Film-Philosophy
Journal | Salon | Portal (ISSN 1466-4615)
Vol. 7 No. 43, November 2003
Martha P. Nochimson
New York Film Festival 2003
This year there was a
noticeable presence at the New York Film Festival, whether
intentionally or not, of films reflecting back on the past,
both real and imagined. A second wave of millennial summing
up, more profound than that forced by the media in the year
2000, these films, at their best, seek with courage and
compassion to understand the larger forces at work in the
troubled 20th century. At their worst, they stand as work
riddled by self-deluding cliches in collusion with our own
worst impulses. Among the number of 'films of remembrance'
shown, those that demand to be discussed because they best
exemplify the ongoing struggle to make cinema responsive to
the needs of filmgoing audiences to know reality 'again for
the first time' (pace T. S. Eliot) are, in a rough order of
importance: _S21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine_ (Dir.
Rithy Pan); _The Fog of War_ (Dir. Errol Morris); _Dogville_
(Dir. Lars von Trier); _Mayor of the Sunset Strip_ (Dir.
George Hickenlooper); _Bright Leaves_ (Dir. Ross McElwee);
and _The Best of Youth_ (Dir. Marco Tullio Giordana). Alas,
among the NYFF 2003 films of memory and summation, it is
also necessary to discuss _Mystic River_ (Dir. Clint
Eastwood), but only because of its inexplicable media
notoriety, a sad testimony to a Dubya phenomenon in things
cinematic. This is one hanging chad. Among the festival
films not informed by this core trend, but eminently worthy
of mention, are: _PTU_ (Dir. Johnnie To); _Free Radicals_
(Dir. Barbara Albert); _Crimson Gold_ (Dir. Jafar Panahi);
and _Raja_ (Dir. Jacques Doillon), though, unhappily, it
would strain this portmanteau overview to talk in detail
about more than the first two. _S21_ and _The Fog of War_
are both documentaries that probe the edges of two of our
greatest cultural nightmares: the regime of the Khmer Rouge
in Cambodia from 1975-1979, and American aggression in the
last half of the 20th century, primarily in Vietnam and
Cambodia. In many ways, these two documentaries interface
not only in their focus on the same historical epoch, but
also in their rejection of the usual address to the audience
through action and event. In their reliance on unadorned
testimony, both give evidence of filmmakers who have come to
the conclusion that in telling these stories there would
have been something essentially corrupt about imitating
fiction film with narrative recreations. To the credit of
both films, the cheap emotionality of the pathetic fallacy,
so dominant in the works of panderers to the spectacle of
human suffering like Steven Spielberg, is cleanly avoided.
These documentaries are more in the tradition of Claude
Lanzman's approach to the European Holocaust. Both Rithy Pan and Errol
Morris grapple unflinchingly with the question of how one
makes a film about events that are barely understood, events
that challenge us to come to grips with the darkest moments
in human history. Of necessity, the films give two different
answers. The American documentary frames the question from a
relatively safe perspective, that of the concerned onlooker;
Errol Morris was a participant in the Anti-War movement in
the 1970s at the University of Wisconsin and at Princeton,
far from the napalm and the genocide. Rithy Pan speaks from
the center of the South East Asian holocaust. He was 11
years old when the Khmer Rouge took over his country. He
lost his entire family to their terrorism and was himself
sent to a labor camp, from which he miraculously escaped to
Thailand and found his way to France, where he made his
first steps toward becoming a filmmaker. There is also a stark
opposition between the materials available to these two
filmmakers. The American documentary directly interrogates
one of the major architects of the debacle in South East
Asia: Robert MacNamara, the Secretary of Defense for both
President John Kennedy and President Lyndon Johnson, the man
materially responsible for the savaging of the country of
Viet Nam and the creation of the kinds of conditions in
Cambodia that caused the rise of the Khmer Rouge. By
contrast, Rithy Pan creates his film out of the memories of
the most helpless of the survivors of S21: Vann Nath, a fine
artist, who was imprisoned in S21 for reasons he still
doesn't understand, one other survivor, and a dozen of the
former Khmer Rouge, some of them his former jailers. The New
York Film Festival, in bringing these two films together in
one event, reveals one of the more unexamined bonuses of the
festival phenomenon: films that might have drifted in their
own orbits by being distributed in very diverse venues, are
made to talk to each other. _S21_ and _The Fog of War_ look
blankly into each other's eyes, the first featuring a man
asking for someone to take responsibility, the second
featuring a man denying the possibility of such a
thing. Pan's _S21_ is about the
most infamous of the Khmer Rouge death camps, which were
instituted for no other reason than to kill Cambodians for
