The Flip Side of the Coin: October 2024

For viewers familiar with Philippe Lesage's international breakthrough Genèse (2018), the beginning of his follow-up may come as a shock. Who by Fire, the Canadian director's fourth narrative feature, starts not with propulsive schoolroom dancing, but with stasis in motion, following a car on a highway as it winds its way deeper into the woods. The shot holds for an unnervingly long time, accompanied by a droning musical accompaniment, before moving into the car, where two people's legs and hands are seen as they sit side-by-side, crammed in the back seat. The tentative movements eventually give way to faces captured in a gliding pan; only later will it be made clear that this car contains screenwriter Albert (Paul Ahmarani), his two children Aliocha (Aurelia Arandi-Longpré) and Max (Antoine Marchand Gagnon), and the latter's friend Jeff (Noah Parker), on their way to Albert's former collaborator Blake (Arieh Worthalter) in his cabin only accessible by seaplane. The somewhat spiky sense of humor established by this early journey sets the tone for what slowly reveals itself to be a tremendously unpredictable, protean work, drawing its energy from the disparities between the history of certain relationships and how they can unexpectedly develop and feed upon each other. Of course, it all stems from the latent resentment between Albert and Blake: after a series of acclaimed films, the latter decided that he wanted to move away from fiction and towards truth, making documentaries for a much smaller audience and leaving the former in the lurch. This is the first time that they have seen each other in years, and their playful roughhousing and first trading of barbs have already been showcased by the time the first of Albert's prized wines have been opened. This entire dynamic would be enough to sustain a typical film, but Who by Fire's ambition is such that it not only folds in numerous specialties prized by each man—Albert's highly developed palate, Blake's aptitude for the outdoors—but also seems to expand, infecting each significant relationship with more than a hint of rivalry. The most unexpected bond formed and broken is between Blake and Jeff, who was invited to the cabin because of his interest in filmmaking and admiration of the veteran director, though his eye quickly wanders towards Aliocha and her own conflicted feelings. Piled on top of this are various associates of Blake's, including his editor, cook, hunting guide, and eventually a couple—including a former star played by Irène Jacob—who take up residence in the lodge partway through, notching up the intrigue to even greater heights that are somehow sustained across 160 minutes. Who by Fire relishes each and every challenge it places itself. It is a film with few onscreen people but a stuffed ensemble cast; it makes great use of the central lodge yet possesses an increasingly expansive sense of the surrounding woods and rivers; it deals frankly with illicit desires but offers a certain discretion. The coy sense of play sometimes literally bursts into song, including a rollicking (and hilariously plot-relevant) group dance to the B-52s' "Rock Lobster," but is typically expressed by Lesage's facility with camera movement. A few scenes set at the dining table are as expressive as anything in the cinema of the past few years, including a long take where the camera drifts over the table into seemingly impossible positions. One of Who by Fire's greatest assets is Lesage's willingness to shift the tenor of his film to fit any given sequence. Sometimes, the entire genre switches; one stretch in the first half follows Jeff as he gets lost in the woods at night and quickly has to find shelter, resembling a survival thriller more than anything else. Its fluidity even extends to setting—it's entirely unclear when the film takes place, with typewriters and Steenbecks clashing with a mention of Jacob's character's stardom in the 1990s—and point of identification: Jeff eventually emerges as the main character but (by design) Parker's unassured, recessive presence is outmatched by Ahmarani and Worthalter's gregarious loquaciousness. What is certain, after all the emotional exuberance and anguish felt at certain moments, is a central irresoluteness. After all the sparks, the fire still burns, even if it's only a few smoldering embers.

Thursday, October 3, 2024

REFORM! First Draft

Complete first draft for In Review Online.

