Syndromes and a Century

Syndromes and a Century is a wonderful film by Apichatpong Weerasethakul. I love his work, and this is definitely a kind of bridge between the documentary-inspired work he was making in his earlier career and the later stuff like Cemetery of Splendour and Uncle Boonmee. This is really charming.

Mysterious Object at Noon (2000)

Mysterious Object at Noon (ดอกฟ้าในมือมาร) is nonsensical in many ways, but it is never boring, and the documentary aspects of it are fascinating. I am not sure I think the filmed version of the story the people in Thailand are telling is interesting at all, though. Mysterious Object at Noon is much more interesting when we are looking at contemporary people in Thailand than when we are watching the fiction those same people are creating. Either way, this is a strange and intriguing movie, inspired in many ways by the work of Kidlat Tahimik. And I think I am only just now seeing how influential of a filmmaker he was.

One of My Favorite Films of 2017

A Ghost Story is one of my favorite movies of the year. Right now I have it at #2. It's a beautiful film.

A Ghost Story is a haunting, mysterious fable about longevity, about what lives on after us, about letting go. It also manages to be whimsical in lots of ways, and to rethink what we even mean by a ghost. The image of the ghost with the sheet over its head and holes for eyes is a very old one – a child's image of a ghost, or perhaps a Hayao Miyazaki image of a ghost. This is childish or whimsical; it's even sort of silly. But it turns serious quite quickly, even haunting, and there is an extraordinary payoff to its sheet-over-the-head aesthetic.

David Lowery's film is a kind of fusion of Kelly Reichardt, Tsai Ming-Liang, Terrence Malick, and Apichatpong Weerasethakul, and it was just my cup of tea. The thing is, it doesn't feel derivative. It feels totally original and fascinating, and once you think you've figured it out, it goes further, into uncharted, strange territory.

(One warning. This is not a long movie at all, but it is a slow, contemplative film. If you don't like Reichardt, or Tsai or Weerasethakul, you will be annoyed by this movie's pace.)

The film's third act is my favorite section of the film. These parts of the film are about time and waiting and being. At one point we seem to project thousands of years into the future and then jump back another thousand and start again. A Ghost Story wonders what it means to live on, to live with, what it means to be in the first place. This meditation is about how people (or things?) haunt us – it is a ghost story, after all – but it is itself haunting, as we might think about how we are going to live on or what came before us or, indeed, what we are in the first place.

I loved this movie.

Cemetery of Splendour

Cemetery of Splendour (รักที่ขอนแก่น) is much sweeter than Weerasethakul's other movies, or at least it seemed so to me. Or maybe I mean that it is warmer or kinder. Obviously, if you aren't into Weerasethakul you won't be into this – it is slow and thoughtful. I really, really liked this one, though. Indeed, much more than the earlier films of his that I've seen. It's beautiful.

Jauja

Jauja is an entrancing dream of a film. It is a kind of combination of Tsai Ming-Liang and Apichatpong Weerasethakul, which is to say that it is definitely not for everyone. But I was into it.

Visitez Mon Site! (Holy Motors)

I know there are a lot of in-jokes and symbols and references I am supposed to get in order to enjoy Holy Motors, and I supposed it didn't help that I haven't seen any of Leos Carax's other work, so you will have to judge me for my reaction to this movie.

Holy Motors (this is the title in French, as well) is a movie about a man who rides around the Île-de-France region all day in a white limousine. He has nine appointments for the day, and for each appointment he is (apparently) – or perhaps simply portrays – a different person. All fine and well, but why?

The film is quite self-consciously about the movies, and so Holy Motors displays a nostalgia for old films and old ways of making films, as well as nostalgia in general (a beautiful building has been gutted and will be turned into some modern monstrosity, the headstones in the cemetery don't have names but instead say "visit my website"). Nostalgia is not really my thing, so I didn't quite identify with the film's sentiments on this count. In fact, I found the day's second appointment – which contains the most hip technology in the film – to be one of the most intriguing of the day's appointments.

The film is also about Leos Carax, though, and these are the references I didn't get as I watched. Evidently he conceded to make this film digitally and he believes that older cameras are holy in some way (they have motors, which is where he, apparently, gets his title). The main character's name is M. Oscar, which is Leos Carax's given name. Carax appears in the film, as well, having woken up from a dream and stumbling into a movie theatre where everyone is (as still as stone) watching King Vidor's The Crowd. I was oblivious to all of these self-references, and I am not sure if they are intended to be humor. I rather think that they are: in-jokes for the initiated. They certainly are not self-critiques, however. Holy Motors is not interested in real self-reflexivity.