utterly imagined crimes against the government. The
prisoners were brought to S21 like animals intended for
slaughter. They were starved and beaten, manacled 24 hours a
day in a prone position, except when they were put through a
ceremony of death that principally involved the use of
torture to elicit painstakingly detailed confessions to
crimes they never committed, crimes that never occurred at
all. There is no film footage in the documentary of any of
these events; I have no idea whether any exists. The film
begins with a beautiful image of a woman washing a baby,
strangely it is a grandmother figure not the mother, who is
nowhere in sight. This is perhaps the distillation of what
is to come, a statement that though life goes on an entire
generation is missing. Pan then permits us to overhear the
conversations of Vann Nath who, along with only two other
S21 inmates out of a total of 17,000 prisoners, is still
alive to tell what happened. Nath speaks with one other
survivor, and several former guards. The guards, who began
to work at S21 in their teens, describe, as if recovering
some part of their memories that they have long locked up,
their daily routine. Their bodies propel them into
re-enactments of daily chores, words used long ago burst
from their lips, as if they are sleepwalkers. When asked
direct questions they can only say, without any
self-consciousness born of the Nuremberg trials, 'I followed
orders'. Pan tracks the camera around the maze of rooms in
the now empty camp; Vann Nath speaks while he paints
brightly colored, expressionistic images of lines of men
manacled to each other. We see the endless piles of
photographs and elegantly written confessions of chimerical
crimes painstakingly recorded for each one of the 17,000
souls to come through this process, a process arguably
rooted in lessons learned from the French about the need to
document everything. We somehow become soaked in the air,
the dust, the molecules of this setting. We begin to know
this place, as does Nath, while like him we cannot know why
it happened. In every way Nath's questions, which become
ours, go unanswered: How could it happen and why has no one
apologized or even said they were sorry? The brilliance of Pan's
film is manifold. Born out of his own need to tell this
story, it is utterly without self-pity, without rage, while
it remains steadfastly uncompromising in its refusal to
blink at anything, including his belief that 'memory is
fragile'. There is no attempt to satisfy a demand for
certainty, to give what can be recovered even the slightest
appearance of solid fact: the fate of fact in this instance
is all too devastatingly present in the piles of coerced
confessions slowly turning to dust. Instead, the film boldly
releases the power of what is not there. As the former
guards give their somnambulist performances, what can never
be recovered for sight emerges from the empty space. Nath's
non-realistic paintings populate the terrible rooms with the
bodies of real people and the sufferings that can never be
directly shown. And out of all this rises the phantoms of
the Khmer Rouge leaders, so elusive and distant in every
way, being never in direct, embodied communication with the
guards in the trenches, who nevertheless pitilessly carried
out their will to the smallest detail. Because the film will
not reduce these perpetrators of one of the most horrendous
persecutions in human history to graspable villains, they
become unforgettable in their ineffability, daring us to do
something with this new knowledge of evil. _S21_ approaches
perfection in its documentary purity, putting to shame the
vulgar compromises made by so many who have sought to
excavate the European holocaust and other human tragedies by
forging for the camera the appearance of solid
representability that it craves. In _The Fog of War_ Errol
Morris makes the vulgar choice, but with a knowing,
satirical intention, imitating in the structure of his film
what is also the content: the representation of a man with
the soul of an engineer, with all the longing of his kind
for clean edges, even though he is dealing with the
irretrievably messiest circumstance known to the human
condition: war. _The Fog of War_ catches on film the
bottomless pit of internal contradictions that make up such
a man as Robert McNamara, illustrating a mind moving slowly
in endless circles of self-justification and angst by
creating a tension between the overt structure of the
documentary and the content. Morris begins the film with
some old footage of McNamara holding a pointer in front of
some pristine, clearly articulated charts by means of which
he is about to explain everything to his audience of
government officials. Morris then goes on to divide the film
into eleven 'clear cut lessons', in the style of the self
help book, including: 1, Empathize With Your Enemies; 2,
Rationality Will Not Save Us; 7, Belief and Seeing are Often
Both Wrong; 9, In Order to do Good, You May Have to Engage
in Evil; and so forth. The lesson titles themselves are a
study in confusion and the abdication of responsibility.
