Kiarostami's new film 'Shirin'

I have reviewed Abbas Kiarostami's new film Shirin for my latest contribution to 3 Quarks Daily. It is an amazing film that should be seen by all. In my review, I suggested a connection between Kiarostami and, improbably perhaps, Pedro Almodóvar. Do feel encouraged to click the link and read it at 3QD. Thanks.

JS @ 3QD

The Ministry of Information and 3 Quarks Daily have joined forces. Starting today, I will write a column for 3QD every four weeks. (Note: not monthly but every four weeks.) Thanks to Abbas Raza and the 3QD posse for the opportunity.

My first installment is called 'The Jennifer Aniston in All of Us'. Do feel encouraged to read it and to read widely at 3QD, the best collective blog I know.

Remarkably, I had never seen Jennifer Aniston in a single thing: not one movie, not one episode of her sitcom. I had to borrow a dvd of Office Space (1999) while writing my article. Yet somehow I seem to know all her business despite being an infrequent, though avid, reader of celebrity magazines. Then again, I don't actually read the magazines; I just like looking at the pictures. How is it that we know so much about people we don't know at all?

I also finally bought a dvd of Alain Resnais's Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959), one of the most influential films ever made and a favourite of mine. The way we think about film editing, narrative, and memory—either separately or all together—owes a lot to this film. The flashbacks to Emmanuelle Riva's memories really are how we imagine memory today, and not just the flashbacks written in Marguerite Duras's screenplay but also Resnais's editing together of newsreels, re-enactments, and vérité street scenes with the actors' performances. And as for the film's approach to romance in transit, where would Wong Kar-wai and his contemporaries be without Resnais?

Having written my first piece for 3QD makes me want to re-commit to my own blog. I have mentioned before that I had promised Daniel F. that I would do a series on the entire discography of David Byrne. The instruction he gave, which I accepted, was that I have to rank all of Byrne's albums, with and without Talking Heads, one by one without any ties. I hereby promise to begin the series before the end of 2008, so come back soon for this special series.

the end of a century

Ingmar Bergman, my first favourite director when I discovered cinema in my late teenaged years, died two days ago on July 30, 2007. Over the years I have devoted a sizable portion of my brain to studying his work: twenty-seven Bergman-directed films so far, two theatrical adaptations, nine plays directed by him, and several books of interviews, autobiography, and screenplays. Although I never met him, I feel like I have lost someone close to me. On a world scale, we are all poorer for all that we lost on July 30.

I don't think there was another artist alive whose life and work operated at such a level of myth. Even his birthday, July 14, 1918, carried a whiff of myth: the start of the French Revolution and the end of World War One. Greek mythology is full of stories of family members killing each other. Bergman understood the mythic nature of the primal, ineluctable conflicts within families and turned his own life, and his parents', into modern myth. Other directors have made films from his screenplays about his parents and his childhood: Bille August's The Best Intentions (1992), Daniel Bergman's Sunday's Children (1992), and Liv Ullmann's Private Confessions (1996). In Sunday's Children, we get to experience the complicated pleasure of watching his son Daniel's direction of an internecine encounter between actors playing the director's father (i.e., Ingmar) and grandfather. His artistic stature, as one of the greatest film directors, theatre directors, and screenwriters, is Shakespearean and, with his five wives and nine children, his appetites Falstaffian.

Unfortunately, the myth of the Swedish director of doom and gloom has obscured much of his achievement as an artist. My favourite film of his has always been Winter Light (1962), possibly the dourest, bleakest film ever made. (It makes me smile every time, but perhaps that's just me.) With a screenplay about a doubt-wracked priest, played by Gunnar Björnstrand, who rejects the love of a horny, carelessly godless parishioner played by Ingrid Thulin, it could sound like a stereotypical Bergman plot, and perhaps it is. But this film, like most of his work, is a triumph of style. If one blocked the subtitles and just listened to the spare, unmusical soundtrack, one would be able to feel every bit of the story. And, working with cinematographers Gunnar Fischer and Sven Nykvist, his films achieved some of the most expressionistic black and white since Germany in the 1920's.

I feel especially privileged to have seen so many of his theatrical productions at BAM over the years. I still recall his production of Ibsen's Doll's House in 1991. When Torvald struck Nora in the chest with an open palm, an action not found in the text, the entire audience at the BAM Harvey gasped as one. It is still a thrill to recall it all these years later. No one else could direct Strindberg like Bergman. Back in 1996 New York's Roundabout Theatre staged The Father with Frank Langella. The audience chuckled throughout as if they were watching a domestic comedy. Even when the great Helen Mirren and Ian McKellen did Dance of Death on Broadway in 2001 it felt light and breezy. Strindberg's dream plays are perhaps the most difficult set of plays to direct in the modern canon. When Bergman brought A Ghost Sonata to BAM in 2001, not only did he triumph in communicating the play despite the difficulties of its form, but it was fucking terrifying! And, reader, no one in the audience laughed.

