The Last Mistress

2007 // France - Italy // Catherine Breillat // August 18, 2008 // Theatrical Print

B - If the mannered dullness of The Duchess of Langeais was a wincing blow to the fortunes of period erotic drama this year, The Last Mistress just might be its salvation, or at least a pleasurable redemption. Director Catherine Breillat meticulously assembles this tragedy of curdled love and molten lust with the obligatory production design opulence, but also with a clear command of the bitter-sour notes lurking within the material. Although The Last Mistress works within familiar genre conventions, it upends expectations with smoldering shocks and quiet gestures. Its most conspicuous flaw is the thin characterization that afflicts the French aristocrats populating its salons, opera boxes, and seaside castles. Thankfully, Asia Argento lends The Last Mistress the forbidden heat, wicked bite, and mysterious allure that it longs for. Breillat understands her star's centrality, and wields her like an assassin's dagger.

Bookending the film are scenes with the Vicomte de Mareuil (Michael Lonsdale) and Comtesse de Mendoze (Yolande Moreau), who serve as windows into the mentality of the Parisian nobility. The pair is preoccupied with one topic: the imminent marriage of angelic heiress Hermangarde (Roxane Mesquida) and rakish wanderer Ryno de Marigny (Fu'ad Ait Aattou). That Ryno is a notorious womanizer, socially unworthy of Hermangarde, fills the scandalized Vicomte and Comtesse with sanctimony and glee. Specifically, Ryno seems unable to give up his tempestuous, ten-year affair with a Spanish-Italian courtesan, Vellini (Argento). Much of the film takes place in flashback, as Ryno, desperate to win the approval of Hermangarde's sly, sweet grandmother, the Marquise de Flers, confesses the details of this forbidden relationship.

The film's characters—smooth young dandies and silver grande dames alike—are undeniably beautiful in their way, but often disappointingly one-dimensional. It's not an unforgivable sin (this is period costume drama, after all,) save perhaps in the context of Ryno. Too often, the witty devil that Ryno should be slips to reveal a dunderheaded victim of Vellini's curious charms, or merely a bland, pampered narcissist. The former might be intentional, as the film in part examines the way that addiction to illicit sex makes fools of people. The latter, however, is evidence of misplaced emphasis. Ryno just doesn't have the strength of character to serve as an engaging protagonist. It may be a casting issue: Aattou's porcelain androgyny doesn't really suit a worldly libertine. At any rate, Breillat compensates by relying on Argento to evoke the cruel, damaged, sex-hungry tone that makes the film thrive. Her Vellini is not the hero, or even the anti-hero, but she is the film's heart.

Indeed, it is Argento that makes The Last Mistress worthwhile, even dazzling at times. Vellini is far from the most beautiful woman in Paris—Ryno describes her as an "ugly mutt" when he first glimpses her—but there's a fire in her breast that everyone can sense and Ryno covets. Argento's rounded, boyish, mean features and strange, curved teeth suggest a woman brimming with contempt for social standards and the opinions of others. This makes Vellini all the more desirable, and it grants a primal intensity to her lovemaking. She is a riddle that Ryno savors but has no hope of resolving.

Agento walks a fine line by embarking on a full-throated, even frenzied performance. At times she veers past pained and collides into outright silliness. (One disturbing sex scene has her shrieking in such orgasmic anguish that it's a little hard not to giggle.) Still, there's a hypnotic completeness to the portrayal, a wholesale commitment to render Vellini as a physically and emotionally unified character, even as she bubbles with conflicting urges. She is a strange woman, but her behavior never seems strange in the moment. Consider a scene where Ryno lays wounded from a pistol duel. Vellini, previously venomously dismissive of Ryno's advances, suddenly lunges past the surgeon and hungrily licks the man's wound. Breillat and Argento make the gesture marvelously unexpected, but not confusing. The meaning is as clear as the moment is bizarre: Ryno's infatuation is now requited.

The lazy adjective "brave" gets tossed around whenever an actress of any talent bares her breasts on screen, even for a moment. What Argento does in The Last Mistress is a whole different ballgame: scenes of torrid sex that are only a shade removed from soft-core pornography. That this requires confidence on the actress' part goes without saying, but it also demands good judgment from both performer and film-maker. Is the scene merely prurient or does it serve to illustrate something significant about the character? (Can a scene be simultaneously prurient and utilitarian? I think so, and I think The Last Mistress has such scenes.) Breillat is engaging in voyeurism, to be sure, but her gaze is directed into the heart and mind. We are embarrassed at the sight of naked, rutting Vellini, not because we are ashamed of her carnal sins, but because Argento gives such a rattling performance that it offers glimpses of ugly, broken places in the noblewoman's inner world. It's no coincidence that Argento projects the most discomfiting, realistic sensuality in the most defeated, ruinous sex scene in the film. Ryno is, by comparison, merely a blank (albeit well-sculpted) prop.

