SLIFF 2011: Pig

2011 // USA // Henry Barrial // November 13, 2011 // Theatrical HDCAM (Landmark Tivoli Theater)

The intrinsic grittiness of low-budget independent film-making ultimately contributes to the uncanny mood of the conceptually ambitious thriller Pig. Writer-director Henry Barrial’s script lays out a scenario with echoes of other noir-tinted puzzle-box films such as The Game, Oldboy, and Memento. However, in its cinematic execution, the story discovers a disorienting, dream-like aura that places it in the hinterlands of David Lynch country. A Man (Rudolph Martin) awakens hooded and bound in the desert with no memory of his identity. He carries only a scrap of paper scrawled with a name: “Manny Elder.” After collapsing from exhaustion, he finds himself in the care of a beautiful widow, Isabel (Heather Ankeny), who entices him to stay with her and her young son at their remote desert home. However, the confounding visions that flash through the Man’s mind compel him to search for his identity, leading him into Los Angeles and through a succession of strange encounters. By the end of the first act, the story has undergone a drastic realignment that deepens the narrative mystery even as it narrows the film’s potential. From that moment on, it’s apparent that Pig’s story must necessarily rest on a dream, a science-fiction conceit, or a malevolent conspiracy of epic proportions. (Or all three).

There’s a streak of faintly dissatisfying conservatism to Pig’s final scenes, but it has less to do with the film’s message or style than with the inherent limitations of genre storytelling. No explanation that the film might offer for its strange events could realistically maintain the narrative’s internal integrity and also preserve the unsettling mood that pervades the bulk of its scenes. A splendidly crafted but radically different style is on display in a particular film-within-the-film sequence, suggesting that the atmosphere that pervades Pig elsewhere represents an adroit utilization of the baseline indie aesthetic. The Los Angeles of the film is kin to the weird, diabolical metropolis of Lynch’s doppelganger triptych (Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive, and INLAND EMPIRE). It’s a sunny-yet-ominous place full of offhandedly eccentric moments, vaguely sinister spaces, and banal and often anachronistic objects that seem to roil with significance. In the final analysis, the film is more invested in presenting a story that glistens with philosophical relevance for our current age than in exploiting the horrifying potential of its disorienting atmospherics. Still, while it lasts, Pig is disarming stuff, the kind of sly little genre experiment that reveals the parched cinematic imagination that characterizes most studio thrillers.

SLIFF 2011: Shame

2011 // UK // Steve McQueen // November 12, 2011 // Digital Theatrical Projection (Landmark Tivoli Theater)

With his sophomore feature film, Shame, director Steve McQueen once again ruthlessly observes as Michael Fassbender subjects himself to a hideous regimen of self-annihilation. However, whereas McQueen's stunning 2008 debut, Hunger, depicted an IRA true believer forgoing food as an act of political protest, the director's new film focuses on a man utterly dominated by sexual compulsions. Brandon (Fassbender) leads a quintessential lonely New York City bachelor life, one bounded by a successful New-New Economy career and aseptic one-bedroom apartment, but defined by the relentless pursuit of orgasm. "Libido" seems too feeble a word to describe Brandon's drives, which are akin to a yawning, ravenous void that he fills with an endless succession of one-night-stands and call girls (not to mention habitual wanks in the office restroom). Into this frenzied pit of sexual need tumbles Brandon's little sister, Cissy (Carey Mulligan), a struggling torch-singer who crashes on his couch when she finds herself back in New York and between lovers. Needless to say, Cissy's presence sets Brandon on edge, not only because of their sharp personality clashes, but because Baby Sis throws a monkey-wrench into his sexual routine.

Regardless of whether Brandon's disengaged, hypersexual behavior truly constitutes “sexual addiction,” (or whether such an affliction even exists), the man is plainly engaged in a fearsome cycle that is spiraling slowly and inevitably downward, a cycle he seems to find personally repugnant and yet is unable to halt. There's no denying that Shame is a psychologically ugly film, repugnant in a way that even Hunger never managed. The latter film at least grapples with the alleged moral purity of self-destruction for ideological reasons, even if it never fully embraces such a view. By comparison, Brandon's carnal pursuits contain not a hint of joyful hedonism, just a slack inertia and a whopping dose of self-hatred. In the main, the film relies on Fassbender's exceedingly raw performance to convey the foulness of Brandon's rutting, rather than on seedy style or production design. To wit: There is a extended threesome scene late in the film that is lovingly shot in golden hues, scored with rapturous strings, and edited to take the viewer sleekly from one position and act to the next. And yet Fassbender's face contains all the evidence necessary to illustrate that this erotic marathon is an act of supreme unhappiness and loathing.