McNamara's augmentation of these points, presented as if
great clarity were being reached, is a Sargasso sea of
motives and memories that nothing will ever untangle. Unable
to apologize (since how can he assign guilt when he has come
to the conclusion that reason, belief, and perception are so
immensely flawed) he is also unable to rid himself of the
sorrow that reason, belief, and perception have forced upon
him. With wit and irony, but also compassion, Errol has
constructed a deceptively simple portrait of the United
States as weeping assassin. The accomplishment pales before
that of Rithy Pan's surgical removal of his heart for
exposure before a film audience, but it is a substantial
achievement: an American self-appraisal unalloyed by the
cloying treacle of pseudo-patriotism. Like _The Fog of War_,
George Hickenlooper's _Mayor of the Sunset Strip_ and Ross
McElwee's _Bright Leaves_ also demonstrate the growing
American interest in (and genius for) documentary. These are
both much smaller projects than those of Morris and Pan, and
though each is a confrontation of a suitably enigmatic
subject, neither could or does aim for the heart-stopping
importance of either of the above discussed films.
Nonetheless, _Mayor of the Sunset Strip_, in chronicling the
unusual life and times of Rodney Bingenheimer, shines a
light on a subject of interest: the pathos and incongruities
of the hysteria for celebrity. Bingenheimer, a small, almost
inarticulate, self-effacing man, who responds to questions
about what makes for a great musical artist with comments
that add up to an endorsement of rhythm and melody,
inexplicably spent a couple of decades in Los Angeles, as a
Rock and Roll star-maker. Through a chain of events that the
film attempts to probe, this likeable nerd who at first
lacked a job and never had financial resources to speak of,
became the final word on which music groups had 'it'. Later,
when he became a disk jockey for KROQ, he made careers
simply by playing on his show music that other, more
established stations wouldn't touch. Plainly it was simply
the proximity of the records to Bingenheimer that did the
trick; though his lack of anything ordinarily associated
with charisma or eloquence gives the film ample occasion to
play with mystery. Moreover, in a business hardly known for
either its memory or its warmth, the heavy hitters that
Bingenheimer helped propel to stardom (David Bowie, Cher)
remain surprisingly grateful and warm toward him, despite
the fact that he no longer has a platform from which to
promote anyone, not even himself. Once the man to sleep
with, not for his own attractions, but because he was the
attainable hand that had touched the hand of everyone's
unattainable rock idol, he now lives alone in an apartment
filled with the rock memorabilia of his halcyon days,
dreaming of the ideal woman. Hickenlooper's documentary
is replete with star interviews, great vintage footage, and
a curiosity about the lives of others who had all the sex,
drugs, and rock and roll that the sixties and seventies had
to offer, almost certainly as mirrors of our own unrealized
fantasies of notoriety and debauchery. Ross McElwee's
_Bright Leaves_ cuts out the middleman and goes right to
self-examination, not of our dreams and wishes for glitz and
sleaze, however, but of the desire for roots and a
distinguished pedigree. In a very funny self-satire, McElwee
goes once again in search of his southern roots, this time
spurred on by a wonderfully depicted dream about tobacco
leaves which opens the film. Now, why did I dream that, he
wonders and his wife enlightens him. The old days below the
Mason Dixon line are calling to him. Returning to North
Carolina, McElwee reconnects with a cousin, the heretofore
unknown riches of his spectacular collection of original
35mm Hollywood prints and memorabilia, and, best of all, a
family secret that will finally make up for the injuries the
McElwee family has suffered at the hands of the Duke family.
Old Duke, it seems, cheated Old McElwee out of an important
tobacco patent which ruined him financially and raised the
Dukes to the heights of pre-eminent social power in North
Carolina. However, the McElwee family secret that the
documentary maker is greeted with on his trip home is that
_Bright Leaf_ (Dir. Michael Curtiz, 1950) the Patricia
Neal/Gary Cooper film, is the story of his family's agony.
(For those uninitiated in tobacco lore, Bright Leaf is the
name of a commercially desirable variety of tobacco.) The
Dukes, as he says, may have Bull Durham, but the McElwees
have their own Hollywood movie. Or do they? Following up
on this genealogical lightning bolt, McElwee has hilarious
encounters with Patricia Neal; the widow of the author of
the novel on which Bright Leaf was based; tobacco farmers;
film critics at the North Carolina School of the Arts; an
old teacher; eccentric relatives worthy of Tennessee
Williams; the 50th and final Tobacco Day parade with all its
beauty queens; and friends trying to quit smoking. He
dredges up old home movies that pose more questions,
including that of why his staunchly Protestant father is
wearing a yarmulke during a Christmas day telephone call.
