Gomorra

It Turns Out That Violent Organized Crime Has an Ugly Side

2008 // Italy // Matteo Garrone // April 2, 2009 // Theatrical Print

B+ - The publicity for Matteo Garrone's Italian crime behemoth, Gomorra, lauds the film as a willful de-glamorization—a "grittification," if you will—of gangster mythology, cinematic and otherwise. Yet even this claim doesn't quite convey the peculiar, bracing subversiveness of the film. What Garrone delivers is not another Mafia Movie, but a finely crafted movie about the Mafia (or, to be precise, Naples' crime syndicate, known as the Camorra). Gomorra is a fearful, agonized panorama of a criminal organization's place in an apartment complex, a neighborhood, a city, a nation, a world, a universe. It is a vast, fragmented, and repulsive film. You can taste the dust on it, smell the garbage, feel the flies brushing past your eyelashes. Many crime dramas have countered the romanticism of The Godfather by cranking up the brutal violence and moral degeneracy. Gomorra takes a more daring approach, tossing out the entire epic form, cribbing loosely from the hyperlink cinema style of Altman and Iñárritu, and binding its storylines together with the frayed twine of locality and human weakness. It's mesmerizing, in its way, even if Garrone never molds it into a graceful shape. Of course, given the film's approach to its subject matter, I'm not sure it would be wise or even possible to do so. Gomorra is a film deformed by dread, full of discomfiting vibrations that rattle the viewer deep in the belly.

Garrone takes a discriminating, studious line of attack in presenting the film's multiple threads. He selects five stories connected to the Camorra and observes each tale's rot with an eerie calm and sickening clarity. These stories are only loosely stitched to each other, if at all, and the decision to forgo the typical preoccupation with synchronicity serves the film well. The connective tissue here is much less contrived, as it is comprised of setting, tone, and theme. Gomorra's thesis is hardly provocative: organized crime is an awful institution that gobbles up and spits out everything it encounters, lacking any other mode for interacting with the world. It's not the most original sentiment, but Garrone presents it without the now-tired operatic grandiosity or relentless homage. (Well, not much, at any rate. A character does cite Scarface and the film visually quotes The Godfather wedding scene, but these are completely apropos and tremendously sly, respectively.) Indeed, although Gomorra is a fictional work inspired by real events, it strikes the look and feel of a low-budget nature documentary, what with its handheld camera work and mood of wary observation. It invites a wondering queasiness that these events are happening in the world, in one form or another: this treachery, this corruption, this abandonment, this ultimatum, this folly.

The stories all have a familiar odor, but Garrone presents each with a vigilance for both character and place. Tito (Nicolo Manta) is a young adolescent who ingratiates himself to the neighborhood gang, a move that eventually requires him to betray friends and cover himself in innocent blood. The money-carrier Don Ciro (Gianfelice Imparato), who doles out payments to old gangsters, widows, and families of jailed members, finds himself caught in the middle of a clan feud. The master tailor Pasquale (Salvatore Cantalupo) angers his company's mob backers when he tries to moonlight at a Chinese factory. Roberto (Carmine Paternoster), a deputy for Camorra waste management kingpin Franco (Toni Servillo), begins to doubt his chosen path when he witnesses the environmental and safety disasters he helps create. Finally, hopelessly dim wannabe tough-guys Marco (Marco Macor) and Ciro (Ciro Petrone) go on an inept crime spree that draws the lethal ire of the local Camorra boss. The performances are commendably genuine, especially that of Cantalupo, who expertly conveys Pasquale's gentle, modest demeanor while also revealing the bitterness in his heart. Paternoster also deserves praise for lending heft to a role with sparing dialog, as almost everything we need to know about Roberto is conveyed through the way he watches his boss.