Compounding the loss, Michaelangelo Antonioni died the very same day. Not since July 4, 1826, the fiftieth anniversary of the U.S. Declaration of Independence, when John Adams and Thomas Jefferson died simultaneously, have such great, linked figures died on the same day in separate places. Bergman and Antonioni were the last giants of what we often call postwar 'art cinema'. Kurosawa, Ray, Fellini, Truffaut et al. are all gone. (As far as I am concerned, Jean-Luc Godard was only great for seven or eight years.) What linked these directors was a zealous commitment to the æsthetics of cinema, i.e. the deepest explorations possible of the expressive properties of film language and film form.

Ultimately, all film is art, and earlier cinema was undeniably full of great artists of the screen: Feuillade, Sjöström, Lang, Murnau, Ozu. But much of the world only saw their work as entertainment. There are great directors alive today: Hou Hsiao-Hsien, Claire Denis, Abbas Kiarostami, but only Martin Scorsese and Pedro Almodóvar have anything like a Bergman- or Fellini-sized persona. We call the work of the great postwar directors by the imperfect labels of 'art cinema' or 'arthouse' because their claims to artistry were self-conscious, superlative, and, most importantly, persuasive. They convinced the rest of the world that cinema was indeed a great art that deserved appreciation and preservation. They elevated the world's opinion of cinema in part by, like Bergman, mythologizing themselves. Just read the list of names and it sounds like a roster of cultural heroes. And they were. And now the last of that generation has left us for good.

the real and the fake

In the fall of 2005, I had the opportunity to present Close-Up, the film by Abbas Kiarostami, to the freshman class at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts. The spark of the film came from a real news story in Tehran: a man named Hossain Sabzian was arrested for conning a family into believing he was the famous film director Mohsen Makhmalbaf. In the film, which is not at all a documentary, all of the actual participants re-enact their real-life roles.

For the Tisch screening, I decided to extend the film's conceit into the real world: I pretended to be Kiarostami himself introducing the film in person. More than just a case of life imitating art imitating life, the idea was to put the students in the same situation as the conned family and then lead a discussion of the issues raised by the film.

All I did to create the persona of a Great Iranian Director was don a pair of sunglasses and use the word 'the' where a native English speaker would not. That's it: no fake accent, nothing else. I assumed that the students would figure it out during the film, but in that I was wrong. When I returned to the stage for the Q&A, the students had still not realized that I was not the real Abbas Kiarostami, and when I insisted I was a member of the NYU faculty, some of them persisted for several minutes in believing I was Kiarostami pretending to be someone named Jeff Strabone. When my identity was all cleared up—if one can make such a claim about identity—about 75% of the auditorium admitted, by a show of hands, that they had believed I was Kiarostami.

Tonight I attended the start of the MoMA's three-week Kiarostami film series. For the first time ever, the real Kiarostami and the fake Kiarostami were together in the same room, though I was surely the only person there having a pseudo-uncanny experience. On a more serious note, everyone in the New York area should drop everything and see these films. His major works include:
Where Is the Friend's House?* (1987)
And Life Goes On…* (1991)
Through the Olive Trees* (1994)
Close-Up (1990)
A Taste of Cherry (1997)
The Wind Will Carry Us (1999)
Ten (2002).
(The starred films form a trilogy.)

Describing his work can be a challenge, as anyone who read A.O. Scott's article in today's New York Times has witnessed. Perhaps the best way to approach it is to start from the outside and work our way in. The thing one is most likely to see in his films is people endlessly driving around in cars. One of his films, Ten, consists entirely of ten scenes of a driver and her passengers. That's all there is, yet it manages to be his most emotionally intense film. His most famous shot is probably the aerosol can rolling down the hill for thirty-five seconds in Close-Up. Again, that's all it is: a can rolling down a hill for what seems like forever. Two of his recent films—Ten and Five—try to remove the participation of the director entirely from the film, and in other films—And Life Goes On and Through the Olive Trees—the protagonists are the fictional directors of ealier Kiarostami films. The Wind Will Carry Us, a film that draws on Iranian poetry and investigates the ethics of an urban documentary filmmaker working in a remote town, offers a humorous take on communicating with an unseen higher power—via mobile from the only hill that gets reception.

