Though I see well over a
hundred of films every year, I don’t go out to a movie theater very often,
since I am a stay-at-home cheapskate, happy to see as many films as I can on
Blu-ray disk or video streaming from Netflix, for a simple monthly membership,
unbroken since June 2000. The choice of
films at Images Cinema in Williamstown usually represents exactly what I intend
to see, even if I am typically content to wait a few months to see them at
home. Recently, however, Images offered
three films in one week that I couldn’t wait to see.
Though I’ve never really
liked any Jean-Luc Godard film after Masculine
Feminine (1966), and certainly
none since his break with my main man Truffaut, in order to maintain
credibility as some sort of expert on film I had to see his latest, which came
in at #2 on the Film Comment poll for the Best Film of 2014. So when Images went out on a limb and showed Goodbye to Language in
3D (MC-75, NFX), I availed myself of the singular opportunity. And since the primary interest of the film
lay in the way it played around with the 3D format, such viewing was essential
to any evaluation. Nonetheless, this
Godard will come nowhere near my list of the year’s best. I did not so much watch the film, as observe
myself in the act of watching it, piecing together perception out of visual
clues and illusions. Trying to find a
point of reference around which to resolve a coherent visual perception, I
often lifted the 3D glasses, but other times I simply reveled in the
representational quality of the format.
I think in particular of a lingering shot of a passing ship with the
waves of its wake lapping into the foreground.
(I wasn’t sharp enough to witness the effect that several critics
mentioned, in the unreadable superimposition as a couple splits, which if you
close one eye or the other, resolves into two separate, and separating, images.) The film did suggest many ways that 3D could
be used to good effect outside of action films or animation. Of the actual content, and of Godard’s
intellectual pretensions and hobbyhorses, the less said, the better. You endure all that for 70 minutes in order
to see the occasional amazing image, definitely not to see or hear two unreal
characters pontificate, about how the two most interesting ideas are “infinity
and zero” (the man) or “no, sex and death” (the woman, who elsewhere announces
her purpose in life as “to say ‘no’ and to die.”) Godard not only dredges up his old Mao
obsession, but even attributes a Zhou Enlai quote to him in error. He long ago claimed the privilege to fool
around with film any way he wants, but hasn’t had a genuine new thought in
forty years or more. He’s always
congratulating himself on his own cleverness.
After the Godard I went back
to the box office, and into the theater again, for the humanistic antithesis
and antidote. A new Dardenne brothers
film is an event for me, so I didn’t want to postpone the pleasure, and I truly
appreciate Images for showing each as it comes out. Two Days, One Night (MC-89,
NFX) is not their greatest film (my personal favorites are Rosetta and The
Kid with a Bike), but it is their
most accessible to date, and I urge you to see it at earliest opportunity. Relatively speaking, they calm down their
herky-jerky, on-the-fly style, and they include a well-known actress in the
lead. Oscar-winner Marion Cotillard
meshes seamlessly with the Dardennes’ regulars and nonprofessionals, and indeed
received another Best Actress nomination.
She’s completely believable as a worker in a Belgian solar panel
factory, who is threatened with losing her job when she tries to return from
medical leave for depression. The
factory manager has determined that he can function with a crew of sixteen, so
he will allow her to return to work only if her fellow workers forego a bonus
to cover her wages. She has one weekend,
the time denoted in the title, to try to influence her fellows individually by
direct appeal, fearful that without the job her family will lose the house they
just moved into from public housing. The
film plays out as a parable of solidarity, without ever speaking the word, and
as a demonstration of Jean Renoir’s famous dictum, “There is only one terrible
thing, and that is, everyone has his reasons.”
With the breadth of a sociological survey, the Dardennes pose one
question, and then observe the disparate answers of their characters, in a way
that ratchets up suspense, and then provides a surprising but completely
convincing resolution. Eschewing background music as usual, they feature two
songs on the car radio, one by Petula Clark (in annoyingly unsubtitled French),
and Van Morrison singing “Gloria,” in a music cue that was positively
Bressonian. There are few filmmakers
working today with whom I feel more affinity than Jean-Pierre and Luc
Dardenne.
Mike Leigh is right in
there with them, and the next attraction at Images was his latest, Mr. Turner (MC-94, NFX), with commentary on the painterly
subject from one of the Clark ’s own attractions, Michael Cassin. This was definitely a film that deserved to
be seen on the widest possible canvas.
It ran long enough to feel a bit wearying, but I very much look forward
to seeing it again at greater leisure.
One thing I’ll be more attentive to is the extent to which it serves as
disguised autobiography -- a deep, late-life look at an artist with whom Leigh
feels a close identity. Having confirmed
the film’s fidelity to the facts of Turner’s life, as close-mouthed and
little-known as portrayed, I’ll relax into scenes whose meanings are fragmented,
but eventually form a meaningful mosaic.
But this is judging the film from one’s fatigue at the end, rather than
the sense of rapturous immersion with which it begins. Never has the past felt more palpable in an
historical film -- the past when it was present, just how it looked and
even how it smelled. The density of
specification offers time travel to Britain
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