The City and the City First Draft

Complete first draft for In Review Online.

There’s something to be said for the narrative and structural principles of incoherence, attempting to evoke a fractured place, culture, or time through a jumble of stories. The results can certainly be mixed, suffering from a surfeit of complications, or otherwise failing to link together its strands with anything more than the faintest of ideas. But in the right hands, it can be a revelation, little pieces adding up to a grand portrait that continually surprises as it digs deeper and deeper into the unknown. The City and the City, the first directorial collaboration between Syllas Tzoumerkas (The Miracle of the Sargasso Sea) and Christos Passalis (an actor known for Dogtooth and his appearances in Tzoumerkas’s past films, making his directorial debut here), falls somewhere in the middle of these two impulses in its chronicling of the Greek Jewish community Thessaloniki and its severe persecution by Nazi invaders in 1943. Across six chapters, something of a vague narrative develops as characters, including a Jewish family, drift in and out of the stories told, but many moments initially seem random or disconnected, linked only by the shared air of unease and dislocation in both narrative and presentation. Tzoumerkas and Passalis’s directorial presentation ascribes to a similar level of free mixing. While The City and the City appears to all be set in the 20th century, stretching from World War II to somewhere in the 1980s, at least several scenes make no efforts to hide the present state of the city, with modern cars and bright lights rushing by these people clad in period garb. Even the scenes more visibly set in the 1940s have a slippery relationship: the first chapter cuts between an impoverished clothes seller filmed in black-and-white — surrounded by a cascade of languages including Turkish, Armenian, and Ladino — and a richer Greek family filmed in color; the ordinary implication would be that these take place in separate times, but that doesn’t appear to be the case. The City and the City finds more of a focal point when it deals directly with the horrors of the Nazi occupation. An especially striking sequence depicts forced physical exercises run by the soldiers, where they torment men in extended takes whose camera focus seems to only capture a small circle in a different part of the frame with each shot. Such devices, along with the use of archival footage and explanatory intertitles, creates a more vivid sense of history and direct effects than many of the more deliberately obscure episodes. Perhaps The City and the City’s most incisive element comes in its chapter title cards: each one shows a particular government organization who forms the principal aggressor for the part. Crucially, this extends both before and after the Nazi occupation; while the penultimate scene, appearing to be either a flashback to or a revelation of a secret backroom where fascist torture is still taking place, muddles things too much, the central message becomes clear in these indicting moments: oppression will always threaten those not in power, especially the people of a specific community.

RRR First Draft

Complete first draft for In Review Online.