What does it all add up to? Kiarostami's work is a restless and relentless investigation of the possibilities and limits of film form, filmic time, directing, and the categories of narrative and documentary. He has an uncanny ability to extend time in such a way that stills it to tantalizing extremes. His is a cinema of stillness and contemplation, not necessarily for transcendental purposes but for exploring the properties of narrative expectation and the experience of time. (Sometimes, his aim feels like nothing more than cheek as in the maddening re-takes in Through the Olive Trees.) He wants to know things like, What is it to direct a film? to construct a narrative? or to sit in a movie theatre and experience time?

The Tisch students said they expected the rolling aerosol can in Close-Up to explode. They expected event. Instead, it came to a quiet stop. It was more a case of the humor of time and the thwarting of expectation. I have seen ten of his feature films so far, and they are all like that can: an extreme prolongation of expectation with no necessary closure, its reward instead being the experience of expectation. If 'unbearable' could ever be meant as a compliment, that is what I would call Kiarostami's work: unbearable cinema. And it would be unforgiveable to miss it.

best film of the year

Since overcoming the furious seriousness of my youth, I have enjoyed taking the mantle of the æsthete in all matters of culture. In my assumption of the persona, that has meant elevating style over content and surface over depth. Consquently, I often say things like, 'Content is nothing; style is everything'. While I do earnestly think that such a belief offers benefits to humanity like safety and a guiltless love of beauty, I can also recognize my susceptibility to the pull of Wildean epigram in saying such things. ('There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.' Oscar Wilde, preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray.)

But then a great book or film or play of deep moral and political commitment comes along and all my dandyism and foppishness fall by the wayside. Commitment, of course, is not enough. It takes a work of great æsthetic achievement as well to avoid the pitfalls of easy didacticism and dull morals. I saw such a film last night and, while I recognize the risks inherent in immediately calling it the best film of the year, I'm going to run with it (and, yes, today is the Oscar deadline). It was, in short, a national epic for an age that history has taught to be anti-epic.

What is a national epic? Usually, it's a myth or a lie, a substitution of easy narcissism—if not supremacism—for the mess of history. The Nazis, the Soviets, the Serbs, and the Afrikaners all made deep investments in epic in the twentieth century, but only their crimes make them any different than all the other epic-hungry nations of the world. In a best-case scenario, national epics are what nations tell themselves so they can live with what they've done and forget it.

Salman Rushdie's great accomplishment in Midnight's Children was to write a national counter-epic. The novel comprehends the sweep of twentieth-century Indian history while constantly questioning narrative's ability to do so—'Reality is a question of perspective; the further you get from the past, the more concrete and plausible it seems'—and acknowledging its protagonist's need to 're-write the whole history of my times purely in order to place myself in a central role'. (chapter 12) Instead of a tale of heroism, the novel offers a narrative about narrativization told by a schlemiel with a big nose. Its sprawling form demonstrates that the only healthy version of history is the mixed-up kind that the novel calls in its final chapter 'the chutnification of history'. The great Taiwanese filmmaker Hou Hsiao-Hsien used a different post-epic approach in his trilogy (City of Sadness; The Puppetmaster; Good Men, Good Women) by formally showing the limits of cinema's ability to comprehend history and experience. Through his use of open framing, the characters fall out of the frame; the film literally cannot contain them.

All of which brings me to the best film of the year: Das Leben der Anderen (The Lives of Others), directed by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck of Germany. The film, set in East Germany in 1984, takes us inside the Stasi and its surveillance of a risk-averse playwright whose actress-girlfriend the Stasi chief minister covets. The agency entrusts the operation to a true believer, a man so zealous in defense of his craft that he teaches interrogation at the Stasi academy. (Because the film is still out, I will avoid spoilers, but it kills me to have to do so.)

I had heard that the film was about Stasi surveillance, but I was surprised that it asks us to identify with the zealous agent Wiesler, played with supreme control by Ulrich Mühe. If Forest Whitaker finds subtlety in exuberance in The Last King of Scotland, Mühe finds exuberance in subtlety. Like Almodóvar's Hable con ella, the film begins with the characters attending a performance, but agent Wiesler is no Almdovóran hero moved to tears by art. No, he will spend the performance staring at his target through binoculars. But what of the power of art to transform us? Does anyone still believe in such things? (Reader, I struggle, for your benefit, with the need to avoid spoilers.)

