything here, because he doesn’t have to. Doesn’t the opposite of pretentious mean that the filmmaker has enough trust invested in his audience that he knows, and he can be sure that we’re smart enough to get that war sucks? Do we really need to be told that through exploding organs, blood-drenched battle-fields and cutely worded taglines that people in war… y’know… die… and… uh… experience grief and loss? Are we going to call Malick’s film pretentious because presents the idea that soldiers may actually doubt themselves once in a while? That they’re not all like-minded courageous heroes who overcome all odds? They have their own personal views of war and not everyone is on the same page as each other? That when they’re actually in battle, there may be an inkling of them that isn’t sure whether what they’re doing? Is The Thin Red Line pretentious because it takes too long to watch, and doesn’t fill every sequence with some snappy, easily digestible dialogue that makes us feel like we totally have a grip on this whole “war” thing, or a rocking battle-sequence where we root for a side and hope they “win”? Are we going to point and yell “pretentious” at a movie that doesn’t treat us like children waiting to be lectured on war, but instead treats us like individuals who have our own questions to ask?

Pretentious is being used by people the same way the word “theory” was hijacked to mean “guess”. Pretentious no longer applies to just things which attach more importance to themselves than they are worth… Pretentious is now the spitball we throw at anything that may take more time to understand than we are willing to give it.

Ironically, the so-called mainstream Hollywood movies that have been coming out seem to embody every level of pretense. I just watched Captain America : Civil War and asked myself, what the hell about this movie even justifies the title Civil War? The film lasts about 2.5 hours, and maybe an hour of it is back-and-forth conversations between the Avengers making the most hollow, tumblr-post level arguments about whether their power needs to be kept in check because everywhere they went they saved people, but also inadvertently murdered a bunch as well (ATTENTION: war is hell guys… war is hell. In case you couldn’t figure that out for yourself). Not to mention that this giant epic battle of choosing sides between TeamCap and TeamIron takes place on… and airport. No, seriously, the whole thing happens on a deserted airport terminal, and lasts roughly 5 to 10 minutes . It is only in maybe the last 7 minutes of the movie where Captain America and Iron Man show any level of real, tangible animosity towards each other, where for a split second, Captain America raises his shield to slam it on Iron Man’s face, then catches himself. In 2.5 hours, this 6 second moment is the only time where I felt Tony Stark’s fear and grief over the killing of his parents, and Captain’s very-American level of nationalistic arrogance shielded as “a fight for justice”. Of course, this is erased right after when the movie cuts to the “future” and Captain America sends Iron Man a voice-mail saying “sorry”, and we’re all just supposed to act like he didn’t almost just bash the man’s face in with a metal shield… okay.

The word pretentious is closer associated to the title of this movie, Civil War (more like Civil Argument) than anything that goes on in Yorgos Lanthimos’s also recently released dystopian love story, The Lobster*… a movie that no doubt people will call pretentious because it completely subverts our idea of love and marriage into a bizarre ritual of “find a soul-mate or effectively die” that the movie gives no background for. The characters speak and behave in awkward pauses and robotic monotone dialogues on purpose, and its so hard for us to understand this level of non-conformity in our love stories that we automatically slap the PRETENTIOUS tag on it because its beyond our trying to figure out. Never-mind that the entire agenda of Lanthimos is to evade any sense of importance to his story, other than have it exist and just say “here… you deal with it”. Meanwhile a middle school locker-room argument between Iron Man and Captain America is a CIVIL WAR. Yeesh.

Colossal Youth: Paintings of a Life on the Brink of Death

Colossal Youth (Pedro Costa, 2006)

I haven’t come across a filmmaker with an almost Ozu-like dedication to the static shot as Pedro Costa. Throughout his examination of the people and places in the Fontainhas Neighborhood in Lisbon, Portugal, we get an almost painterly experience throughout his films. A gallery of frames, sculptures, contained spaces with some moving parts, but mostly still, as they are, in real time, decaying before our very eyes. His characters too, hardly moving and even when in extensive conversation rarely looking at each other or at anything in particular really; mannequins, furniture, remnants of the slowly dying surroundings which they have inhabited their whole lives. Even the clean polished apartments, which Ventura, Costa’s central character in the beautifully understated film Colossal Youth, is being forced into moving into as his slum community is being demolished, look lifeless and dead. The white walls are not really that white, the clean corners are not really that clean. As the “realtor” explains the beauties of the area, Ventura quietly points to a cobweb near the ceiling and matter-of-factly states “there’s spiders everywhere”.

Costa is as much of a visual filmmaker as anybody, but his visuals are not really associated with what we normally see and are used to as ‘cinema’, but more a combination of performance art and modernist sculpture. Lighting plays a role almost opposite that used in the films of Aki Kaurismaki. Kaurismaki puts spotlights on actors to illicit the feel of a theatrical performance, highlighting a dramatic space but then subverting it with a typical Finnish dead-pan subtlety. Costa’s lighting is simply part of the aesthetic. It isn’t highlighting the characters, but blending them into their surroundings. They are part of the scenery, just as much a piece of the greater painting as the furniture or walls they stand beside.

Even as characters shift around and pass by places, the camera and lighting doesn’t follow them. Our eyes and attention is constantly being guided to the details of the buildings, the inanimate monoliths, walls, staircases, roofs, street-corners, alleyways, and witnessing their death in real time. All the scratches, mold, chipped paint, dirt, mud, dust, everything signaling the passing of life. The only time the camera moves throughout the entirety of Colossal Youth is the two sequences in which Ventura sits in a park… the only two places he ever visits which exhibit a sense of vibrant living, a fight for life and against death… organisms, trees, birds, worms, nature at work constantly living, never stopping, never still.

The beautifully decaying images of Pedro Costa’s Colossal Youth: