The Substance of Style

I recently saw Luca Guadagnino's I Am Love, starring Tilda Swinton as Emma, a Russian married into a wealthy Italian textile dynasty. Upon learning of her daughter's homosexuality, she is inspired to escape the imprisonment of the suffocating bourgeois and spark a passionate affair with one of her son's friends. It's aesthetic stylization of the highest order: Milanese villas draped in luxurious furnishings, characters constantly adorned in sophisticated high fashions and feasting on five-star cuisine, and a final scene bursting with waterworks and a roaring piece of classical music by John Adams. Imagine being woken up to a crystal chandelier shoved in your face and having Mozart cranked up to full volume, and that gives you an idea of the proud, elegantly dramatic bombast that I Am Love delivers (the tagline on the Italian poster was the appropriately grandiose "Everything Will Change Forever"). As potentially off-putting as this may seem, I surrendered to it's wavelength and was deeply engaged throughout. Which brings up an interesting discussion: when is it acceptable for there to be too much style and too little substance in a movie?

A Single Man, which shares with I Am Love a heightened cinematic approach and plots involving main characters undergoing intense transformations, struck me as fussy and superficial. I mean, really, does Colin Firth HAVE to live in an super-chic art deco pad and teach at a school populated by bombshells? Predictably, Tom Ford revels in every pretty face and shiny surface he comes across. Firth's performance is magnificent, managing to sneak in a few genuinely raw moments, but the movie fails to live up to him. Why did I see the style of I Am Love as so indicative, and that of A Single Man as arbitrary riffraff?

This may not end up having to do with the substance (both movies feature well-worn plots) but the context behind it. I Am Love is heavily influenced by the glossy melodramas of Douglas Sirk and the films of Luchino Visconti (Swinton even described the film in an interview as "Visconti on acid"), where the style was just as powerful and expressive as the emotional substance on display. In addition, for all of the accusations of pretension it could have caused, I found its execution goofily sincere, following through on its overused "message" with a sloppy dignity.

Tom Ford, on the other hand, seems to have a frame of reference that dominated by photo-spreads for L'Uomo Vogue and models that look like Brigitte Bardot and Kate Moss. And the tragic-ironic ending wouldn't be so ludicrous if he had gotten serious and spent time nurturing the proper emotions to pull it off. For a large portion of the movie, Ford treats Firth as nothing but an empty object to be looked at or arranged.

Of course, analyzing a movie's worth by its aesthetics may all just be pure subjectivity. I prefer the candy-colored emptiness of Marie Antoinette to the razzle-dazzle buffoonery of Moulin Rouge! for no other reason than personal preference. And as much as Jean-Luc Godard pioneered the effortless mixture of substance and style with such works as Contempt and 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her, some of the substance goes completely over my head, yet I adore it anyway.

The Dreamlife of Angeles

There has been so much text dedicated to Mulholland Dr., whether it involves trying to untangle its intricacies or just talking about how damn good of a movie it is. Originally released in 2001, the movie had recently risen back into cinematic conversation by topping many a "Best of the Decade" list. At the risk of repeating what has already been said (in all honesty, what more could be said about this movie that the finest of writers hasn't already said?), I'll point out a few elements of the movie that are really special to me.

The Plot

The most talked-about aspect of the Mulholland Dr. is the plot, with its fractured identities, dream worlds and real worlds, and, let's be honest, scenes involving characters that have no correlation to what ends up being the main thread of the movie. Everything down to certain props has some ambiguous, mysterious nature that Lynch does not fully explain. If you look on the fan website "Lost On Mulholland Drive" there are roughly twenty-seven different theories that attempt to rationalize the film's hallucinatory logic.

My view is this: The first two-thirds of Mulholland Dr. are a dream concocted by Diane (Naomi Watts) that sees her living out a fantasy of being an innocent wannabe-starlet named Betty and helping Rita (Laura Harring), an amnesiac with a purse full of money, get to the bottom of what is going on. Along the way, Betty auditions for a movie and grabs the attention of film director Adam (Justin Theroux, who actually gets as much screentime as Betty and Rita for the first half of the dream) and ends up falling in love with Rita. When she wakes up, Diane talks to a neighbor, makes a cup of coffee, tries to masturbate and ends up killing herself. In between we are given further looks into Diane's memories and subconscious, letting us know that Rita and Diane were friends and lovers, but Rita has grown tired of her since dating Adam, making Diane jealous and hiring a hit man to kill her.

