Trust First Draft

Complete first draft written for In Review Online.

Hal Hartley occupies a curious position in the American film scene. While he might reasonably be called an icon of the independent film scene and has remained a fixture of prestigious film festivals like Sundance and Cannes since the late 1980s, he has never had the true breakout success or mainstream recognition of someone like a Whit Stillman, let alone a Quentin Tarantino. True, his style and interests have shifted over the years, but aside from a few circles, Hartley’s visibility has waned considerably, to the point where he is rarely mentioned amid the independent heyday of the 1990s. This is a shame, because in a just world, 1990’s Trust would rightly be regarded as one of the most significant American films of the decade. It was Hartley’s second film after the prior year’s The Unbelievable Truth, and in essence the two form a loose diptych, centering on the yearnings and anxieties of characters played by Adrienne Shelly. In this case, Shelly plays Maria Coughlin, a 17-year-old high schooler who begins the film in rip-roaring fashion: she announces to her parents that she has dropped out of high school and that she is pregnant, then slaps her father, who drops dead of a heart attack. Her counterpart is Matthew Slaughter (Hartley stalwart Martin Donovan), an older man with a troubled past who lives with his abusive father, and in his first scene quits his job fixing cheap electronics and puts his supervisor’s head in a vise. The extremities of the described events help to begin the process of typifying what makes Hartley’s style so unique and invigorating; while Hartley’s first three films (including 1992’s Simple Men) belong to the so-called Long Island Trilogy and identifiably exist in that space, all cool tones and wide expanses of concrete, the actual world that Hartley illustrates is one as prone to bursts of surreal behavior and emotions as his 1991 short “Ambition,” wherein a walk to work is punctuated by three separate brawls, including with a woman holding a submachine gun. Crucially, these moments are received with the same heightened deadpan equanimity that characterizes almost all of Hartley’s interactions, ensuring that they blend into the texture of the film rather than jut out from it. And just as crucially, the burgeoning romance that develops between Maria and Matthew is just as strange, just as thrilling in its development as these moments. The two don’t meet until almost half an hour into the film, and their first interaction is undertaken out of necessity: she has been kicked out of her house, and unlike the other men in the film he takes pity on her and offers her a place to stay for the night. Hartley conceives of love as not necessarily an innate force that can conquer all, but as something born from desperation and loneliness which is subject to the very destabilizing and vindictive forces that first caused it to come into being. For Maria, it is her mother Jean (Merritt Nelson) and her now ex-boyfriend Anthony (Gary Sauer), and for Matthew his father Jim (John MacKay) and the general state of Reaganite capitalism and its erosion of principles of quality and integrity. These factors are well in place by the time the two finally meet, so when they do it registers with a great gravity, a relief that the rest of the film both challenges and ultimately upholds. Trust is filled to the brim with subplots and obstacles, like Maria spending much of the film trying to find a frustrated housewife who stole a baby from a bus stop, which are ultimately less about the central romance and more about a certain way of being, an almost moral sense that Hartley infuses the film with. His philosophical discussions, like the one that gives the film its title — Maria sees love as being formed from respect, admiration, and trust, while Matthew is unable to let go of the material facts of their situation — are conveyed with a prosaic directness and flesh out what drives his characters down certain paths. This extends in large part to his supporting cast, who all are given a quirk of behavior, a shade of characterization that further deepens the concerns of the film, especially characters like Maria’s sister Peg (Edie Falco) and Karen Sillas as a weary abortion clinic nurse. But at the end of the day, the film belongs to Donovan and especially Shelly, and their two acting styles mesh incredibly harmoniously with Hartley. Donovan, in his first of many performances for Hartley, leans into the inherent artificiality of the dialogue, delivering his lines with a brusque intelligence that projects a downbeat confidence in his convictions and hopes. By contrast, this would be Shelly’s last performance for Hartley in a tragically short life, and what begins as a bratty arrogance in the first third of the film stunningly metamorphosizes into a tenderness, a considerateness that is informed by her maturation, her need to grow up in a world that tries to smother young women like her. Though Trust is one of the great American romance films, in no small part because it is the story of two messed-up, lonely people who connect because there is no one else who can truly understand them, it is just as much an achingly observed, ultimately ebullient Bildungsroman, an act of self-assertion that speaks so much to Hartley’s compassion and his ability to wring immense pathos from his signature, too-little-seen stylizations.

