Thursday, June 16, 2005

 
Kontroll

Like Travis Bickle's trash-and-hooker-strewn streets of "Taxi Driver," the Budapest subway system -- the setting of "Kontroll" -- presents itself as a kind of hell on earth. Or perhaps more aptly, a transactional purgatory, where people are always coming and going but nobody stays around for very long. The hero of "Kontroll," (or again, more accurately, the anti-hero, for his is a decidedly tarnished brand of valor) the world-weary Bulcsu, literally lives down here. By day, he leads a team of rag-tag subway-system inspectors who roam the platforms and cars fining riders who can't be bothered to pay for a subway ticket. And each night, after the trains have stopped running, the lights extinguished, he crumples up against a stainless-steel column and drifts off to sleep.

Very little of this registers during the film's first act: "Kontroll" starts off perfectly content to be a low-fi Hungarian "Reservoir Dogs," complete with visual and verbal homage, Bulcsu's motley crew almost mimicking Harvey Keitel and company's every move. In the first thirty minutes, we learn just how gritty a place the Budapest subway can be and are introduced to a bizarre cast of ancillary characters: a shaving-cream-spraying prankster, a pimp and his cluster of cheap prostitutes, and a mysterious hooded stranger who appears from nowhere whenever the platform lights flicker, pushing passengers to their death into the tracks of oncoming trains.

But as the film continues, "Kontroll" evolves from crime-noir comedy into a fascinating character study set within a surreal tone poem, a meditation on good and evil besides. Bulcsu, as we later find out, had another life -- a distinguished professional existence -- upstairs before he self-exiled himself underground. At one point, a girl wearing an overstuffed teddy-bear outfit asks him: "who are you hiding from?" and we only have to see Bulcsu's eyes to know that he's hiding from himself.

Hiding and running. In a competitive pastime called "Railing," Bulcsu races a coworker down the train tracks from one station to the next, the midnight express threateningly bearing down from behind. One gets the sense that Bulcsu is trying to outrun the earthbound, dreary part of himself in hopes that his spiritually radiant half will miraculously separate, pull ahead, and leave the dark laggard behind to get consumed by the oncoming train. Whether he finally succeeds is an exercise left to the viewer and the imagination.

Then there is the magnificent spectacle that is Bela, a fifty-something train operator constantly under the influence of cheap Hungarian cigarettes and the contents of a hip flask. Like everything and everyone else in the first act, he seems like just so much set dressing, but in time transmutes into one of the film's central characters, a fallen angel casting warmth everywhere he goes, from his candlelit traincab-turned-cloister to an idle subway car-cum-dining-room. Bela is Bulcsu's one true confidante in the underground inferno, a fellow soul exiled from above after a minor train collision mishap.

Both Bela and Bulcsu are soulmates in that they're constantly out of things, interfacing with the real world only to the extent necessary for survival. Bulcsu carries a Brando-esque air of detachment about him, Bela his absentminded professor. Neither are at home here; they're just beating time until a good reason comes along for doing something bigger and better. The glory of their subway gig is that it demands nothing more of them than mere survival -- not perfection or brilliance or competitive agility. Just existence: raw, basic and unpeaceful.

"Kontroll" has a Pure Analog look, which is to say it is one of a diminishing breed of film bypassing the digital intermediate process of special effects and color-correction. It was shot on a new, fast and virtually grainless stock from Kodak that afforded available-light photography in the dingy fluorescent and floodlit annals of the Budapest underground and processed in the photochemical domain at Kodak's relatively new Hungary Cinelabs, opened in 2002. The result is an image that is at once richly organic, authentic, and darkly beautiful. While its budget was around $800,000, the picture has the production value of the kind of film Hollywood routinely manufactures for fifty million.

And the music. Who could forget the dirtied, gritty techno-landscape forged by Neo? There's a particular theme of Bulscu's loneliness moodily intoned by a lone trumpet over glitch-beep that will twist an emotional dagger in your heart.

I'm under the impression that there were roughly ten or twelve English-language prints of this film struck for US distribution: currently, "Kontroll" plays in about just as many screens stateside. If I could afford it, I would fly all my friends to the nearest one to see this film. And I find myself working through schemes for the San Diego print to get "misplaced" by the courier this Thursday evening on its way to the airport.

Not to be missed on the big screen. It's just too overwhelmingly cinematic to fit into a twenty-seven inch Trinitron.