S. S. Rajamouli’s latest epic RRR begins with perhaps the most unexpected first song possible. A young girl, Malli (Twinkle Sharma), is singing to Catherine Buxton (Alison Doody), the wife of a Delhi governor (Ray Stevenson) who is visiting the Gond tribe in a forest located in the modern state of Telangana. After being charmed by this plaintive voice, the Buxtons trick Malli’s family into selling her as a plaything, severely beating her mother when she tries to resist. This, as the first of the three title cards that makes up RRR’s title helpfully points out, is The StoRy: a colonial force brutally asserting its force and power over the native people, with Malli’s innocence both registering strongly on an individual and a national, allegorical level. But such an appellation is as much pretext as it is the driving force for the narrative: the film quickly becomes the story of two real Telugu revolutionaries in an imagined account of a friendship that the two formed in the 1920s: Komaram Bheem (N. T. Rama Rao Jr.) and Alluri Sitarama Raju (Ram Charan). The two are presented, at least initially, as literally elementally opposed forces: Raju is introduced as The FiRe, first seen as a police officer fighting through literally hundreds of people to capture an Indian man for a superior, while Bheem is The WateR, whose opening scene finds him trapping an enormous tiger. At first glance, this appears to be the central conflict of the film, with Bheem, the tribe’s protector, attempting to rescue his lost lamb while Raju, the traitor cop, attempts to find the “outsider” in the teeming throngs of Delhi. But after an extraordinary sequence that finds the two of them meeting and then saving a boy caught in the water below a train derailment by jumping over a bridge and wrapping themselves in an Indian flag to avoid the flames, the title card, 30 minutes in, at last comes in and the entire dynamic shifts. RRR — which doesn’t stand for anything, as Rajamouli chose to use a title that could appeal to as wide an audience as possible given the grand sweep of the narrative; the fan-contest winner in Telugu was Raudraṁ raṇaṁ rudhiraṁ, which translates to Rage War Blood — thus presents a title, and a narrative, that is both united and divided. The two men, who clasp hands both in the air and underwater, quickly become best friends, sharing an interest in general frolicking and their impossibly productive workout regiments, while they both continue with their missions. The first revelation of their identities and perceived betrayals on both their parts comes to head at the final scene before the InteRRRval, during Bheem’s chaotic assault on the governor’s palace, before it is revealed that Raju actually joined the police force to obtain weapons for his own state’s revolution against the British. The cascading revelations about Raju and their effect on Bheem introduce an interesting, fitting balance of motivations. Bheem is never anything other than himself, a principled and kind man who will nonetheless do anything it takes to bring the tribe’s daughter home, while Raju’s character is complex and conflicted, equally committed to his ultimate cause though it requires active participation in the subjugation and maiming of his own people. But such concerns, and how they dovetail into the wider portrait of betrayal and redemption, arise just as much out of the time spent with building brotherhood as it does in the gloriously artificial action sequences. RRR is truly a packed film, but its 182 minutes never feel unjustified, and while the character relationships are simple and almost preordained from each character’s first appearance — especially with Jenny (Olivia Morris), the One Good British person who Bheem falls in love with, and Sita (Alia Bhatt), Raju’s fiancée — much of the pleasure of the film comes from the slow assemblage of every piece into place. It might be a machine, but it is one of magnificent intricacy and care; even the obvious CGI enhancements — including the wholly artificial animals — retain a great impact because of their firm grounding in real bodies and choreography. (It should be noted here that others more knowledgeable than I have written about the potential use, whether intentional or not, of the film to support the facist Hindu nationalism of Modi, though all antagonism in the film is directly squarely towards the British colonizers.) Any accurate survey of RRR inevitably (and rightly) devolves into a recounting of the most memorable set-pieces that Rajamouli crafts with swooping cameras, exaggerated angles, and rhythmic editing: the song “Naatu Naatu,” which begins as a rebuke to English pretentiousness at a party and becomes a joyous competition between men and women alike to see who at the dance will be the last one standing; a prison break that involves Raju dual-wielding rifles while sitting on Bheem’s shoulders; the sheer chaos of the raid on the palace, with so much action going on in the background as Bheem and Raju face off with hose and torch in hand, respectively. But what sticks just as vividly in the mind are the defiance of Bheem as he is lacerated by a spiked whip, his refusal to kneel inspiring the crowd of Indians to stampede the guards; the improbable spectacle of the governor being launched from his car and firing his rifle in mid-air; Raju maintaining his figure while in prison by exercising even as he is being starved. RRR’s rousing narrative derives its power equally from its central supermen, so incredibly statuesque and charismatic, and its feel for communal action, each scene another cog in this tale of sacrifice and resistance. In terms of sheer spectacle in the current landscape, Rajamouli and his collaborators are nigh unmatched in viscerality and clarity of vision.

Singing in the Wilderness First Draft

Complete first draft for In Review Online.

