Bright Star

In the Very Temple of Delight

2009 // UK - Australia - France // Jane Campion // September 27, 2009 // Theatrical Print

A- - Jane Campion's new film, Bright Star, is positively swollen with exquisite sorrow. Unabashed and yet sober in her embrace of the romantic, Campion exhibits a shrewd talent for blending personal and cultural understandings of love, and Bright Star is further, devastating proof of her instincts. In presenting the tale of the relationship between seamstress Fanny Brawne and the English poet John Keats, Bright Star relies on the viewer's own romantic reference points as well as their understanding of generic tropes. The film slathers on the components of a textbook romantic tragedy: a soul in creative torment, attraction concealed behind bickering, social barriers that suffocate the lovers, a meddlesome third party, emotions that quickly veer from ecstatic to distraught, and a world that seems almost malevolent to love. Campion assembles these well-worn elements into a whole that is not only deeply affecting, but also visually and aurally compelling. Bright Star does not ask for our indulgence. It earns it, by sweeping us along into a world where poetry expresses what blunt declarations, and even physical intimacies, cannot. It operates much like poetry itself. To borrow a phrase from Campion's masterpiece, The Piano, it is not so much an account of a chaste love affair as it is a mood that passes through you.

The characters of Bright Star do not know what we know, of course. They are unaware that John Keats would perish of tuberculosis at age twenty-five, and that he would one day be regarded as a titan among the English romantic poets. Campion presents Keats (Ben Wishaw) as an admired figure within a small literary circle, but a penniless man, supported by friends, frequently excoriated by contemporary critics. Campion is not attempting anything so banal as a biopic, however, and so the film observes Keats primarily from the perspective of the true protagonist, Fanny (Abbie Cornish), whose family knows the poet and eventually rents half of the country house where Keats and his friend Charles Brown (Paul Schneider) live. Fanny has a quick wit and is renowned for the exquisite clothing she designs and sews herself. In the curious social landscape of early nineteenth century England, she seems to be of a higher station than Keats, a mere starving artist with no prospects. Keats is troubled, roiled by a witch's brew of existential terror, as personified by his ill brother, and professional insecurity. He is charming and brilliant as both a creator and a theorist, but failure haunts him.

Fanny has little interest in poetry, yet there is something in Keats that pulls at her, despite (or perhaps due to) the shadows that seem to trail behind him. She is a modern woman, thoroughly unconcerned with gossip and proud of her own craft. She works her way into Keats' life with gestures that are simultaneously transparent and genuine: she bakes his ailing brother biscuits, makes him a pillow slip, invites him to Christmas dinner, and asks for instruction in poetry appreciation. The exact moment when their relationship evolves from friendship to love is uncertain, but after they share a few gentle kisses in the woods, their demeanor around each other changes. In one of the film's most lovely shots, they follow Fannie's young sister, Margaret (Edie Marten), stealing kisses and holding hands when her back is turned, freezing comically when she glances at them. Campion magnificently conveys the sense of two people who revel in the presence of one another, but probably could not explain precisely why they find such delight there. That Fannie and Keats were so often denied this simple pleasure makes their story all the more bittersweet.

Fanny's family never stands in her way, but her mother (Kerry Fox) is concerned for her daughter's future. Campion and her performers convey as much though glances and body language as through words, establishing all that we need to know about the personalities of the Brawne family. Little brother Samuel (Thomas Sanster) barely speaks, but his loyalty to both his mother and Fanny, and the way those loyalties rend him, is in stark evidence. The most active antagonist in the tale is Brown, who endeavors to drive Fanny away with sheer cruelty, motivated almost certainly by jealously (perhaps sexual). Doom coils through the film, and not merely because of the death that we know is looming. The lovers are boxed in by financial and social realities, and they cannot envision an escape. Their hopes for the future are limited to their next meeting. When Keats moves to the Isle of Wight for a summer to write, their correspondence is filled with rapturous highs and despairing lows. Fanny waits expectantly for the postman, and on days when no letter comes, she is inconsolable.