Filmically, we're treated to a masterful display of the cinematography of surveillance and the color palette of Erich Honecker's DDR. Can this really be the director-screenwriter's first feature? The style of this film is as subtle and controlled as Mühe's performance. The rest of the cast is first-rate as well. Sebastian Koch embodies the cool, the quiet sexiness, and the humanism we fancifully attribute to men of the arts. Martina Gedeck burns as the desperate, self-doubting actress. Ulrich Tukur and Thomas Thieme are perfect as the badly dressed Stasi higher-ups. If they look like that in real life, they both need makeovers.

The film rises to the level of epic—and no, not counter-epic or 'epic' in quotes—by telling Germans the story of themselves. It's not a story of heroes and triumphs and easy moralizing. It's a story of truth. It hurts to watch it. If its classification as epic needs qualification, then let us call it an epic that hurts. The film shows us everything: the insane closed logic of the zealots of order, the depradations they exact on the innocent and the confused, the compromises of spirit that such an order requires for survival, and the tragic fate of those who cannot weather such impossible compromises.

We can only hope that when the long Bush-Cheney nightmare is over, we can have as thorough and uncompromising a truth-telling about how Americans sat by while the Supreme Court sanctioned a coup, towers fell while terrorism warnings were ignored, people who needed our help in Afghanistan were abandoned for war elsewhere, intellectuals paraded their support for torture on television, the rule of law was suspended, and our countrymen returned the culprits to power. But perhaps epic would not be the appropriate genre. No, the only genre suited to our late history would be tragedy.

Oscar predictions and favorites

Here it is, just a few hours behind schedule: my list of predictions and favorites. Explanations will follow in separate entries in about six or seven hours, i.e. after I wake up. Do feel encouraged to post your own predictions in the comments thread.

Tale of the Tape
24 Oscar categories
113 nominations
58 films nominated
I have seen 17 nominated films accounting for 48 nominations.
I did not see any of the animated features, animated shorts, documentary shorts, or live action shorts.

See the first comment for the complete list of all 26 first-run features for 2006 that I've seen.

BEST PICTURE
best picture: The Lives of Others (not nominated)
best nominated: The Queen
(would not mind: The Departed)
PREDICTION: Babel

DIRECTOR
best director: Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, The Lives of Others (not nominated)
best nominated: Martin Scorsese
(would not mind: Stephen Frears)
(should have been nominated: Pedro Almodóvar)
PREDICTION: Martin Scorsese

ACTOR IN A LEADING ROLE
best actor: Forest Whitaker, The Last King of Scotland; and Ulrich Mühe, The Lives of Others (not nominated)
PREDICTION: Forest Whitaker

ACTRESS IN A LEADING ROLE
best actress: Helen Mirren, The Queen
(would not mind: Penelope Cruz)
(should have been nominated: Ivana Baquero, Pan's Labyrinth)
PREDICTION: Helen Mirren

ACTOR IN A SUPPORTING ROLE
best supporting actor: Michael Sheen, The Queen (not nominated)
best nominated: Mark Wahlberg, The Departed
PREDICTION: Mark Wahlberg

ACTRESS IN A SUPPORTING ROLE
best supporting actress: Abigail Breslin, Little Miss Sunshine
PREDICTION: Jennifer Hudson, Dreamgirls

ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY
best screenplay: Peter Morgan, The Queen; and Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, The Lives of Others (not nominated)
PREDICTION: Peter Morgan, The Queen

ADAPTED SCREENPLAY
best adapted screenplay: William Monahan, The Departed
(should have been nominated: Frank Cottrell Boyce, Tristram Shandy)
PREDICTION: William Monahan, The Departed

FOREIGN-LANGUAGE FILM
best foreign-language film: Das Leben der Anderen (The Lives of Others)
PREDICTION: Pan's Labyrinth

ART DIRECTION
best art direction: Eugenio Caballero and Pilar Revuelta, Pan's Labyrinth
PREDICTION: Pan's Labyrinth

CINEMATOGRAPHY
best cinematography: Emmanuel Lubezki, Children of Men
(would not mind: Guillermo Navarro, Pan's Labyrinth)
PREDICTION: Children of Men

FILM EDITING
best editing: Clare Douglas, Christopher Rouse, and Richard Pearson, United 93
PREDICTION: Thelma Schoonmaker, The Departed

ANIMATED FEATURE
PREDICTION: Happy Feet

ORIGINAL SCORE
PREDICTION: Alexandre Desplat, The Queen

ORIGINAL SONG
PREDICTION: 'Our Town' by Randy Newman (music and lyrics), from Cars

COSTUME DESIGN
best costume design: Milena Canonero, Marie Antoinette
PREDICTION: Marie Antoinette
[I may revise this one after watching The Devil Wears Prada on dvd later today.]

