Cinemanila 2006

Noel Vera

Once again, ladies and folks, the single most important event to hit
Metro Manila this year…

Michel Gondry's "La Science des rêves" (The Science of Sleep, 2006)
is a slight love story with a lovely texture--animated cardboard
cityscapes, cellophane seas, cotton-ball clouds. We often enter the
mind of the protagonist, Stephane (Gael Garcia Bernal) and it's a TV
studio with a cardboard box of a camera, owing not a little debt
to "Peewee's Playhouse" (don't laugh; I liked that show, and I don't
care that Paul Reubens got arrested for indecent exposure). Much of
the charm of the film--and much of its grating edge--comes from the
interaction between Stephane and Stephanie (Charlotte Gainsbourg),
the way Stephane keeps throwing childish tantrums and whirring away
into one flight of fancy / paranoid fantasy after another and
Stephanie has to wait for him to come down. Bernal's performance is
key, I think; if he played Stephane as a man helplessly locked in
his immaturity wanting to be loved, the picture would collapse in a
sticky mess; as is there's an amoral quality to his neediness as
there is in most children, so there's real suspense in the
possibility that Stephanie will throw up her hands and give up on
him altogether.

Michel Gondry has learned a thing or two from directing Charlie
Kaufman's scripts (his work on Kaufman's "Eternal Sunshine of the
Spotless Mind" is perhaps my favorite of any adaptation of Kaufman's
scripts). Learned too much, perhaps; will he devote the rest of his
career as Kaufman apparently does to emotionally stunted men falling
in love with mysteriously beautiful women? I hope not. But this is a
nice addition to his portfolio.

Allen Coulter's "Hollywoodland" (2006)is good, but good as a
collection of performances than an actual thriller, and far better
as the story of George Reeves (who played Superman on the long-
running television series) than a noir film. Adrien Brody as the
gumshoe detective investigating Reeves' death is a terrific actor,
but when someone compares him to Ralph Meeker, I wanted to laugh
(probably meant to be ironic--but I still wanted to laugh); the rest
of his co-stars don't really make much of an impression (although
Diane Lane makes for a devastatingly sexy elder matron).

It's when the movie goes into flashbacks that it really comes to
life, and it's amazing that Ben Affleck, of all people, comes
through best here. He probably doesn't capture the real Reeves (I
haven't seen all that many episodes of the show, just enough to get
a faint impression) so much as he creates a Reeves we can all
identify with--ambitious, not a bit unscrupulous, charming
nevertheless, and overall--and this is the tragedy of his life--
haunted by the knowledge that he's not really as good as he makes
himself out to be.

The picture isn't crazy--it doesn't have the exuberant sense of
style or spirit of experimentation of De Palma's "The Black Dahlia"
(2006) (I'm in the minority on this, I know)--but thanks to Affleck
(I still can't get over it) it does tell the story of one man's not-
quite-meteoric trajectory well. This is easily the best, most moving
Superman film I've ever seen--well, maybe not; I still tend to favor
Richard Lester's funny, sexually sophisticated "Superman 2" (1980).
This comes a close second, I'd say, while Affleck, after the late
Christopher Reeves, is easily the best Superman I've ever seen.

Kim Ki Duk's reputation has fallen precipitously, thanks to the
pretentiousness and misogyny perceived in his works; perhaps his
detractors have a point, but I'd take him and his penchant for
wordless sequences, memorable imagery, and simple yet inventive
plots to schlock-shock filmmakers like Park Chan-wook ("Oldboy,"
2003). "Bom yeoreum gaeul gyeoul geurigo bom " (Spring, Summer,
Fall, Winter…and Spring, 2003) has a young apprentice growing up in
a floating Buddhist temple (a consistent element in Kim's films--
aside from the tendency to keep mum--are the often striking
locations for his stories). A magic current takes a boat to and from
the temple, and the gate (a witty touch) stands on the lake-shore
(more or less; sometimes visitors are forced to wade a few feet past
the gate to climb aboard a waiting boat).

The boy grows up, learns (in for me the simplest and most affecting
vignette of the film) the moral cost of cruelty, discovers sex,
leaves the temple, comes back. The changing of the seasons are a
metaphor for the changes in a man's life, but while the idea seems
unpromisingly obvious on paper, the execution--in gorgeous color, in
the middle of an unrelenting stillness--is anything but dull. Films
that try to deal with Buddhism on its own terms are rare; most of
the time they seem silly (Bernardo Bertolucci's "Little Buddha") or
they use a bit of history to add spine and structure (Martin
Scorsese's "Kundun" (1997)). Myself, I'd count Bae Yong-
kyun's "Dharmaga tongjoguro kan kkadalgun" (Why Has Bodhi-Dharma
Left for the East? 1989--perhaps the finest example of this
extremely small genre), this film, and King Hu's "A Touch of Zen"
(1971--a stretch, I know, but what a stretch!).

That said, Robert Altman's "A Prairie Home Companion" (2006) proves
that you don't need to be Buddhist to acquire a sense of serenity
about death. What with a heart transplant and Paul Thomas Anderson
waiting in the wings during production to take charge (just in
case), Altman can't not have the subject on his mind, and I think
his feelings infuse the film.

Stylistically, Altman takes a page from the kind of confined theater
setting he used in "Come to the 5 and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean"
(1982) and runs with it--flowing long takes, subtle changes in
lighting, theatrical conceits (lights fading on and off, people seen
in and through mirrors, other people walking about invisible to
everyone else) that somehow seem of a piece with the mood and
texture of the film.

Of the changes--I've listened to Garrison Keillor's radio show, and
while I like it in its own context (my favorite being Tom Keith, the
show's awesome sound effects man, who gets to show off a little
onscreen), I think the film is triumphantly its own freestanding
self. Kevin Kline takes over from Keillor in playing Guy Noir--a
program regular--and his character has been revised considerably:
instead of a sane if bemused private eye adrift in a world of
eccentrics, Kline's Noir is eccentrically clumsy (and rather dim)
himself. More crucial is the toning down of the politics (decidedly
liberal in the radio program), except for what little you can find
in the film's premise (heartless corporation cancels down-home radio
show). I imagine Altman and Keillor felt that any overt political
satire would date the film outright, distract the audience from its
themes of passing and loss, and I for one am all right with that.

It isn't so much what Altman and Keillor are saying (that death is
inevitable, and as close as, oh, that mysteriously beautiful woman
standing next to you), as the way they say it, with a kind of heroic
bemusement all the more moving because it hints at rather than
pushes pathos. Keillor sums it all up when the youngest member of
the cast (Lindsay Lohan, who is excellent as Lola) demands that he
do a eulogy--to the show, to the dead man in the basement, to
anything. Keillor replies: "I'm of an age when if I started to do
eulogies, I'd be doing nothing else."

"You don't want to be remembered?" Lola asks.

"I don't want them to be told to remember me."

The rest is silence.

(First published in Businessworld 11/3/06)

(Comments? Email me at noelbotevera@...)