Chinese documentary has long been a vibrant and all too underseen area of filmmaking, even before the international recognition of masters like Jia Zhangke and Wang Bing. In reaction to the overt stylizations and lavish filmmaking of the Fifth Generation, which itself rejected the Cultural Revolution’s social realism, the Sixth Generation operated in a neo-realist fashion, skirting the lines of documentary in its use of non-actors and much more quotidian plots. Concurrently, full-fledged documentarians like Wu Wenguang and Yue Jiang began their own even more independent movement. The newest trend appears to be Chinese documentarians who received their education in the United States, making films resolutely about their native land while maintaining a certain distance in form and/or subject matter; Zhu Shengze is the foremost leader of this loose movement at present. Another member is Chen Dongnan, who makes her feature-length debut with Singing in the Wilderness. The documentary, shot over close to a decade, follows the farming people of the Little Well Village in Fumin County of China’s Yunnan province. They belong to the A-Hmao subset of the Miao people, a historically oppressed and poor minority within China who were pushed to the mountaintops by the Han Chinese majority thousands of years ago. This village, in stark contrast to the vast majority of China, which mostly follows either atheism or folk religions, has embraced Christianity, and their church choir, conducted by Long Guangyuan, has become a backbone of the community. Once Zhang Xiaoming, the county propaganda minister, becomes enraptured by their untrained yet passionate singing, their rise to international fame begins, leading to appearances in Beijing and Lincoln Center, events which challenge the group’s identity in the face of government advertising and mandated subject matter. At the same time, the film follows two choir members as they embark on marriage: Zhang Yaping (referred to simply as Ping in the chyron), who has a volatile relationship with her husband from another, bigger village, and Wang Jiansheng (Sheng) who longs to become a preacher and chafes against the farming lifestyle and his arranged marriage. Chen cannily ties all of these threads into a larger tapestry of the sweeping nature of China’s modernization and image creation that people like Jia have also captured so astutely. What makes this particular instance special is its specificity, in both the ethnic and religious aspects. Throughout, there is the implicit idea, never directly commented on by the villagers, of a certain exoticization: before their first performance, the villagers, who normally otherwise wear fairly modern clothing, are given traditional garb that emphasizes uniformity and tradition which, as a village elder observes in one of just two talking heads, has already mostly faded away: he sings part of a Miao ethnic song before sadly noting that he’s forgotten the rest of it, and that there are no more people who remember such songs. Instead, the villagers find their identity in these songs which aren’t in their native language: Singing in the Wilderness, at least in its international releases, probably ought to note the many times where the film switches between A-Hmao and Mandarin: the former is used during most of the conversations between villagers, including in their urban settings, and the latter is used during the semi-common use of voiceover, the singing of songs (secular and non-secular alike), and official announcements; an especially notable recurring theme is Sheng’s use of Mandarin rather than A-Hmao during his sermons, presumably in an effort to be able to minister to a wider region of China than his immediate people. This tension between the village and the wider world recurs without ever necessarily being used as a cudgel to emphasize the beauty of the former. While it is startling to see Europeans being led through a guided tour of the village, along with almost a shock-cut to promotional footage and a performance of “Mamma Mia” on China’s Got Talent, Chen does not solely rely on such wild extremes, instead carefully drawing out how each incursion relates to the villagers’ predicaments. This especially comes to the fore in the turbulent emotional journeys both Ping and Sheng go on; crucially they are both linked explicitly to Christianity and singing, two pursuits seen as incompatible with the prescribed means of life. Singing in the Wilderness, aside from decrying the corrupt aborted land development that drastically cut down on farming space, doesn’t aim to suggest that one approach is necessarily better than the other, but Chen’s faithful evocation of a resolutely modern type of struggle resounds with a clarity all its own.

Andrew Norman Wilson

1. Z = |Z/Z•Z-1 mod 2|-1: Lavender Town Syndrome (2019)
2. Ode to Seekers 2012 (2016)
3. Z = |Z/Z•Z-1 mod 2|-1: The Old Victrola (2019)
4. Impersonator (2021)
5. In the Air Tonight (2020)
6. The Unthinkable Bygone (2016)

1. Z = |Z/Z•Z-1 mod 2|-1: Lavender Town Syndrome (2019)
2. Ode to Seekers 2012 (2016)
3. Z = |Z/Z•Z-1 mod 2|-1: The Old Victrola (2019)
4. Impersonator (2021)
5. In the Air Tonight (2020)
6. The Unthinkable Bygone (2016)

On the Occasion of Remembering the Turning Gate First Draft

Complete first draft for In Review Online's Kicking the Canon section.

