Of Time and the City

Ode to a Landscape Lost

2008 // UK // Terence Davies // March 14, 2009 // Theatrical Print

[Of Time and the City featured in a limited engagement on March 13-15, 2009 at the Webster University Film Series.]

A - Even the most supple and contemplative documentary features usually make gestures towards a narrative, sculpting their visual and aural components into hand-holds where viewers might find purchase. The only noteworthy exception to this principle in recent memory is Philip Philip Gröning's magnificent Into Great Silence, a film that broke every rule of the medium and achieved something singularly beautiful. While Philip Gröning's triumph strove for a quiet, observational character, Terence Davies' equally superb Of Time and City takes an entirely different track, embracing the director's own memories and emotions with soaring enthusiasm. The ultimate effect is daring and exquisite, resulting in a film that functions as a tone poem to a vanished environment, and yet also as a tuning fork keyed to the viewer's own nostalgic impulses. Via a collage of images, music, and narration, Davies explores the most cherished crevasses of his heart, where the lost Liverpool of his youth still resides, and in doing so he tunnels into our own hidden stores of bittersweet remembrance.

Davies has assembled an astonishing plethora of archival footage—both black-and-white and color—depicting Liverpool's public and private face, with a focus on the 1940s through the 60s, a span corresponding to the director's early life. This material is combined with a smattering of contemporary footage documenting the city's monumental landscape and the babble of its street life, creating a portrait that is both intimate and suffused with a lingering Industrial chill. The archival material is intriguing, perplexing, and revelatory. While I suspect that aerial shots of Liverpool's hideously modern Catholic cathedral are as plentiful as dandelions, one wonders about the footage of an elderly woman salting her dinner, or of children at play in vacant lots littered with brick. Where did these images come from? Why were they captured? It's almost as though some anonymous Liverpudlian's 8mm camera were whirring away in five-decade anticipation of Davies' extraordinary film.

The director knits together this footage with musical selections, most of them classical pieces, and narration he wrote and performed himself. While Of Time and the City's visuals lay out a footpath for the viewer, it's the narration that calls out to us, leading us gently forward through the film's experience. With a superb voice that is all warm cream and scratchy wool, Davies offers recollections studded with dazzling detail, and poetry that wonders aloud at the mystery of change and the meaning of home. Inasmuch as Of Time and the City can be said to have a structure, it is a rhythmic one created by the pattern of Davies' musings, which fall into three broad categories. First are his meticulous remembrances of warmly remembered but decontextualized scenes, such as Christmastime or a trip to the beach. Second are his recollections of specific events in the history of Liverpool and England: the Queen's coronation, the Korean War, the emergence of the Beatles (which Davis dismisses as the moment when pop evaporated from his own cultural consciousness). Finally, there are his more abstract and lyrical ruminations on time's ravaging hand, and in particular how it alters both landscapes and our memories. Streaks of personal anguish, longing, and resentment characterize much of the narration, particularly with respect to Davies' homosexuality, his Catholic faith, and the intersection of the two.

Mere description cannot do justice to the elegant manner in which these disparate elements—sensory, intellectual, and emotional—are united into a wondrous and distinctly filmic experience. It's easy to characterize Davies' meditation on his native city as profoundly personal, but the cunning of Of Time and the City rests on its mingling of the personal and the universal. The film excavates down through the accumulated clay of the creator's life to unearth the essential emotional landmarks of the Western cultural experience, examining them with an eye that is both rational and intuitive. While its anti-royal and anti-Church currents carry a bitter tinge—and justifiably so, in Davies' estimation—what truly astonishes is the film's spot-on admixture of tenderness, sorrow, drollness, and awe. Davies has bottled the wistful ache of unglossed nostalgia in cinematic form, capturing the ineffable urge to savor the past and shake our heads at its passing. It is this perfection of tone that lends Of Time and the City its smudged loveliness, and that makes it such a curiously powerful experience.