MAKEUP
PREDICTION: David Marti and Montse Ribe, Pan's Labyrinth

DOCUMENTARY FEATURE
PREDICTION: An Inconvenient Truth, Davis Guggenheim

SOUND MIXING
PREDICTION: Michael Minkler, Bob Beemer, and Willie Burton, Dreamgirls
Note: this film had the worst sound mixing of the year, but that's my prediction.

SOUND EDITING
PREDICTION: Alan Robert Murray, Letters from Iwo Jima

VISUAL EFFECTS
PREDICTION: John Knoll, Hal Hickel, Charles Gibson and Allen Hall, 'Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest'

SHORT FILM - ANIMATED
PREDICTION: The Danish Poet, Torill Kove

SHORT FILM - LIVE ACTION
PREDICTION: West Bank Story, Ari Sandel

DOCUMENTARY SHORT SUBJECT
PREDICTION: The Blood of Yingzhou District, Ruby Yang and Thomas Lennon

fading sun, rising sunshine

I have seen two more films this week in my mad dash to Sunday's Oscars: Letters from Iwo Jima and Little Miss Sunshine. I'm still very keen to see two of the foreign-language nominees, Days of Glory (Algeria) and The Lives of Others (Germany), but we'll see what I have time for.

I guess I just don't belong to the cult of Clint Eastwood. In 2003 he directed Mystic River, an ugly, stupid movie based on unimaginative platitudes of innocence and vengeance that brought six of the coolest actors born between 1958 and 1964 together for no good reason whatsoever. (Laura Linney's Lady Macbeth turn at the end stole the show.) Incredibly, or not, it was nominated for best picture and best director.

This year, my reaction to Eastwood's Letters from Iwo Jima is not angry but equally mystified. It is nothing more than a boring, digitally de-colorized war movie of explosions and a range of male responses to the stress of combat. Ken Watanabe is great as the worldly General Kuribayashi, a man of equal parts compassion, conviction, and courage. But the film is a big nothing. Can someone help me understand the reasons for the hype?

Message-wise, the film wants to teach us not to demonize an enemy we do not understand. A timely (and obvious) message perhaps, but one would not want to get too carried away analogizing al-Qa'ida to imperial Japan. People generally rally to their nation's cause, however wrong it may be, in time of war; al-Qa'ida fights to abolish nations per se. But enough about that. This is supposed to be Oscars week.

On a sunshinier note, Little Miss Sunshine was a complete surprise to me. When I heard last year that it was a moving road movie about a dysfunctional family on their way to a children's beauty pageant, it sounded like the last thing I would want to see. I'm probably exaggerating, but it seems like half the films made by Americans these days are about dysfunctional families. (Why do we even have this term 'dysfunctional family'? Isn't it redundant?)

But any story told well is worth hearing, not for the content but for the telling. The content of a well-told story always feels new even when it is anything but. Filmically, Little Miss Sunshine is nothing special. There are some cute compositions of the family members as a chain, à la Abbey Road—sitting on a bench with equidistant spacing between them, moving in line formation, taking turns jumping into their vehicle—but it is the screenplay and ensemble cast that shine here.

I'll limit myself to the start of the film for the sake of remaining spoiler-free. Even so, I don't think I could describe the screenplay without it sounding trite or mawkish. My academic colleagues will appreciate the setup: Steve Carell plays Frank, the nation's preëminent Proust scholar, who has just experienced a failed suicide attempt prompted by a sequence of events beginning with falling in love with one of his grad students, who then left him for the nation's #2 Proust scholar, which then led him to words and actions that led to his being fired from his university position. His sister's family takes him in and things go downhill from there.

The story works because the screenwriter, Michael Arndt, never shies away from the pain of disappointment that real people experience. The dysfunctional family scenario is everywhere these days, but it usually amounts to a shallow catalogue of quirks. Rarely does this genre of narrative make one feel the pain of one's own family or one's own experience. Little Miss Sunshine is a dysfunctional family film that succeeds. And it's very funny.

People who know me personally know that the HBO series Six Feet Under is like scripture to me: I study it over and over again on dvd, and I would certainly never take its name in vain. I do think there are grounds for comparison, and not just because the family drives around with a [spoiler suppressed] in the back of the [spoiler suppressed]. Think of it as Six Feet Under meets Arrested Development: humor, gravitas, recognition, and genuine feeling, earned by the creators' honest and mature reflection on real experience.

Although not nominated, could it be my choice for best screenplay of the year? Tune in Saturday night around midnight, New York time, for my full list of predictions and favorites.

