8 1/2 (1963)

Dir. Frederico Fellini
Writ. Federico Fellini, Ennio Flaiano (story); Ennio Flaiano , Tullio Pinelli, Federico Fellini, Brunello Rondi
w/ Marcello Mastroianni, Sandra Milo, Claudia Cardinale, Anouk Aimée

Besieged by an undiagnosed but cloying malady, reclusive director Guido Anselmi searches for his film as obstacles emerge in every form imaginable. Frederico Fellini's afterimage labors under heavy dreams, sifts through an ocean of actresses, and collides with his inevitable frailty while meandering, trance-like, through his production. All the while, as clips of conversations make up the frenetic background through which he tunnels, he exists in an alternate dimension which demands more and more from him as he traverses toward a resolution of the personal, revealing, and bizarre. Favoring the journey for the ultimate sake of destination, Fellini often submerges his director in collective, diasporic memories, some that hold stigma, and some that soothe.

Anything going on outside of Guido's mind becomes passé the moment it occurs in his rut. The actresses gather to catch his attention, but few do. Direct conversation means as much as crystal tinkling at a cocktail party, and he avoids it with disinterest, even to the point of talking to a hapless man just to get away. Due to a subtle capturing, a mastery on Fellini's part, it's often hard to distinguish between the reality of the people in Guido's world and the appearance of them in his mind. Often, things don't connect, and characters barrage, picking at the senses until he retreats back into another dimension. Even meetings crucial to the film's progress, such as meeting with the Bishop concerning representing Italy with the rectitude of his film's themes, don't prevail upon him to leave off his musings.

His inner life preoccupies and drives him to distraction, enchants and torments him with its vivid imagery and guilt-laden layers that blight the more salient moments of his childhood. An early introduction to Saraghina, a garish woman who lives in a sea shanty, conveys his first curiosity in the vigorous female form. As the social and moral outcast dances the rhumba for a coin, the boys cheer, but Guido responds in earnest to the prostitute's visceral daring. The Church then chases him down, finds his disgraced mother, and shames him for lewdness.

Fellini doesn't work it to death. His understanding of Guido as halcyon as moonlit tidepools, the director allows him the freedom earned by a lifetime of inner turmoil to do as he pleases, and he phones his lover. When Carla seems to have missed the train, he shrugs with apparent indifference; but the camera with relief, so that her sudden appearance as the train departs declares a man torn between two unknowns. Although her presence helps him get at least one good night's rest, his mental detachment increases with her dense witticisms even as his body responds with a will of its own. His wife Luisa arriving only a little later, though, seems to bring him angst, shoving his thoughts to the outer realms where no one can reach him.

The essential play that Fellini prepares effuses a desire for the world to be lovely and reasonable, as evidenced by Guido's delight that his wife and mistress, once having spotted each other, take to each other with comraderie and style and genuine affability. But do they really treat each other right, or by way of magic has the camera tricked into reality a whim of the director? Like I said, it's hard to say sometimes. In his secret heart, Guido clings to and cherishes his wife, seeing her simplicity and her strength, the quiet calm at the far end of his restless fantasies. Aware of his seeming emotional destitution, he finds solace in that place.

Yet Guido's film plays out as a trite send-up to that emotional destitution, and during a viewing of the actresses' screen tests, Luisa watches the sad parodies of herself and Carla mutilate lines over and over. None of them can ever bring the same simpering gibberish or that certain je ne sais quoi. The screenings project relentlessly, and the only abatement is the arrival of Claudia Cardinale as a facet of herself, his last hope and savior. When she, too, undermines his fantasy notion of her, Guido faces the novelty of a lifetime of imperfection reflected all around him. Things grow dark, perturbing, and gauntly out of reach, the images fragmenting as Fellini hoodwinks his audience one last time, because he can.