Campion ushers us into Fanny's story after she and Keats have already become acquainted, as attraction starts to take root and grow into something more. The exclusion of a portentous first encounter is telling. While Bright Star has the veneer of a conventional romantic narrative, Campion is more focused on permitting her viewers' minds to settle over the emotional curvatures of her characters. The process of romance, the little physical and emotional events that accumulate into something ineffable, is secondary to the sensation of romance, a mood that powers the film's dynamos. Perhaps more than any other English-language film-maker who tackles matters of the heart, Campion understands the strength of her chosen medium. Her film gazes lovingly as the seasons slip by, but there is more than rough symbolism at work in her use of blossoms, leaves, and snow. Campion appreciates the relationship between place, time, and feeling, and the way that memories we cherish are so often bound to the sensations that cascade over us in that moment. Thus the feeling when a lover first touched our hand is linked inextricably with Christmas tea and a roaring hearth. As with The Piano, Campion presents images that are both aesthetically arresting and emotionally resonant, establishing a pensive, almost nostalgic intimacy between audience and character. Her cinematic approach is always balanced just on the edge of metaphor without, amazingly enough, ever succumbing to glibness. It's not that love is like sitting in a room filled with butterflies, or that grief is like walking through a gray, snowbound forest. Rather, by presenting Fanny in such situations, the film finds expression for emotional states that resist more cerebral scrutiny.

Bright Star is not free of missteps. The whipsaw character of Fanny's mood backfires at times, as when she goes from euphoric to suicidal in a single cut, and as a result the viewer's empathy for her plight starts to dry up. The film plods in its final twenty or thirty minutes, as Keats' miserable demise looms closer and his relationship with Fanny seems to become more static, all in the misguided attempt to wring as much anguish as possible from tragedy. Yet Campion's film is still a potent illustration of how uniquely suited cinema is to telling stories that rely on the interaction between the senses and the heart. This is not a film about John Keats, or about Fanny Brawne, or about life in nineteenth century England. It's about love and death, and how much it hurts that life has to contain both.

Ponyo

A Fish That Dreamed It Was a Girl

2008 // Japan // Hayao Miyazaki // September 17, 2009 // Theatrical Print

A- - Japanese animated film-maker Hayao Miyazaki has an unusual talent for telling stories that are visually and emotionally compelling despite the admittedly murky character of his fantasy worlds. In films such as My Neighbor Totoro, Princess Mononoke, and Spirited Away, one gets the sense that fidelity to a coherent mythology is, at best, an afterthought. Miyazaki's works operate on the senses and the heart. That's not a backhanded complement, but a truism that, once embraced, leads to an appreciation for his unusual and rewarding films. Ponyo is no exception to this principle. Trying to decipher every jot of this weird, wild aquatic fantasy is an exercise in futility. Better to sit back and absorb it, revel in it, and let it weave its enchantments. As with all of Miyazaki's films, and in contrast to most works of animated kiddie fare, Ponyo lingers on both the intimate and epic while examining the intersection of the mundane and the fantastic. Indeed, consistent with the animistic thread that runs throughout the director's work, Ponyo presents the worlds of flesh and spirit as tightly entwined and ultimately interdependent. This is underlined not merely through exposition—which is sparing and on-the-nose—but also through the rhythm and emphasis of the film's scenes. The steeping of noodles in hot water receives as much attention as a titanic sea goddess drifting through the ocean depths. Such is the way of Miyazaki, who sees the human magic within the banal details of life and connects them to unrealities that possess a mythic tinge.

His latest film is the story of a magical goldfish, the eponymous Ponyo (Noah Lindsey Cyrus), who yearns to be human. The daughter of a sea wizard, Fujimoto (Liam Neeson), Ponyo has the cherubic face of a little girl, complete with a shock of red hair. Such a strange creature should be grotesque, but Japanese animation excels at making the repulsive appear adorable, and Ponyo is distinctly adorable. Ponyo's curiosity draws her to a little boy, Sosuke (Frankie Jonas), who dwells in a seaside bungalow. Their interaction sets into motion events that threaten the balance between land and sea, which Fujimoto desperately attempts to restore. Crucial to the tale is Sosuke's mother, Lisa (Tina Fey), who works at a local nursing home, looks after her son, and waits restlessly for her husband's fishing ship to return from long hitches at sea. While Fujimoto and his oceanic minions can be frightening, there are no true villains in this story. Ponyo is a story of mishaps, misunderstandings, and unexamined emotions that lead characters into unfortunate circumstances.