One of the primary games played by the motley, ever-expanding group of Hong Sang-soo lovers is that of contextualizing and recontextualizing each film within his rapidly accumulating body of work. His films reverberate across each other, as the continual additions to the “infinite worlds possible” shed new light on the ones that came before it. With this in mind, On the Occasion of Remembering the Turning Gate (2002), Hong’s fourth of twenty-seven and counting features, stands as a sparkling example, as both one of his strongest early films and a Rosetta Stone for the work to come. It’s well worth situating Turning Gate among its predecessors that it effectively built upon and broke away from. Hong’s debut, The Day a Pig Fell Into a Well (1996), utilized a network narrative in four parts, tracking each of the points in a love rectangle and their bleak circumstances, which culminates in a possible double murder. Opting for less overtly drastic stakes, The Power of Kangwon Province (1998) acridly captured an overlapping two-part portrait of two lovers. The first Hong that utilized his trademark twists on structure was the black-and-white Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors (2000), a complex recounting of a budding but fraught relationship in two mirrored sections of seven chapters each, where the events play out in radically different ways and end up privileging the viewpoint character. On the Occasion of Remembering the Turning Gate also takes place across seven chapters, but the structural and narrative similarities between it and the preceding films largely ends there. It is — to a degree greater than even The Power of Kangwon Province’s duplicated vacation undertaken by each of its lovers — a vacation film, where Kyung-soo (Kim Sang-kyung), a floundering actor, makes an impromptu visit to his friend Sung-woo (Kim Hak-seon) in Chuncheon. After some misadventures, he becomes involved with Myung-suk (Ye Ji-won), a dancer friend of Sung-woo’s who quickly becomes far more emotionally interested in him than the reverse. After things go south and Kyung-soo boards a train, he randomly encounters Sun-young (Chu Sang-mi), a married woman who once knew him in their youth but whom he’s forgotten. After they have a brief affair, Kyung-soo is quite literally left out in the rain, his own passionate love for Sun-young rejected. Tied up within all this is the legend of the Turning Gate at Chungpyung Temple, which Hong unusually uses as a structuring metaphor rather than as the incidental bit of color favored in other films. It tells the story of a commoner who, after being beheaded for falling in love with the daughter of a king, transformed into a snake that wrapped itself around the princess. To be rid of it, the princess went to the temple and told the snake to wait there for some food. The snake eventually went after her but was driven away by rain and lightning; the connection to Kyung-soo’s eventual trajectory is made explicit in both the English (but not the Korean) title and the final chapter card. Hong’s films rarely rely on metaphor as stringently as On the Occasion of Remembering the Turning Gate, but it would be too much to ascribe the sole or true meaning of the film to just this broad outline. For one, aside from the scene in which the legend is recounted by Sung-woo, the seventh chapter card, and the last scene, the Turning Gate is never truly invoked; the men even turn back from the Turning Gate, claiming that it’s nothing special, thus denying both Kyung-soo and the viewer the visual linkage that might trigger an additional significance at this early point in the film. Instead, On the Occasion of Remembering the Turning Gate resonates even more strongly as the first example of Hong’s predilection for doubling, here accomplished through almost an inverse approach to character interactions across the film’s halves: Kyung-soo goes from the pursued to the pursuer, quite literally following Sun-young back to her house and continually returning in his efforts to court her. Hong’s repetition, as literalized and tweaked in Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, is, as in his later work, subsumed beneath the basic pleasures that were nearly fully by this point: of watching characters chat over food and soju as scenes play out over a series of misunderstandings and casual revelations. Hong’s writing, too, more closely resembles his later work than the previous three films, with the phrase “Even though it’s difficult to be a human being, let’s not turn into monsters” being repeated at least twice, a humorous koan that reflects both Kyung-soo’s blinkered perspective and an overarching mystery to these replaying circumstances. Hong would return to his more bitter side with Woman Is the Future of Man (2004), before beginning to evolve, using longer scenes and introducing his trademark zooms in the films to come, eventually blossoming into one of the most improbable mainstays of arthouse filmmaking. But On the Occasion of Remembering the Turning Gate remains a great lodestone, an early hybrid of the impulses that would come to define his filmmaking that remains as humorous and disarming as ever, both in and out of context.

Last Year at Marienbad First Draft

Complete first draft for In Review Online's Kicking the Canon section.

