Live From Pawleys Island: Movie Journal, 12/3-12/10

I'm beginning my year-end DVD whirlwind a few weeks early this year, and here are the discoveries of the week:





Zoo (Robinson Devor, 2007)

On the surface, Zoo is a documentary about men who like to have sex with male horses. This is like saying that War and Peace is about the Battle of Borodino. Robinson Devor has created the closest successor to Errol Morris’s lyrical, meditative documentaries, juxtaposing actual interviews with dramatic reconstructions of the events described. Devor refuses to judge or exoticize the community of men in rural Washington who come together to have sex with these horses, but he does present their world as a dreamy, haunting and alien universe. It is extremely difficult for a non-zoophile to completely understand and totally identify with the lifestyle of a zoophile, but the notion of considering them any less acceptable in their sexual practices becomes essentially moot. Their world may be strange, but it contains the same quality of beauty that any other world might contain.






Offside (Jafar Panahi, 2006)

Jonathan Rosenbaum said it best when he declared Jafar Panahi’s latest political entertainment “so accessible and entertaining that some discerning viewers are suspicious of it.” Offside is a blast, a warm, humanist comedy that is immensely watchable, but suspicious of it I am. Not for any subversive political message: the story of several young women arrested for attempting to watch the 2005 World Cup qualifier between Iran and Bahrain is as direct as they come. (In Iran, women are not allowed to attend soccer matches, so many attempt to disguise themselves as boys in order to gain access to the stadium.) Its tricky balance between toughness and sentimentality, however, often lapses from one side to the other. Certainly the film’s most enjoyable moments are when the girls engage in pure ecstasy at outwitting their captors, and their captors’ eventual giving up at trying to control them. But then there are moments when Offside veers into cuteness, a tendency to let the personal cloud the political. The ending purports to close the gap between the soldiers and the girls by using the game as a nexus of community rather than division, but Panahi’s tone betrays him. At the end of the day, however, so many of these quibbles are those of a spurned lover wanting the film to be something it is not and does not want to be. As Roger Ebert did at the end of Almost Famous, I gave myself a big hug at the conclusion of Offside.






Regular Lovers (Philippe Garrel, 2005)

Philippe Garrel’s love letter to his youth and his stern rebuttal to Bernardo Bertolucci’s facile The Dreamers, Regular Lovers is a haunting portrait of the aftermath of May ’68. Shot in sumptuous but also charmingly tossed-off black and white, Garrel’s chamber epic follows a young poet, Francois (Louis Garrel, the director’s son and also one of the stars of The Dreamers), as he negotiates how to exist after his and his friends’ moment of triumph evaporates. Regular Lovers is intoxicated by the quotidian, the casual atmosphere of young people unsure of where to go or what to do. It also does not demonize all figures of authority, nor does it sanctify the behavior of Francois and his friends. (The scene where some cops enter Francois and his friend’s apartment is hilarious in the way the cops admire the art on the walls.) The centerpiece, a communal dance to The Kinks’ “This Time Tomorrow,” is a gorgeously rapturous and melancholy ode to trying to establish a community in a world that has rejected you.





In Between Days (So Yong Kim, 2006)

Although it is set in a Canadian metropolis, In Between Days could be set anywhere. The cold and isolating atmosphere in which the protagonist, Aimie (Ji-seon Kim) finds herself is emblematic of the isolation she isn’t even aware of within herself. Haunting pillow shots where she recites letters to her father remind us just how distant her reality is from her perception of it. She falls in love with the only person with whom she can communicate, drops out of a class in order to buy him a bracelet, and holds a typically adolescent insouciance toward the larger universe. After Tran (Taegu Andy Kang) rejects her affections, she begins to understand how alone she really is. Kim films these intimate moments in tossed off, handheld takes, using quiet, effortless dialogue. In Between Days is a delicate and sad slice of life.





The Golden Compass (Chris Weitz, 2007)

I really wanted The Golden Compass to be good. It would mean that the meaty portions of Philip Pullman’s “His Dark Materials” series, The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass, could be brought to cinematic life with all of their dark, beautiful nuances intact. Instead, The Golden Compass is a loud, CG-stuffed piece of fantasy ephemera, lacking in spiritual or philosophical depth. Certainly the notion of religion as the ultimate force of evil in the world hasn’t been completely sanitized–the leaders of the evil Magisterium have a certain clerical look and feel to them–but any weight or toughness of Pullman’s ideas are pretty much absent. Even Lyra Belaqua (a competent Dakota Blue Richards) is missing her edge. And the ultimate punch pulled is leaving the film on a note of hope, whereas the book’s conclusion is Lyra’s first major step away from innocence and toward experience. One can feebly hope for improvements in The Subtle Knife.