There is much to the narrative that defies rational understanding: a tsunami of golden fish, an underwater garden in a luminous bubble, and a toy boat that magically transforms into a seaworthy vessel. Little is explained to the satisfaction of a nitpick-prone viewer, and what we are shown often only raises further questions. No matter. Part of Ponyo's charm is simply witnessing the imagination of Miyazaki as it runs wild under the sea. Just as Mononoke is a film that practically smells of the forest, Ponyo is the director's Ocean Film. His vision of the underwater landscape is rooted in the living things of the real world, but with a fantastical twist. Jellyfish float amid waves of shimmering color, and crabs scuttle through the rooms of undersea cottages. Ponyo's oceanic world is at once familiar and uncanny, flabbergasting and just a little bit scary. Fujomoto is more cartoonish, looking like a Dickensian heavy by way of Pee-Wee's Playhouse, but perhaps that's because he was once human. His eccentricities seem to be the traits of a man who is acting the way he imagines an immortal sea wizard would act.

The undersea marvels contribute to the memorable texture of the film, and lend it an otherworldly allure. However, consistent with Miyazaki's other works, the spectacle of Ponyo is less vital than its emotional currents, which are painfully authentic and rooted in a deep appreciation for the fundamental innocence of children. Distilled to its essence, Ponyo's story is typical of a thousand myths and folk tales: an animal yearns to be human, and the love of a human spurs the animal to pursue that yearning. Miyazaki has discarded the sexual elements that often accompany such stories, presenting us with a five-year-old boy and his unconditional love for a fish. The fact of Sosuke's love is utterly uncontroversial. Here the tension flows from the ache of separation: of Sosuke from Ponyo, of Fujimoto from Ponyo, of Sosuke's parents from each other, and, most vitally to the journey that comprises the final act of the film, of Sosuke from his mother. Ecological concerns provide a backdrop for Miyazaki's tale, but the themes of the film are not in any sense political. Ponyo is, after a fashion, about all the transitions in life that are simultaneously exquisite and agonizing: growing up, falling in love, moving out, getting married, having children, growing old. The metaphor is simple and grand. To leave the sea, to become human, is a natural thing. When confronted with the impossibility that Ponyo has transformed from goldfish to girl, Lisa marvels, "Life is mysterious and amazing."  In any other film, this might have been a ridiculous line, but Miyazaki lends it a tone of genuine wonder. I presumed that Coraline would not have any competition this year as the perfect film for a parent and child to share. Ponyo proved me wrong.

Hunger

2008 // UK - Ireland // Steve McQueen // September 13, 2009 // DVD - IFC (2009)

A - On a purely sensory level, Hunger functions as a grim, riveting depiction of humanity's capacity for depraved indifference to others and to the self. In portraying the conditions inside a British prison during the IRA's "blanket strike" and "no-wash strike" in 1981, first-time director Steve McQueen conveys a searing sense of place through texture and sound, especially minute details such as a single snowflake melting on skin. Hunger is a film of pregnant silences and violent outbursts, but the fulcrum of the film is a mesmerizing conversation where IRA zealot Bobby Sands (Michael Fassbender) explains to a priest (Liam Cunningham) why he is about to start a hunger strike. In this peerless sequence, which consists mainly of a single shot and lasts more than fifteen minutes by my count, McQueen drills down into the humane essence of the film, beyond the spectacle of the grueling battle of wills between guards and prisoners. Hunger's concerns are ethical, even transcendental, conveyed with the authority of a supremely focused and confident film-maker. With disturbing intensity, McQueen asks us to consider the meaning of sacrifice, and whether it is morally superior to dehumanize oneself rather than suffer the cruelties inflicted by others.