Watchmen

Ordinary's Just Not Good Enough Today

2009 // USA // Zack Snyder // March 11, 2009 // IMAX Theatrical Print

B - Zack Snyder's adaptation of Watchmen is a dizzying feat of world-building, among the densest and most bewildering I've ever seen. It's a sprawling, exhausting work, one that perpetually threatens to burst from the director's control, and on occasion succeeds in effecting just such an escape. The story Snyder is attempting to tell is simply too vast, too intricate, too discomfiting, too pensive, and too nasty for its nearly-three-hour running time to accommodate. It is, in other words, a glorious mess of a film, offering novel, absorbing sights and themes but also unfortunately susceptible to off-key indulgences and the wearying effect of an undisciplined structure. That said, Watchmen is a fascinating mess, one that calls out to be scrutinized, explored, and savored, like a cinematic collage. It is the not the ur-superhero film that fans might have hoped, but no matter. It will rattle and mystify many viewers, I suspect, especially those who have never paused to contemplate the implications of a world of caped crusaders.

Over two decades ago, writer Alan Moore and illustrator Dave Gibbons collaborated to create Watchmen the comic, now held up as one of the most vital and revolutionary works in the medium. Accordingly, anticipation (and trepidation) regarding the film adaptation has been intense, but—and I say this as a great admirer of the book—I don't want to spend too much time comparing comic to film, or dithering over what was or was not a judicious decision in the adaptation process. Snyder's film should stand on its own, and it's from that perspective that I approach it (for the most part).

The world of Watchmen is one of staggering bulk, an alternate history that begins with the supposition that costumed vigilantes emerged in the early twentieth century to tackle crime. These "masks" were not super-beings, but merely men and women of exceptional physical and mental ability. In a mesmerizing credit sequence, Snyder explicates the details of this Other America, where superheroes hobnob with the century's cultural icons and leave their messy fingerprints all over its seminal events. The nation's first super-group, the Minutemen, eventually collapses as its members are retired, slain, or stricken. Where the Watchmen timeline diverges acutely from our own is in the appearance of a true super-powered hero. Disintegrated in a nuclear accident, research physicist John Osterman (Billy Crudup) reassembles himself by sheer will, emerging as a quantum superman with electric-blue skin and godlike omnipotence. Now dubbed Dr. Manhattan, he joins a new super-group, the Watchmen, alongside a slate of decidedly mundane masked avengers. The alliance doesn't last, however, and the film picks up the tale in 1985, when costumed vigilantism is banned by federal law and Richard Nixon is serving his fifth term as President.

Only one mask fought under the banners of both the Minutemen and Watchmen: the Comedian (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), a violent, misogynistic thug with a blackly humorous streak a mile wide. In the film's opening sequence, the Comedian—67 years old but still in phenomenal shape—is attacked in his apartment and tossed out the window by a shadowy assailant. The mystery of the retired superhero's murder crouches over the film, one of several noir tropes woven into the grand tapestry of Watchmen. Indeed, Snyder has created one of the most tonally ambitious films in recent memory, all the more potent for its general success in uniting elements and moods from disparate genres into an ironic epic. Fundamentally, Watchmen engages in a perilous endeavor: a deconstruction of the superhero, and most specifically an assault on the coherence of a genre that would dare to paint costumed vigilantes and science-fiction godlings as "heroes" at all. Moore and Gibbon's comic has seeped into the pop landscape for more than twenty years (often quite subtly), and therefore Watchmen's animating principles may not be as culturally audacious as they once seemed. Still, Snyder's film is so ruthlessly enamored with its own fractured countenance, and presents it with such sweeping indifference for audience uneasiness, that one can't help but stand in awe of the thing. It is a sprawling, unconventional, difficult film, probably one of the most difficult Hollywood blockbusters of the decade.