Hong Kong comes to Boston, or, why Scorsese deserves the Oscar

Part two of two on Scorsese. Click here for part one.

I still have a couple of films to see in the best director category, but I am prepared to say that, if Martin Scorsese finally wins this year, his Oscar will be deserved. (Check back Saturday night for the complete list of my Oscar predictions and preferences.)

People sometimes speak imprecisely about what a director does and doesn't do. The best case I can think of is another Scorsese film, Gangs of New York (2002). There were several awful things about that film, chiefly its insufferably stupid screenplay, but the film's problems cannot all be laid at the director's feet.

Visually, Gangs of New York is an outstanding and inventive film. I only saw it once—I can't bear the thought of watching it again—yet one shot has stayed with me since. Scorsese created a waterfront 360-degree pan that, in one revolution, told the entire story of the Irish in America: first we see the Irish immigrants stepping off a ship, then we see the newly arrived being recruited and outfitted for the Union army, then we see them setting off to war, next we see the coffins returning from the battlefield, and finally the coffins are loaded into a ship to return to Ireland for burial. All that visual storyteling occurs in a single rotation of the camera. That is great directing.

A film director's main task is the visual interpretation of a screenplay. The director also bears the theatrical responsibility of directing the actors, but to my way of thinking, that comes second. Acting-wise, Gangs of New York was a wildly mixed bag: Daniel Day-Lewis's ferocious and frightening fury as Bill 'The Butcher' Cutting versus the limp intertness of Leonardo DiCaprio and Cameron Diaz. But on filmic æsthetics alone, Gangs is a great feat of directing. (Who should have won the directing Oscar that year? Pedro Almodóvar for Hable con ella. Easily.)

This year, Scorsese is nominated for The Departed, his adaptation of the Hong Kong film Infernal Affairs (2002), starring Tony Leung and Andy Lau. Many Hong Kong police films since the 1980's have featured a pair of doubled or opposed male leads. John Woo's The Killer (1989) and Hard Boiled (1992) come to mind. In Infernal Affairs, the doubling is ratcheted up to new levels as we follow a police mole in the mob and a mob mole in the police trying to outwit and discover each other. Hong Kong screenplays are typically cavalier narrative affairs. People don't watch HK hyper-violence to scrutinize the details of plot points. Even so, by local standards Infernal Affairs had a tight plot with few obvious holes.

This then is the film Scorsese chose to remake: a proven international box office smash with an intricate and intriguing double cat-and-mouse plot. But the script is not a director's responsibility. The cinematic interpretation is. And Scorsese has managed to make this film his own while working in several visual cues to its Hong Kong roots.

The film's visual HK borrowings include some slow-motion and a Chinatown scene wherein DiCaprio, in the Leung role, spots his fleeing nemesis in the suspended shards of a glass hanging ornament. Without knowing the geographic source of the material, one might find these bits hokey, but they ought instead to be recognized as very economical and clever ways of paying homage in an adaptation that winds up being all Scorsese from start to finish.

Infernal Affairs relies on Tony Leung's typically melancholic eyes to provide the film's emotional weight. In The Departed Scorsese replaces HK cool with genuine horror at the violence that men do. I know that some of my readers will strenuously object to my saying this, but it's Scorsese's most eloquent portrayal of the ugly side of masculinity since Raging Bull. No particular shot stands out in the way that the dock scene did in Gangs. It's more of an overall impression achieved, in part, by a revision of earlier Scorsese moments.

Readers may remember the scene in Goodfellas where Ray Liotta uses his gun to bash the face of the Long Island neighbor in Lorraine Bracco's driveway. That was a deliciously nasty little scene, but the neighbor had invited revenge by attempting to impose himself sexually on Bracco's character. When we first witness DiCaprio's violence in The Departed, he finishes a guy off by ramming the hook end of a coatrack into his face. True, the guy was a mobster, but it's a far more chilling scene than in Goodfellas, not simply because DiCaprio is a cop, but because he is doing it to prove his tough-guy bona fides to an invisible audience of other men. There's no quotable, amusingly demented Joe Pesci here. ('Whaddaya mean I'm funny?') Just darkness and men behaving badly towards each other. Even the Rolling Stones' 'Gimme Shelter', by now a Scorsese mainstay, is back, but this time we're not along for a drug-addled automobile ride fleeing a police helicopter with a pot of tomato sauce possibly burning at home, as in Goodfellas. This time we hear the shout of 'War, children, it’s just a shot away' as Jack Nicholson's ganglord character recruits a child into mob life. The gang's induction—or is it seduction?—of children in Goodfellas invited our identification with Henry Hill's acceptance into his new 'family'. Here the scene is sickening.