How does this fully explain the Cowboy, Club Silencio, or many of the side characters that Lynch puts emphasis on in the dream's beginning? I'm not really sure, though I will expand on my personal interpretation of one of the mentioned elements later on. These could be dreams-within-dreams (it is noteworthy that Laura Harring is shown going to sleep right before the first Winkie's sequence) or further metaphorical reflections of Diane's subconscious, but it personally does not detract from the film that I count them as plotlines that were probably going to be expanded upon if Lynch had in fact been able to make Mulholland Dr. a television series.

The Acting

Despite Justin Theroux getting first billing in the film's opening credits, Mulholland Dr. belongs to Naomi Watts, for which it was her breakthrough to international stardom. Watts perfectly embodies the early gee-wiz spunk and touching naivete of Betty ("I've just come from Deep River, Ontario and now I'm in this... dream place!") and later pulls off the intense emotion of the audition scene, which ends up alluding to the darker, repressed emotion evident of Diane later on. What is so brilliant about her performance (and Lynch's staging) is that, until showing off her depth in that scene, the audience's view of her saw her only as chipper, over-energetic and not a little annoying. She becomes a great actress right in front of our eyes.

The Love Scene

Lynch's view of women could be interpreted as bordering on the misogynistic, what with the torture he put Isabella Rosselini and Sherly Lee through in Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, respectively. What is refreshing in Mulholland Dr. is its tenderness in its portrayal of the relationship that Rita and Diane share. This is most evident in the film's first love scene.

What first begins as an innocent pat on the cheek goodnight between the two devolves into a passionate prolonged kiss, with Betty slowly whispering into Rita's ear "I'm in love with you... I'm in love with you" as Angelo Badalamenti's music swells to a momentous high in the background. What is so extraordinary about this scene is how genuinely moving it is, with Betty discovering that her interest and loyalty for Rita was really based on desire. There is nothing exploitative or vulgar about it, and is a far cry from, say, the perversely brutal rapes of Rosselini and Lee. What gives the scene its tragic weight is Rita's lack of reply to Diane's declaration of love, showing that Diane, deep down, knows that the feelings will never be reciprocated.

Club Silencio

Visited by the Rita and Diane, the mysterious blue-tinted theater represents, in my view, Lynch's cynical awareness of Hollywood. When Rebekah Del Rio gets up to perform a breathtaking rendition "Llorando" (which is Roy Orbison's "Crying" in Spanish), she collapses on the ground near the end, yet the music (and her vocals) continue playing. The manager nonchalantly picks her up and carries her backstage. Hollywood is a notorious chew-you-up-and-spit-you-out kind of business, leaving a trail of famous casualties in its wake. Despite Del Rio's fainting, the Silencio establishment continues on without any acknowledgement, as if she is just an interchangeable part to be replaced.

In closing...

As thankful as I am that Lynch made Mulholland Dr. for the big screen, I can't help but think about what it would have become if it was formatted for a television series. Would it have been roughly the same story stretched over a season? Or would Lynch have made even more complex dream/reality situations for the other characters that inhabit the movie? It's tantalizing to consider, but what we have been left with is no reason to complain.

Seeing is Believing

Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There and Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds do not share much in common content-wise. Yet when paired together, their aesthetic inventiveness and creativity is damn near astounding when compared to most of the output this past decade had to offer. Both are rooted in well-established genres: that of the musical biopic and the war film, respectively. And yet each takes great pleasure in stretching the parameters not just of the conventions of said genres, but those of traditional cinema itself.

The most pertinent of these elements is historical accuracy. Every year, we are drowned in numerous Oscar-bait Hollywood films ranging from Walk the Line to Saving Private Ryan that come with the “based on a true story” seal of approval. As sincere and well-made as these films can be, they usually end up reducing there subject to a tidy, containable product.

Haynes and Tarantino are two filmmakers well aware of the fact that cinema is an automatically heightening force, and thus unable to capture a completely reality-based experience. By acknowledging this, they in turn are able to reject the unofficial rules both genres are supposed to follow. I’m Not There and Inglorious Basterds are aware of the fact that they are purely cinematic objects, living only on the screen in which they are being projected. So rather than trying to escape this fact, both films heartily embrace it.

Another one of these elements is narrative storytelling. Most of said genres attempt to follow the logical progression of the subject they are tackling, attempting to “get it all in” at a respectable two-and-a-half hours. Characters and events are skipped and altered, making the final product ridden with holes and loose ends, even as it swears to us that we finally “know” the person.

I’m Not There, rather than presenting a unified vision of the Bob Dylan subject, disassembles him into six different entities, played by actors varying gender, age and race. In addition, it gleefully mishmashes its many happenings, wildly crosscutting between several different times, settings and moods so that they coexist, mirror and overlap one another.