Fellini claimed that his seventh film was only half a film, giving this title its only real significance; the picture, on the other hand, is worth far more than a thousand words. It defines and redefines filmmaking, unabashed by real-life problems, and starkly honest at its depths, so much so that it led the Time magazine reviewer in June, 1963 to write, "Fellini has a singular personal problem: why is he so preoccupied with making movies that speak of the emptiness of life?" But had the writer the opportunity to watch this several times and reflect, he very well may have sung an altogether different tune; one of surprises, inspiration, and joy.

Closely Watched Trains (1966)

Dir. Jirí Menzel
Writ. Bohumil Hrabal (also novel), Jirí Menzel
w/ Václav Neckár, Josef Somr

Stepping into the niche his ancestors have carved for him, Milos begins his apprenticeship as a dispatcher at the local train depot in Nazi-controlled Czechoslovokia. His girl, a train conductor, loves him, and all he has to do is "stand on the platform with a signal disc and avoid any hard work, while others have to drudge and toil." Life is good. But when it's time to make love, Milos suffers anxiety, a misunderstanding of his manhood that leads him first to a suicide attempt and then to a more alluring solution, an older woman.

Milos's quiet acknowledgment of the goings-on around him make for thoughtful viewing. Like a well-made cup of tea, Closely Watched Trains progresses, gently provocative and brimming with delightful moments; insightful, humorous, and brazen. An inspector arrives at the station to show the stomping power of the Reich, reminding the workers that they all have to like each other in order to win, and departing in a car on the tracks, running in reverse.

Later, when Milos's philandering co-worker gets nabbed for tatooing a young girl with official rubber stamps, the Inspector returns to declare the dispatcher's guilt of abusing the German national language as engraved on one of the stamps and displayed on the girl's right buttock. It's wonderful irreverence, the sort of material to be expected from a man some have called the Woody Allen of Czechoslovokian cinema, for both physical and humorous resemblances.

Since 1966, of course, the country has split into the Czech Republic and Slovokia, and a similar hint of division surfaces within the forty-year-old film. The town, station, far away cities and countries exist as separate entities, mere matters of geography. The imposition of the Reich holds little sway over Menzel's individual countrymen. Distance and culture clash raise too high a barrier to make much of an impression beyond the idea that the Germans are pigs who don't know how to treat cattle, let alone people. The soldiers that pass through on foot get afforded the same courtesies as the closely watched trains that arrive almost without origination on one side of the tracks and depart to the unknown on the other.

Menzel's style, influenced by the Nouvelle Vague, retains its integrity by not indulging in the experimental or overdoing technique. True to form, the images flow with the logic of a mountain stream, but with an undercurrent of dark humor contextualized by an unending sensitivity to humanity's weaknesses and shortcomings as well as its surprising strengths. Each take supports the previous and jumps into the next, securing the masterpiece as a lasting monument to its director and its country.

A bold and kind treatment of the enduring reality of the human spirit, it won the Grand Prix at the Mannheim Film Festival and The Best Foreign Language Film Award at the 1967 Academy Awards.

Bande à Parte (1964)

Dir. Jean-Luc Godard
Writ. Jean-Luc Godard, based loosely on Dorothy Hitchins's novel
w/ Anna Karina, Claude Brasseur, and Sami Frey

With little going on in Odile's life besides an English class, she quickly, unwittingly ensnares herself in a heist of money from her aunt and guardian's safe. Coquettish looks and misunderstood conversation between a misfit girl and two young men dabbling with the idea of being gangsters at first results in lackadaisical hanging out, but soon turns mean-spirited.

The story, one of bored youth without direction or guidance, is nothing new. A few notable implementations, though, veer this away from a typical '60s romp à la Annette Funicello. Black and white film, for one. It shimmers with high-key lighting, open skies, and white walls; and, while it may not have a lot of honorable intention or content, resistance to smiling at parts can prove futile. Each scene has urgency, due mainly to the "live reporting" camera techniques.

Godard gives the actors little pith with which to mold their characters, an aspect that would've felt asphyxiating to many actors of that time and of today. Karina, for the most part, contours her features into a pitiable frown meant, presumably, to convey a smorgasbord of emotions ranging from confusion to dislike. She frowns a lot. The scenes where the trio enjoy each other's company -- when they dance the Madison or attempt a minute of silence -- feel the most natural, the most credible.