It can often be difficult to evaluate the work of a director who is branching out from their niche. With Jon Bois, he has worked himself into several such pigeonholes, due to his relatively recent rapid rise to prominence (within a more cinephilic context) and the demands of market expectations. Bois, of course, has always been a video creator interested first and foremost in sports, even discounting his longstanding tenure with SB Nation and Secret Base. He has also never shied away from the importance of his collaborators, praising the contributions of Alex Rubenstein to their Dorktown videos, which include The History of the Seattle Mariners series that arguably brought Bois to his current level of recognition as a pioneer in Internet documentary aesthetics. So, the prospect of a Jon Bois video made without any other voices (literally and figuratively) for the first time in years, and on a subject entirely apart from sports, might almost seem like a test of how far viewers are willing to go along with his interests. Reform! comes, not coincidentally, alongside the launch of the Secret Base Patreon and the continuation of the long-dormant Pretty Good series, Bois's first great video endeavor. It divided its focus equally between sports and non-sports topics, and was put on hiatus because of lack of interest and/or trepidation from sponsors more focused on sports; the hope is that the Patreon will allow a general branching out for Secret Base employees, most of all Bois. While it plays out similarly to the Pretty Good series, especially possessing the greater sense of narrative-building that the new videos have shown, Reform! is a different proposition altogether. In three videos totaling about two-and-a-half hours, Bois relates the history of the Reform Party movement, the most successful third party in American politics of the last century, which formed and imploded within eight years. While this is his first video focused entirely on politics, it is by no means a sudden awakening. He has laced his stances throughout his videos for years, often to galvanizing effect: the scene in the Randall Cunningham video where he enumerates the reasons why someone would be pro-union before abruptly saying that anti-union people are assholes; the references to the lack of accountability for white-collar criminals responsible for the Great Recession and the Atlanta Falcons-New England Patriots Super Bowl as a reflection of the 2016 election in The History of the Atlanta Falcons; his direction of the Fighting in the Age of Loneliness series penned by Chapo Trap House co-host Felix Biederman, which construed mixed martial-arts and UFC as a reflection of our entire era; there are even mentions in Falcons and 20020 of the Native American practice of a precursor to football as a non-violent substitute for war. Reform!, then, comes not as an entirely new direction but instead a long-awaited, brilliant elaboration on themes that remained dormant until now. For one, as much as Rubenstein, Seth Rosenthal, Kofie Yeboah, and other collaborators have improved Secret Base projects as writers and narrators, it is somewhat freeing to remember that Bois is the only voice here; the unity provided by his sole perspective creates a much different and more even experience from the Dorktown videos. There is also an urgency that pulses through Reform!; not to downplay the importance of sports to the public and individual people, but Bois constantly reorients the series around the issues that mattered then and continue to matter now, the Reform Party's pervasive interest in curbing the national debt notwithstanding. This, interestingly, creates a tension with the knowledge that all the stories contained within revolve around three elections whose outcomes are presumably known to virtually every viewer. While many individual games which Bois and Rubenstein elaborated upon so fully in the Dorktown videos were unlikely to be known to the average viewer, the ultimate "important" outcome is already known here: Clinton will win in 1992 and 1996, Bush will win in 2000, with the rest of the proceedings "merely" fascinating detail. Considering the consternation and strife that runs rampant throughout Reform!, it creates, if not a sense of waste, then a feeling of doom and gloom, of the nation heading in a direction that the main figures (and Bois himself) do not necessarily want. At its heart, Reform! is interested, like all of Bois's greatest projects, in people that embody a certain dream or fantasy that clashes with ordinary ideas of success. The Reform Party proves to be one of the starkest examples of this: its largest wins on a national level were achieved by billionaire Ross Perot, who was broadly disinterested in the practice of politics, and through his and many others' incompetence