While Breillat equates Ryno's sexual obsession with Vellini to a drug addiction, she also offers an assessment of sexual behavior that is more challenging than a mere depiction of human weakness. Through Ryno's confession to the Maquise, we eventually learn how such ferocious desire and bad blood blossomed between the couple. The tortuous path of their affair indicates that The Last Mistress is not the typical indictment of wealthy society its genre trappings might suggest. Rather, Breillat offers a more sobering and personal examination of the dynamics of lust. How does desire appear, so often unbidden and inconvenient? Can it evolve into genuine love? And if love vanishes, will desire survive, growing irresistible and cancerous in its absence? Breillat conducts these inquiries with such intensity, and with such a captivating instrument in Argento, that the film's narrative troubles--chiefly some confused storytelling in the final half hour--seem trifling.

Tell No One

2006 // France // Guillaume Canet // August 10, 2008 // Theatrical Print

C - Guillaume Canet's absorbing yet irksome thriller Tell No One engages (for a time) as a puzzle box, and also as a bitter rumination on the costs of secrecy. It twists together computer mischief, frenetic action set pieces, and cops-and-corruption melodrama, and punctuates them with brutally violent exclamation marks. Despite the cloak-and-dagger intensity of its plot, Tell No One rarely grandstands, its themes murmuring rather than screaming. It boasts sufficient moments of originality and sleek cinematic pleasure that its story troubles—evidencing a distressingly amateur tendency—are rendered doubly exasperating. The plot may be convoluted, but this doesn't justify Tell No One's garbled cinematic language. When a con succeeds not through misdirection and cunning but because the mark didn't even understand the rules of the game, something has gone seriously awry.

Tell No One boasts a shameless, pop- and soul-strewn soundtrack that proclaims the film's earnestly romantic ethos. And wherever romance rears its head in a thriller, tragedy is sure to be lurking nearby. Accordingly, the film presents us with French pediatrician Alexendre Beck (François Cluzet) who had just finished medical school when his wife Margot (Marie-Josée Croze) was murdered, apparently by a notorious serial killer. Eight years later, the good doctor is still numb from the loss of a woman he believed to be his soul mate. Now there are new rumblings in the case, precipitated by freshly unearthed bodies, freshly suspicious policemen, and, most significantly, a mysterious email sent to Beck. He's baffled and anguished when the email links him to a live surveillance camera that captures—for only a moment—a woman who looks remarkably like Margot. But it can't be Margot, can it? Are the police tormenting him? Or is it someone else's sick game?

Beck's lingering doubts and still-bloody emotional wounds seem to render him ripe for gas-lighting, as his friend and sister's lover Hélène (Kristin Scott Thomas) suspects. Beck begins to wonder how much he really knows about his wife's death, or, for that matter, her life. There are more emails, photos he can't explain, and breadcrumbs that lead in ever-widening spiral out from Margot. Tell No One is most effective when it roils within Beck's headspace, keeping its focus on this one man's enduring love for his wife. Never mind that the storybook glow to their relationship seems sketchy, despite the film's heavy-handed assertion that they were Meant For Each Other. Within the conflicted territory where Beck's affections and fears swirl, Tell No One finds the room to neatly explore the consequences of keeping secrets. The film is essentially a tragedy, a grim tale where no good deed goes unpunished, and where happy endings tend to brush past in a crowd and vanish, glimpsed but never found.

There's more than a little of Paul Greengrass's ADD jitters in Canet's approach to action sequences, but the director is skillful enough to maintain a brisk aura of authentic danger throughout them. The chases and escapes are never dull, although they at times feel like detours in a work plainly absorbed with perils more abstract than car crashes. Similarly, there's something disappointing about a film with lofty thematic ambitions that traffics in thriller conventions so clichéd they sting. When Beck aids a gangbanger's hemophiliac son in an early scene, there's no doubt that the act will reap a boon later, especially when Beck nobly refuses the thug's money. The film practically has a genre checklist in hand: the wrongly accused protagonist, the clandestine meeting in a public place, the rot in the halls of power, and an overly-long climactic exposition, complete with clarifying flashbacks. Thank goodness that Tell No One is more interesting than its trappings would suggest. That said, there is the odd flash of bottled lightning. Among the goons hounding Beck's steps, Mikaela Fisher leaves a lasting impression as a lanky ghoul of an amazon with a knack for pressure-point torture. And Canet pulls off an astonishing coup by employing an overcooked U2 song in a completely appropriate and gratifying manner.