Ultimately, of course, McElwee is playing with issues so
fruitful for documentaries: How can we know what we know?
How do we use popular culture in constructing our
identities? What is the nature of history? Fiction can equal and even
surpass documentary in its exploration of human mysteries,
only, however, if it takes a suitably oblique route. Though
there have been many towering feature films about the nature
of evil, there has never been a single onscreen fictional
narrative about the European Holocaust that didn't
trivialize the suffering of all those who perished in the
death camps of the Third Reich, on the battlefield, and on
the home fronts across Europe. Similarly, although the
devastation of abuse has fared better in popular culture
fictional narratives, films about abuse too often dwindle
into message films, with the tones of case files, or become
another form of exacerbating abuse because of the unexamined
blind spots of their directors. The latter is the case with
_Mystic River_, a film choking on cliches, both visual and
narrative, and gleaming with thickly disguised misanthropic
contempt for women, working class people, and, worst of all,
men who are not in complete control of their
destinies. I will give Clint
Eastwood, who according to Marcia Gay Harden is very nice to
his actors, the benefit of the doubt; I doubt any awareness
on his part of what a hateful film he has made. He is not
likely to find enlightenment any time soon either because he
has managed, as always, to push the buttons of the audience
and of many reviewers unable to resist saluting that
vigilante masculinity that masquerades as the 'no bullshit
honesty' so dear to Americans. I would also like to state,
before proceeding further, that I have not read the book by
Dennis Lehane from which the film was adapted, so I don't
know if Eastwood has swallowed from the source pre-packaged
biases against women, working people, and men who share the
universal human condition of frailty but have had worse luck
than some. In any case, somewhere in the story he seems to
have found inspiration for this new version of Dirty
Harryism, with its liberal looking face-lift -- a disguise
that may have fooled such normally aware actors as Tim
Robbins, Marcia Gay Harden, Laura Linney, and Sean Penn;
either way, it certainly misused their talents. *Warning*: I
will have to expose every significant plot event in the film
in order to give this film the justice it
deserves. _Mystic River_ is the
story of the lives of three smalltown boys from
Massachusetts: Dave (Tim Robbins), Jimmy (Sean Penn), a
tough little customer, and Sean (Kevin Bacon). It uses
flashback and present-day action to explore memory and the
consequences of actions taken long ago. In flashback we
learn that, as little boys, Dave, Jimmy, and Sean were
accosted by a man purporting to be a policeman who,
determining that Dave was the most sensitive of them,
intimidated him into getting into an unmarked 'police car',
after which Dave was abducted and repeatedly raped by the
ersatz police officer and another man disguised as a priest.
After four days, which we don't see except in very brief
flashcuts, Dave escaped from the physical clutches of his
tormentors, but indeed he never escaped from them
psychologically. Cut to the present-day, thirty years later,
and Jimmy is now the unofficial boss of the South
Buckingham's underworld and is married to his second wife;
Sean is a policeman who is emotionally blocked and has
thereby alienated his wife to such an extent that she is in
hiding from him, calling him from time to time without
saying a word when he answers; and Dave is married and has a
son, but he is still haunted by the terrible memories of his
abduction. When Jimmy's teenaged daughter is murdered,
Dave's next crisis flowers. Because of cliches about what
abused children become as adults, he is suspected although
he is innocent, and eventually when circumstantial evidence
convinces Dave's wife Celeste (Marcia Gay Harden) that her
husband is indeed the person who murdered the girl, she
confesses her fears to Jimmy. Sean is unable to keep Jimmy
from murdering Dave in retaliation because he gets to Jimmy
too late with the news of what really happened. Jimmy is at
first overwhelmed by guilt, but makes his peace with it when
his wife Annabeth (Laura Linney), using a combination of sex
and self-serving rationalization, successfully dissuades him
from turning himself in. Understood by many as a
hard-hitting drama about ordinary people, an unflinching
look at modern chaos, the film is actually the opposite side
of the Hollywood coin, and buys into the fantasy of the
patent on beauty and charm held by those rich enough to buy
high fashion clothes and live in fabulous mansions. If
decades of mind-numbing schlock has attached all the virtues
to the rich -- so persuasively that I for one was devastated
by disappointment when I met real rich people -- then
_Mystic River_ is rotten with the corollary fantasy that is
equally effective in supporting Hollywood's obsession with
money. If the rich have all the beauty and charm, then
what's left to say about the working people? Obviously, the
'fantasy' that attaches all ugliness and vice to people who
cannot buy stylish clothes and who live in dark, cramped
quarters. This is a film that never met a working-class man
or woman it didn't think was ugly and spiritually deformed,
a throwback to the old films of the 1930s and 40s in
Hollywood. You want real, as opposed to fetishized glamour?