Topology of Sirens First Draft

Complete first draft written for In Review Online.

The way in which people interact with the archaic or outmoded is an ever-evolving proposition. Especially given the unbelievable pace of the 20 th and 21 st centuries, where innumerable technologies have been developed, widely used, and then abandoned for the next shiny thing, devices that once were widely taken for granted just a decade or so ago take on a different aura entirely, one almost akin to uncovering a buried, obscure treasure. Jonathan Davies’s Topology of Sirens, one of the most assured and evocative feature debuts of the past few years, which premieres as part of the FIDMarseille International Competition, takes this paradox as one of its primary animating forces. It follows Cas (documentary filmmaker Courtney Stephens), a sound engineer who moves into her deceased aunt’s home in what appears to be an unnamed neighborhood of Los Angeles. As she reconnects with her friends within the local experimental music scene, she discovers within a locked closet of the house a rare hurdy-gurdy. Inside the outdated instrument are seven answering machine mini-cassette tapes, each labeled with a mysterious symbol and containing different varieties of soundscapes and audio effects. This cryptic find begins a loose series of wanderings across the greater LA area, as linkages and coincidences pile up without necessarily coalescing into a unifying purpose or meaning. Much of what compels about Topology of Sirens stems from this approach to narrative and how it maps onto Davies’s contemplative style. The film feels very much of a piece with Tyler Taormina’s Ham on Rye from 2019: Taormina and Davies are part of a drone music duo, produced each other’s films, and both films are gorgeously lensed by Carson Lund (full disclosure: all three are friends of mine), but while that film adhered to a clear if powerful structural trajectory, no such net exists for Topology. Instead, the film feels refreshingly charged in its conviction that any situation, any encounter can unlock another link in the chain towards comprehension, and that the strength of the revelation can be felt much more than it can be explicated. It is no accident that these pivot points can be so often located in abandoned technologies like the cassette tapes or the hurdy-gurdy; in particular, one scene set at a long- running amateur TV station features a character played by film preservationist Mark Toscano, who takes stock of the continual submission of home tapes, including one man who taped pre- digital television static so that people would still be able to see analog snow well past its conventional usage. Davies doesn’t aim to tie all these obsolete items into a neat bow, but he has a pronounced appreciation for them, and how they can blend with and be enhanced by new technologies; one of Cas’s final actions in the film is to create mixdowns of the tape recordings, blending the formerly discrete music to create something else entirely. In an interview for FIDMarseille, Davies attributes the governing aesthetic and narrative principles to ‘90s PC point-and-click adventure games, but Topology of Sirens unfolds in ways that hew much closer and deeper to typically cinematic means. Shot mostly in master shots, which frequently move with gliding precision across rooms, the film’s quiet nature — there is relatively little dialogue in the film, charmingly credited as “featuring dialogue from the cast” — allows for both a bounty of interstitial moments of natural and suburban landmarks and a series of truly startling and magical ruptures. These moments, including a few live musical performances, are frequently signaled by a definite shift in perspectives, and stun in a way that somehow only furthers the mystical mood that Topology of Sirens consistently manages to weave. More than anything, Davies trusts in the sensorial import of his images, in the implications and pleasures of shifting lights and dissolves, and the effect is nothing short of transporting.

Chang Chen First Draft

Complete first draft written for Criterion.