Superhero films with a vast cast of characters seem to start with superpowers that are visually or conceptually impressive and then tack on character traits that read as either ridiculously tidy or just completely arbitrary. (I'm looking at you, X-Men.) With the exception of Dr. Manhattan, Watchmen's vigilantes are normal people, and thus their personalities are essential to both the film's narrative and its thematic aims. The costumes, gadgets, and methods of the masks reflect their values and flaws, rather than the other way around. Thus, we have the likes of Nite Owl (Patrick Wilson), a nebbishy tinkerer who is literally impotent without his cowl and cape. Silk Spectre (Malin Akerman) took over her mother's superhero identity out of obligation, and now seethes with regrets and resentments. The bloodthirsty Comedian moonlights as a government killer. Ozymandias (Matthew Goode) parlayed his fame into a corporate empire, complete with an action figure line. And then there's Rorschach (Jackie Earle Haley), a sociopath whose twisted code of street justice draws from Travis Bickle, Ayn Rand, and Timothy McVeigh. Dr. Manhattan stands outside this rogue's gallery of all-too-human neuroses, but he has his own problems. His omnipotence and omniscience set him apart from humankind's concerns, and the vibrations of quarks hold his attention more than an incipient nuclear war between the U.S. and the Soviets.

Watchmen utilizes Rorschach's investigation of the Comedian's murder as the entry point into a convoluted tale of politics, crime, war, finance, sex, disease, and genocide. Describing the story's intricacies would be daunting, and beside the point. Watchmen's plot is a vehicle for a series of discomfiting set pieces and dialogues that erode and deform the viewer's conceptions of what a superhero film looks like. Watchmen presents itself as both a finger-wagging adjustment to the genre—"This is what a superhero film should look like, if it was remotely honest."—but also as a rejection of the genre's entire form and function. In other words, it's not just a bold gamble, it's twice as bold as it needs to be. Vast, digressive, and shot through with rot and filigree in equal proportions, the film is constantly shifting beneath the viewer's feet. It indulges in camp excess, gee-whiz action, stone-faced satire, unsettling nihilism, and meditative musings, often at the same time. Slathered on top of this tonal hodgepodge are visual and aural witticisms that range from the exceedingly sly to the groan-inducing. The film is not confusing, but it does sometimes seem utterly out-of-control, with Snyder flitting so often between viewpoints and flashbacks, often clumsily, that the films risks toppling over. Both the richness of the underlying source material and the director's determination to convey a comparable depth in the film—however haphazard the result might seem at times—salvage Watchmen from the schematic character that often dooms reverent adaptations. It may be a flawed and frustrating film in some respects, but Watchmen is anything but lifeless.

Snyder has come to Watchmen by way of his damn scary but politically inert remake of Dawn of the Dead and the loud, crude, gorgeous adaptation of Frank Miller's Hellenic gorefest, 300. With those films, the director demonstrated his facility for slick red-meat entertainment and little else. Here Snyder reaches much higher, evincing an unabashed adoration for the complexity of Moore's story, even as he resists the world-builder's penchant for creative thumb-twiddling (*cough* George Lucas *cough*). Watchmen is a hopelessly dense film, in terms of design, story, and themes, but its density serves it well, evoking a coherent and believable stage for its tragedies to play out. In other words, Snyder’s approach strikes me as the correct one for a filmic Watchmen in the same way that Moore and Gibbons' approach was correct for the comic. Unfortunately, Snyder fails to approach his medium with discipline. Watchmen feels comfortable at its current running-time, but it could just as easily be an hour shorter or an hour longer. This suggests a dramatic flabbiness and directorial capriciousness that is at odds with the film's meticulous design. Synder just doesn't seem to put much (or any) value on artistic precision, preferring to throw everything at the wall and see what sticks. While that isn't a death knell for a film like Watchmen, which plays out like a disjointed soul-searching of our cultural consciousness, it necessarily renders the film a less than satisfying cinematic experience and lends it a whiff of contempt for the audience.