The serious flaw that bedevils Tell No One is its simple failure to effectively communicate its plot points, a problem that reeks distressingly of Z-movie clumsiness. In terms of pure storytelling, the film is a mess. New characters appear without warning and make statements that certainly seem relevant, yet context is perpetually a few paces behind the film-makers (and the viewer). I spent half the film trying to keep up with a proliferation of vaguely sketched relationships and barely hinted plot elements. Yet, if anything, Tell No One is overly long, frittering away its running time on chases and monologues that go on several beats past their purpose. It's a film sorely in need of a re-write, methinks. The problem may also be one of editing, as there actually appear to be missing scenes at select points. Most maddeningly, vital backstory is revealed only when it is relevant for a "surprising" revelation. (One example of this at the climax is so egregious that I am convinced I missed something earlier in the film. This alleged twist simply couldn't be as cheap as it seemed.) It's lamentable to see such fundamental storytelling blunders hobble a thriller that is otherwise so thoughtful and engaging.

Man on Wire

2008 // UK - USA // James Marsh // August 5, 2008 // Theatrical Print

B - James Marsh's Man on Wire succeeds gratifyingly in one crucial respect, despite its questionable structural choices: It ascends to become more than a mere cinematic description of an event. That counts for a lot in documentary film-making. Marsh strives mightily to convey (and largely accomplishes) a sense of the transcendent in this story of French acrobat Philippe Petit and the outrageous artistic stunt he improbably pulled off. In 1974, Petit and several accomplices entered the World Trade Center and strung a high-wire between the Two Towers, setting the stage for a 45-minute tightrope performance at 1,400 feet with no net.

That's pretty much the story, but as with most effective documentaries, Man on Wire—which takes its title from the Port Authority's description of Petit's "disorderly conduct"—is compelling because of the unexpected themes it discovers. If the film falters a bit in its presentation, it's due to to the clumsy, scrambled structure it employs, and the way it hedges its bets by dwelling for far too long on the drama of its story's heist aspects. Still, Man on Wire pinpoints the same sublime wonder that Petit evoked when he created such a baffling, beautiful work of performance art.

Man on Wire begins on the day of the "coup," as Petit's team termed their act of trespassing-slash-performance. The tale of the coup unfolds gradually in stylized black-and-white recreations, and Marsh presents the act as a good-natured caper. It's not an untenable approach per se, but the film's fractured tone in these sequences—simultaneously anxious and clownish—always seems somewhat awkward. In this respect, Man on Wire compares unfavorably to last year's Deep Water, another film about human limits and foolish risks that marvelously evoked tense drama from historical events. Ultimately, Man on Wire's aims soar higher, so its odd tone is a minor sin.

The film's more vexing problem is that it intercuts the lengthy coup sequence with flashbacks that examine Petit's youth, his previous tightrope stunts, and the team's elaborate planning and preparations. This repeatedly deflates the tension that the film is attempting to evoke, and for no discernible reason. (Contrast this with Into the Wild, a flawed film that nonetheless shrewdly used a entwined, twin narrative structure to prevent a glum mood from settling over its latter half.) The chopped and rearranged story just doesn't add anything to Man on Wire, which would have been much more compelling as a chronological narrative.

Despite these problems, however, the giddy thrill of Petit's stunt—of his whole persona and worldview, actually—exhibits an undeniable pull on the film and the viewer. Man on Wire's stylistic nods to the heist genre work best when they convey a certain Naughty Boy glee, such as in the perpetrators' clichéd nicknames ("The Australian," "The Inside Man", etc.) While some of Petit's accomplices assisted in his previous stunts, they all seem to have been taken unawares by the Frenchman's commitment to the "WTC Project". Their remembrances all strike a similar note: The reality of the danger (and the lunacy of it all) didn't hit them until they realized that Petit actually intended to step onto that wire.

The acrobat's passion and Zen focus burn through every frame of Man on Wire. It's fair to say that the documentary is Petit's film as much as Marsh's. Occasionally the filmmaker errs on the side of credulity in his mythologizing of the man. There's something a little too neat about Petit's alleged resolve as a teenager to wirewalk between the Twin Towers, before the structures were even completed, and Marsh seems to accept this ancedote without question. At other times Marsh pulls back from more fascinating territory, such as his tantalizing and maddening dance around the disintegration of Petit's relationships in the wake of the WTC Project.