As a performer, Chang Chen specializes in observing and listening. One of the key Taiwanese actors of the past thirty years, he began his career at fourteen with Edward Yang’s epochal masterpiece A Brighter Summer Day (1991) and has worked with some of the most notable contemporary Chinese-speaking directors, from Yang to Hou Hsiao-hsien, John Woo to Ang Lee, in both his native country and in China and Hong Kong. Across his career, whether by dint of almost exclusively speaking Mandarin among Cantonese speakers or playing people on the periphery of the story, Chang tends to be on the outside looking in, a slightly aloof and inscrutable figure even when he’s at the center. I have long held an intense admiration for him, in large part because I see something of myself in his characters: a young Taiwanese man living in another place, who always feels like an outsider constantly attempting to understand those around him. Few filmmakers have harnessed that odd-man-out quality as well as Wong Kar-wai, with whom Chang has worked four times. In return, their collaboration offers something that no other actor in Wong’s considerable repertory cast provides: an unmolded performer at the beginning of his career, whose screen presence and roles shift profoundly with each film. This youthfulness is put to pointed use in Chang’s first Wong film, Happy Together (1997). In the destructive pas de deux between Tony Leung and Leslie Cheung, Chang is the only other significant character. His role is deliberately ambiguous, especially his sexuality, but he does represent a radiance, an innocence that has long been absent from the two lovers’ lives. In a film shadowed by the Handover, where characters struggle to break out of the cages of their past, his nationality is no accident: he and Taiwan stand out as beacons of hope, of a possible future where tears and pain can be left behind. Chang would get his own duet and true showcase with The Hand (2004), Wong’s short contribution to the Eros omnibus, recently expanded to feature-length. As a tailor who develops an intense relationship with a high-class call girl (Gong Li), his nigh-ageless appearance becomes indispensable to the film. For most of the film he could be anywhere between twenty and forty years old, a temporal blurriness which, when coupled with understated jumps in chronology, deliberately unmoors the film from any conventional sense of time, allowing the pair’s longing to assume a floating yet palpable grandness and tragedy. His quiet countenance is here deployed as a mask for his ardent emotions, holding until it is shattered at the close. Chang’s other two Wong appearances are far more peripheral, although to different aims. He is one fleeting face amid the cavalcade of ghosts from Wong’s past that comprises 2046 (2004). More telling is his storyline in The Grandmaster (2013). Though he appears in only three scenes and interacts with a character from the main narrative just once, he registers profoundly as a kung fu master among equals. He is simultaneously set apart and within the fold, in a state of suspension that perfectly represents his unique, essential presence in Wong’s oeuvre.

Chang Chen Incomplete Draft

Incomplete draft written for Criterion.