Acting-wise, I finally see why Scorsese has persevered in his belief in Leonardo DiCaprio. I had written off DiCaprio's adult career as a series of failures, but here he rises to the occasion as his character sinks into despair and isolation. His suffering is not as economically portrayed as Tony Leung's—how could it be?—but he achieves genuine pathos and clearly works for it. Matt Damon makes the devilish most of his deceptively boyish face. And Jack Nicholson? He stays on the right side of the line, ham-wise. It's Scorsese's conspicuously dark lighting in his first scene that defines the character, not Nicholson's sometime tendency to run rampant through a film. But if Scorsese's directing is visible in the acting, it's in DiCaprio's surprisingly mature suffering.

Going into the film, I expected none of this. I thought it would simply be a tight thriller and perhaps a compromise by Scorsese to go for the gold with a proven seller. It was anything but the latter. Instead, it was a very good Scorsese film and one that should earn him a deserved Oscar.

scent of an Oscar?

Al Pacino has deserved several Academy Awards but has only one once. It wasn't for either of the great Godfather films, it wasn't for best supporting actor in Glengarry Glen Ross, and it certainly wasn't for Scarface, although in retrospect Tony Montana is surely the most culturally important movie role of the past twenty-five years. (Fishscale, anyone?) This year the smart money says the Academy will finally recognize Martin Scorsese as best director, but why have they denied him before and does he deserve it for The Departed?

Let's get straight to the point: Martin Scorsese has never won an Oscar because of racism. Racism, you say? But he's white, isn't he? As in everything, it all depends on who's doing the looking. I hope we can all agree that all the racial categories of past and present are biological fictions. Their only reality is in people's minds. (If I need to explain this to you, then perhaps you're at the wrong website. Try this one instead.)

Scorsese has been nominated five times and has deserved it at least two of those times: 1980 for Raging Bull and 1990 for Goodfellas. But let's consider all five nominations and the winners :
-1980 Raging Bull (Robert Redford for Ordinary People);
-1988 The Last Temptation of Christ (Barry Levinson for Rain Man);
-1990 Goodfellas (Kevin Costner for Dances with Wolves);
-2002 Gangs of New York (Roman Polanski for The Pianist); and
-2004 The Aviator (Clint Eastwood for Million Dollar Baby).

Any group of people can be constructed by others, or by themselves, as a race, and racial identities often have hierarchies within them. Are the Irish a race? They were to many of the English who occupied their country and starved them out of it. They were to the white Americans to whose country they then emigrated. Today they're a 'nationality' or an 'ethnicity', perhaps equally imaginary categories but less susceptible to discrimination. In the twenty-first century, many Americans have racialized Muslims (a religious group) and Arabs (a language group), which only goes to show fluid and adaptable 'racial' discrimination is.

The category of 'white people' has always had its internal hierarchies in the States: there are white people, and then there are 'ethnic whites' or 'white ethnics'. For many people—consciously or unconsciously—to be an 'ethnic white' is to be white but not quite. The category usually includes Italians, Poles, Greeks—basically any European population group that is Catholic or Orthodox Christian and/or generally swarthier-complected than WASPs. To the ignorant people who care about degrees of whiteness, Jews are somehow beyond the pale. (For the record, I don't subscribe to any of this racial rubbish. I'm just trying to characterize a racist set of attitudes that one encounters in the world. I believe that racism exists but race doesn't.) (Second aside: if you ever watch Spike Lee's Jungle Fever again, pay attention to the Italian-American candy store scenes. Michael Badalucco's character explicitly talks about his ethnic envy of Robert Redford. Spike Lee knows what I'm talking about.)

Now scroll back up to the list of Scorsese's nominations. Do you see any patterns? Scorsese most deserved to win in 1980 and 1990 for New York-based films about Italian-Americans, and he was beaten both times by Redford and Costner(!), non-'ethnic' white guys making films about non-'ethnic' white people way west of New York. And Clint Eastwood? Eastwood is the icon of the stoic, no-nonsense white man of the west. Scorsese is not just Italian-American. He's also short, asthmatic, a fast-talker, and a New Yorker. In person he talks even faster than Woody Allen in Annie Hall. I'll even go one further and say that much of America, especially in the 70's and 80's, racialized New Yorkers in general. We were one big cesspool of pollution to the red-blooded, and blue-blooded, states. (Woody Allen expressed New Yorkers' internalized racism eloquently in Annie Hall: 'Don't you see? The rest of the country looks upon New York like we're left-wing, communist, Jewish, homosexual pornographers. I think of us that way sometimes and I live here.')