Even more than most of the genuine oddities that have managed to find their way into the that motley crew known as the Canon (whatever that may be) over the past century, Alain Resnais’s Last Year at Marienbad (1961) seems to stand alone in the cinephile landscape, through the years a projection of an impenetrable ivory tower as the furthest purveyor of high ‘60s modernism, even as other films rise and fall in esteem around it. It is probably among the most viewed works of French cinema by someone not named Godard, Truffaut, Rohmer, or Varda, and one of the unlikeliest flagship films for any director; not that Resnais hasn’t taken his particularly pleasurable and elusive brand of surrealism further elsewhere, but films like Hiroshima mon amour (1959) and his follow-up masterpiece Muriel (1963) at least possess a more discernible moment-to-moment progression. All of the traditional appellations are of course true to an extent: each viewing only seems to deepen the fundamental strangeness of setting and scenario that drive Last Year at Marienbad as surely as Alain Robbe-Grillet’s script or Sacha Vierny’s bold cinematography. It is, of course, ultimately something of a love triangle, a push-pull of seduction, obsession, and intimidation between three people simply known (extratextually) as X (Giorgio Albertazzi), A (Delphine Seyrig), and M (Sacha Pitoeff). But it also comes across as something far greater, and far more terrifying, than that might imply, encompassing seemingly infinite variations on similar interactions that, while ultimately building to something that could be reasonably called a resolution, leave the possibility open that the film spans multiple times and realities that Resnais fluidly moves between. Last Year at Marienbad always runs the risk of sounding too abstruse, too much of a singular art object to genuinely embrace. But it is this exact tension that animates the film, whose surfaces — like Seyrig’s Chanel dresses, the luminous black-and-white CinemaScope, and the grand hotel itself, or rather the multiple hotels that are sutured to form one labyrinthine locale — never fail to catch the eye even as the mind reels. There is equal pleasure and confusion to be found in the way that Resnais cuts on a figure’s motion to that same figure in a totally different space (and time?), in the eerie reappearance of a character within the same extended tracking shot, in the purposeful mis-dubbing of minor characters. The opening itself captures this odd combination: an initially conventional tracking shot capturing the decorated ceilings of the hotel, accompanied by Albertazzi’s sonorous, Italian-accented French narration, initially takes on sensual overtones before metamorphizing to the uncanny by virtue of its extended nature and the repetition of the same phrases in the narration. Haute couture pleasures become deadening objects in the film, another form of entrapment. For such a gorgeous, cavernous space, Last Year at Marienbad’s hotel, all trompe l’oeil hallways that recede into the distance, take on that stifling quality, something which its other unnamed denizens offer in spades. Early in the film, it is often unhazy who the main characters are for those unfamiliar with Albertazzi and Seyrig’s faces, as Resnais privileges these moments of conversation, often brief snatches filled with dead air and non-sequiturs, and above all the angular faces, each too perfect to seem like it came from the regular world. Each exchange initially carries a potential focal point, with all of these bodies used as another form of static ornamentation. This mannequin approach is taken to its natural limit at numerous points throughout the film, as the camera rushes past eerily still figures, often in the middle of putting cards or walking on a staircase. Last Year at Marienbad constantly combines different approaches to produce these violent and eerie disjunctions — most commonly extended long takes intermixed with rapid editing — but each element feels inseparable from the other, a unified aesthetic whose axes are so heightened already that their contrast in some ways justifies the use of both of them. All of this, of course, could and has been accused of coming across as empty formalism. But Last Year at Marienbad’s exploration of memory and time as funneled through sexual brinksmanship is ultimately deeply rooted in definable units, which are intermixed to create the hazy atmosphere. The most obvious examples are the games of Nim, in which M asserts his dominance over X by continually beating him in the ostensibly simple game. As genuinely funny as it is to watch the slow but precise progression of the game, of this seeming mastermind being continually outsmarted, the use of different objects suggests something of the indefinable mutability of the hotel. So, too, does the relative clarity of the images in relation to the elements swirling around it: choices of costume, use of narration which is clearly contradicted by the action on screen, and most of all the total uncertainty of whether the scene on screen is meant to illustrate a past action, the present recounting/interaction, or something else altogether. A seduction becomes an assault becomes a moment of passionate projection; all of these may have happened and none of them, to one person or another, and the impossibility of sorting out which is which gets to the core of the troubling, ultimately very human struggles that this enacts. Last Year at Marienbad continues to remain one of the most resistant Great Films in both viewing and in discussing, but arguably reaches as deeply as any in its pure visceral sensations: the mad dash of Seyrig out onto the balcony, possibly traversing time and space; the successive series of rushes into fantasized erotic acceptance; the terror of watching people suddenly talking as non-diagetic(?) music swells, before resuming as swiftly as ever. The great beauty of Resnais’s masterwork is that, in the unfathomable abundance of possible things to grasp on to, there is so much that is immediately transfixing in this, a film as modern and groundbreaking as it was sixty years ago.