Equally distressing is Snyder's ongoing affection for gruesome slow-motion action sequences, which suited 300's pornographic blood-letting much better than Watchmen's epic meanderings. While visually mesmerizing and a refreshing antidote to the jarring, hyper-edited scenes that afflict most action features, these sequences don't evoke tension or advance the film's themes. They're pure, gratuitous spectacle, and Snyder would do well to grow out of them. In Watchmen, they actively undermine the film at times. Apologists will inevitably insist that Snyder is demonstrating the horrid consequences of violence, where previous superhero films have veiled it. One of the film's prominent theses, after all, is that superheroes are deeply sick people who enjoy brutality. Perhaps, but the gleeful tone of Snyder's action scenes betray at least a partial intent to pander to adolescent bloodlust.

While Snyder's unrestrained id can be blamed for most of Watchmen's failings, it is also responsible for the film's curious appeal. There's nothing relaxed or delicate about Watchmen. It asks us to contemplate aspects of our pop cultural landscape and (allegedly) shared values that resist scrutiny. With a gleeful middle finger, it rejects reflexive awe for a swath of America's hallowed institutions and idols: knowledge, technology, family, wealth, justice, media, patriotism. Perhaps most uncomfortably, it strips away the alleged harmlessness of our childhood fantasies and exposes them as monstrous expressions of our most self-centered and dysfunctional impulses.

Coraline

You're Lost, Little Girl

2009 // USA // Henry Selick // March 8, 2009 // Real 3D Theatrical Print

A - When Henry Selick delivered the ambitious, whimsically prickly The Nightmare Before Christmas in 1995, I doubt that he had any inkling that his little fable--rendered via the exhausting, old-school technique of stop motion animation--would become a cultural touchstone for a generation of nostalgic goths and wannabe goths, who grooved on the film's mashup of Jules Bass Christmas specials and Tim Burton's droopy sensibilities. (Not that I'm speaking from personal experience of anything. *Cough.*) In the years that followed, Selick made a blander stop motion follow-up and a rather notorious flop, but with his new film, Coraline, the director has come blazing back to the front lines of both feature animation and "mature" children's storytelling. Here is a film that dares the viewer to resist its enchantments and terrors, boasting some of the most dazzling design since, well, The Nightmare Before Christmas. However, Coraline decisively surpasses Selick's previous milestone in both a technical and artistic sense, setting a high-water mark for the sort of intricate, captivating animated stories that seem in short supply these days. And the story! The sooty fingerprints of modern myth-spinner Neil Gaiman are all over this wondrous tale, which borrows equally from Victorian nursery literature, kid-savvy afternoon TV fare, and a Hero's Journey that would make Joseph Campbell do a double-take.

So, the story: Coraline Jones (Dakota Fanning), a blue-haired pixie whose primary talent seems to be sneering, has moved to drizzly Oregon with her cold, horribly un-fun parents, gardening authors who, paradoxically, detest the outdoors. Coraline--friendless, bored, and irritated at her parents' joyless inattention--sets about exploring her surroundings. Her new home, a sprawling, improbably pink Victorian house divided into apartments, shelters a plethora of colorful neighbors: a Russian acrobat in the attic; a pair of moldy theater divas in the basement; and the absent landlord's lurking grandson, Wybie, an awkward, dreadlocked little twerp with an affinity for the odd and the gross. These characters are insufficient to maintain Coraline's attention, however, and eventually her explorations yield a tiny door concealed behind the apartment's wallpaper. Curiosity ushers her through the portal, along a silken tunnel, and into a parallel world. There, she discovers a doppelganger of her new home, where her "Other Parents" are warm and attentive to her every need and whim. Indeed, the Other House is like a pleasuredrome constructed for Coraline's private enjoyment. Every turn reveals new delights: sumptuous feats, clockwork wonders, glowing gardens, mouse circuses, and high-wire acrobatics. Only one detail suggests that things aren't quite right: everyone in the Other House has buttons instead of eyes. Just like a ragdoll that Wybie gave to Coraline, as a matter of fact...