**** (out of four)

posted 9:54 PM

Wednesday, May 25, 2005

 
The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill

In a time when 'documentary' has come to mean clinical across-the-table interviews married to stock news footage with voiceover, The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill stands out from the crowd by treating its subject cinematically and organically. Watching it, I was transported to the late seventies and early eighties, that last great era of the documentary as subjective auteur artform (as opposed to today's tendency towards PBS-ready Objective History). When the likes of Ross McElwee and the Maysles Brothers were working the scene with their Eclair NPR's on their shoulders (Parrots documentarian Judy Irving also shoots on an NPR), flies on the wall capturing America's peculiar and varied microcosms in the French Cinema Verite tradition.

Yes, "Enron" and "Fog of War" are factually instructive and "Bowling for Columbine" politically poignant, but "Wild Parrots" actually brings you somewhere, shows you emotion on a human (as opposed to geopolitical or energy-market) scale and makes the puttering about of a guy and some birds seem to amount to something significantly greater than a hill of beans (or parrot poop).

Shot in glorious super-16mm, Irving's picture is also the best-looking documentary since "I am Trying to Break Your Heart." The cinematography beautfifully establishes a sense of place, showing the parrot flock surrounded by fog-shrouded coves, a looming Coit tower, a distant Alcatraz. The look is rich and organic, as opposed to HandyCam electrofringe formica, a treat for the eyes throughout.

The filmmaker, Judy Irving, makes no effort to remove herself from the proceedings; given that she constantly interacted with the subject(s) over a six-year period, how could she? By keeping her presence felt, Irving arrives at an emotional honesty that finally pays off as the picture comes to a close in a surprise ending. In the end, we are grateful for her gentle, thoughful subjectivity. It comes off feeling real and it shows up all the artifice inherent in just about every other documentary that's played the circuit in the last decade.

How authentic, how refreshing this all feels.

Highly recommended.

**** (out of four)

posted 10:11 PM

Thursday, October 09, 2003

 
Taking Sides

There's a scene in Taking Sides where, in a bombed out shell of a building, an audience breathlessly witnesses a performance of Schubert's String Quintet in C. The place is Germany, sometime around 1945, and there is no rooftop, chandeliers, or heating - just some makeshift spotlights mounted on the walls and folding chairs organized into tidy rows. Somewhere in the delicate Adagio, it starts raining and a canopy of umbrellas mechanically opens; the musicians keep playing and the audience barely blinks. When it comes to Germans and their Schubert, we gather, the show must go on.

It is hard to imagine what one is to do after their homeland has been utterly obliterated, but Taking Sides makes a strong case for listening to chamber music. As the camera dollies across the rows of faces held in rapt attention, we feel that this makeshift performance of Schubert is no cultural extravagance but a matter of necessity, of validating survival, of proving that beauty and genius still exist after a people's buildings are leveled and a family's loved ones gone.

Across town, in the light of day, Harvey Keitel is an American major interrogating members of the Berlin Philharmonic in an attempt to ensnare conductor Wilhelm Furtwangler (played by Stellan Skarsgard) in the Allies' De-Nazification effort. "He was Hitler's Bandleader!" says Keitel's boss, an American southern-twang two-star General. "Deep down inside, we're all Nazis; Hitler just tapped into something and unlocked it."

The implication, of course, is that Furtwangler and his Berlin Philharmonic were keys used by the Third Reich to unlock the evil stored in mens' souls, that Furtwangler was a frontman for a party preaching the superiority of the mythical Aryan warrior artist. "Find him guilty," says the General. "He represents everything evil that we're fighting against."

And so Keitel ventures into Germany, setting up shop in his own bombed-out building with the help of two young assistants: an American lieutenant and a female German typist. And the dramatic pendulum is set in motion. Keitel begins by interviewing all the members of the Berlin Philharmonic who played under Furtwangler, warming up the pan in which to fry his big fish. Then, finally, after several days of preheat, he summons the conductor for grilling and lets the sparks fly.

Most of the interrogations - and thus, the movie - revolve around the question: can art and politics be kept separate? Can an artist, searching for universal truth and beauty, ever truly isolate himself from the political milieu in which he functions? In an evil regime like Nazi Germany, is it ethically allowable for an artist to play along with evil men in order to bring beauty to the people? Isn't art itself a kind of authority for taste and intellect - an autocratic force emanating from the canvas or stage? And isn't the orchestral conductor - dictator of a force of 120 musicians - the ultimate embodiment of such authority?