Could this be too much digging into a film constructed to look fresh and cool, and timbred with Michel Legrand's light-hearted Parisian score? Possibly. Godard piecemealed the script together, day by day, using what sets he could and, more often than not, existing lighting. He didn't overly concern himself with characterization, plot, or story development. What his efforts lack in depth and substance doesn't get made up for with realistic cinematography and fresh, rebellious approach.

Hackneyed writing, stringed fragments of pop culture references, may project cool and crisp, but attention to craft serves the cast, crew, and audience much better, providing the respect and structure needed for actors to apply their medium. To wit, although Anna Karina is an undeniable beauty, placing her in front of the camera and rolling does not a feature film make. She does her best, but often resorts to eye-candy posturing.

The most praisable aspect of Godard's work may be that it never purports to be something that it is not. For a couple of other reasons besides this, Bande à Parte didn't get relegated to the arena of kitsch. Since Godard's style changed dramatically from film to film, his pulpy followings never congealed to the thickness of a John Waters or an Ed Wood fan base. He also creates a whimsical atmosphere that remains consistent throughout, the mark of a good director, if not a great writer. Perhaps the best moment arrives when Karina sings on the subway, a sad song that reflects her state of mind more than it supports the story.

An irony exists that helps to bridge the comprehension gap between contemporary French filmmaking and the old New Wave. Jean-Pierre Jeunet's Amelie, despised by many a self-titled film buff who will readily claim any of Godard's pieces as an automatic better film, nods to him while also upstaging the New Wave giant. On the whole, Jeunet creates a more interesting, character-supported, and sweetly rendered peek at French filmmaking. Why? Attention to detail, involvement of the audience in the experience, ideals posessing no substitutes.

What Godard has put down for posterity often looks good, but fails to deliver in any tangible way. The sites of Paris, the offhand innocence of a young girl, and the excitement of being in a "band of outsiders" holds universal appeal to youthful decadence, an audience that bemoans the perception of the grass always being greener on the other side of the pond. In reality, though, Bande à Parte does little else to conjure the imagination or inspire.

It ends, as it began, at nowhere, but at least the journey held some little magic as it went along. Perhaps that, more than an overt reaction to the mainstream filmmaking of the time, held the greatest importance to the writer. I liked the middle parts most.

Yes (2005)

Dir. Sally Potter
Writ. Walter Donohue, Sally Potter
w/ Joan Allen, Simon Abkarian, Sam Neill, Shirley Henderson

Before the young lovers set eyes on each other, the houses of Montague and Capulet had sealed Romeo and Juliet's fate. That sixteenth century prism of an unobtainable co-existence of peace and love sets the proscenium for Sally Potter's (Orlando) heady exposure of modern conflict as laid between two souls, Yes.

A middle-Eastern man takes daily affronts to his pride in a London kitchen. A scientist from Belfast vis-a-vis America, long fallen out of pleasure with an absent husband, explores the capacity of living cells to discern their destinies. They meet, partaking of a private intimacy just beyond the noses of the surrounding public, and all the tumblers unlock. Amid an interracial argument about to come to blows, the cook loses his job and he breaks off the romance and retreats to Beirut where he reclaims his original profession as a surgeon. Meanwhile, her marriage untenable, the woman who raised her dying, the scientist reaches out to him, unwilling to part ways despite the grief and despair.

The choices Potter's subjects make both visible and audible, she reveals these hidden lives with a piquantly honest social acumen, contrasting them through a variety of means. Whether or not to voice fears, who to confide in, and when to keep secrets secret comprise Yes's core. As the determined heroine, Joan Allen waxes and wanes with more juice than usual. Parisian theatre production company owner and co-star Simon Akbarian presents a persuasive stage charisma with a loyalty to the verse that unfolds the tale. Although his approach translates to film as threadbare at turns, he plays off Allen's feminine sense of creature character with such skill that the decision's overlookable, more so than the stilted lines of the supporting cast, especially the kitchen crew. His mysteriousness and instinctual timing produce an exotic masculinity that emaciates only marginally when confronted with his insecurities.