Make it ugly. This mode of characterizing ordinary people
dogs the work of Frank Capra, for example, though he at
least allows one or two charming real folks among a sea of
the unprepossessing masses. In Hollywood's most insulting
fantasies, poor people have to be cleaned up by rich people
in order to look good, as in _Annie Get Your Gun_ (1950). In
Eastwood's film, among the denizens of the low rent
district, with no Pygmalion in sight, only the murder
victim, Katie (Emmy Rossum), the doomed 19 year old girl,
radiates any human loveliness. Otherwise, Eastwood indulges
in close-up shots and lighting that make the characters in
this film look as ugly as possible, with the prize for
grotesquery going to Dave and his wife. Yes indeedy, it's
the boy who didn't become a cop or a gang boss, the boy
whose sensitivity attracted the abusers who becomes the
physical manifestation of repulsiveness; the other two,
tougher boys, are only sneeringly mean in physiognomy. Not
nice, the film whispers secretly, but more masculine, and
better than the fate of soft guys. But if the film registers
a contempt for working class men who have the nerve to be
sensitive, it is even more unforgiving of people who have
the nerve to be working class women. Maybe the guys would
have worked it all out, bad as the situation was, if not for
the women, who are even softer than the soft guy; well, in
terms of becoming emotional -- actually they're kind of hard
in an emotional way. The film's hatred for women treads
round and round this involution, creating an absurd
scenario, almost completely lacking in motivation, in which
women bear the responsibility for the heaping on poor Dave's
head of suffering after suffering. The lack of female
motivation for creating trouble is hidden under slathers of
mock earnestness. Jimmy is really earnest when Celeste comes
to tell him that she thinks Dave killed his daughter. That
theory was already on the table, but Jimmy, earnestly, was
holding out for evidence. Celeste doesn't actually have any,
but the fact that Dave's wife would say a thing like that
carries weight for Jimmy. And Celeste, tell us again just
why you went to Jimmy with your fears. At least Annabeth
does have financial and sexual motivation for keeping
earnest Jimmy from going to the police when he learns he
killed an innocent man, not to mention a friend. Breathing
heavily and pawing him incessantly, Annabeth tells Jimmy
that his actions are those of the man who will do anything
for his family, and how proud that makes her, and how
comforted she is to have him around the house. And his
motivation for letting her convince him is completely
understandable, once you understand how completely helpless
the strongest man is rendered by working class female
sexuality, that pernicious force. Whose guilt wouldn't cave
in completely with Laura Linney crawling all over him,
praising his manliness, and exhibiting many of her own
tattoos? To switch metaphors with lighting speed, it turns
out that Annabeth is Jimmy's Condoleeza Rice. If you drag
your own values into the film, the two of them become
contemptible. But how does the film itself frame
them? Here is probably where the
audience divides about _Mystic River_. Perhaps some might
dismiss the film's final turn of the knife as an inoffensive
coincidence with little bearing on the meaning, but I see no
reason to look away from the fact that emotionally repressed
Sean finds immediate release right after Jimmy's act of
vigilantism, stimulating his wife to speak. Film narrative
works by the implications that emerge when pieces of film
are spliced together. In the famous Kuleshov experiments,
viewers assumed that the very same image of a man denoted
hunger when juxtaposed to a bowl of soup, and sadness when
juxtaposed with a coffin. The juxtaposition of Jimmy's
violence and Sean's release is at work in the film even if
no one wants to talk about it. Moreover, the final scene, a
parade full of American flags in bright sunshine, may seem
ironic to some, but I cannot find anything in it but a new
rapport between Jimmy and Sean. In this last scene, Sean has
not yet brought Jimmy in to be tried for Dave's murder,
although he knows Jimmy's secret. Why not? Does he intend to
give Jimmy a pass because boys will be boys, or to keep mum
out of friendship for a man who is tougher than his innocent
victim? These are in the air as Sean playfully points his
finger at Jimmy to simulate the firing of a gun, while the