Taking Sides makes a perfect companion to Max, last year's film about a young Adolf abandoning art school to pursue politics. The tagline for Max was the equation: Art+Politics=Power. In the movie, young Adolf shouts to Max Rothman, a Jewish art dealer who has rejected his work, "Politics is the new Art!" and after seeing how he conceives of the Third Reich in graphite on sketchpads, we wonder if he's onto something.

It's quite possible that the thing that made Nazi Germany unique - the thing that set it apart from other fascist regimes - was in how it so masterfully merged Art and Politics through its use of the New Media. How television and radio and offset printing were used for propaganda, that new science-art of making people not just hear a message, but feel it in their bones, bypassing all the rational better-judgement circuits of the brain. Building on the long-held view of war as art, Hitler realized that mass media allowed art into the battlefield of mindspace, a force that arguably brainwashed so many Germans into an ethnic-cleansing frenzy.

How exactly Furtwangler, an orchestral conductor, fits into all this is hard to define and the viewer, on watching Taking Sides, will have a hard time doing just that. In addition to the subtle philosophical questions of art and politics at hand, there's a sense that the American prosecutors are in some ways as bad as the men they're going after. Keitel's American Major is so brutish and terrifying in his relentless pursuit of a cowering Skarsgard that his German typist asks to resign, saying that "she was once questioned by the Gestapo just in the way you question him." And watching all this, we wonder if Keitel, like all the Nazi officers standing trial, has himself fallen victim to the old psychology 101 experiment wherein people in positions of authority are inevitably found to abuse it.

The emotions in this film are high-octane, radiating primarily from Keitel and Skarsgard who inhabit the talky script with all the intensity of a stage play. In fact, the movie feels like a broadway production as seen under the magnifying glass of the camera lens. Some people will find this off-putting, but the thing is that Taking Sides works. It isn't at all awkward in its stage-bound feeling; it’s in fact quite charming in how the claustrophobic quarters concentrate our thoughts. The movie brings its own cinematic angle to the proceedings and is a beautiful thing to look at, warm light pouring through the windows of the interrogation room and subtle camera moves maintaining tension during otherwise static scenes. Ping-Pong dialog notwithstanding, this movie knows how to tell a story visually.

But the big treasure is just how many thought-provoking questions can be raised in two hours of sitting screen-faced in a dark room. How people at midnight on a Saturday poured out of a theatre in La Jolla heatedly discussing Art, Politics, and Psychology and wondering aloud how these concepts apply to America's current Media-Political environment. The days of seeking refuge in Schubert may have never existed for Americans, but maybe in times of darkness we are rather to be found in the halls of the cinema.

**** (out of four)

posted 1:29 AM

Sunday, September 21, 2003

 
Lost in Translation

Bill Murray seems to have made a career out of playing worn-out, melancholy men with lives on autopilot, unlucky in love, doomed to walk this earth alone. In Rushmore and The Royal Tennenbaums, he played a bored steel tycoon and a sulking psychiatrist, respectively, chasing women much younger than himself only to be dumped somewhere mid-movie. In Groundhog Day, Murray's wry weathercaster would have never gotten the girl but for his five million chances at reliving the same day over and over again.

These days, Murray just looks sad. We feel his sadness just by looking at him. But we laugh anyway because we know that behind the dour fascade, Murray's laughing, too, comically deadpanning the cruel absurdity around him, eyebrow cocked, wry one-liner a second away. His comedic milieu is the old standby of Goofus and Gallant, Murray playing the zany, irreverent foil to the Universe's straight man. The only real difference between Ghost Busters and now is that the craziness of old has been internalized, toned-down in the mellowness of middle age, making the Gallant Universe suddenly look foolish in comparison for its stuffy self-righteousness. Instead of acting out radical absurdist notions, the New-Old Murray basks in ironic disbelief at the comedy of errors moving about him.

In the opening sequence of Lost in Translation, Murray's character (a washed-up action movie star) rides through downtown Tokyo, staring out the window at the neon lights and throngs of people passing by. He is the Stranger, an observer outside the world he observes, totally unengaged in its hustle, its bustle, its connections and relations. He is Alone, looking out at the Other. Or, in the parlance of Volkswagen: Murray is not a driver on the highway of life; he's a passenger - a passenger fed up with all the drivers, weary at the high-adrenaline movers pushing him around the city, through his stale marriage and a diminishing career.