In keeping with the erotically charged atmosphere, Potter also scribbled in the housekeeper, whose musings both tantalize and give pause for reflection. "Dirt never really goes away," she says, "It just gets pushed around." Like all living cells with a destination, she minimizes her role in the play, making herself very small yet resourceful. Fishing a condom from a toilet and carrying away stained sheets, her observations bring marked heat to an existence rife with infidelities for all the right reasons, not to mention the strains on a man who would like to be rid of the third wheel as much as he would his third-world image. Two people can't hold each other responsible for all the wrongs of the world, but love does tend to leave its targets vulnerable to all.

Raw and vital, Yes shares the soil of human thought in textured transitions that vary from nickelodeon epiphanies to deep sea swells, just like the gamet of human emotion. Totally aware of the horrors constantly impeding the planet, Potter reaffirms the diminishing line between objectivity and individual perspective. Since human understanding will always be subject to interpretation, objectivity can never be isolated and defined. All anyone can ever do is try, whether she be a scientist devoted to quantification or a man obsessed with his identity.

Unlike the bard's ill-fated lovers, the scientist and the cook-cum-doctor choose to live in this uneasy world, not without fear. The tides have shifted since the days of Capulet and Montague. Their ultimate separation gains no peace, bridges no cultural gaps. Their destiny lies bound together, as intertwined as the futures of all nations; such is Potter's vision for peace, one of the most recommendable in years.

Parting may still be such sweet sorrow in the twenty-first century, but it can't be nearly as sweet as togetherness. Yes individually conquers the notion that everything must have a price, exhorting its audience to believe that, for once, this isn't just another movie, or even the stuff that dreams are made of, but that peace can be as free and clear as love.

Saraband (2005)

Dir. Ingmar Bergman
Writ. Ingmar Bergman
w/ Liv Ullman, Erland Josephson, Börje Ahlstedt, Julia Dufvenius

When Lawrence Kasdan sat to edit the funeral ensemble The Big Chill, he became increasingly aware that the film's impact would be breached if he kept the deceased's living flashbacks in the cut. Upon completion, all shots of Kevin Costner had been removed, leaving only the telltale hairline that more attentive devoteés would recognize in later years. It also hauntingly retained a sense of the unknown, the unforeseeable, and muted and simultaneously strengthened the piece's ghosted legacy.

Bergman attributes the idea to Alf Sjöberg, Sweden's greatest filmmaker until his own career unfolded after writing Hets (Torment/Frenzy) for him. "What is half-hidden," Sjöberg told his young protégé, "is far more suggestive, more seductive, more exciting than what is fully visible." The theory rules the prevailing body of Bergman's work; but, in Saraband, he brandishes it with a tangible relish, relating each character's life to the death of one woman in the past.

Considering the story material, the decision to abandon the rule governing actors eyeing the camera creates a unique relationship between the audience and seasoned veteran Liv Ullman as divorce lawyer Marianne. She confides to the viewer her skepticism comingled with her desire to visit her former husband, even as she's approaching the final steps to his sun-basking side after decades of separation. What follows is the great echo of youth in a grouchy maturity, as the two rediscover each other. In their halcyon reunion scene, Marianne brings up his cranky days at university, which Johan dismisses, admitting that he'd been "gummed up in the standard academic nonsense," but that everything had changed when he received his honorary doctorate from the University of Michigan. Later, she tells him that he's like some "forgotten character in a stupid, old film."

Both jests display Bergman's deft humor at work.

Bereft of the daughters she had with Johan -- one lives in Australia, the other vegetates in a home -- Marianne opens maternally to the last generation, the young cellist, Karin. The fast bond with Johan's motherless granddaughter from his first marriage proves life-changing as, two years prior, the girl's mother died and left an inconsolable and vulnerable widower alone with her. Fogged and disadvantaged, Karin has found herself in a sexual imbroglio with her father. Marianne's simple ear provides the necessary candlepower for the girl to make a cathartic move that offsets the lives of her father and grandfather. Thus the two men have lost the common thread -- the girl's mother -- and in so doing, the stage has been set for what storytellers the world over refer to as "the thing."