parade passes by and Jimmy shrugs his shoulders back at
Sean, with a kind of insouciance. Some will argue that the
final mime between Sean and Jimmy is enigmatic, or implies a
threat offered by Sean to Jimmy. But, it is necessary to
dismantle the entire rhetoric of _Mystic River_ to avoid
interpreting the closing frames as a sunshine-soaked version
of the good old boy hand shake. Sure murder is wrong, but,
Hell, it's more manly than 'taking it up the butt', to put
it as crudely as the subtext of Eastwood's film does. If
this isn't the most disingenuous cocktail of homophobia,
misogyny, and misanthropy that has ever appeared in American
movies, it will do. Eastwood's version of an
American summation of the past is chilling, distorting the
processes of memory in order to reinstate with shiny new
packaging all the old prejudices so many of us struggled so
long to unwrap and discard. But again, if we consider that
the festival permits films to talk to one another, the
thickly cloaked biases of _Mystic River_ make a fascinating
juxtaposition with Lars von Trier's latest film _Dogville_,
which shows the ostensibly good, smalltown people of the
American heartland to be precisely so cloaked. Contrasted
with Eastwood's earnest 'realism' -- that turns out to be a
mimetic style far from reality that savages ordinary life --
von Trier's cold contemplation of the supposedly decent
'ordinary Joe' of the American Depression era is utterly
abstract in mode, re-evaluating, by means of the distancing
powers of reflexivity, the nostalgia with which Diane
Arbus's photos of the Depression are commonly regarded. The
abstractions form a compact between film and audience that
promotes an active contemplation of the difference between
what things seem to be and what they are, as opposed to
Eastwood's attempt to seduce us into believing that he's
'telling it like it is'. Happily, I will be able to proceed
with a discussion of this and all the other fiction films to
follow without giving away whatever narrative surprises
there may be. _Dogville_ takes place in
a tiny, mythical American town of that name in the scenic
Rocky Mountains, but there isn't a single natural setting in
the entire film. The town is drawn like an architectural
plan in chalk on a black floor. Bits and pieces of scenery
indicate the presence of homes, shops, fields, and the town
hall, but there are no complete sets. Moses, the dog, after
which the town may have been named, is, until the end of the
film, a diagram with sound effects. The costumes are correct
to the period of the 1930s, but so very evocative of the
fact that they are costumes. The acting styles announce that
the performers are playing recognizable types: Tom Edison
(Paul Bettany), the young, aspiring, would-be writer; Grace
(Nicole Kidman), the beautiful mysterious stranger; Tom
Edison Sr. (Philip Baker Hall), the kindly retired town
doctor; Chuck (Stellan Skarsgard) the town curmudgeon; Ma
Ginger (Lauren Bacall) the wise old woman; The Big Man
(James Caan), the ruthless gangster boss; and so forth. The
film contains a certifiable plot replete with suspense,
surprises, and emotional moments, but it is narrated by John
Hurt in the tones of a tale for children, very reminiscent
of the narration of Stanley Kubrick's _Barry Lyndon_. There
is no doubting the film's reflexivity; it presents itself as
fiction and as a film. There is nothing new in
the tactic of peeling away the first positive impression to
reveal unsuspected nether levels of evil, but von Trier
makes it new, primarily because of what is revealed about
Grace, the beautiful stranger. The revelations about the
townsfolk of Dogville and their peccadilloes hark back to
the naturalism of Sherwood Anderson in _Winesberg, Ohio_,
which broke the news there was a range of kinds of sexuality
in smalltown America, just like in the big cities, and also
frequent lapses from the Judeo-Christian ethic even where
there were no foreigners and Communists. Von Trier adds to
this mix the possibilities for evil in that most seemingly
virtuous of political forms: egalitarian, direct
Democracy. I'm going to go out on a
limb to say, however, that Grace is von Trier's most
completely original invention in this film, and she is the
focal point of the film's narrative, which concerns the
consequences of her mysterious arrival in Dogville. Dressed
and coiffed glamorously, she has the skin of a woman
unaccustomed to housework or any other type of manual labor.