That's really all I need to say about the story--the sly, gradual manner in which the film unspools is exquisite--but it will quickly become apparent that Coraline is a horror film, not in the slasher-film sense, but in the sense in which all fairy tales are fundamentally horror stories. That is, it features a transition from the familiar to the fantastical, with the fantastical at first appearing sweet but eventually revealing itself as monstrous and twisted. Gaiman's original novella might hew to this template, but Selick not only preserves it in his screenplay, but expands on it through a gorgeous, fun-house aesthetic of breathtaking density. Here is where Coraline represents a world-building feat that leaps far beyond Nightmare's achievements. For while the latter film's look was giddy, gothic fun, it remained a kind of spookshow diorama, one that dovetailed neatly with Tim Burton's long affinity for puppetry's otherworldly, self-conscious fakery. Not so with Coraline, where Selick conjures a marvelously realized universe that feels complete, inhabited, and oddly real. Offering a wondrous rejoinder to the notion that design is a factor disconnected from cinema's artistic voice, Coraline lays the groundwork for its chilling terrors and rousing heroics with jaw-dropping sensory detail. Although the film brims with whimsical caricatures and supernatural hoodoo, its pleasures are remarkably immediate and visceral. Selick is ruthlessly and joyously committed to his story's status as a harrowing adventure, and the incredible texture of Coraline's world evokes boredom, glee, and peril with equal credibility. The triumph of this approach is manifest in the narrative potency of the film's thrilling third act, which plays out like a frightening monomyth epic for the Cartoon Network set.

Gaiman's involvement should be telling, but it bears emphasizing that Coraline is on the decidedly intense end of the scale among animated children's features. Frightening imagery and themes abound, and a drizzling of adult humor only adds to the sense that the film is aimed at an older cohort of kids and their parents. Which is perhaps for the best, as Coraline offers a sophisticated and emotionally resonant examination of child-parent relationships that will likely challenge and provoke young viewers. While Coraline's folks fit the mold of the disinterested, unpleasant guardians that are endemic to this class of fable, the girl herself is hardly a shining hero. Whiny and antagonistic, Coraline has no patience for the pursuits of others, preferring that the world focus on coddling and satisfying her. In short, she is seflish, and her journey into the Other House and back serves as a path to awaken a sensitivity to those around her. The Other Mother, as we eventually learn, is not truly a reflection of Coraline's mom, but of the girl herself and her craving for love. That Coraline's real mother meets her halfway on the return journey from nightmare to normalcy is a reflection of Selick's determination to craft a story with a more intricate emotional life than most other fare for young viewers, animated or not. The central theme in Coraline's sweet-and-sour heart is a touching and magnificent one, never hammered but gently revealed: the maturation of the love between parent and child from simplistic dependency to a respect that is both humane and intensely personal. I can't imagine a more worthwhile and fulfilling journey for the young and young in spirit.

Two Lovers

Betty or Veronica?​

2009 // USA // James Gray // February 24, 2009 // Theatrical Print

B- - Two Lovers reaffirms director James Gray's solemnly precocious talent for telling discreetly compelling stories that should, by all rights, be outright stifling in their familiarity. In We Own the Night, Gray lent both a Shakespearean howl and a profoundly personal coloring to the tale of a man tugged by competing loyalties until tragedy pushes him over a threshold. Now Gray, returning with Joaquin Phoenix to the marvelously sagging Brooklyn landscape, provides his spin on a creaky romantic trope: a man's choice between a stable brunette and a free-spirited blonde. The sensory pleasures on display elevate Two Lovers, as do Gray's infusions of thematic and metaphorical texture, rescuing it from the sheer unpleasantness of its characters and a gnawing sense that we've heard this song before. The quiet, observant qualities to Two Lovers stand in contrast to the alleged seriousness of clumsy, oh-so-serious contemporary pap such as Frost/Nixon and The Reader, but the sheer willfulness of the film's sedate "adultness" results in an unfortunate aura of dreariness and obsequious modesty. It's an easy film to enjoy and even admire, but will anyone remember it in three months, let alone three years?