It's this kind of bold upending of expectations—and the refusal to indulge in cinematic laziness—that makes McQueen's film-making approach so invigorating, no matter how unpleasant the subject matter. The director's use of anamorphic widescreen is, if anything more striking here than in Hunger, and his camera placement and use of long takes are just as thrilling. Returning cinematographer Sean Bobbitt presents a cool, gorgeous urban landscape that glints with a distinctly Gotham atmosphere. Meanwhile, the film's look also subtly complements its deep aura of twenty-first century despair, with all the directionless anxiety that implies. Buried deep in the script is a suggestion that family abuse is at the root of Brandon and Cissy's problems, but Shame isn't particularly interested in excavating the siblings' deeply scarified psyches in search of personal demons to exorcise. This is gruesome portraiture, pure and simple, executed largely without the pleasure of a redemptive narrative arc. The film simply wants us to look unflinchingly at Brandon and consider how such an outwardly functional but inwardly broken person could be created and sustained.

SLIFF 2011: A Dangerous Method

2011 // Canada // David Cronenberg // November 11, 2011 // Theatrical Projection (Landmark Plaza Frontenac Cinema)

For a film that ostensibly concerns itself with the relationship between pioneering psychiatrists Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender) and Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mortensen), A Dangerous Method offers little insight into the ways in which these men transformed one another, personally and professionally. That isn't so much a criticism as an observation that that while film is quite invested in charting the emotional topography between the two men, each is hunkered down in a bunker constructed of their particular intellectual and emotional idiosyncrasies. Much is made of their contrasts: Swiss and Austrian, Gentile and Jew, young and old. Director David Cronenberg and screenwriter Christopher Hampton (who adapted the film from his own stage play, The Talking Cure, which is in turn based on David Kerr's book A Most Dangerous Method) don't allow either man to change much over the course of the film, particularly Freud, who is more professionally settled, more risk-averse, and deeply entrenched in the correctness of his theories. (There is a suggestion that if the pair had been closer contemporaries, their professional dynamic would have been vastly different.) The film presents both men as ahead-of-their-time giants, each naturally attracted to flame of the other's intellect, and each quietly harboring a remarkably liberated worldview. The story of A Dangerous Method is in large part about how these men went from enthusiastic professional colleagues with deep, mutual admiration—Freud even comments at one point that Jung is his de facto successor—to frosty rivals who barely speak to one another.

It is the film's third primary character who is granted a genuine arc. Sabina Spielrein (Keira Knightley) is a Russian Jewess with severe mental scars, but who nonetheless has ambitions to become a psychiatrist herself. When the film opens, Spielrein is shown to be barely functional, suffering from debilitating psycho-sexual fits elicited by feelings of humiliation and other stimuli. She is brought into Jung's care at his hospital in Zurich, and over the course of the film's eight or so years, she undergoes a transformation from psychic cripple to one of the first female psychoanalysts in the world. Spielrein's case serves as a validation of Jung's ambitions to actually cure patients of their unresolved psychological ailments, but the film posits a far more pivotal role for the woman in this erotic-medical-professional triangle. As Jung dryly observes, Spielrein is “something of a catalyst” on those around her. Her presence (and her nascent psychiatric theories) open up Jung to repressed sexual urges of his own, and before long the two are engaged in an intense, sadomasochistic-flavored affair. Ultimately, the acrid aftermath of Jung and Speilrein's relationship reverberates through the psychoanalytical community, and--in perhaps the film's most fictional leap--splits open the divisions between Jung and Freud that had already been forming. There is a quiet suggestion, through all of this academic turmoil, that Jung and Speilrein would have been an excellent match, but that circumstances (and Jung's cowardice and self-righteousness) precluded a future for the couple. The film keeps this romantic tragedy element admirably understated without muting it entirely, such that when Jung admits late in the film that his adoration for Speilrein will never diminish, it's a genuinely affecting moment.