Where these more humanistic elements are present, they paradoxically serve to highlight Man on Wire's obvious fascination with the sublime aspects of performance. Petit is joyously unapologetic about his stunt, and an enthusiastic witness for its transformative power, both for himself and everyone who looked up that August morning in 1974. He glibly asserts, "There is no 'Why'" when asked about the rationale for the WTC Project, but the why is obvious: To give the world a taste of something magical. Indeed, his accomplices echo this sentiment, speaking in reverent tones about the effect of the spectacle, struggling to find words. Some of them are moved to tears, because of the beauty in the remembered feat, or the pain of their falling out with Petit after such a triumph, or both.

At the documentary's inarguable climax, when Petit finally steps onto the wire, Marsh hushes the Michael Nyman score for a delicate Satie piano tune and takes us through a stunning selection of photos that captured the stunt. It's a beautiful sequence, a moving counterpoint to the film's previously harried, veering path. For days and weeks thereafter, the world buzzed about this man who danced a quarter mile above the earth for less than an hour, becoming like a god. For all of Petit's self-aggrandizing talk of rebellion and "pushing himself," this is Man on Wire's most striking thesis, one that Marsh recognizes and communicates with boundless sincerity and awe. Petit's former girlfriend, Annie, recalls vainly attempting to point him out to spectators beneath the Twin Towers: You can't see him, but he's up there. Like a god, indeed.

Chris & Don: A Love Story

2007 // USA // Tina Mascara and Guido Santi // August 3, 2008 // Theatrical Print

B - A feature documentary about a romantic relationship seems to present particular challenges. In attempting to convey such a profoundly personal subject, a filmmaker risks emotional voyeurism, not to mention its ugly cousin, audience resentment. Who are these people, and what makes their love so damn special that they deserve a movie? Directors Tina Mascara and Guido Santi appreciate that a viewer must first be lured before they will weep. Their new feature, Chris & Don: A Love Story introduces a couple as star-crossed as they come: The Berlin Stories author Christopher Isherwood and portrait painter Don Bachardy, thirty years Isherwood's junior. What could be more compelling than a May-December gay couple that defied the world and discovered an enduring love? However, despite its veneer of against-all-odds romance, Chris & Don quietly discovers an emotional space that is deeply affecting precisely due to its universal nature.

Given that Isherwood passed away in 1986, Mascara and Santi necessarily slant their approach towards the 74-year-old Bachardy, who narrates much of the film with his frank, mirthful recollections. However, Chris & Don doesn't lack for other sources. The film alights on the remembrances of friends and on cultural context provided by literary and art scholars. Perhaps most valuably, Isherwood gets his own say via his meticulous and astonishingly poetic diaries, where he chronicled the ups and down of his life with Bachardy. Read by Michael York—whose voice is unfortunately nothing like the author's—these writings reveal the moments that Isherwoood treasured and the emotional currents that only he discerned. With this mosaic approach, Mascara and Santi assemble a rich and moving personal portrait of two people entwined by sublime bonds.

The documentary method on display in Chris & Don is fairly conventional, but the film benefits from its ocassionally bolder choices. On the one hand, there is a flat and somewhat disengaged quality to the blurry recreations, which are far too reminiscent of History Channel hackery. In contrast, the film's most successful gesture is its scribbled animated sequences, which visualize Isherwood and Bachardy as the animal alter egos they assumed in their private letters. While there is an undeniable charm to these fantasy scenes—Isherwood assumes the persona of an old horse and Bachardy a fluffy cat—they also have a deeper resonance. The device is familiar (Who doesn't have silly pet names for their beloved?), but it also speaks to the cunning behind the couple's apparent whimsy. In externalizing their desires and anxieties, Isherwood and Bachardy were able to pick their way through emotional minefields, such as Bachardy's resentment that he was denied a youth of roving sexual experience.