Sweet and frightened, she is running away from someone whom
she will not discuss. There are, of course, potential
dangers involved in taking the word of a stranger about whom
one can know nothing, but Grace appeals immediately to the
chivalric impulses of handsome, young Tom Edison, who is the
first to find her and then hide her from her unknown but
clearly sinister pursuers. At first blush, it is hard to
imagine that Tom might have made a mistake in believing that
she could not be guilty of anything that might make him
regret sheltering her, and this first impression is
re-enforced, unlike our immediate impressions of the
townspeople, by Grace's subsequent behavior. As the
Dogvillites shed their poor but honest veneers, Grace's
immediately visible beauty and sweetness is augmented by
clear evidence of her willingness to work hard and
cheerfully; her courageous commitment to ethical, Democratic
behavior; and her Christian forbearance toward those who
would injure her. Nevertheless, her guileless Mary
Pickford/Tess Trueheart purity begins to morph before our
eyes, as she maintains it in the face of the growing cruelty
of the townspeople, into something reminiscent of De Sade's
Justine. So that, even before the final reveal at the end of
the film, we are already beginning to feel uneasy about
those virtues, a creeping discomfort with what keeps looking
like infantilized earnestness. When the final word of the
film is spoken, it is clear that von Trier believes that the
ordinary concepts of virtue that Grace has embodied not only
ignore the realities of the human condition but also create
the circumstances for bringing out the worst possibilities
in human nature that ordinarily lie dormant. Von Trier puts
it this way: 'The idea behind Grace's
treatment at the hands of the townspeople was that if you
present yourself to others as a gift, then that is
dangerous. The power that this gives people over the
individual corrupts them. If you give yourself away, it will
never work. You have to have some limits.' I should note that von
Trier's legendary taste for martyred women takes a very new
turn in this film; in this too, nothing fulfills initial
expectations. In von Trier's press
notes, he wittily defends himself against the critics of his
last film, _Dancer in the Dark_, who attacked him for making
a movie about a country he has never visited, by saying that
he knows a lot more about the United States than Warner
Brothers knew about Casablanca. He proves that he also knows
a lot more than Clint Eastwood does about his own country,
though he insists, with justice I think, that he isn't
really talking only about America, but about all people.
Indeed, in the final frames the dog that has previously been
a two dimensional image is transformed into a three
dimensional animal looking directly at the camera, as if to
say, 'All this has a reality of its own kind for you', an
address that would equally apply to any spectator of any
nationality who saw the film. Does anyone think, with me,
that 'Dogville' is an interestingly resonant pun on Dogme,
the name of the filmic movement hell-bent on purity of
presentation that von Trier pioneered in Denmark? Retrospective narrative
about the 20th century is given impressive heft and duration
in Marco Tullio Giordana's six hour saga of the Carati
family from 1966 to 2003, _The Best of Youth_. Originally
intended as a television serial, it was released in Italy
for theatrical distribution, though the press notes are
silent about the logistics of the commercial release of this
extremely long movie. Its story juxtaposes the lives of the
two Carati boys, Nicola (Luigi Lo Cascio) and Matteo
(Alessio Boni), both of whom are idealistic, cultivated
young men. Otherwise they are as different as the proverbial
night and day. Nicola is dark and slight, good humored and
easy going; Matteo is fair, well built, and rigidly
determined to create order and control. How each brother
approaches the student uprisings of the 60s, the fight to
save the artworks in Florence from the floods of the that
era, Red Guard terrorism, and attempts to bring the Mafia
under control in Sicily, structures the frankly melodramatic
events of _The Best of Youth_. As is typical of melodrama,
the politics of the 20th century are filtered through the
personal lives of Nicola, Matteo, their families and
friends, suggesting that the perfectionism that makes
possible both art and fascism has a self-destructive
quality, while the contrasting life-loving impulses of the
Italian culture that foster humane values are what really
shape the country's future. The film is short on
intellectual acuity about cultural trends and counter
trends, recapitulating the cliches of the Mediterranean
versus the Nordic personality -- dark people are by far
happier than the tormented blondes that populate this family
history. But the film is very long on the satisfactions of
marvelously created characters with whom one may easily
empathize, and the beauty of the European landscape, from
Sicily to Norway. It is no doubt simplistic in its
philosophy, suggesting that Italy has ridden out and beyond
the upheavals of the past century toward a brighter future
that awaits the generation of Matteo and Nicola's children.
But, in showing how the post-war generation failed in its
immediate goal of refusing to accept the world as it is in
order to make it a bit better (but paved the way for a
better world for their children), the film is full of warmth
and an irresistible love of people. Finally, Johnnie To's
_PTU_ and Barbara Alpert's _Free Radicals_, in a
counterpoint to the dominant festival trend, point away from
memory to the fragmented present moment. _ PTU_ takes place
in Hong Kong, during one night in which the streets are
alive with various kinds of law enforcement officers, Triad
gangsters, and what may or may not be ordinary citizens. The
film contains the barest outlines of numerous overlapping
plots. Sergeant Lo Sa (Lam Suet) has allowed himself to be
baited by a young gangster, getting himself beaten because
he isn't thinking, and worse, losing his revolver. Sergeant
Mike Ho (Simon Yam), who is part of the elite Police
Tactical Unit (PTU), decides to help Lo, out of professional
comradery, by delaying the report of his missing weapon, an
infraction of the rules that would jeopardize his promotion.