It’s no stretch to say that Chang Chen is one of the key Taiwanese actors of the past thirty years. He began his acting career at fourteen with Edward Yang’s epochal masterpiece A Brighter Summer Day (1991), inaugurating a career involving collaborations with some of the most notable contemporary Chinese-speaking directors, from Yang to Hou Hsiao-hsien, John Woo to Ang Lee, in both his native country and in China and Hong Kong. Chief among these filmmakers has been Wong Kar-wai, with whom he has worked four times. The Hong Kong auteur was the first director that Chang worked with after Yang, and their collaboration offers a few things that no other actor in Wong’s considerable repertory cast provides: a Taiwanese actor, and therefore even more of an outsider than the few mainland stars, who similarly speak Mandarin among Cantonese speakers, and an unmolded performer at the beginning of his career, whose screen presence and roles thus shift profoundly with each film. This youthfulness is put to pointed use in Chang’s first Wong film, Happy Together (1997). In the tortured, mutually destructive pas de deux undergone by Tony Leung and Leslie Cheung, two of the greatest Hong Kong actors of their generation, Chang is the only other significant character, a Taiwanese tourist strapped for cash in Buenos Aires who strikes up a friendship with Leung. His role is deliberately ambiguous, especially in his sexuality: he alludes to difficulties with his parents, seems to be attracted to the sound of Leung’s voice, and shrugs off a woman’s advances. But most of all he represents a radiance, an innocence that has long been absent from the two lovers’ lives. Notably, Chang would get his own duet and his true showcase with The Hand (2004), a feature-length version of Wong’s contribution to the Eros omnibus. Chang’s other two Wong appearances are far more peripheral, although to different aims. In the cavalcade of veritable ghosts from the past that comprises 2046 (2004), where recurring Wong actors appear in roles just a little different from their original incarnations, he appears in exactly one shot in the flesh, as a jealous drummer boyfriend, and in a few scattered moments in the story-within-the-story. More telling is his storyline in The Grandmaster (2013), where he appears as a mysterious government agent named The Razor for only three scenes and interacting with a character from the “main” narrative just once. In a film dedicated to many kung fu masters, who ultimately fall into the annals of history while Ip Man (Leung) lives on, he ultimately becomes one of them. As ever, though he is set apart, he emerges as every bit the equal of the more glamorous Hong Kong stars, an actor marching to his own inimitable rhythm. As a thespian, Chang Chen specializes in observing and listening. One of the key Taiwanese actors of the past thirty years, he began his career at fourteen with Edward Yang’s epochal masterpiece A Brighter Summer Day (1991) and has worked with some of the most notable contemporary Chinese-speaking directors, from Yang to Hou Hsiao-hsien, John Woo to Ang Lee, in both his native country and in China and Hong Kong. Across his career, whether by dint of almost exclusively speaking Mandarin among Cantonese speakers or playing people on the periphery of the central story, Chang tends to be on the outside looking in, a slightly aloof and inscrutable figure even when he is one of the leads. I have long held an intense admiration for him, in large part because I see something of myself in his characters: a young Taiwanese man living in another place, who always feels like an outsider constantly attempting to understand those around him. Few filmmakers have harnessed that quality as well as Wong Kar-wai, with whom Chang has worked four times. In return, their collaboration offers something that no other actor in Wong’s considerable repertory cast provides: an unmolded performer at the beginning of his career, whose screen presence and roles shift profoundly with each film. This youthfulness is put to pointed use in Chang’s first Wong film, Happy Together (1997). In the destructive pas de deux between Tony Leung and Leslie Cheung, Chang is the only other significant character. His role is deliberately ambiguous, especially in his sexuality, but most of all he represents a radiance, an innocence that has long been absent from the two lovers’ lives. In a film shadowed by the Handover, where characters struggle to break out of the cages of their past, his nationality is no accident: he and Taiwan stand out as beacons of hope, of a possible future where tears and pain can be left behind. Chang would get his own duet and true showcase with The Hand (2004), a feature-length version of Wong’s contribution to the Eros omnibus. As a tailor who develops an intense relationship with a high-class call girl (Gong Li), his nigh-ageless appearance becomes paramount to the film. For most of the film he could be anywhere between twenty and forty years old, which, when coupled with understated jumps in time, deliberately unmoors the film from any conventional sense of time, allowing the pair’s longing to assume a floating yet palpable grandness and tragedy. His quiet countenance is here deployed as a mask for his ardent emotions, holding until it is shattered at the close. Chang’s other two Wong appearances are far more peripheral, although to different aims. He is one fleeting face amid the cavalcade of veritable ghosts from Wong’s past that comprises 2046 (2004). More telling is his storyline in The Grandmaster (2013). Though he appears in only three scenes and interacts with a character from the main narrative just once, he registers profoundly as a kung fu master among equals. He is simultaneously set apart and within the fold, a state of suspension that perfectly represents his unique, essential presence in Wong’s oeuvre.

Steven Soderbergh

1. Ocean's Eleven (2001)
2. sex, lies, and videotape (1989)
3. Logan Lucky (2017)
4. Kimi (2022)
5. High Flying Bird (2019)
6. No Sudden Move (2021)
7. Equilibrium (2004)
8. Unsane (2018)
9. Let Them All Talk a.k.a. The Fall of 2019 (2020)

1. Ocean's Eleven (2001)
2. sex, lies, and videotape (1989)
3. Logan Lucky (2017)
4. Kimi (2022)
5. High Flying Bird (2019)
6. No Sudden Move (2021)
7. Unsane (2018)
8. Let Them All Talk a.k.a. The Fall of 2019 (2020)