its broad relevance disappeared as soon as Pat Buchanan took control. But within this context, Bois rightly sees even the minimal true gains as monumental salvos upon the status quo at a time where, per Francis Fukuyama, "the end of history" had been achieved. He sees them as the embodiment of a promise, full of all the faults inherent in a profoundly human enterprise that quickly was co-opted and transformed into something more monstrous. In Reform!, Bois has also assembled perhaps his greatest cast of inexplicable people from names and personalities on down. Especially within this context, it's a delight that Bois, for perhaps the first time in his videos, treats a main character with nothing but contempt; the description of Pat Buchanan as a "big bag of shit" is only the start of a beautiful and entirely justified amount of invective. Elsewhere, he finds a great deal of insight in the inexplicable actions by people capable of being decent: the many blunders by Ross Perot, Jesse Ventura (the closest thing Reform! has to a hero) supporting Donald Trump for the nomination, Lenora Fulani supporting Buchanan, John Hagelin's persistent belief in meditation's ability to bring about world peace. He allows himself more skepticism in these and other moments than he generally does in his sports videos, given the potential existential importance of their actions, but he does so from a place of empathy. Reform! has great fun in crafting sequences that make full use of this cast, the central political chart, and the sets of bars tracking the polling of the candidates in the major elections. The "clown car" montage that blazes through every single Reform Party candidate seeking the nomination in 2000 is one of his most breathlessly hilarious, shifting with breakneck speed between "harmless lunatics and malevolent scumbags." But two sequences, conveyed with starkly different means, stand out for their profound sadness. The first closes part 2, with Bois, in the absence of any footage, utilizing crude models constructed in Google Earth—previously seen most prominently in the farcical "Mr. Jello" scene in Mariners—to illustrate the ousting of Reform Party chairman Jack Gargan, founding father of the entire movement. His stubborn refusal to yield the floor even as he is being shouted down by the vast majority of the room and punches are thrown, sending blocky human figures to the ground, makes the scene all the more horrible in the sudden finality of each action. By placing the viewer literally in his perspective, the degree to which his dreams have been curdled by the politics he sought to dismantle in the first place is visceral. The second centers upon a much less consequential figure, the pricelessly named successor chairman Gerry Moan, who has been characterized as a stickler for rules in an attempt to maintain the decorum of the party even as Buchanan runs roughshod. When a motion is made at the party convention to oust party secretary Jim Mangia, his former longtime ally, for clearly homophobic reasons, Bois presents the sequence simply, using the footage from C-SPAN as Moan struggles to maintain his composure. Bois interweaves his narration with Moan's choked-out words, moving away briefly to show a picture of the two together even amidst the strife earlier on in the convention, before showing Moan leaving the stage, refusing to preside over his friend's dismissal with a sad kind of dignity. Reform!, despite the magnitude of its issues and ramifications, up to and including the Buchanan iteration's profound influence upon both the 2000 and 2016 elections, is maybe the most human of Bois's work so far. Just as the History of series use the structure of a team's history to tell the fascinating stories of individuals, so does Reform! observe a different kind of a pageantry within a framework to convey just what makes all these people tick, seeing none of them as saints but only some of them as demons, which makes the ultimate disappointment all the more potent. However, Reform! concludes with a paean not unlike the endings of Adam Curtis's documentaries of considerably more far-reaching pessimism: a sudden ray of light that emphasizes dreams and possibilities. It is a hope for a better future provided by the seed of idealism that the Reform Party symbolized, placed in contrast to the atrocities and disasters of the past twenty-four years—signaled by Bois simply as his camera glides over the years, up to and including 2023—that have often been indirectly encouraged or directly caused by both political parties. When faced so much devastation in this area, and so much oddity and failed potential in the Reform Party, that Bois still retains this much ultimate optimism speaks to his conviction, the heretofore unexpressed boldness of his vision.

