Petite Solange First Draft

Complete first draft written for In Review Online.

It’s perhaps unfair to say that divorce dramas have had too great a resurgence in recent years. It is by its nature a prime, extreme avenue for filmmakers to explore questions of family, separation, and bureaucracy, but this vehicle for Big Themes can frequently falter if the subject is taken merely on face value, and not burrowed into and inhabited. In that sense, Axelle Ropert would seem to be an ideal director for this sort of endeavor: she directed Tirez la langue, mademoiselle (2013, also known as Miss and the Doctors), one of the finest romantic comedies of recent years, which constantly expanded outward from its love triangle of brother doctors slowly falling in love with the same woman to capture the sense of city life and ineffable connections. Ropert’s newest film, Petite Solange, playing in the International Competition at Locarno, falls under more conventional lines. Its eponymous character, a 13-year-old played by Jade Springer, leads a relatively average life with her parents Antoine (Philippe Katerine), a music store salesman, and Aurélia (Léa Drucker), a theater actress specializing in wronged women, along with her bookish elder brother Romain (Grégoire Montana). Indeed, aside from an evident brightness of spirit, the most distinctive factor about Solange initially is her last name, Maserati, an Italian name inherited from her father which is commented on numerous times throughout the film. But the family begins unhappy, with Antoine engaged in a surreptitious affair with his coworker and Aurélia frequently absent, and only worsens as the film goes on. What sets Petite Solange apart from a run-of-the-mill divorce film, however, is the question of Ropert’s interest. Solange remains front and center throughout the film, with most of the divorce aspect conveyed in overheard shouts, tentative tête-à-tête conversations with her parents, and the normal vagaries of familial interaction. More than anything, this is a patient, quotidian film; for much of it the only substantial shift in these dynamics is Romain practically fleeing to the relative refuge of a graduate degree program. Instead of constant struggle, Ropert opts for a certain creeping sense of unease, a slow evolution in Solange’s character and outlook on life. Sometimes, this runs the risk of cliché: a certain subplot with Solange becoming more and more troublesome in school as a result of domestic stress feels too pat. But more often, Ropert’s signature interest in little subplots, reflecting the unsettled and capricious nature of life, comes through, especially in a tentative flirtation Solange has with a piano-playing bad boy at her school. All of this builds to a sudden release, a rupture in the film’s final twenty minutes that jumps an indeterminate number of years to a greatly changed Solange. Springer’s performance shifts radically in this moment, and it illuminates the extent to which the film principally relies on her initially ebullient presence, along with Ropert’s careful sense of direction and the beautiful 16mm cinematography by Sébastien Buchmann. This is not a radical film about divorce, but it continually demonstrates an interest in burrowing just a little deeper, going in a slightly more interesting direction, and the agglomeration of these choices results in something gratifyingly warm and complex.

Days First Draft

Complete first draft written for Hyperallergic.

Tsai Ming-liang exists in a curious position within the cinephile consciousness. One of the greatest Taiwanese directors and a foremost practitioner of the very loose movement known as slow cinema, which arose in the late 1980s and early 90s, predominately in Asian countries, his feature films all share distinctive attributes — extended, static long takes; frequent presence of rain or water flooding; a patient eye dedicated to a decaying, ultramodern Taipei, where he has set most of his films — that have become so ingrained that it can obscure some of his most interesting recurring elements. In addition, while Tsai himself is well-known, and a certain number of his films are commonly seen, relatively speaking — including Goodbye, Dragon Inn (2013), Vive L’Amour (1994), and Stray Dogs (2013) — others are underseen, lost in the vagaries of poor quality windowboxed DVDs and ultralimited distribution. This isn’t to say that his vaunted aesthetic unity — which, it should be said, is disrupted when needed, such as in the unconventional musical sequences in The Hole (1998) and The Wayward Cloud (2005) — isn’t a key factor of the films, but it is too often favored in comparison to the great narrative unity that his films present. For Tsai is one of the most teleological of directors, concentrating a step-by-step, film-by-film procession focused upon his muse Lee Kang-sheng, who has been in all his feature films, ever since his debut with Rebels of the Neon God (1991). Understanding Lee’s role is crucial, and not just because his distinctive, halting manner of movement and speaking sets a kind of template for all of Tsai’s actors: Tsai is openly gay, and the backbone of his films is his necessarily unrequited longing for Lee, who is straight but often plays a queer character. In effect, the films are tortured by this central relationship, resulting in narratives of outsiders, Lee most of all, longing for some sense of meaning and companionship in a world that is changing before their eyes; the title of I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone (2006) could scarcely be more apropos. Lee’s presence, in addition to recurring male and female actors like Chen Shiang-chyi, Miao Tien, and Yang Kuei-mei, is crucial to this: he plays more-or-less the same character in all these films, initially named Xiaokang but eventually being named just Kang (xiao is Chinese for small). While taking Tsai’s career as a totally coherent continuous narrative isn’t strictly true, it does very much feel like his oeuvre was leading directly to the last two shots of Stray Dogs, a twenty-minute tour-de-force where cinema itself seems to come to a final standstill. It’s no surprise that Tsai initially announced that he was retiring from narrative feature filmmaking after that film. While he has continued to make short and mid-length works in fiction, documentary, and even gallery settings, Tsai kept his promise until Days, which premiered last year in Berlin. One of Tsai’s most stripped-down, direct, and moving works, and one which heralds the start of an exciting new chapter in his career, it was conceived under unusual circumstances for him. Lee was undergoing severe neck pains a few years ago, reflective of Xiaokang’s affliction in The River (1997), and Tsai journeyed with him to film his intense treatments without any specific reason. At the same time, Tsai met a Laotian immigrant to Bangkok, Anong Houngheuangsy, and began filming him as well as he went about his daily work, including extended moments of cooking. From these roots came the first half of Days, which crosscuts between these two strands of footage formed from roughly three years of filming. While these were filmed without any specific concept in mind, they remain as brilliantly shot as any of his films, patiently and lovingly watching these people doing their quotidian tasks. This suddenly pivots at the hour-mark, where Kang and Anong come together in a hotel room for an erotic massage encounter. The effect is stark and entrancing: it has been decades since Tsai had a male lead performance alongside Lee’s continual presence, and to see these two men locked in such intimacy, whether transactional or not, over a period about half an hour, is unprecedented in his work. The summative effect of Days’s elements, especially the long, fading conclusion, is of a melancholy as potent as his other films, but there is something new: a genuine fulfillment, a belief in deep, life-changing connection, even if it is only for a single night.