Sugar

2008 // USA // Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck // September 13, 2009 // DVD - Sony (2009)

B - Given that their previous film, Half Nelson, featured a borderline outlandish premise, it's intriguing that Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck would tackle a story like Sugar, which concerns itself with mediocrity and universal experiences. Decisively rejecting sports movie cliché, Boden and Fleck's latest film follows the rise and fall of Miguel "Sugar" Santos (Algenis Perez Soto), a Dominican pitcher with dreams of Yankee Stadium and a new Cadillac, cultivated at the Caribbean training camp for a big league franchise. Sugar's narrative is comprised of arcs of hope and despair, as Santos journeys into the American farm teams, where he contends with culture shock and the awful realization that he is not, in fact, hot shit. Boden and Fleck occasionally aim for facile melodrama—Sugar falls for an Iowa farm girl!—but the film truly engages when it simply observes how an athlete manages the insufferable tangle of expectations from without and within. Boden and Fleck suggest that commercial athletics all too often treats players as commodities, extinguishing their joy of sport before tossing them aside. To say that Sugar is subversive is too strong, but it is refreshing and commendably precise in its evocation of mood.

Lorna's Silence

2008 // Belgium // Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne // September 9, 2009 // Theatrical Print

B- - There's something inexplicably chilly in the Dardenne brothers' most recent film, the urgently observed and somewhat confounding Lorna's Silence. At the center of its narrative is a complex and thoroughly indecent proposal. Albanian drycleaner Lorna (Arta Dobroshi) has married Belgian junkie Claudy (Jérémie Renier, compelling even as a derelict) at the behest of gangsters in order to obtain citizenship. Their plan is to kill Claudy with a fake overdose and for Lorna to marry a Russian heavy, in a kind of murderous immigration two-step. Naturally, the enterprise comes apart, partly due to Claudy's shaky resolve to clean up and partly due to Lorna's flickering conscience. The brothers shoot with their customary vérité ruthlessness, leavening the gravity with sparing mirth and bringing tragedy down abruptly like a hammer. However, the film fails to develop much psychological detail within the confines of its style, dampening the potential drama. Doboroshi's performance is engaging, but perhaps too inscrutable, and the film never achieves the emotional depths necessary to move it much beyond thriller tensions or crude sympathy for its heroine. Still, the conclusion veers into intriguingly unexpected territory, posing stinging doubts about the absence of human connection in an increasingly mercenary world.

Tetro

Family Matters

2009 // USA - Italy - Argentina // Francis Ford Coppola // September 8, 2009 // Theatrical Print

B - There's a searing line in Michael Chabon's hardboiled / speculative history novel, The Yiddish Policemen's Union, from a scene where half-Jewish, half-Tlingit police detective Berko Shemets confronts his estranged father. "It has nothing to do with religion," he howls, "It has everything to do, God damn it, with fathers!" With a slight adjustment, this could be the tagline of Francis Ford Coppola's Tetro, a film fashioned from equal parts unabashed passion and tightly-wound bitterness. In it we are introduced to the Tetrocinis, a clan for whom literature, film, dance, and especially music are sustenance. Tetro isn't really about art, however; it's about fathers. Coppola himself is the son of the composer Carmine Coppola, and his family is perhaps the most renowned tribe in cinema, comprising daughter Sofia, sister Talia Shire, and nephews Nicholas Cage and Jason Schwartzman, to name a few. While it's not particularly illuminating to psychoanalyze a director through his work, it's probably a safe bet that the operatic and yet mischievous Tetro is Coppola's most personal work in years. In those places where the film stumbles, it's due to tonal awkwardness and narrative silliness. Nonetheless, Tetro's visuals are sumptuous, its audacity invigorating, and its pathos deeply felt.

