In Review Online Drive My Car First Draft

Complete first draft for In Review Online.

Of all the innumerable gambits and devices that Hamaguchi Ryūsuke deploys in his immense Drive My Car, his particular use of language may be the most beautiful and fundamental. On some level this has almost been taken for granted: the film is an expanded adaptation of a Murakami Haruki short story, Kafuku (Nishijima Hidetoshi) is a theater director and actor, and the staging of Uncle Vanya at the Hiroshima festival draws all the characters introduced after the first forty minutes into the same orbit, so it is natural that so much time would be dedicated to the analysis of speech, to paying particular attention to dialogue and its structure in a manner that some might not associate as stringently with a typical arthouse film, even one as relatively accessible as this one. But Hamaguchi’s fascination goes even deeper than that. Kafuku presents a concise yet mystic summation of Chekhov that might be taken as something of a mission statement for the film, saying that he has refused to play Vanya because “when you say his lines, it drags out the real you,” something that cannot be borne by a man so wracked with doubt and grief in such an exposed setting. But the question of where the lines end and something more indefinite, yet just as full of truth, begins is left hanging. It’s very much worth noting that this dialogue comes two-thirds of the way through Drive My Car, and that soon afterwards Chekhov in a stage or even audiotape form will be set aside for a flight into the countryside, where the Vanya/Sonya dynamic will be played out in less obviously locked-down settings. Yet herein lies a paradox: this penultimate stretch of the film, in which Kafuku and Watari (Miura Tōko) lay bare the pasts of themselves and those they lost, is at once the quietest — there is even a moment where the sound completely drops out as the Saab arrives in the snow — and the most obviously narratively-driven part of the film, which fully commits to its transposition of Chekhov’s characters onto Hamaguchi’s central two figures. Indeed, one of the longest takes in the film, a five-minute emotional, approaches theatricality in its locked-down medium shot and simple staging, with Kafuku on the left and Watari on the right talking to each other. So, if Kafuku’s assessment of Chekhov is meant to then emanate both forwards and backwards, it does so in a way that effectively throws each and every scene into relief. The rehearsal scenes assume even greater importance, and various moments of explicit emotional revelation, like Takatsuki’s (Okada Masaki) monologue or the wondrous conversation with Lee Yun-a (Park Yu-rim), are linked in the viewer’s mind to a sense of transference, a feeling that exposure to Uncle Vanya has allowed for a freedom to express one’s true self in a way otherwise limited by reticence or the limitations of societal conventions or customs, even coming down to the language barriers that are frequently invoked. And it is notable that, though Oto’s (Kirishima Reika) taped reading of Chekhov is not heard again after this turning point, her nature, previously construed as potentially duplicitous and unknowable, becomes something much more open and revelatory. Hamaguchi fills his films with these evolutions of understanding, with these transformations of scenes that might be seen as simply quotidian into a realm that represents a staging ground for new perspectives and emotions. In its scope and indelible etchings of its characters, Drive My Car may be the fullest expression yet of one of his greatest strengths.

In Review Online Malmkrog First Draft

Complete first draft for In Review Online.

Cristi Puiu’s fifth fiction feature Malmkrog represents a further entrenchment in the oeuvre of perhaps the Romanian New Wave’s most dedicated portrayer of claustrophobic incidents and the web of personal interactions that can result in such confined spaces and at such long durations. Malmkrog represents something of an extreme in both regards: his first period film, it is set entirely in a luxurious, secluded manor in fin de siècle Transylvania and runs a full three hours and twenty minutes. These further extended stretches of time also contain little of the life-and-death drama of The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, the methodical killings of Aurora, or the deft family interplay of Sieranevada. Instead, Malmkrog confines itself almost exclusively to the philosophical, ethical, and ecumenical debates of five aristocrats, which principally cover those two inevitably intertwined constants in any empire: war and religion. But far from an arid exercise — ironic, considering the film’s foundations in Puiu’s prior staging of excerpts from Vladimir Solovyov’s novel War, Progress, and the End of History: Three Conversations, Including a Short Story of the Anti-Christ at an acting workshop in Toulouse that was later compiled into his Three Interpretation Exercises (2013) — Malmkrog emerges something as uniquely cinematic, as much in Puiu’s sense for blocking and motion as in the words and tone that are adopted over the vast bulk of 200 minutes. Split into six discrete segments, the film is careful to ensure a continuity of rigor and playfulness while varying its approach: the first segment is taken up mostly by a 44-minute long-take, which vacillates between static, stately frames and sudden pivots to catch the change in positions of each participant in the conversation, while two of the other segments are shot in individual close-ups as the speakers sit at a dinner table, cutting constantly with a marked literalism. Yet despite the potential realism of what is being depicted, save for a few spectral images and one tremendously disorienting rupture, the film’s affect lies somewhere in between. The plain absurdity of the situation, which draws dinner guests into meals that they sit down for but barely touch, instead preferring to prattle on for hours, only grows further as the night draws on, and yet it would totally overstate the situation to say that Puiu mostly uses these words as a means to lampoon the self-importance of the rich. The looming world wars are but the most obvious lenses upon which to view the relevance of these extended conversations, and it is apparent from Puiu’s watchful gaze that he finds something inherently fascinating about, say, the way the host reads from the Gospel According to Luke in order to refute one of the guests’ assertions; in many ways, this is one of the great recent films about religion and the particular ways in which believers interact with each other. And there is just as much care paid to certain details, like the interplay between the aristocrats and their servants — the second chapter is dedicated to the lead servant — or the choice of language: despite the Romanian setting, most of the film is conducted in French, the de facto language of the aristocrats at the time. Such signifiers pile up over time, and yet Malmkrog remains an immediate, bracing experience from the get-go, so monomaniacally focused is it upon the pleasures and pain of verbal one-upmanship and discourse. Puiu’s graceful direction remains consistent as an essential ballast, and the purposeful irresolution at the close only feels fitting for the existence of those in perpetual suspension, cloistered and secure in their ideologies.