Things are getting better at the Academy and in the States generally, but the Academy has historically discriminated against Scorsese as an Italian-American, as a New Yorker, and, compared to Eastwood et al., as a non-Hollywood masculine body. It's racism and more, and it stinks. Will the Academy, as expected, right a historic wrong this year? And if Scorsese wins, will he deserve it? For the answer to the last question, tune in tomorrow for part two, tentatively titled 'Hong Kong comes to Boston'.

and the Oscar does not go to...

Every year we all have our choices for the best films and performances not nominated for an Oscar, but what's even worse is when the best films of the year don't even get released in one's home country. Those of us in New York are lucky to have film festivals throughout the year—NDNF, Tribeca, NYFF, others—and we are also treated to occasional film series with the explicit theme of presenting the best unreleased feature films of the year. Sometimes single screenings are our only opportunities to see the best films of the year on a big screen.

The two best unreleased films of 2006 both come from Taiwan, but that should not be surprising. Taiwan and Iran have continuously produced two of the most exciting national cinemas of the past twenty years, and Taiwanese films in particular often have too little narrative action and editing for the typical audience. So, without further ado, here are the two best films unreleased in the States in 2006.

2. Three Times, 2005, Hou Hsiao-Hsien, Taiwan
NYFF, Alice Tully Hall, October 6, 2005

I don't think there has ever been a filmmaker who has used the long take and the open frame as expressively as Hou Hsiao-Hsien. In films like The Puppetmaster (1993), Hou has demonstrated how the rigorous interrogation of film form can lead to works not just of high æsthetic sophistication but also political and moral commitment. Not that æsthetics and morality have any necessary relationship to each other, but a film that explores both is satisfying on all levels.

Three Times is not an interrogation of national narrative like The Puppetmaster. It is instead three self-contained romance stories, each set in a different decade of the twentieth or twenty-first century. Shu Qi and Chang Chen play the young woman and young man across the century in 1966, 1911, and 2005. Each segment has its own film style and palette of colors, and each one shows a different generation's experience of courtship and romance: from sweet innocence in the 1960's, to the lop-sided balance of power between patron and flower girl in a brothel, to Hou's jaded take on our contemporary moment.

As always in Hou's work, the visuals do more of the work than his barely scripted plots. J. Hoberman, film critic of the Village Voice, has compared the stationary frame that dominates many of his films to cinema's earliest era. In the second segment of Three Times, Hou goes one better by adopting the look and limitations of the silent era. For a filmmaker whose style sometimes involves as much camera movement as a Lumière film, it's quite funny to see him using intertitles for dialogue. I'd urge you to see this film, but you probably can't.

1. The Wayward Cloud, 2005, Tsai Ming-Liang, Taiwan
BAM Cinema, April 15, 2006

What makes me rank Tsai's film higher than Hou's? It drew me in with humor and eroticism and gradually took me to lower and lower depths of discomfort and nausea. Like Hou and Edward Yang, Tsai typically relies on a style of static long takes and a paucity of event. But not this time.

The film begins with a sex scene involving a watermelon. And what does one do with a watermelon? You will have to see the film to find out, but it manages to be both sexy and funny. Or is it? The Wayward Cloud is a film about pornography, seen from both sides: the finished, polished product and the ugliness of industrialized sex. I don't say this often, but this is not an easy film to watch. And yet we're treated to riotous musical outbreaks with brightly-colored umbrellas and Busby Berkeley-esque dance numbers. This film will draw you in and spit you out. Anyone interested in films of audience-complicity or films with two levels that operate at cross purposes needs to see this film, but sadly, you probably can't see this one either.

Why begin Oscar week with an entry about films not even considered for nomination? We need to be mindful of how narrow a sliver of cinema the Oscars comprehend.

And now that we've said that, we can be totally shameless for the rest of the week. Yay. Frankly, I can't wait to see what they're wearing this year.

Oscar countdown

I saw fewer films in 2006 than in any year of my adult life, but there were enough gems to make it a good year in film. Over the next seven days, let's talk about the year in film. I'll offer my predictions as well as the films that should win, whether nominated or not. I hope you will join me in the comment threads.

For now, I'm posting the complete list of nominees as the first comment in this thread. The text is unformatted, so you can copy it and easily do whatever you like with it. My list has the advantage of including the names of all the individuals nominated. This information is harder to find that one might think. The list of nominees at the official Oscar site lists all the actors' names but only movie titles in most other categories. Unlike the Academy, I think everyone from the cinematographer to the makeup artist deserves to be recognized by name.