Much of the film takes place in Argentina, which Coppola and cinematographer Mahai Malaimare Jr. shoot in sumptuous black-and-white, evoking the joyfulness and slightly forlorn qualities of Fellini's Italy. The just-shy-of-eighteen Bennie Tetrocini (Alden Ehrenreich, the finest of Leonardo DiCaprio clones) has come to Buenos Aires to find his older half-brother, Angelo (Vincent Gallo), who left home a decade ago on a writing sabbatical. Bennie discovers his brother living in a sad little apartment with a near-wife, Miranda (Maribel Verdú), who is both loyal and painfully confident in Angelo's genius. Unfortunately, the volatile and suspicious Angelo, who now insists on the name "Tetro," hasn't written anything in years. He spends his time lingering in the orbit of a group of theater oddballs, who are staging a production of Faust that is part poetry-quipping drag spectacle and part burlesque act. Bennie is perplexed and mildly angered at Tetro's situation, given that he has longed to see his brother for years. "You promised you would come and get me," he reminds Tetro. Despite the gulf of years between them, the brothers have a shared misery. Their father, the conductor Carlo Tetrocini, is an arrogant man disposed to acts of baffling cruelty.

Bennie eventually uncovers Tetro's unfinished magnum opus, a hodgepodge of coded scrawlings secreted away in a suitcase. The manuscript is, naturally, a thinly veiled autobiographical novel about the elder Tetrocini and all the miseries he has inflicted on his relations. Bennie begins to read, to learn something of the father he barely knows. Coppola uses this as a cue for flashbacks shot in color with a narrower 1:85 aspect ratio, although these sequences may just be Tetro's imaginings of past events. These scenes mostly serve to establish beyond a shadow of a doubt that Carlo Tetrocini is an arrogant son of a bitch. When Tetro leaves on his sabbatical, his father acidly mocks him in public, "What will you write about?" Tetro whispers his reply, "This."

Coppola's story has the outlines of a conventional family tragedy, but in its details and mounting it plays more as a fairy tale. At three separate junctures, the film digresses into luscious dance sequences that reflect and reveal aspects of the main storyline. These dance pieces are accented with visual effects that lend them an otherworldly feel, as though they were allegorical pop-up chapters of Tetro's tale. These sequences alone are the most visually arresting thing that Coppola has done since his flirtation with self-consciously fake sets and effects in Bram Stoker's Dracula. Yet the exaggerated aspects of Tetro extend to the narrative details of the primary story as well. The Tetrocinis seem to dwell in an alternate universe of sorts, one where art is more accessible and more vital than in our own. Symphony conductors have rock star reputations and groupies, ragtag theater troupes can waltz into international drama competitions with the right play, and misunderstood, misanthropic geniuses can be found wasting away in asylums. This slightly absurd tone suffuses the film, and even threatens to derail it at the climax, which occurs at a baroque festival where a grande dame of the Argentinean arts holds court. Coppola certainly never asks us to accept his tale as authentic, but Tetro does suffer from excesses even within the confines of its fantastical universe. The blend of grave melodrama and the outlandish never gels into the alluring whole that Coppola is striving for. (In other words, it is further evidence that Apocalypse Now was something like bottled lightning.)

That said, one can't deny the genuine feeling that oozes from the film's pores. Coppola regards even his cartoonish characters seriously, eschewing mockery for humor that relies on cutting remarks and bawdy situations. For a film that is concerned at bottom with familial cruelty and deception, Tetro exhibits little misanthropy. Coppola indicts Carlo Tetrocini for his monstrousness, but he paints the old man as such an unmitigated bastard that the film's thematic thrust obviously goes beyond, "Fathers Fuck Us Up." Coppola is also interested in the way that families respond to destructive influences from within, and why it is that individuals construct different edifices and moral codes to deal with those influences. What's refreshing is that the director doesn't come down in favor of any one path out of familial darkness over any other. Instead he intimates that the deeply personal nature of our struggles with the past should not preclude bonds with others, a surprisingly warm sentiment from a director whose masterworks have relied on the isolating nature of the human experience. It's enough to give one encouragement that, the waning of his cinematic intuition aside, Coppola remains a film-maker committed to exploring new territory in aesthetically compelling ways.