Chris & Don suffers somewhat from its gentle yet persistent need to highlight the positive and hint at the negative. Mascara and Santi clearly wish to render the couple's romance as inspiring and touching, but in the interest of drama they can't resist adding concessions to the rockier patches in the relationship. The treatment is a touch too vague, however, and Bachardy's anecdotes are too elliptical. It's not that the film wants it both ways—gay men as exemplars of both committed lovers and quarreling bitches—so much as the tension in the story's middle feels affected and, well, cheap. Fortunately this criticism doesn't apply to the final chapter of Chris & Don, where the directors pluck out a genuinely devastating vision of the mysterious places where love, art, and death intersect. Bachardy shows the hundreds of drawings and paintings he completed of Isherwood in the author's final months as cancer slowly defeated him. When Bachardy tearfully muses that his final, furious burst of creativity would have made his lover proud, it is the most humane moment in any documentary this year.

Up the Yangtze

2007 // Canada // Yung Chang // July 30, 2008 // Theatrical Print

B - Yung Chang's Up the Yangtze dangles delicately in the documentary space between an unvarnished portrait of life and a nimble examination of social issues. Deceptively modest in its approach and laced with swift, unexpected stabs of pathos, Yangtze is most essentially a glimpse of a land in flux. Chang is plainly fascinated with the ways that epic changes to landscapes and societies sweep some people along, raise others to heady heights, and drown still others without a glimmer of pity. Yangtze is primarily the tale of "Cindy" Shui Yu, a sixteen-year-old Chinese peasant (though she looks younger) who takes a job on a kitschy river cruise in order to help her family claw its way out of poverty. Chang, however, frequently wanders away to gaze at the brown expanse of the Yangtze River, to peek in on the struggles of Cindy's parents, or to listen placidly to others only tangentially related to the story. In this way, Yangtze moves with plodding resolve from the personal to the universal and back again, its intentions naked but always accented with remarkable insight and empathy.

The Chinese-Canadian Chang dribbles sparse narration into the film, reflecting on China's future and his own family history, particularly recollected snatches of conversation with his grandfather. He explains that the Yangtze River is rising, its banks swelling under the influence of the colossal Three Gorges Dam. Millions of people, most of them poor and rural, will be displaced from their homes when the project's final human costs are tallied, if indeed they are ever tallied. Cindy's family is one such household. Her parents' decision to send her to work on the tourist ships is one born of financial necessity. There is a thin reed of hope in the choice, but Chang reveals—with a cunning appreciation for the language of face and body—how it wracks the family with frustration, sadness, and shame.

There is a tinge of the unadventurous in the subject matter here. Cindy's journey from her family's sagging peasant hut to a cheaply "glamorous" life catering to Ugly American tourists, complete with shopping trips in the city and luxuries like makeup, seems a little too conventional to be penetrating. However, Chang follows her path with unobtrusive sensitivity, as well as an eye for the uncomfortable currents of class in crypto-capitalist modern China. When Cindy's ship docks in her hometown and her parents stop by the pier for a visit, the director catches the girl squirming via her posture, eyes, and awkward rhythms. Here is something everyone can understand: the burn where love for our families shades into embarrassment.

However, Chang isn't content with a mere family drama or adolescent coming-of-age tale. The changes cascading through Cindy's young life echo the changes that overwhelm the other characters and China itself. "Jerry" Bo Yu Chen, a fellow worker on the ship, is a handsome, cocky young man with taste for bigger things. Chang is entranced by Jerry's enthusiasm at the lucrative tips offered by the work, but the director also detects the arrogance that will eventually get the young porter disciplined by the ship's manager. Jerry confesses that he senses it too, revealing self-awareness and a tendency for despair that we do not expect. It seems crude to suggest that Cindy and Jerry "represent" modern China. Rather, their lives reflect the dynamics and problems of that country writ small.

The rising waters of the Yangtze are always on Chang's mind, an obvious but complex metaphor for the forces at work in the film. Most urgently, the floods carry the risk of drowning to higher ground, threatening spaces previously sacrosanct from their currents, and forcing the Chinese to sink or swim. Although Three Gorges is a man-made thing, for people such as Cindy's family it might as well be a calamity sent by the gods. For the Party is like a god, except that it never seems to acknowledge prayers. It is a deity that only pronounces, as when a minder cheerfully explains to the tourists that all "relocatees" will be prosperous and content as a result of the dam.

In one of this documentary's most vivid moments, a shopkeeper, at first seemingly fatalistic about the project, suddenly breaks down into uncontrollable sobbing as he recalls being beaten from his home by government officials. Equally haunting is a scene near Yangtze's conclusion, a time-lapse sequence of Cindy's old home slowly being swallowed by the muddy, merciless river. Progress cannot be stopped, but it is folly (perhaps even monstrous) to insist, as the government and business boosters seem to, that there are no traumas, losses, or costs.

