Telluride at Dartmouth #4

I am so frustrated for not having posted yet about Pablo Larraín's No, which played at Telluride and will play at the New York Film Festival next month. You will note that though I liked this film quite a bit it is not ranked in my 2012 rankings because (as far as I can tell) it does not yet have a U.S. distributor. I should also tell you that it is, as of today, Chile's official selection for the Foreign Language Oscar.

Plus, it's a really good film. It stars Gael García Bernal (everyone's favorite Mexican actor) who I know you all remember from Y Tu Mamá También, Amores Perros, El Crimen del Padre Amaro, Bad Education and a million other movies. No's subject matter is the plebiscite in Chile that functioned as a referendum on the government of General Augusto Pinochet. García Bernal is an advertising man who runs the "No" campaign, which calls for Pinochet to be ousted.

Okay, now here's how the film works. No is shot as though it is a piece of 1980s South-American television: the aspect ration is closer to 1:1.33 than I have seen in a movie in a long time, the lighting is decidedly televisual, and the film stock looks really old to eyes used to watching things like, say, Transformers: Dark of the Moon.

At first I found this conceit irritating. I know it's a movie about the 1980s, but I don't wanna watch a 1980s movie, mom! Why can't you just film it like all the other pretty movies from 2012, thankyouverymuch. But I'll be damned if the whole thing doesn't just work after a while. We watch so much advertising footage in the course of the film, witness so much of what Chileans saw on their small screens at home, that what is an advertisement and what is reality becomes strangely blurred. So much so that by the time Gael and his son go to a political rally in the film's third act, I wasn't sure whether Pinochet's advertising team had captured the pair on video, if they were broadcasting that video on television as a smear campaign, or if it was really happening. In this way, Larraín's film manages to conflate anti-Pinochet propaganda, footage of Pinochet himself, the blatant semiotics of advertising imagery, and the narrative of No itself. The more I think about it, the smarter it becomes.

Furthermore, No, this film about the overthrowing of a dictator who proclaimed a "dirty war" on his own people, who committed countless atrocities, is unapologetically comedic. In fact, No is really funny. Larraín is able to balance the material dangers that his protagonists faced as they combated Pinochet's regime, the potential for violence that always hangs over them, with a true spirit of victory and fun. And there is something funny about Pinochet and his uniform (in the same way that Chaplin proves that there is something funny about Hitler in his delightful burlesque). This directorial skill seems to me to be a rather extraordinary one, a feat rarely pulled off by even the most experienced of directors (I am thinking now of that painfully unfunny fowl in Mr. Spielberg's War Horse.) That No is also an entertaining piece of historiography, an important political commentary on the reasons why people vote against their own interests, and a catalog of Pinochet's crimes against the Cuban citizenry is truly remarkable.

Silence and the Artist

The Artist is a gimmick. And I think it's going to win Best Picture, or rather, I should say that I hope it wins Best Picture, because if it is a gimmick (and it is) it is the most clever gimmick I've seen in years.

See, The Artist is a silent film. It's made in black and white and also in the old 1:37 aspect ratio. There is a gorgeous Old Hollywood score undergirding the whole thing (just like silent pictures of old) but we don't actually get to hear the actors (Jean Dujardin, Bérénice Bejo, John Goodman, James Cromwell) actually speak.

And it works. It works like gangbusters. Of course, silent movies worked too, and many of them still work, a fact to which anyone who has seen Sunrise or 7th Heaven or The Gold Rush can attest. The Artist is delightful: movie magic from start to finish, drawing particular attention to an aspect of the cinema that is not given a lot of attention on its own (think of how very much we always comment on camerawork, or editing, or acting, and how little on the audio in a movie!).

Ludovic Bource, who scored the film, has, as far as I can tell, never scored anything this enormous, but his music is great: instantly hummable, was nominated for a Golden Globe, and seems destined to be nominated for Best Original Score come January.

The acting in this movie is also wonderful. It is impossible not to fall in love with Dujardin and Bejo. They're simply the most lovable pair I can think of. Dujardin in particular has such a charismatic way about him that it is hard for me to imagine anyone else achieving anything anywhere near what he does in this role. I was in love with him within the film's first ten minutes. He's simply astounding.

The film is indebted, of course, to Singin' in the Rain – any film about the transition from silents to talkies is bound to be – and the plot is heavily dependent on the iconic plot of A Star Is Born, but none of that matters in The Artist. If it's derivative, it puts such an original twist on its source material that I didn't mind one bit. Instead, I went along for the ride, mesmerized by the audacious filmmaking, the sheer cleverness, and the sheer magic up on that screen.

(Just as a sidenote, I can't help but think of last year's silent film, The Illusionist, and how much I absolutely loved it. And, as you can probably tell, The Artist is also (as people are so fond of saying) a love letter to the movies, but Michel Hazanavicius's love letter is so much more interesting than Scorsese's. (I know, I know. I should leave Marty alone. I'll stop now.))