Garrone's Naples has the look of a former Soviet metropolis, festering with corruption, crime, and neglect. No, scratch that: It evokes some kind of urban dystopia just beyond the horizon. Much of the action takes place in locales oozing with a profound despair: crumbling housing projects strewn with garbage; abandoned quarries full of toxic sludge; sweltering textile factories; shabby arcades and strip clubs. This environment, established with such striking fidelity and ruthlessness, veritably bellows the film's disgusted subtext. The Camorra's violence and depravity contribute to a grueling negative feedback loop: the organization is fighting over scraps at the end of history, even as its actions hasten that end. Or, to put it another way, the mob shits where it eats—carelessly, even gleefully, so.

Much of Gomorra's thematic meat is the stuff of countless films about organized crime: loyalty, machismo, peril, deceit, enterprise, and so on. Garrone's treatment of these element isn't really extraordinary or even particularly novel. The five primary storylines—and a few tangents—are fairly simplistic stuff. Characters make foolish decisions, suffer consequences, and then either rectify their mistakes or blindly proceed down the same path. Individually, none of the stories is tremendously enthralling, although all are told with a reserved style that turns the head, if only because observing a drive-by shooting the way one might observe a lion attack on a wildebeest herd seems so incongruous with the strained "humanity" we expect of a Mafia Movie.

What makes Gomorra compelling is Garrone's skill for dribbling in unsettling moments and details which either reflect an artistic sensibility more sophisticated than the film's rough edges might suggest, or which simply contribute to an overwhelming aura of doom and madness. In the former category, consider an offhand remark from Tito's friend about his infected lip piercing, obtained as a gang initiation, or the way that Ciro's raspy tenor evokes the ailment of the film's aging don, who can only be understood when he clasps his hand to his throat. Examples of the latter include the blackened, bombed-out apartment (never explained) that Don Ciro passes on the way to a delivery. Or the chilling yowl that the emaciated Marco unleashes, seemingly to himself, as he stands in a polluted river wearing only a Speedo and assault rifle. These elements knit together to convey a sense of both claustrophobia and vulnerability, the smell of a civilization cornered, exposed, teetering, dysfunctional beyond all hope of salvation. That Garrone establishes this nightmarish tone so decisively from a neat stack of five sad little urban dramas is not just impressive, it's downright spooky.

F*** Everyone, Amen: Thoughts on the Depressing and the Weird in Synecdoche, New York

[Note: This essay contains minor spoilers.]​

This week I've been embroiled in a lively discussion at The Film Doctor regarding Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York, a film that has risen to a personal pinnacle among last year's cinematic offerings since I first experienced it in November. Perhaps unsurprisingly, mulling over Synecdoche's intricacies with other commentators—who are generally cooler to the film's bitter pleasures than I—has been helpful in evolving and solidifying my own views. There's enough to chew on in Synecdoche to occupy one well into the gumming years, but for now I just want to offer a few post-scripts to my initial review of the film.

***

While Synecdoche, New York addresses depression with a bracing forthrightness, it's increasingly apparent to me with each viewing that it is not, in any sense, a depressing film experience. There seems to be a temptation to label any film that takes up timeless, "negative" themes such as mortality, failure, and loss as intrinsically dismal, but such shorthand does a disservice to the efforts of those artists who deign to work with such moribund clay. Shouldn't it matter what a film has to say about mortality, failure, and loss, and how it says it? This is where Synecdoche gets its goofy, ghastly fingers into me. Rather than a mere two-hour repetition of the fact that Things End, it emerges as a harsh indictment of those trapped within ridiculous loops woven from this self-evident sentiment. My personal struggles with such snares render Kaufman's accusatory finger—crooked and mischievous through it may be—as an especially stinging critic. However, Synecdoche offers a balm: It's not just about you. Through the peculiar telepathy of cinema, I know with some certainty that Kaufman struggles with such despair as well. It doesn't end there: Synecdoche presents a message of universal suffering—"This is everyone's experience. Every single one."—and therefore the possibility of universal love.