Using vignetted narrative, woven together as classical movements, Bergman carefully develops this portrait of some of the most brittle family relations ever to get caught on film. Grudges and death have demanded more tensile strength of these characters than any of them had to give, but for one who died. In the Swede's native tongue, he gave this her name, that of his mother: Anna.

What the world has been given, at the end, is hope. Realism provides the backdrop for Bergman's final adieu to the silver screen, but hope drives it home. Whether you remember this as a parting gift to generations of admirers and enthusiasts or as a simple love sonnet to a wife one filmmaker fears he may never see again, you may rest satisfied that you are in the hands of a very wise man who has lived a full life and knows what it is to love.

Inside Man (2006)

Dir. Spike Lee
Writ. Russell Gewirtz
w/ Denzel Washington, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Jodie Foster, Clive Owen, Christopher Plummer, and Willem Dafoe

Whomever had the job of showing Denzel Washington the script for the first time must've left the actor's side, ears ringing with voluptuously bell-like peals of laughter. Gewirtz's story gives us Frazier, a detective under investigation for a missing sum, enough to buy a Staten Island condo. He then lands the negotiation of a hostage crisis in the middle of the Manhattan financial district, a chance to prove worthy of command that he and his eager partner both jump at with zeal; however, the robber has already told us in all confidence at the beginning of the film that he has planned the most brilliant, perfect robbery, leaving little doubt in the audience's mind that all will go according to plan. Ah, and therein lies the rub. We like Frazier within seconds and want to see him win the day, but Gewirtz has also cleverly circumvented the pitfall of the genre by taking away every question but the "how?" In short, Washington got handed all the elements of a perfect role, where the outcome becomes a minor point at the very start, and the journey to it excites all the more, because it's the only thing that matters.

Politically charged yet witty, the filmworld's angriest auteur may actually have been prescribed this script by his therapist. What it renders for posterity in terms of interracial content it also winks at with the humor necessary for anyone wishing to remain a long-term citizen of America's most stressed-out boilerpot of a city. No stranger these days to suave machismo, Washington steps into this sweet spot of a role designed to supply an African-American actor the same ethos as a Serpico or a Michael Corleone, a Columbo or a Sam Spade -- only black and beautiful. And Washington executes Frazier with gusto, aware of the detective's limitations, but spot-on with the attitude and persona peculiar to a man trying to make pay-grade in a city police force that's suffered in the public eye. He even infuses a mild accent into the role to make things more fun. It might make you want to shout, "Hey, Washington, your Brooklyn's showing, Baby!" in the middle of the theatre.

Lee suitably makes no show of humility when presenting the Big Apple. Loud music, an Indian melody overlaying an invincible rap beat, takes us into the heart of the action and sets the tone fairly aptly. Russell Gerwitz's tight script blends the New York vernacular of "Giuliani Time" with a sense of poor showmanship that must be overcome. The synthesis makes for a heist movie that leaves the audience with a slightly new take on the genre; Matthew Libatique's now-expert photography takes up any slack that may have been leftover. With a license to return to basic student film techniques, he uses effective jump cuts and 360 degree panning, not to mention a great instinct for knowing when to shoot from outside of a room rather than inside. Armed these days with a higher budget and the eternal confidence of carte blanche on a Spike Lee joint, Pi and Requiem for a Dream credits tucked long under his belt, his style works beautifully, and in waves that separate each act distinctly yet elegantly.

One of the more impressive feats of the film, Clive Owen's turn as the mastermind, overcomes the basic challenge of characterization without much interaction through subtle writing and innovations in presenting a robbery. This script offers unusuality in such a way that the actor's work deals mostly in being completely full of himself, as at the opening when Owen stares down the camera to deliver a monologue brimming with detached triumph and worthy of Olivier.