Frameland 2021 Features First Draft

Complete first drafts for Frameland.

Just Don’t Think I’ll Scream It was perhaps no surprise last year that people turned to films from the past in order to contextualize and, perhaps, find some measure of solace and comfort. People naturally gravitated to works concerning some notion of infection, including the obvious Contagion and, on a much more wonderfully unanticipated notice, Tsai’s The Hole and Kurosawa’s Bright Future. However, perhaps both the most fitting and unusual choice was released this year: Frank Beauvais’s Just Don’t Think I’ll Scream, which, in an extra bit of irony, premiered in the Berlinale Forum in 2019, was scheduled to have a Film Forum run in April 2020, only to finally, belatedly, receive a January 2021 Film Forum virtual cinema release. An especially dizzying exemplar of the collage film, it is made up solely of brief shots from the 400-some films that Beauvais watched between April and October 2016, a period in his life filled with profound isolation and depression where he did basically nothing but watch films in the little village dwelling where he was abandoned by his partner. The short film clips, carefully chosen to eschew close-ups, and thus identifiability, are paired to a narration which frankly lays out his ongoing state of affairs, and the ambiguity on one side, and the blunt demarcations on the other, pair to form an odd, wondrous bond. By taking out all the expected bits of signposting, Beauvais dives fully into the swirl of images that comes with the madness of cinephilia, with the flickers of strife corresponding to the horrors of last year with depressingly full force for film lovers with a simpatico mindset. Even more than its skillful construction and daring associations, Just Don’t Think I’ll Scream emerges as an omnivorous exorcism, a brilliant evocation of a mindset that yearns for, yet is unable to escape, at least for a time.

Impromptu Dinner (Drive My Car) A film as expansive and quietly complex as Drive My Car offers numerous inroads into Hamaguchi Ryūsuke’s central concerns. One of the more understated yet fitting ones comes almost exactly halfway through the three-hour runtime, and arises, like many of the encounters that Kafuku (Nishijima Hidetoshi) has throughout the film, almost by sheer happenstance. After a day of theater rehearsals, Kafuku offers to give his dramaturge Yun-su (Jin Dae-yeon) a ride back to his house, for which he is offered dinner in turn. This leads to the utterly charming reveal of one of the cutest couples in film history: Yun-su is married to one of the central production’s actors, Yun-a (Park Yu-rim). This sets the tone for a set of dinner conversations that, as much as any scene in the film, is equally delightful, moving, awkward, and insightful, with Kafuku’s driver Misaki (Miura Tōko) present as a silent but palpable counterpoint. Misaki’s taciturn nature exists almost as the inverse of Yu-su’s own physical muteness: where the former keeps to herself, slowly opening up as the film moves along, Park’s expressivity and passion emerges with forceful poise from her very first scene. While often present, she is given a handful of true showcase scenes, each seeming to tilt the entire film’s sense of equilibrium on its practice. And it is here, the only one where the words are her own and not Chekov’s, that it comes most fully into being — though of course she is still being interpreted by Yun-su; characters are fittingly never free from mediation in Hamaguchi’s films. Talking about her past and her decision to start acting, her clarity of thought and reason shines all the brighter in the face of the conflicting emotions present elsewhere. The ability to move on from past traumas and find a better tomorrow is one that each character is seeking in their own way, and Yun-su’s role in this, and her totally generous description of how she got to it, is as cathartic and beautiful as the many other brilliant scenes of more forthright understanding.

West Side Story First Draft

Complete first draft for The Film Stage.