To elaborate: One of Synecdoche's primary effects is to jolt the viewer into a recognition of the overwhelming magnitude of the human dilemma of transience, to remind us that it is a human dilemma, not your dilemma. Caden only understands this imperfectly. He calls attention to his cast's mortality to satisfy his own ego and sorrow-addled sadism. (Especially that cutting amendment, "[E]ach of us secretly believing we won't [die].") He's not commiserating with his performers out of compassion, or even acknowledging their humanity. Given the potency of our own traumas and disappointments, as felt from within the oubliette of our skulls, it's easy to forget (or ignore) that every other person feels their own traumas and disappointments just as keenly. The isolation we feel within our suffering is illusory. And so a remarkably Buddhist sentiment surfaces within Kaufman's film: By clinging to our misery as if it were unique, we only deepen our misery. By instead reaching out to embrace the misery of others, to make it our own, and pursue its diminishment as fervently as we pursue the diminishment of our own, we might create a connection, an artery through which a spiritual palliative can flow, sweetening our brief time in the world.

***

Over at FilmDoctor, I noted that Kaufman, like David Lynch, has a spooky flair for shaping his cinematic worlds according to dream-logic, a talent I describe as an "intuition for intuition". I never sense that Kaufman's surreal visuals or jumbled narratives represent a contemptuous weirdness for weirdness' sake. Not that the reason for every odd jot up on the screen is immediately apparent, but where films like Synecdoche and Mulholland Drive succeed is in striking a consistent aura of aptness, whatever bizarre tongue they choose to speak. Caden's complaint about Madeleine Gravis' self-help book ("I'm not really getting it") and Madeleine's response ("Oh, but it's getting you") could be an exchange between myself and Kaufman. Given the intense, intuitive character of both Synecdoche's stimuli and my own responses, it's impossible for me to adequately articulate why exactly the film works as art.

Is this just a cop-out? Is it a hand-waving means to avoid a fair-minded, clear-eyed examination of the film's flaws? Fair enough. Yet it seems significant that a dense exegesis of the film is possible not merely due to the presence of its staggering detail, but the arrangement of that detail and the manner in which the characters interact with it. It's easy to dismiss a work as vast and perplexing as Synecdoche as a disjointed hodge-podge simply because it doesn't effortlessly coalesce into a neat package at a certain angle, like some Magic Eye picture. Yet dreams don't conform to this expectation, so why should a film do so when it so plainly strives for an oneiric sensibility? Internet forums such as those at IMDb and Rotten Tomatoes are littered with viewers who ostensibly enjoyed Synecdoche, but are oddly obsessed with discerning some secret talisman that will unlock its mysteries, an answer that will snap all of its peculiarities into focus. Lynch himself gave voice to this compulsive need to quest for a skeleton key, when in an early episode of Twin Peaks, Agent Dale Cooper coins the slogan: "Crack the code, solve the crime." Of course, Lynch and his partners (and adversaries) on that seminal show went on to metaphorically bash Coop's teeth in for presuming that a solution could be had by a sufficiently meticulous reading. Art is not a cryptogram, and vice-versa.

This is why the frustrated questions that seem to stem from Synecdoche's surreal particulars—Why the burning house?—lack easy answers, or at least easy answers that are not simultaneously misleading on some level. There is no grand solution buried deep in Synecdoche's mordant heart, but rather a plethora of truths, some observational, some instructive, that are underlined and bolded every time one scratches at a given detail, often uncovering hidden, gilded layers.

***

One final note: Manohla Dargis' intensely personal review and Roger Ebert's stream-of-consciousness "anti-review" have received a lot of attention, but if you haven't read Nick Davis' vast, superlative treatment of Synecdoche yet, do so now.