Holiday in Handcuffs (Ron Underwood/Sara Endsley, 2007)

I hate TV Christmas specials. Most Christmas movies are bad enough, but the massive churning out of feel-good, 2-hour pieces of sentimentality on the tube just about kill me. But ABC Family’s Holiday in Handcuffs is so deliciously absurd that I couldn’t help but plow through the sappy ending. There’s nothing family-friendly about this tableau of grotesques. Melissa Joan Hart is depicted as a PMS-raging psychobitch, her parents the ultimate suburban perfectionists, her brother a closeted golden boy, her grandmother a hard-drinking, tough-talking, all-around bawdy broad. Downright kinky sexual innuendos abound, and by the end of the first 90 minutes, I thought I’d walked into a John Waters movie. The plot is completely preposterous: Hart is dumped by her boyfriend, and she believes she must impress her parents by bringing somebody home for Christmas, so she kidnaps loveable rich boy Mario Lopez. Of course, the jig is eventually up, Lopez and Hart fall in love, and everybody learns a lesson. But for about an hour-and-a-half, the movie is so damned out of its mind I couldn’t help but love it. Please go to http://www.abcfamily.com to find out the next showtime!





Away from Her (Sarah Polley, 2006)

Fiona (Julie Christie) and Grant (Gordon Pinsent) have the sort of wealthy-liberal marriage most of us could only dream about. But the fairy tale ends when Fiona is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, and is placed in a treatment center. The great sadness of having to cope with such a loss informs every single frame of this beautiful, graceful film, one which neither sentimentalizes nor trivializes the effect of Alzheimer’s disease on a marriage. Grant watches as the woman he knew vanishes, as she finds it difficult to remember him, and even takes up with a fellow patient. Grant was once unfaithful, many decades ago, and perhaps this is Fiona punishing him. Or perhaps it is an inevitable byproduct of Fiona desperately attempting to find something which makes sense to her. Neil Young’s “Harvest Moon,” in its original version and a new, instrumental version, haunts the backdoors of the film, where Grant realizes that he and Fiona must invent new lives for themselves, and performs the ultimate sacrifice–which is also the ultimate act of love. Polley’s direction and camerawork is so understated, so quiet, so assured, that we can only marvel at the beautifully sad thing she has created, and wonder what true love ultimately means.





Black Book (Paul Verhoeven, 2006)

I have been mulling over Paul Verhoeven’s first Dutch film in 22 years for a couple of days, and still can’t decide how I feel about it. Verhoeven’s career is certainly a peculiar one, one which has seen him fashioning gaudy blockbusters that contain a nastily satirical edge to them. This is a more muted work, but only barely: after all, this is a film which features a woman dyeing her pubic hair blonde to match her new coiffure, and later getting a bucket of shit dumped on her. Verhoeven’s direction is raunchily propulsive, pulp disguised as art. (Or is it the other way around?) What’s so maddening/fascinating is the way he shifts our sympathies around. There are anti-Semitic Dutch Resistance fighters, sympathetic Gestapo commanders, Dutch collaborators and subversive Nazis. The only one behind whom we firmly stand is Rachel (Carice van Houten), a force of nature who uses her body to do battle with anyone who may stand in her way. The film’s most haunting image is Rachel watching her parents mowed down by a Nazi gun boat, and she seeming to float away, an apparition no longer connected to the corporeal world. That soon changes, as she infiltrates the Gestapo by screwing her way to precious information. But it seems too convenient that she’d start schtupping the one nice Nazi in Amsterdam, while the rest are monsters. And the ending, with all of its twists and revelations, feels too clean in a bizarre way. And what of Ronnie, Rachel’s freewheeling friend who fucks Nazis and Canadian soldiers alike, and has a rip-roaring good time while doing it all? She lacks any political conscience, and is consistently rewarded for it. Is Verhoeven being salaciously subversive in these ambiguities, or is he simply morally backward? I still can’t tell.