Encounters at the End of the World

2007 // USA // Werner Herzog // July 30, 2008 // Theatrical Print

A - The Discovery Channel and its lesser edutainment progeny are a bit like eccentric Victorian naturalists, disseminating wonders and grotesqueries for an ecological spectacle that would made Barnum proud. This, perhaps more than the Bowdlerization or Disneyfication of Nature, is one of the more unfortunate legacies of the nature documentary. Art has receded in favor of the accumulation of curious factoids and gruesome oddities for their own collectible sake. Thank God, then, for Werner Herzog. The German director has spent decades carefully building his cynical credibility. As a result, he can approach the natural world with the same awestruck notes as any Discovery feature, even as he pushes beyond the banal limits of such fare in the pursuit of something more probing and, well, visionary.

This makes it all the more strange and delicious that the cable network produced his latest feature, Encounters at the End of World. This exploration of the landscapes, creatures, and people of Antarctica is as magnificent as nature documentaries come. Encounters elicits authentic chills of astonishment and reverence with its marriage of sights and sounds, and then uses that emotional toehold to thrust us into familiar but always disquieting Herzog thematic territory. What drives humanity off the edge of the map? In a twenty-first century bedeviled by possible environmental calamity, will we find salvation there or just auguries of doom?

Encounters is a beautiful film. No, scratch that. It's downright gorgeous. It more than fulfills its promise to show us vistas unlike any we've seen before. Many filmmakers, even very shoddy ones, can mate shots of natural beauty with swelling choral music to attain a faux solemnity. Herzog, however, achieves such a union so damn well, and with such a clear distaste for cheap sentiment, that his solemnity arrives with a gleam of legitimacy, not to mention dark veins that trace to deeper, rougher musings. When Herzog comments, in that appealing Teutonic cadence of his, that divers gliding through the frigid polar ocean remind him of astronauts, it's not merely an observation. He not-so-subtly claims the heroism of space travelers on behalf of the scientists he profiles. Moreover, he ponders why we as a species, and these people in particular, are drawn to the last unconquered realm on the planet. Or maybe not so unconquered, for as Herzog reminds us, there is little true exploration to be had in the world anymore, even at its basement. Perhaps that's why Encounters also suggests that Anarctica represents something more than territory to be claimed and carved up. It is a place where all the final mysteries of the natural world seem to huddle, calling out to researchers in biology, geology, and physics.

It's also a place of dreams and madness, a flytrap that collects survivors, wanderers, oddballs, and second- and third-chancers. Everyone that Herzog encounters—forklift operators, vulcanologists, plumbers, hermited penguin watchers—seems to be waiting for something. Whether that thing is the Big Score of the con-man or the Big Answer of the sage remains ambiguous. Regardless, the thousand strange souls dwelling in McMurdo Station and points beyond seem to expect that their Grail will tumble out of a hole at the bottom of the world any day now. Ever alert for mush-headed Big Ideas, Herzog nevertheless seems to find something marvelous and inspiring about these people. He lingers on them, long after they have elucidated their research or told their rambling stories. It's as if the director is trying to catch them in a moment when the pretense drops away. When it doesn't, when it becomes obvious that Antarctica's cold burns away pretense, that her people are exactly what they appear to be... well, one almost senses a ghost of a smile on Herzog's lips.

Encounters is less sour and more somber in tone than the admittedly magnificent Grizzly Man. There Herzog discovered endless layers to fearless fool Timothy Treadwell. Here he marvels not so much at Antarctica's complexities and contrasts, but its sheer inpenetrability. Although a glaciologist cautions that this continent of ice is a dynamic, living thing, Herzog nonetheless conveys it as a vast, eternal monolith, one defined primarily (in the film at least) by its alluring and yet pitiless power over humans. This theme of the polar waste as a siren is reinforced by repeated invocation—often via consciously quaint historical footage—of early twentieth century expeditions to the continent.

Yet the film returns time and again to the possibility of Antarctica as oracle, a place where dedicated seekers might find secret knowledge, and this idea exhibits a magnetic pull over the film. Of course, Herzog, being who he is, always has questions, doubts, and suspicions. Even as he gapes at the eerie beauty of the undersea vistas, there's always that lingering curmudgeon impulse. It's the same one that ultimately decided that a grizzly bear's face held only stupid hunger, rather than animal wisdom. It's the same one that deservedly dwells on Encounters' most chilling image: that of a disoriented penguin, waddling off not towards its nesting grounds or the sea, but to the mountains and certain death.