Dear Mr. Brody First Draft

Complete first draft for In Review Online.

Keith Maitland had something of a breakout in 2016 with Tower, a film about the 1966 University of Texas, Austin clocktower mass shooting, which utilized a blend of animation and live-action to conjure both the tense afternoon and the process of historical and personal reckoning inherent in such a traumatic, collective event. His follow-up, Dear Mr. Brody, opts for something more muddled, a documentary about both an individual and the people who he inspired, both directly and tangentially, and consequently runs into trouble attempting to reconcile them into a cohesive whole. The eponymous Dear Mr. Brody is Michael J. Brody, Jr., the millionaire heir to the Jelke margarine fortune who, over the course of about 10 days in January 1970, pledged to give away his $25 million inheritance to literally anybody who asked by letter. The result was a whirlwind media tour involving a record deal, possible movie rights, and constant reportage and public hounding as Brody made more outlandish promises — that he had ten billion dollars, that he could end the war in Vietnam — before his checks began to bounce and he suffered a drug-related breakdown, eventually dying by suicide a few years later. This story is told by numerous people in Brody’s orbit: his widow, the son of his business partner, film producer (of Badlands and Phantom of the Paradise) Edward Pressman who possesses thousands of the letters that were sent to Brody, and his “bodyguard” among others. But it only forms about two-thirds of the film — including the array of archival footage and Flower Power animation related to Brody himself. The rest is dedicated to those who wrote to him, as facilitated by a researcher who has now opened over 10,000 of the unopened letters that Brody never bothered to get around to, sometimes interviewing the writer to have them speak the words that they wrote fifty years ago. Both premises, especially the latter, carry a great deal of promise, but Dear Mr. Brody opts for a structure that appears to needlessly attempt to narrativize them, and interweaves them in a way that feels unilluminating, though the power of individual sequences is still maintained. Chief among the problems is an apparent attempt to preserve an investigatory, almost mystery-driven format, saving revelations like the fact that most of the letters were unopened, that Brody was heavily influenced by PCP, and that he likely had only $1.2 million at any one time to drop at key junctures. While attempting to ascribe standards of ethical storytelling to documentaries is a fraught, complicated subject, it comes across as needlessly obfuscatory when placed alongside scenes of total emotional commitment that deal with the letters and supplicants themselves. These moments, far from the de rigeur blank backdrops and multi-cam set-up of the more traditional talking heads, are presented either in a white void — to better show off the often colorful and decorative letters — or in spaces familiar to the writers, engendering a better sense of intimacy that allows them to explore what this moment means to them and their own histories. A few sequences additionally appear to feature actors reading the letters and playing some of the writers when they were young, either filmed on film or hazily emulated to create a slipperiness of fact and fiction not present elsewhere in the film. Such potential for personal, deeply felt revelation — the most moving scene in the film unexpectedly invokes a prior letter writer to create a potent familial bond — is only fitfully applied, and it makes the story of this troubled millionaire — perhaps a con artist, a possibility implied early but never really invoked again — seem all the smaller. The end credits roll over footage of people opening letters and reading them to each other, an ultimately more compelling subject that ought to have been its own film, instead of awkwardly grafted on to a merely decent one.