Phoenix has always excelled at man-child roles with a bit of worldly tinting at the edges. Perhaps it's the naked moistness in those eyes, ringed with permanent charcoal-dust, and the way they play off his self-conscious, doughy smile. Even in his most outwardly confident personas—Max California, Merrill Hess—Phoenix conveys a lingering shyness, dribbled with thinly concealed doubts about his character's abilities and station. Never has this been used for finer effect than in Two Lovers, where Gray capitalizes on the actor;s affinity for wounded bewilderment and uneasy masculinity. Phoenix's Leonard Kraditor, the thirty-something son of Jewish dry cleaners, finds himself in a kind of sad-sack secondary adolescence in the wake of a scuttled engagement and sketchy psychological tribulations. The film opens with a half-hearted suicide attempt, and from there we migrate to Leonard's bedroom in his parents' apartment, still furnished as a teenage boy's might be and littered with the detritus of his obsessions and distractions: photographic prints, DVDs, and a portrait of his absent fiancé. Gray has an eye for spaces that are somewhat resistant to contemporary gloss, and his ragged Brighton Beach is rife with them, in contrast to the film's gleaming glimpses of Manhattan. Just as worthy of attention is Gray's striking sound design, which revels in low ambient tones and the rasp of winter winds on rooftops.

Leonard's mother, Ruth, is a sour-faced, protective matron, cursed with an epic nosy streak. Perhaps because she is portrayed by Isabella Rossellini—jowly but still magnetic—Ruth doesn't seem to harbor any poisonous purpose, but we can feel Leonard's suffocation just the same. Improbably, two beautiful young women enter Leonard's troubled life nearly simultaneously. The Sensible Girl is Sandra (Vinessa Shaw), the daughter of another dry cleaning entrepreneur who is on the cusp of buying out Leonard's family. Sandra represents everything Leonard should want (by his parents' estimation): a pretty Jewess who is thoroughly smitten with him, and an access point for a slight upgrade in his family's prospects. (The usual euphemism is a "smart match.") Sandra's comfort around him and her reserved sexiness put a glint in Leonard's eyes, but he betrays a bit of restlessness about their rapid courtship. Enter Michelle (Gwenyth Paltrow), a willowy wild girl who has recently moved into an apartment across the courtyard. Dim and narcissistic, but effortlessly desirable, Michelle is the sort of woman who seems to inhabit a separate cosmos from Leonard. Yet here she is, following Leonard on a tour of his parents' knick-knacks and curiously disposed to his vulnerable charms. There's the little matter of Michelle's older (married) boyfriend, but for Leonard, hope springs eternal, as it does for all emotionally stunted and morally negligent Nice Guys.

Gray is following a recognizable melodramatic template, but even as he compresses his story down into a questionably dense time frame, he slathers on ambitious and engaging subtexts. The performances are uniformly excellent and credible, and as a result the characters never degenerate into ludicrous metaphors. Yet the dichotomies in Leonard's dilemma are stark. Sandra embodies a submission to others' expectations, an acceptance of ethnic and religious identity, and an extension of the Oedipal unease the ripples through Leonard's home life. (Sandra's well-intentioned reassurance, "I want to take care of you," seems an ill omen to the stifled Leonard.) The emotionally troubled and thoroughly WASP-y Michelle, meanwhile, represents contravention of social obligations, wide-open possibilities, and empathy with (rather than sympathy for) Leonard's own inner anguishes. Gray's direction and his screenplay with co-writer Ric Menello register these aspects of the story without feeling the need to brazenly state them, delivering abundant, whispered drama.

Two Lovers' fundamental problem is not that it courts flippant dismissal from the viewer, which is what I expected. (Two gorgeous women? These are the problems you want to have.) Gray paints Leonard as a broken man who is wincingly susceptible to confusion about his desires, and thereby prevents the story from descending into a soapy, vacuous tale of deception and betrayal. Yet while the viewer might understand Leonard, his hopeless immaturity precludes the possibility that they will grow to like him or trust him. That's a serious deficit in a film that spends nearly every minute of its running time following his interpersonal gambits and fumbles, and asks—with a kind of muted desperation—that we feel his pain, and deeply. More troubling, the film never challenges Leonard to confront the anxieties that drive his indecisiveness, or asks him to suffer tangible consequences for his ill-advised tightrope act on the Sandra-Michelle dilemma. Annoyingly, the narrative provides an escape hatch at the last minute which protects the innocent from heartbreak, sidestepping anything approaching a reckoning for Leonard's cravenness and emotional recklessness. It's a dismal and consequence-free conclusion to a visually rich and emotionally authentic work. In other words, Gray sort of breaks your heart.