Moscow, Belgium

2008 // Belgium // Christophe Van Rompaey // March 26, 2009 // Theatrical Print

C - Scruffily endearing and accented with a gratifying guilelessness, Christophe Van Rompaey's Moscow, Belgium is a working-schlub dramedy with a clear sense of its operating parameters. The tale of separated forty-something working mom Matty (Barbara Sarafian) and her fumbling affair with a twenty-something truck driver (Jurgen Delnaet) is played for mellow laughs and cringing melodrama. The film paints an emotionally detailed but tightly framed portrait of middle-aged confusion and longing, and that's about all it does. Hence the absence of any substantial thematic aims, counter-balanced somewhat by a studious regard for its characters. The peripheral roles are cartoonish, but the principals are plump enough to reveal fresh layers in each successive scene. With the exception of Sarafian, who uses her eyes, mouth, and even hair to delicate effect, the performances don't exactly dazzle, nor does the script. There's uncertainty in the story, and refreshingly so, but there is also triteness and contrivance. What makes Moscow, Belgium more pleasurable than slicker romantic fare is the loose structure of it conversations and its penchant for subdued observation elsewhere. These don't make the film a marvel or anything, but do render it more appealing than the genre's usual ephemera.

Favorite Film Characters Meme

Kevin J. Olson at Hugo Stiglitz Makes Movies has tagged me with the Favorite Films Characters Meme, which appears to have originated over at FilmSquish. I don't have a film to review at the moment, so what the heck? Bear in mind that my film literacy skews recent, and my own life experience skews... er, white and male. Therefore my list perhaps inevitably reflects those biases. Here we go, in chronological order: 1. Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins), Psycho (1960)

People always mean well. They cluck their thick tongues, and shake their heads and suggest, oh, so very delicately.

Hitchcock may be the hand behind Psycho’s whipsaw narrative shift and its preternaturally sneaky diversion of audience sympathies, but it’s Anthony Perkins’ timeless and astoundingly skillful portrayal that lends the film its humanity (paradoxically enough). Never mind the crude Freudian outlines to Norman Bates. Psycho is scarcely big enough to contain the chilling, contradictory gestalt that Perkins creates: placid, defensive, genial, resentful, anxious, seething, all capped with a dose of awkward schoolboy eroticism. The effect is simultaneously disquieting and pitiable. Norman is a monster who is acutely cognizant of his own guilt, but completely unable and unwilling to cease his atrocities. Traumatized and wracked to his core, the viewer almost feels sorry for him. Then again, there’s that ghost of an impish smile as Abergast’s car sinks into the pond: “I’ve been a bad boy, haven’t I?”

2. Leo Bloom (Gene Wilder), The Producers (1968)

I'm sorry I called you "Fat, fat, fat".

With his breakout role as terminally nebbishy accountant Leo Bloom, Gene Wilder created what may be the most overwrought, pathetic little milquetoast in the history of film comedy. Between Zero Mostel’s venal, scenery-gorging ogre, Max Bialystock, and the countless zany secondary and tertiary characters that populate The Producers, one might expect poor Leo Bloom to vanish. Not so. Wilder’s peculiar bookkeeper—all anxiousness, sweat, and frizz—claims the spotlight as the story’s pitiable victim, but also as an object of derision, given his ludicrous emotional fragility and utter spinelessness. Bloom is a bullied, feeble man-child with no morals and the coping skills of a toddler, and yet Wilder manages to make his loser antics tremendously funny for every moment he’s on screen.

3. Father Damien Karras (Jason Miller), The Exorcist (1973)

Come into me. God damn you. Take me.

Two stellar characters lend The Exorcist its exquisite drama: Ellen Burstyn’s brittle-yet-resolute Chris MacNeil and Jason Miller’s Damien Karras. Burstyn’s performance may be slightly superior, but it’s Karras who is the keystone to the story’s potency. Even a Baptist-turned-atheist such as myself can sense the distinctly Catholic character to Miller’s portrayal: wit and soothing reason on the surface, ache and tribulation beneath. A counselor priest whose own faith is splintering, Karras flagellates himself (via boxing and running) to make amends for his sins of negligence, and to hold back his suffocating despair in the face of the world’s sorrows and madness. The shrewd, gentle establishment of Karras’ suppressed fear and anger for the ninety minutes that precede the titular exorcism transform the climactic confrontation with Pazuzu from a B-movie showdown into a scene of terrifying emotional force.