Inglorious Basterds gets its point across in a much different but equally radical manner. Telling the story with five “chapters” that range from twenty to forty-five in length, it’s often astonishing in its deliberateness. Characters frequently sit at a table and talk. And talk. And talk. Words are the ultimate weaponry in Tarantino’s universe, a storybook fantasia mixed with espionage procedural.

While I’m Not There’s chief interest is music, literally every frame of the film is imbued with some cinematic recognition. Each of the character arcs come complete with their own individual aesthetic, from the films of Godard, Fellini and Leone to made-for-TV documentaries. The Godard-inspired segments, revolving around an actor named Robbie Clark who portrays “Dylan” in a film, feature plenty of New Wave flourishes, from rapid onscreen inter-titles to direct dialogue taken from Godard’s seminal 60’s work.

Tarantino has always been an undeniably cinematic filmmaker, his movies subsisting off the content of past films. Everything from music to characters to costumes to dialogue is either a direct grab or variation from some other movie, making them each an eclectic refraction of cinema history. Inglourious Basterds is his first work to directly incorporate the act of watching and making movies into the story. Tarantino has crafted a universe where film critic-Lieutenants can use movie extra work as alibis and movie starlet-double agents can have their signed autographs used against them in treacherous double crosses. And, most prominent of them all, a rigged movie premiere brings the downfall of the Third Reich. Inglorious Basterds is Tarantino’s revisionist history lesson, so crammed with cinema it’s comparable to a warped “Making Of” on the end of WWII.

But this is not to suggest Tarantino and Haynes are being disrespectful in their portrayal of history. If anything, their films are broad extensions of the ability of cinema to be as powerful as any artillery or textbook. The subject of the movie premiere in Inglourious Basterds, a schlock-y production that follows the travails of a German soldier, has the audiences laughing and applauding as he wipes out hordes of American troops, an unsettling reminder of the influence of cinematic propaganda. When hundreds of reels of film later burn the Nazi party to a crisp, it plays as an even more abstract expression of this fact, as it might as well be cinema’s past rising up to leave its mark on history.

Haynes’ portrayal of Robbie’s rise to cross-cultural stardom, and eventual disassociation from his wife Claire amongst the chaos of the Vietnam War, is equally cinema-infused. During their breakup, Claire somberly quotes a fragment of the famous coffee cup monologue from Godard’s 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her, a striking indication of cultural influence on their private relationship. Later, Haynes juxtaposes the handing over of their divorce papers with grainy footage of the peace treaty signing signifying the end of the Vietnam War. The on screen representation of the personal and political is made harmonious.

It’s hard to see what the future will hold for these two movies, whether they will be championed among the very films they reference or fade into obscurity among the fog of movies descending at a faster and faster rate. Either way, for the time being, they represent the kind of cinematic daring that is keeping current state of the movie world afloat.

Cinematic Obsession: Enter the Void

Director Gaspar Noe, the maker of that silly little film Irreversible, is back on the scene with Enter the Void. Described by Noe as a "psychedelic melodrama", it follows the spirit of Oscar (Nathaniel Brown), who has been shot and killed by the cops in a drug-bust, as he wanders around the neon-lit streets of Tokyo trapped in a dizzy limbo, brought upon by a promise to never leave his sister Linda (Paz De La Huerta, who apparently continues her display of bodily assets so proudly flaunted in The Limits of Control).

I wasn't a huge fan of the dime-store philosophy or shock tactics of Irreversible, and yet I'm wildly anxious to see the aesthetic feast Noe has prepared with this one. In addition to the aforementioned neon-drenched palette, Daft Punk's Thomas Bangalter was put in charge of sound effects (get ready for plenty of "untz untz"). And, best of all, Noe filmed the movie directly from Oscar's point-of-view, blinking and all. So we, the audience, are Oscar, seeing every moment of his crazy posthumous odyssey. Which brings to mind another odyssey... Noe has said he was inspired by everything from 2001 to Lady in the Lake to "The Tibetian Book of the Dead".

After screening an unfinished version at Cannes last May, Noe later took it to Toronto and London and, less than a month ago, Sundance, where IFC films snatched up the US distribution rights. It'll be interesting to see how they put a trailer together for it. All I know is I can't wait to experience all 160 minutes (yes!) of Enter the Void. I mean, come on, look at the opening credits!

My first posting...

Well, hello! This is very exciting. My first blog posting. Let me start by saying a little about myself.

My name is Clint. I am 18 years old and live in Dallas, TX. But, seeing as it is my senior year in high school, I will soon be going to live and learn somewhere else. My main interests are movies, media and music.

The reason I started this blog is to find an outlet for all my thoughts and ideas and to hopefully find others that share those interests. Anyways, I shall keep the introduction brief, so here it goes...