Pace and presence

By coincidence, last night I watched two arty foreign films, and both ended with a long slow shot looking up at the sky. One a daylight sky into which an object ascends until it disappears from sight, and the other a post-sunset sky into which a myriad of stars gradually appears. I wouldn’t say my response to either was like day and night, more like dawn versus twilight, just a different shade of light coming or going. But they will remain linked in my mind by questions of languorous pacing and the presence of the staring camera eye, which seems to be la mode du jour among knowing international film critics these days.

So I came to Heaven (2002, MC-68) by pure happenstance, browsing in the college library for a dvd to fill in a gap in my Netflix cycle. Cate Blanchett on the cover caught my eye, though I knew nothing of the title. Turns out it had a posthumous script by Krzysztof Kieslowski -- intended to be the first of a trilogy (with Hell and Purgatory) that might have rivaled his Three Colors: Red, White, and Blue -- and direction by Tom Tykwer, best known for the highly kinetic Run Lola Run. A shared obsession with synchronicity joins the ruminative fables of one and the thriller dynamics of the other, woven together through the slow and oh-so-steady movements of an aerial camera. This film is lovely to look at, whether it’s the roofs of Turin or the hills of Tuscany we pass over, and intriguing to think about, at least till the spell is broken by a series of “Hey, wait a minute, what about ...?” questions. Cate Blanchett is an English teacher in Italy, and we first see her in the process of planting a bomb in an imposing modern office building. We later learn that she is driven to righteous revenge because the police had refused to act when she told them her target was a drug kingpin, but her bomb goes horribly awry in a way she only learns when the police are interrogating her. Giovanni Ribisi is a translator for the carabineri who immediately falls for her and helps her escape. His devotion redeems her awful acts and restores her to the world through love. Or so one reading would go. I have stubborn objections to the way that’s worked out, though scene by scene I am swept along by the vivid visual presence of beauty, both Cate’s and the landscape’s.

Similarly, I eventually made my peace with the glacial pace of Silent Light (MC-79) just because it was beautiful to look at, for however long it took. Carlos Reygadas’ third film is set in a rural Mennonite community in Mexico, speaking a rare German dialect, and the first comparisons I reach for are Agnes Varda’s Le Bonheur and Carl Dreyer’s Ordet. Weird, huh? You’ll have to see it for yourself, but only if you have a zen-like patience for prolonged shots in which very little is happening. You could judge by the first shot, maybe five minutes long, of the sun rising over farm fields and distant mountains. Though that will come to seem expressive next to similarly prolonged shots of two characters standing silently with their backs to the camera. Once a story finally emerges, it’s pretty racy. Though Johan has an adorable blond-haired brood of children by his loving wife Esther, he finds himself drawn magnetically to a woman in town named Marianne. Each character refers to each other as “poor such and such,” but mutual sympathy only goes so far. Tragedy is bound to ensue, but is there a redemption beyond all personal conflict? Opinions may differ. Mine is that there is something here to recompense the time put in, but I imagine few could sit still for it. Usually I only go as slow as, say, Terence Malick’s The New World, but I managed to watch this without ever hitting the fast-forward button.