Sophia Coppola uses the old dramatic trick of creating situational and visual metaphors for her characters' interior lives in this, her second movie. And even if it doesn't come off as transparently as we'd like, we are still grateful to her for avoiding the Sophomoric Talk Trap, of properly showing us everything on the screen instead of merely saying it. So rather than hearing Murray sob into his whiskey that his wife doesn't understand him, that he feels totally disconnected from his art, that he's alienated from most of the world - we just see him riding, nonplussed, in a limousine, looking out the window. We see him blinking at a 4-AM incoming fax from his wife asking about upholstery samples. We observe him struggling to get through a day of shooting for an inane whisky television ad. And instead of having her characters wax philosophical about the difficulty of connecting, Coppola simply drops them in a foreign land (Japan), where they literally speak a different language from everyone else.

Lost in Translation, suitably, is about less talk, more show, and it works like a charm. Sophia Coppola clearly knows how to tell a story visually. Richard Linklater, here's a lesson; Kevin Smith, take note.

While staying at a posh hotel in-between the whisky commercial shoot and a TV appearance, Murray bumps into a recently married, recently-Yale-graduated twentysomething drifter (spot-on played by Scarlett Johansson) who is spending her days hanging out waiting for her fashion photographer husband to return from his gig. They recognize each others' loneliness and decide to be alone together, roaming the city, part comforting one another, part falling in love.

Much will doubtless be made of all the throwaway jokey jabs at Japanese culture, at the old schtick of stranger-in-a-strange-land, of old-man-falls-for-young-girl. But the best scenes in the movie are those showing these two characters simply being alone with themselves in Japan's less-traveled backstreets. Of Murray playing golf, solo, under a looming Mt. Fuji. Of Scarlet Johanasson witnessing a traditional Japanese wedding from a secluded vantage point in a formal garden. These scenes radiate such peace as to nearly arrest the celluloid from advancing through the projector and suspend us in Bazin's ideal 'holy moment' of God incarnate captured by eye of the cinema.

Wonderful.

My only gripe with the film is that it hardly seems lit, that interiors are dim and dreary and lacking in that punchy contrast that we've become accustomed to with the likes of Conrad Hall and Dante Spinotti behind the camera. That, and the profusion of handheld work, combines to make this one of the most visually uninteresting things I've seen in awhile. I really hope this was just out of budget or time restraints and not some sort of misguided quest for photographic "realism." I mean, c'mon, it's a movie; there's no real there, just flickers of light. Why not make them beautiful?

***1/2 (out of four)

posted 4:30 PM

Sunday, March 09, 2003

 
P.S. Your Cat is Dead

I really hope this is a Steve Guttenberg vanity project, something that he's doing just to get back into the swing of making movies after all these years. There's something to be said for just picking yourself up by your bootstraps and making a movie, dammit, and if nothing else, Mr. Guttenberg has done so with this film, which he wrote, produced, directed, and plays the lead.

But this film had better be a warm-up because it just can't stand on its own merits. It is a 90-minute affair in which neither plot nor character nor atmosphere nor philosophical insight are present. And like Guttenberg himself, the movie fancies itself cute - which it is not. It's just bad.

In a film where so much is so wrong, it's hard to know where to begin. Let's see: there's a gay latino thief strapped to Guttenberg's kitchen sink with the butt cut out of his pants; a cardboard prop of an ex-girlfriend who leaves him on the night the movie takes place (New Years Eve); Guttenberg's atrocious acting with broad, painted-on expressions better suited to mimework or Ringling Brothers than cinema close-ups; the supposedly "terrible" apartment he inhabits that looks more like a multimillion SOHO loft; the cheezy voiceover at the beginning; the cheezy pullback as the sun comes up the next morning with the rays hitting Guttenberg's face.

I could go on, but it would take longer than it does to actually see the film yourself. Suffice to say, you can safely skip this one. If you really want a good artist-in-midlife-crisis movie with gay undertones and wacky shenanigans, rent Tootsie instead. While I can respect Guttenberg's indie effort to jump-start his sinking acting career, that doesn't mean I have to like it - or that you should go see it.

*1/2 (out of four)

posted 4:37 PM