West Side Story — a curious exception in the modern glut of sequels and remakes, with its powerhouse combination of hallowed subject matter and director — announces itself immediately. Where the original 1961 film helmed by Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins began with a series of aerial shots over New York City, director Steven Spielberg opts for an elaborate crane shot that etches out an important distinction: this story is set amid the slums in the process of being cleared for the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, the immaculate Manhattan arts complex where, it must be said, the film premiered a few days ago. While previous incarnations of the Romeo and Juliet-inspired musical — with music by Leonard Bernstein and lyrics by the dearly departed Stephen Sondheim — were identifiably set in a downtrodden New York, an entirely different sense of precarity begins here, woven into the fabric of the film, as the Jets’ struggle with the Sharks seems doomed almost before it begins. West Side Story traffics in such deviations, at the level of both form and content, in a manner that alternately heralds the brilliance of both its source material and its director. In terms of its song and narrative structure, it functions as a hybrid of the musical — “Cool” is moved back to Act 1 — and Wise and Robbins’ film — “America” remains a buoyant series of ripostes between Anita (Ariana DeBose) and Bernardo (David Alvarez). But in others, Spielberg and Tony Kushner have greatly built out the contexts of characters, beginning with Tony (Ansel Elgort) himself, who at the start of the film has just been released after a year’s stint in prison for almost killing another boy in a gang fight. Apart from giving him another reason for wanting to leave the gang lifestyle, it also institutes a theme of transformation that courses through a number of the characters: María’s (Rachel Zegler) prospective fiancé Chino (Josh Andrés Rivera) is a bookish accountant who wants to join the Sharks against Bernardo’s wishes, Anybodys’s (nonbinary actor Iris Mena) desire to be in the Jets and assertion of gender identity is further emphasized. While West Side Story, with its two-day timespan and inevitable tragic end, is an inherently linear work, this version registers as even more focused in its progression and development of characters. Across the board, arcs or scenes not present in the original work lend an additional layer of urgency to West Side Story, whether they be as charming as María deciding whether or not to wear lipstick (against Bernardo’s wishes) to the dance, or as charged as Riff — Mike Faist, who practically steals the film with his unique combination of ease, intensity, and vulnerability — purchasing a gun to bring to the rumble; “Cool” is reconfigured as a duel between him and Tony, who attempts to take the gun from him to prevent the rumble from happening. In line with the concerted efforts to cast Latinx actors for the Puerto Rican characters, purposefully unsubtitled Spanish plays a significant role: first in a rousing song that the Sharks sing in defiance of the Jets and the police after the fight in the prologue, then in a set of conversations between María, Anita, and Bernardo, wherein they speak a mix of English and Spanish. In keeping with a general aspirational spirit through this version that collides with the tragedy, Bernardo is a boxer intending to make his living, and so Anita constantly chastises him, telling him and María to practice speaking English, even while all three of them feel more comfortable expressing themselves naturally in Spanish. All of this is consciously configured so that English speakers will understand everything of importance, but there’s a sensitivity to the way that people speak on both sides that is embodied in one of the biggest yet most reverential changes: Doc is replaced with Valentina, the Puerto Rican widow of Doc who runs his store, and is played by Rita Moreno, the original film’s Anita. Very much in the role of a mentor, she represents an alternative path of racial and behavioral harmony, singing “Somewhere” and participating in the final procession that closes the film. While actors like Moreno, Faist, DeBose, and newcomer Zegler get their moments to shine, it’s likely most accurate to say that West Side Story’s star is Spielberg himself, with a great deal of assistance from stalwart cinematographer Janusz Kamiński, production designer Adam Stockhausen, and costumer Paul Tazewell. With his first full-fledged musical, Spielberg has further incorporated the swooping cameras and piercing lighting that have defined his style as of late; even more fascinatingly, his choices in setting bring out fascinating motifs. The Jets and their turf are defined by blue and cooler tones, while the Sharks and the Puerto Rican neighborhoods opt for warmer, typically orange tones, and the interplay alone in Tony and María’s costumes suggests its own clear progression. While the locales in the 1961 film certainly felt authentic, here they are bustling with life, suggesting something of Jacques Demy in the incorporation of whole communities within musical numbers: “America” becomes even more lively when characters are weaving in and out of stores, crowds, and sidewalks, taking over the streets for short bursts before moving back once again. “I Feel Pretty”’s dress store becomes a multi-level emporium where María literally tries on the fashions and lifestyle of the White upper-class, a literalization very much in keeping with Spielberg’s overall vision. When the very ground on which people live becomes uncertain, the necessity of passion — in love, in combat — becomes all the more apparent, and Spielberg’s fidelity to that sentiment and to his own decisions bears the vitality of this alternate take aloft.