At the same time a Triad gangster named Pony Tail has been
murdered and the CID has been put in charge of the
investigation. Much to Mike and Lo's chagrin, CID unit
leader Leigh Cheung (Ruby Wong), who keeps turning up in
their vicinity, is suspicious about their behavior, and they
have to keep her from learning that they are trying to find
Lo's gun before the last possible moment when the missing
revolver would have to be reported. But these pro-forma
narrative structures are not what interests To, who uses
them to adumbrate what really compels him: the details of
how the subcultures formed by the police and the Triads work
internally, as well as how they relate to each other. To's
21st Century world is a maze that people bonded by the rules
of their own tribes must negotiate in order to fulfill their
commitments. The film is full of absurdist images of
technology (cell phones, flash lights, and cars) which
confuse communication, and indeterminate images a young boy
on a bicycle, much too young to be out in the wee hours of
the morning, who breaks car windows setting off the car
alarms, seemingly as part of some larger scheme that is
never identified. Indeed, the cosmic order that moves
inexorably while human beings are focusing on the minutiae
of their own machinations is the point of the film. In the
end, people die but no one's efforts pay off; what
resolution occurs is reached completely by chance, or is it
destiny, another of To's preoccupations. To's minimalist
images are stunningly beautiful, his humor fresh and
original, and his suggestion of the city as a stockade
within an enigmatic universe is provocative. Barbara Albert's _Free
Radicals_, loosely predicated on chaos theory, also
envisions the human race stranded within a befuddling
cosmos, boldly tracing the discontinuities in the lives of a
number of lower middle class Austrians in a small town. The
theme of the film is sounded immediately with the seemingly
meaningless situation of Manu (Kathrin Resetarits), a young
woman who is the only person to survive a plane crash on her
way home from a Mexican vacation. Four years later, now
married and the mother of one child, she dies suddenly in a
car crash while returning home from a girl's night out at a
disco club. Clearly, in a courageous stroke, Albert trounces
the conventional expectations of the filmgoing public, who
have been trained by numerous fantasy films to now expect to
be illuminated about the meaning of fate and destiny
involved in a remarkable survival. But the expectation is
raised to disappoint it: there isn't any special fate at
work here; the seemingly 'chosen' survivor can be marked for
destruction in an equally unexpected moment. In _Free
Radicals_ neither religion nor psychologically based
therapies can mitigate the indeterminate intrusions of joy
and sorrow into human affairs. At the same time another
character, a math professor, is able to validate the fractal
principle: form does reiterate itself from the large
outlines of a pattern to its smaller pieces, all form
mirrors itself, and here again the easy, bite-sized comforts
of the meliorist film are not involved in this discovery.
Manu's accidents mirror each other in form, but not in ways
that she could have made use of to help her to guide herself
through life. This then is the
situation: how can people live in a world that has no
inherently humanized form? Albert ponders this question by
means of the random swerves of the unpredictable romances
and moments of good and bad fortune that punctuate this film
-- for Manu's promiscuous best friend; her bereaved husband;
a punky, belligerent teenage girl and a conventional, very
popular teenage boy; a young woman of mixed racial heritage;
and a lonely, heavy-set woman longing for love -- which,
like long fused roman candles ignited by some unseen hand
and then forgotten, explode when least expected. Albert
reaches no definite conclusions, but, throughout, both the
selfish and generous impulses of the plethora of characters,
all seeking intimacy as a kind of anchor in the flux and
change of events, are blessed by the director's charity and
compassion, and an occasional moment of peace. New York Film Festival
2003 featured an abundance of richly original and/or
courageous films; even its worst selections were made
meaningful by the interplay among them. There was a positive
attitude toward past and future, and the impulse toward some
kind of healing of the scars of history seemed to
characterize the retrospective subjects of many of the
films. Our sufficiency to negotiate the discontinuities of
the present were also center stage, even if in fewer
offerings. Contradictions abound in the festival films, but
ultimately the world's filmmakers give evidence of faith
despite the sometimes unfathomable horror of the forces
strafing the darkling plains on which the human community
toils. Mercy College, New York,
USA Copyright ©
Film-Philosophy 2003 Martha P. Nochimson, 'New
York Film Festival 2003', _Film-Philosophy_, vol. 7 no. 43,
November 2003
<http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol7-2003/n43nochimson>. Join the _Film-Philosophy_
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