Artistic elements aside for a moment, though, Lee possesses an incredible knack for timeliness. Although the characters portrayed in Inside Man are fictional, they are based on real-life figures. We've seen these people before. They're Madison Avenue Ivy Leaguers who live in the same city with beat cops without ever mixing -- the shaken and changed who walk the streets below the penthouses of the indifferent and uninterested. They're the citizens of a city without a common identity but which struggles to find one in the post-9/11 world.

Although this film remains Washington's chance to swagger and shine, Lee doesn't take the New York out of the New York. Tensions and paradoxes shade Inside Man with nuance and talking points, as if the director were lifting up a bit of the grid, placing it into our palms, and asking, if we were to live here, what the hell would we do? It's a damned good question, Lee. In a world where bank heists of perfect proportions will always be a work of fiction, it's good to be reminded of what's real.

Waking Life (2001)

Dir. Richard Linklater
Writ. Richard Linklater
w/ Wiley Wiggins, Caveh Zahedi, Julie Delpy, Ethan Hawke, Steven Soderbergh, et al.


In a moment of pure self-actualization around the turn of the millenium, Waking Life entered the troposphere of social consciousness as naturally as though it had been hovering there always, with the implicit promise to stay just as long. Linklater brings us to a place, never more than a thought away from a young man full of questions, each answer bringing him a little more towards consciousness without guaranteeing him absolute reality. He begins with two children playing a fortune game. You remember the carefully folded paper with colors and numbers and, in the innermost folds, your secreted life's story? For this particular boy, "dream is destiny," and -- how true; for, of course, that boy is but a fragment of a larger dream that the main character, the questioner, finds himself waking up in, layer after layer, as his increased appreciation allows him to navigate his dreams more and more freely.

Recurring dream characters ebb and flow throughout the dreamscape, but the thread of questioning remains his constant divining tool, that hint of awareness that breathes of its own accord. One moment, our dreamer may be delving into postmodernism and, the next, into "the new evolution." Using simple voice-over, a classical ensemble, and a visual style that defies categorization (but how about "beautiful") Linklater accomplishes in a short time what many filmmakers can not in several expensive hours of reel: sort of stream-of-consciousness meets "what I wanted to talk about with my friends all my life, but..." By leaving characterization to the elements of argument and reason, the work becomes audience experience, allowing a rare peek into the writing process without muddying the cerebral quality of this fine work.

Yet, of all of Linklater's films, this one endures the most criticism. Ardent fans of other pieces supply the words "pretentious" and "glib" when avoiding eye contact and serious discussion. And while Dazed and Confused catchphrases have become household words, this little prize gets scuffed around and ignored. Could it be that audience resistance to the experience offered here waxes oxymoronic, that not allowing this artform to wrap and lull and awaken you somehow commits the highest pretentiousness of all? In a society obsessed with empty, mind-numbing entertainment, is it possible that we've forgotten that art's primary objective is to imitate life? Truth be told, this filmmaker takes it a step further.

Art interacts with life.

Oh, it's not the life of schedules where characters know the mundane details of each other's lives, like where they work or what kind of car they drive: none of that holds any import. But the body language of the characters conjures up such a sense of the spiritual, an inescapable and indefinable reality that gets portrayed best perhaps in a superb scene of a movie house showing the film Holy Moment. Caveh Zahedi shows that every moment in life, like in a movie, can be holy by staying open and committing to the moment, beginning with just two people. But then, of course, life kind of stops, gets put on pause. You stop talking. You feel. Like the experience of committing yourself to a theatre for a couple of hours or so, that's always time you'll never get back.

Which is why, when Linklater fills this with the aggregate of his experiential thought, what we get doesn't merely justify our participation in Waking Life; it challenges our approach to everything. Every minute detail that you thought was so important the last time you opened your mouth dimishes and your senses are lent to focus and imagination, which is precisely the difference between art, which is meant to supplement and to teach, and static, which is just more resistance. As Speed Levitch tells us, "We are the author of ourselves, co-authoring a gigantic Dostoevsky novel starring clowns." Life happens and sometimes, it is very, very funny. But it never really stops. A layer of perception always awaits us, right around the bend.