Holy Motors is interested in what is real and what is not, where people go when they are not in our lives, whether we can actually trust what we see or not, whether the cameras are lying. Again, I get these questions, but I am not really interested in these kinds of questions. Perhaps it is so many years working in the theatre. Is this real? Is this possible? In the theatre we don't really ask that. We ask how to do it or what is happening or where it is headed. Of course it's not real.

More than anything, Leos Carax's film reminded me of David Lynch. Carax is much more interesting than Lynch for my money, but their styles are very similar. The poster, too, recalls the poster for Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, and the film made me think of that too – but only for a little bit. Apichatpong's project (I am thinking of his other films, as well) is very different and strikes me as a spiritual exploration, not of what is real, but of what is possible or how desire can shift our morphologies. Or maybe I'm just saying that I like Apichatpong and don't like Lynch or Carax. (The poster is also supposed to make us think of Georges Franju's Les Yeux sans Visage (Eyes without a Face), and if you miss the fact that Édith Scob is in both films, there is an explicit reference to Les Yeux near the end of Holy Motors.)

I will say this for Holy Motors, it is constantly surprising. Every time I think I have figured it out, Carax reminds me that I have not. The film's ending(s) are absolutely insane and worthy of any Lynchian surreal trip.

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives

The Palme d'Or winner Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives opens with the following epigram:

Facing the jungle, the hills and vales, 
my past lives as an animal and other beings rise up before me.

The film is striking and fascinating (don't see it if you don't like slow pictures, though) but I also just really loved the idea of the past as an animal hanging out in the forest.

L.P. Hartley's novel The Go-Between famously begins with the phrase The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there. And I've always loved that idea of trying to go back to the past as though it is somewhere else.

But in Apichatpong Weerasethakul's film Uncle Boonmee, the past isn't somewhere to go, it's something that never goes. Instead, it hangs about, sometimes making things difficult, sometimes comforting one. It is not a place that one can leave. The past is a kind of creature that one must learn to live with in harmony or at least having called a kind of truce.

Nina Simone / Tropical Malady

Today's film was experimental Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Tropical Malady. It was weird to say the least. I liked it more than I disliked it, but just. I feel the same way about Tropical Malady that I feel about Tsai Ming-Liang's Goodbye Dragon Inn: I kinda liked it but I would never recommend it to anyone.

I haven't been going to the movies, lately. In fact, I haven't seen anything new in the theatre since Caché, which I saw last Sunday. I've been mining the DVD library. I want to catch up on all of the 2005 stuff I missed. This week that has meant Happy Endings (mostly good with some excellent performances by Maggie Gyllenhaal and Lisa Kudrow) and Tropical Malady. Next week, hopefully, it will mean Yes, Hustle & Flow and Kings and Queen.

Last night I saw Brokeback Mountain for the second time. It's even better, quite honestly. I saw it this time, with my dear friend Elizabeth, and we were both in tears when the lights came up. (I was also sniffling quite unattractively.) The thing I noticed this time around was how brilliantly Ang Lee created the mythic proportions of the love between Ennis and Jack. Every time they are together and alone, the scenery is breathtaking: wide vistas, beautiful rivers, immaculate lighting. Even when they are alone together in the hotel after their first four years apart, the camera never pulls back to show their surroundings, it keeps tight in on the two lovers, just giving us them and not putting us in a setting of any kind. And when the men are away from each other the settings are bleak, never beautiful, always surrounded by people wearing scowls or stuck in unnavigable social situations. All of this cinematically combines to make their rendezvous, though few and far between, feel special, freeing to the audience, as though the characters, away from the madness of their distasteful normal lives, can finally be themselves. It's a brilliant film and it's looking more and more like the eventual Best Picture winner on March fifth.

Also and totally off topic from cinema, I purchased a Nina Simone cd on Tuesday and I guess I've never heard this song "The Other Woman" but I am absolutely in love with A) Nina Simone herself and B) this heart-rending song. There's a poorly-recorded live Jeff Buckley version floating around the internet and it's pretty good, too, but Nina Simone's rendition is unforgettable.