Tuesday, October 1, 2024

Tsai Ming-liang First Draft

Complete first draft for the BFI.

Why this might not seem so easy With the exception of Apichatpong Weerasethakul, the Malaysian-Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-liang is likely the most famous active filmmaker within the loose movement known as slow cinema. Renowned for his static long takes, minimal dialogue, and the obscure and unpredictable nature of his pacing and narratives, Tsai operates at an extreme end of the general cinephilic consciousness. He has been a beloved figure for decades without once sacrificing the rigor of his filmmaking, constantly pushing the boundaries of cinema’s capacity for duration and stasis. But Tsai’s oeuvre is not merely a series of uninflected experiments with form. Among many other things, it is an expression of love for his muse: actor Lee Kang-sheng, who has appeared in every one of his theatrical feature films. A gay filmmaker with a straight actor as the subject of his unrequited desires, Tsai has observed Lee age onscreen for more than 30 years, moving into weathered middle-age while maintaining a perpetually taciturn, world-weary expression and physicality. This persistence of vision is matched by Tsai’s eye for the contemporary Taipei that became his home, full of decaying apartments and littered streets which reflect the essential loneliness of Lee and some of his other key actors like Yang Kuei-mei, Chen Shiang-chyi, Miao Tien, and Lu Yi-ching. As their typically thwarted longings play out amid a city which is at once modern and bygone, Tsai’s films accumulate a tremendous sense of mood and texture, as imposing as they are inviting. The best place to start - Rebels of the Neon God One of Tsai’s other key traits is his status as one of the most teleological of directors. From 1991 to 2013, every single one of his features registered as a conscious step in his development, introducing new thematic concerns and formal innovations with a consistency perhaps only matched by Robert Bresson. So, it makes sense to start at the beginning, with Tsai’s directorial debut Rebels of the Neon God (1991), his first theatrical feature after an extended stint in television filmmaking. Already, many of the pieces are in place: the interwoven structure with central characters—here, Lee and early regular Chen Chao-jung, who forms a relationship with a young woman—who only glancingly interact, heavy rain, and the family of Lee, Miao, and Lu, which runs through a great number of Tsai’s films. Granted, there are multiple aspects that feel distinct from even his following few films: there is a synth bass-heavy original score, a greater focus on petty crime—and a corresponding, relatively straightforward narrative—courtesy of Chen's character, and an incorporation of wider society reminiscent of Edward Yang’s work. But the means by which Rebels of the Neon God suddenly distills itself into the events of a few nights, mixing its protagonists’ frustrations into a potent blend, is pure Tsai. What to watch next Following logically from the previous section’s classification of Tsai, the best next film is his second feature, Vive L’Amour (1994), which refines its predecessor’s latent love triangle into an exploration of sexuality within a vacant apartment. Featuring the first overt demonstration of Tsai’s career-long depiction of tortured queerness, it culminates in an unforgettable expression of anguished catharsis. As steady as Tsai’s films are, they frequently feature wild swings in tone from scene to scene, and there are no better examples than his two musicals, which break at periodic intervals from his trademark minimalism into choreographed sequences featuring lip-synched performances of classic Mandarin songs. The Hole (1998) is a quasi-apocalyptic romance, featuring Lee and Yang as apartment neighbors connected when a plumber knocks a hole into his floor/her ceiling during a mysterious waterborne pandemic. Exclusively consisting of Grace Chang songs, its musical numbers are some of the most jubilant in cinema. By contrast, The Wayward Cloud (2005) features Lee as a porn actor reconnecting with Chen’s character from the devastating The River (1997) and What Time Is It There? (2001)—which itself literalizes the kinship between Tsai and Lee's collaboration and the François Truffaut/Jean-Pierre Léaud partnership—during a water shortage, and, despite some similarly freewheeling musical numbers, registers as an uncommonly harsh film even by Tsai’s often unsparing standards. Tsai’s greatest film is Goodbye, Dragon Inn (2003), which breaks from his usual interests to depict the cinema space as a vanishing nexus for community and desire, featuring a cruising Japanese tourist and Chen as a limping ticket-taker pining for Lee’s projectionist. Taking place on a grand theater’s final night of operation during and after a screening of King Hu’s legendary action film, it is one of the few examples where a director consciously set out to make a masterpiece and succeeded; Tsai’s placement of it on his own Sight & Sound list speaks for itself. Finally, two essential stepping-stones to Tsai’s new period beginning with his gorgeous Days (2020) must be mentioned. Stray Dogs (2013) is one of his most striking works, starring Lee as an unhoused single father and concluding with two of the greatest extended static shots in all of cinema. The Walker series has formed the bulk of his output in the past decade, all starring Lee as a bald, red-robed monk moving extremely slowly through a variety of global locales. The first short “Walker” (2012) and featurette Journey to the West (2014, featuring Denis Lavant) are both essential, but “No No Sleep” (2015) is an under-heralded triumph, with indelible shots from a moving metro train and of public bathing which embody solitude with startling vividness. Where not to start One of the great hidden gems in Tsai’s filmography is his documentary Afternoon (2015), which consists of nothing more (or less) than a 137-minute conversation between Tsai and Lee in the home they share in the mountains of Taiwan, carried out in a single camera angle and four shots, with brief black screens only used to indicate when the crew had to swap out the camera’s SD cards. It may be impenetrable or dull to many, but for those familiar with the depth of the relationship between Tsai and Lee on and off camera, it is a work of great beauty, showing both the director’s surprising gregariousness and the actor’s typical reserve while shedding light on innumerable personal topics. Even more than most of Tsai’s works, it demands a patience and familiarity, amply rewarding those who engage it on its terms.