Like Cronengberg's other post-Spider films, A History of Violence and Eastern Promises, there's a rigorous realism to A Dangerous Method, but not necessarily a discordance with the director's other work. Going all the way back to Shivers, Cronenberg has long had a fascination with individuals who plunge headlong into perilous physical, psychological, and sexual realms. While his latest film is in many ways his most staid and accessible, there's an undeniable thrill in seeing some of his favored themes brought to the forefront and discussed openly by historical figures. Even in a film that consists mostly of jargon-laden conversations and letter-writing, Cronenberg still finds those moments that speak to his perennial fascination with body and machine. These include Spielrein's absent-minded fingering of her virginal bloodstain on a sheet; the pointed (yet restrained) presence of Freud's cigar, with its lengthening ash and damp, chewed end; and the tender way that the film lingers on Jung's wetting of his wife's hands before hooking her to a kind of Edwardian polygraph. Spielrein herself becomes a kind of vessel for the distinguishing “Cronenbergian” deformations of the flesh and mind, through both her grotesque physical contortions and her bizarre sexual confessions. Indeed, one of the film's creepiest moments involves Knightley's description of a wet, questing “mollusc” that she recalls visiting her in her sleep. Both Fassbender and Mortensen do suitable work with their relatively static roles, but the film really belongs to Knightley (and isn't that a suprise). Her madness-induced paroxysms early in the film are so over-the-top that they're almost laughable, but once Speilrein begins to emerge from her shell, Knightley truly shines. She does a stunning job of holding on to a remnant of Spielrein's queasy, unhinged quality, gradually tamping it down as the film's years roll on without ever obliterating it entirely. It's an astounding illusion to watch.

SLIFF 2011: The Artist

2011 // France // Michel Hazanavicius // November 10, 2011 // Digital Theatrical Projection (Landmark Tivoli Theater)

The Artist is enamored with the glamour and thrills of cinema’s silent era and, to an extent, of the early Golden Age that followed it. The film plainly expects that the viewer will find its deliberately anachronistic evocation of this period to be endearing. And, truth be told, it’s challenging to actively dislike a feature as wistful and fluffy as writer-director Michel Hazanavicius’ shamelessly nostalgic film. In it, he spins the entwined tales of dashing silent film star George Valentin (Jean Dujardin) and newly-minted It-Girl Peppy Miller (Bérénice Bejo), the latter ascending just as the former is fading away. Beyond presenting the film in black-and-white with era-appropriate intertitles, orchestral score, and 1.33:1 aspect ratio, Hazanavicius employs a plethora of touches to recall a time when Hollywood studios first began to embrace sound technology. These touches include not only formal flourishes such as filter effects and cranked-up frame rates in some scenes, but also pointedly creaky archetypes and visual gags. There’s an artistic conservatism to the use of these stylistic elements that isn’t found in the contemporary silent works of Guy Maddin, but they serve their purpose here.

Dujardin, who has previously collaborated with Hazanavicius as the titular, clueless secret agent in the director’s OSS 17 spy satires, channels Rudolph Valentino, Douglas Fairbanks, and Errol Flynn while adding a marvelous slathering of vintage comic sensibility. He’s a pleasure to watch, as is the spritely Bejo, who blends Rebecca Hall’s blinding smile and willowy profile with the cheekiness of a Depression-era film damsel. Inasmuch as the story has a conflict, it hinges on Valentin’s sudden and demeaning exile from Hollywood due to his prideful refusal to make talkies. Hazanavicius portrays the transition from silent to sound as a slow-motion tragedy, and Valentin’s fall as pitiable. The story necessarily recalls Singin' in the Rain, if it were shot through with dark Looney Tunes seizures. (Indeed, one nightmare sequence seems plucked from the feverish experiences of Elmer Fudd or Daffy Duck.) The film serves in part as a facile criticism of show business’ slavish devotion to lowbrow tastes and its pitiless penchant for stampeding off in search of the Next Big Thing. The film underlines that criticism with its old school stylings—What could be more underground in 2011 than a silent film?—but its message lacks bite.

Eventually, Valentin’s downward spiral into alcoholism and suicidal despair (hi-larious!) is suddenly reversed in a manner that becomes more head-scratching the longer one dwells on it. The film is so attached to its protagonist (and Dujardin such a perfect charming rascal) that once Valentin’s problems are resolved, all seems right in the world. When the sour so abruptly turns sweet in this manner, however, one can’t help but feel a little cheated. There's a narrative sloppiness to the final act, a defect that points to the broader lack of diligence in the construction of the film. Unlike Charles Chaplin’s Limelight, with which it shares some narrative and thematic features, The Artist isn’t so much cloying as it is ramshackle and crudely considered. Hazanavicius blends together cartoonish tropes, lively dance numbers, restrained slapstick, and knowingly purple melodrama. Each component can be (and often is) engaging on its own, but the whole never seems to coalesce into a clear statement or point of view. Then again, perhaps a point of view isn’t necessary in a film so besotted with ephemeral pleasures.