The film's mood is also problematic, for while Gray astutely avoid matching emotional highs with aesthetic histrionics, he veers a bit too much in the direction of inertness. The result is a film that palpably wants to be admired for its low-key approach while maintaining the viewer's focus on performance and theme. It's all so decisively and soporifically tasteful that one can't shake the feeling of a bait-and-switch: mere competent, intriguing drama masquerading as audacity and vigor. Call it a respectful artistic oppressiveness, one that generates sufficient discomfort with the film's aims that the viewer can't ever truly fall in love with it. A pity, as Gray's cinematic sensibilities are otherwise generally outstanding, indicative of a commanding visual fluency and a sophisticated appreciation for the intricacies of motive and loyalty.

Sita Sings the Blues

First I Was Afraid, I Was Petrified

2008 // USA // Nina Paley // February 14, 2009 // Theatrical Print

[Sita Sings the Blues was featured in a limited engagement on February 13-15, 2009 as a part of the Multicultural Film Series at the Webster University Film Series.]

A - Nina Paley's magnificent Sita Sings the Blues is an endlessly appealing treasure that weds animation's myriad visual possibilities to a witty, painfully personal howl of frustration and liberation. Recalling Yellow Submarine in its delirious blending of storytelling, music, and design, Sita proudly admits to its own conceptual simplicity. It presents a familiar story—one of the oldest, really—of love weakened by crisis and shattered on the shoals of mistrust and betrayal. But, oh how it tells that story!: With wondrous Flash-style animation whose captivating design can only be described as "Game Boy Bollywood." With pop art-inspired compositions and low-key chuckles that echo the Children Television's Workshop in its finest moments. With whorls and bursts of pure color. With ingeniously re-imagined jazz ditties that elicit sighs of delight. Paley offers that rarest of animated works: one that thrives on its own dazzle. Sita's unexpected luster extends to every crevice of its intricate yet natty form. Its joys emerge from the accumulation of a multitude of stylistic embellishments united by the vision of a passionate and furiously inventive auteur.

Sita boasts two narratives and at least four animation styles, although the narratives consciously reflect one another, and the styles blend together and intrude at their edges. The film's rotten-apple heart is Paley's autobiographical tale of her marriage's traumatic disintegration, told in a self-effacing Squigglevision style. While Paley's pain and loneliness shine through in these personal episodes—and also in a rotoscoped interlude that blooms with rainbow-hued fire—the film devotes the bulk of its attention to the story of Sita, wife of King Rama in the Hindu epic the Ramayana. In this manner, Paley admits to the universality of her crisis, transplanting us from its anguished, scrawled particulars to a wider, timeless world of feminine tribulations. Paley discovers comfort within the Ramayana, but Sita Sings the Blues functions as a work more aggressive and joyous than the mere acknowledgment of connection between past and present. The act of making the film was manifestly cathartic for Paley, not just as a means to examine her husband's sins and her own missteps, but also as a celebration of her own aesthetic values. In other words, Sita is a giddy act of creation that has clearly emboldened Paley's post-breakup sense of identity. In an intimate gesture, the director warmly invites us to groove on her playlist, seeking validation not only for the Ramayana as a meaningful text, but also for the hipness of her own style. It's intrinsically personal film-making, with all the limitations that entails, but it nonetheless offers curiously infectious charms and sensory thrills beyond anything in recent memory.