Deep End First Draft

Complete first draft written for In Review Online.

Jerzy Skolimowski had a distinctive output well before he ended up in London. He began his film career in his native Poland with three successive features from 1964 to 1966 — Identification Marks: None, Walkover, and Barrier — which acted as semi-autobiographical accounts of his experiences under the communist system. The first two starred Skolimowski himself as his alter ego Andrzej Leszczyc, both relatively rough-and-tumble films featuring a good amount of tracking shots and evocative shadows, while the latter opted for a more surreal and dreamlike aesthetic. These two approaches were effectively fused in his next film Le Départ (1967), a Belgian film starring Jean-Pierre Léaud as an auto-obsessed hairdresser, which inserted into its pleasurably loose progression various ruptures, including a final projector breakdown as effective as its contemporary Persona. So where does one go after such a decisive break? For Skolimowski, it was to the deep end, or rather, Deep End, his 1970 film and his first effort in the UK. Its focus remains resolutely on Mike (John Moulder Brown), a 15-year-old who gets his first job as a shower room attendant at a public bath, and the object of his burgeoning obsession, his 25-year-old coworker Susan (Jane Asher). In the midst of this central dynamic runs all manner of unnerving, frankly presented encounters and characters, including Susan’s fiancé Chris (Chris Sandford), her lover and Mike’s former physical education teacher (Karl Michael Vogler), and all manner of vaguely or sometimes overtly sinister figures in London society. For Deep End is a film all about sex, or more specifically the absolute terror of sexual perversions, and how quickly it can warp the minds of those around it. This is not to say that Skolimowski is a scold or a prude by any means: he clearly sees sexuality and comfort with it as a spectrum — albeit within a strictly hetero framework, concerning the characters in this film — wherein Mike and Susan are on roughly opposite ends. Mike is very clearly confused by anyone’s advances as long as they don’t concern the woman of his affections, whereas Susan almost sees sex as an a priori, constantly teasing Mike even as his behavior gets more and more unnerving, though there are certain lines drawn for her: she eventually gets fed up with the constant pestering that various men enact upon her, she objects when her fiancé drags her to an adult education film. Like Peeping Tom from a decade before it, Deep End almost sees London as a nightmarish dystopia of sex gone mad, seeing both the bathhouse and the nightlife as a hotbed of strange and unsettling people. Skolimowski’s role here is essentially one of modulation, and he does so here by essentially bifurcating the film. The first half of the film largely takes place in and around the bathhouse, leaving aside the trip to the porn theater, and the interactions that Mike has with clients, including an especially memorable one where an older woman repeatedly pushes his head into her breasts while discussing association football. While sequences like that are willfully extended and acted out in discomfiting long take, the second half takes that strategy and expands it dramatically, first in a 20-minute sequence that follows Mike attempting to spy on Susan and her fiancé, which involves him eating something like ten hot dogs from a Chinese cart owner to give himself a justification for staying in the area, stealing a standee of a nude woman who resembles Susan, and taking refuge with a sex worker with a broken leg, all scored to music from “The Can.” The remaining 25 minutes of the film are taken up by a sequence of even greater absurdity, as Mike and Susan, huddled in the empty pool, boil five large bags of snow in a small kettle and strain it through her stockings in an effort to find her engagement ring’s diamond. What’s emphasized throughout Deep End is the forcefulness of Mike’s teenage fixations, and how they can be expressed in often violent tantrums that go unrecognized until it’s far too late. It’s entirely to Skolimowski’s credit that the final action here is as willfully strange yet visceral as the rest of the film: an almost inexplicable result, augmented by a fundamental damning motivation that resonates with a clanging horror.

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.