4. Chief Phillips (Albert Hall), Apocalypse Now (1979)

My orders say I'm not supposed to know where I'm taking this boat, so I don't. But one look at you, and I know it's gonna be hot.

Colonel Kurtz is the obvious pick, although Captain Willard, Lieutenant Kilgore, and Hopper’s photojournalist are all worthies. Still, the figure that leaps to mind as Apocalypse Now’s most fascinating character—as opposed to performance—is Albert’s Hall’s long-suffering Chief Phillips. The marvelously tough Phillips is the film’s most substantial personality, brimming with anxieties, antipathies, and tenderness. In a film that often feels like a nightmare, he seems to be the only human soul on that boat. Phillips wears two masks throughout Willard’s spiritual journey “way up” the river: the voice of sanity and the hindering dissenter. Coppala’s thematically labyrinthine film deftly accommodates these dual roles, and Hall conveys them both with an emotional ferocity that gives one chills. Just look into those enormous eyes as he contemplates Mr. Clean’s slain body: Is there any doubt that he’s made the decision right there to kill Willard?

5. Seth Brundle (Jeff Goldblum), The Fly (1986)

I'm an insect who dreamt he was a man and loved it. But now the dream is over... and the insect is awake.

If one were to submit that David Cronenberg’s The Fly is a modern horror masterpiece (and I do), the single most vital component to its success would undoubtedly be Seth Brundle himself, one of the most precisely drawn horror protagonists of all time. Allegorical readings of The Fly abound, but Seth succeeds as a character because he fits so neatly within the story’s science-fiction parameters, without requiring grand gestures to elements that dwell outside the story. He is utterly believable, utterly understandable, and utterly tragic. In a pinnacle performance, Jeff Goldblum inexorably ushers us into a terrifying (and sublimely simple) tale of degeneration: of body, gene, species, mind, love, and morality. Goldblum’s signature tics do more than convey Seth’s bookish eccentricities. They are a cunning means to illustrate—via a stop-motion tapestry of evolution and retention—the slow triumph of the invertebrate within.

6. Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster), The Silence of the Lambs (1991)

They don't have a name for what he is.

Anthony Hopkins’ defining portrayal of Hannibal Lector gets the lion’s share of the attention, but let’s be honest, here: the dramatic might of The Silence of the Lambs flows directly from the presence of Clarice Starling. Lector is less a character than a force, part Dragon, part Wise Man on the Mountain. It’s Starling who is the traveler groping her way through Lambs’ Stygian explorations of ambition, knowledge, guilt, class, and, most devastatingly, gender. In one of the most awe-inspiring performances of the late twentieth-century, Foster crafts a heroine for the ages, a detective-warrior who risks the most terrible violations—physical and psychological—for reasons both noble and pathetic. Foster achieves a sublime alchemy with Starling, rendering her flawed humanity and superhuman courage with equivalent forcefulness. The result takes your breath away.

7. Walter Sobchak (John Goodman), The Big Lebowski (1998)

Smokey, my friend, you are entering a world of pain.

We all know someone like Walter Sobchak: an arrogant gasbag with a volcanic temper and a compulsive need to be right. He is, in short, a colossal asshole, so how is it that The Big Lebowski’s miserable mountain of a Vietnam vet comes across as such a delicious character? The magic trick lies somewhere at the confluence of the Coen brothers’ dense, deliriously funny script and in the genius of John Goodman, who paints streaks of honor and sadness onto a fundamentally repellant, unstable person. It’s not just the relentlessly quoted pearls of Sobchak “wisdom” that stick with you, but also that familiarity, the sense that this guy could be rolling at the bowling alley down the street. Perhaps more than any Coen character, Walter exists as both a caricature and as exile from the real world, as lost and full of resentments as the Dude is content.

8. Max Fischer (Jason Schwartzman), Rushmore (1998)

I saved Latin. What did you ever do?