This isn't to say that Sita wholly neglects the cerebral for the visceral. The film indulges three separate approaches to the Ramayana, evincing a dog-eared and sophisticated understanding of storytelling's possibilities and pitfalls. Paley first offers a trio of Indonesian shadow puppets who provide a witty narration and commentary on the Ramayana. They stumble over half-remembered details, giggle at the story's implausibilities, and hold forth on their discomfort with its more problematic themes. Second, the film presents animated Rajput paintings that illustrate the major events of the epic, complete with voice acting that freely indulges in anachronisms. Third—and most stimulating—are the film's distinctive musical sequences, which combine vector animation with songs from jazz singer Annette Hanshaw, lip-synced by a wide-eyed and rolling-hipped Sita. These scenes represent a breathtaking formal achievement, a step beyond the recent "jukebox musical" phenomenon. Consider that Paley had to reconcile a rough outline of the Ramayana on one hand and Hanshaw's library of songs on the other. That she pulled it off at all is fairly impressive, but that she discovers a way to stage, say, "Who's That Knocking at My Door" during Rama's gruesome battle against the demon Ravana—well, that's nothing short of marvelous.

The stylistic delineation of Sita's sequences serves to break up the epic into digestible morsels, and also to orient the viewer in light of the frequent—yet cyclical—shifts in tone. (In this, Sita echoes, to a lesser degree, the elegant coding of Mishima's narrative streams via color and design.) For all of Sita's undeniable first-order appeal—and it is most essentially a lusciously, toe-tappingly good time—what emerges from its whimsical fiddling is a gentle feminist critique of the Ramayana and the contemporary social and interpersonal sicknesses that mirror it. In perhaps the film's most unexpected and naughty moment, the characters that previously inhabited the candy-colored realm of Hanshaw's tunes suddenly burst into an original, up-tempo chant about Rama's supposed virtues, remarking (with a dash of mockery): "Duty first, Sita last." That line gives voice to the rumblings in the film's belly, a gnawing sense of injustice born from the fact that Sita's (read: Paley's and women's) devotion and sacrifices are so routinely rewarded with mistreatment. Still, while Paley permits heartbreak and self-loathing to intrude on Sita's autobiographical sequences, the film doesn't have much time for rage. Ultimately, a mood of liberation and enlightenment triumphs as Sita washes her hands of her husband—and her old life—with a song.

Sita Sings the Blues is unlikely to show up in a theater near you. Asinine copyright restrictions on the Hanshaw recordings have created an enormous barrier to distribution, and so the film's appearances have been limited to film festivals and other isolated screenings. Yet word-of-mouth praise has been mounting for this astonishing film. There may still be hope for a distributor yet. At the very least, allow me to add one more nugget of praise for Sita, raising anticipation for a future DVD release and Paley's next animated wonderwork.

Beauty in Trouble

2006 // Czech Republic // Jan Hrebejk // February 11, 2009 // Theatrical Print

B - The sly success of Jan Hrebejk's blackly comic melodrama, Beauty in Trouble, lies in its gently provocative probing of human behavior within a soap opera framework drunk on guilty pleasures. Borrowing from the Robert Graves poem for its title and tragic seed, Herbejk's film discovers a refreshing stance towards its characters, particularly Marsela, a stubborn Czech redhead who promises a sunny, skanky eroticism. Beauty's heroine finds herself tugged and provoked by bullies, saviors, obligations, and lusts, but Hrebejk shrewdly avoids both finger-wagging and chilly distance. Instead, the film challenges assumptions about how weary, battered people reconcile their conflicting motivations, all while maintaining a tone of puzzled affection even for its ostensible villains. Allegorical readings abound, especially with respect to the Czech Republic's place in tomorrow's Europe. This thematic complexity complements Beauty's most memorable scenes, which are soaked in pure, giddy drama: an unbearably tense confrontation over cookies; a furious, regretful bout of coitus above a chop shop; and the slow, stupid realization that a sleeping figure is stone dead. Not even a soundtrack that notoriously passes around songs with John Carney's Once distracts from Beauty's lurid baubles and restless musings.