Rushmore endures as Wes Anderson’s finest film to date, and central to its virtues is the exasperating, endearing Max Fischer, a fearless geek of outsized ambitions and abundant faux-maturity. It’s preposterous to envision anyone other than Jason Schwartzman filling Max’s shoes. He flawlessly captures Max’s odd-duck blend of intellect, energy, self-importance, and starry-eyed naïveté. Still, Max’s confounding vacillation between contentment and restlessness marks him as a depressingly normal adolescent, albeit one whose epic approach to everything makes a durable impression on those around him. Rushmore features an astonishing number of delicately realized relationships, and yet Max remains its Pole Star, a kid whose boundless zeal to do things infuses Anderson’s film with an infectious earnestness.

9. Diane Selwyn / Betty Elms (Naomi Watts), Mulholland Drive (2001)

It'll be just like in the movies. Pretending to be somebody else.

Diane Selwyn is the most vivid and empathetic incarnation of David Lynch’s Woman in Trouble, an archetype that runs through his filmic nightmares from Blue Velvet to INLAND EMPIRE. Naomi Watts, in the performance of her career, portrays the gray husk of Mulholland Drive's Diane Selwyn with such hideous contempt that she provokes revulsion and pity in equal measure. Then again, she did have her lover murdered, a nasty detail that Diane blots out by plunging deep into her fever-dream persona, Better Elms, a ridiculously chipper projection of her desires (and the viewer’s). Watts’ mesmerizing presence—wide-eyed, weary, or sobbing through clenched teeth—achieves something fresh within the Lynchian cosmos: a protagonist who realizes with keenly felt horror that the demon is within her. She is the monster behind the Winkie’s, the geriatric homunculi, the Italian gangsters, the Cowboy. She is “the one who’s doing it.”

10. William Cutting (Daniel Day Lewis), Gangs of New York (2002)

Here's the thing... I don't give a ten-penny fuck about your moral conundrum, you meat-headed shit-sack... That's pretty much the thing.

I’m a feisty defender of Martin Scorsese’s vivid urban opera, Gangs of New York, but even I must concede that it would be only half as evocative without the presence of one Bill “The Butcher” Cutting. As embodied by Daniel Day Lewis, Bill is a ruthless nativist with the disposition of a mad wildcat. What sets him apart from American cinema’s countless other xenophobes is not just his foaming grandiosity or his gleeful affinity for bloodletting, but his disquieting sense of self. Here is a beast who recognizes his own conflicting weaknesses—cruelty, showmanship, hypocrisy, sentimentality—and yet also sees his place in America’s fabric with clarity. His refusal to stifle the intrinsic violence of the American character for the sake of social order marks him as a kind of revisionist history Antichrist, a villain that represents all that we have repressed about where we came from, what we are, and where we are going.

Breakfast with Scot

2008 // Canada // Laurie Lynd // March 18, 2009 // Theatrical Print

[Breakfast with Scot was screened as a part of QFest 2009.]

C - Given that the film plays as a conventional family comedy, the set-up of Laurie Lynd's Breakfast With Scot requires a convoluted flowchart: Eric and Sam, a straight-laced gay couple, take in Sam's brother's dead ex-girlfriend' son, Scot. Got it? It turns out that the titular eleven-year-old is swishier than his new guardians, which leads to tension vis-à-vis the nominally straight face Eric prefers to present to the world, to say nothing of the perils of raising a manifestly gay preteen. Mild and sweet and ultimately forgettable, the film is strongest when it keeps the focus on Noah Bernett's oddly charming performance as the uber-girly and somewhat oblivious Scot, and on the paralyzing complexity of Eric's reactions to responsibility. Unfortunately, the story is unfocused, pivoting between the Gay Story and Adoption Story flavors of melodrama with a distinct ungainliness, and frittering time away on peripheral characters and subplots for thin sitcom chuckles. Ultimately, the film sweeps away all conflicts with the tidiness of an after-school special, which does a disservice to its ostensible aim to humanize the struggles of gay parents and gay kids. Still, LGBT-friendly family comedies are a rare breed, and they don't come much more benign than this.

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.