Volver (2006)

Going to see a Pedro Almodóvar film is a lot like taking a ride on a metal roller-coaster. Unlike the primitive wooden ones, you can relax knowing that you're not going to get jerked around a lot while watching the rush of pretty colors and participating in the squeals of delight. Right from the get-go, the characters are in the middle of their lives and you get to watch them sizzle and spark and diffuse the screen with everyday moments that could easily have been you only an hour ago. One of the best treats of the Spanish director's peculiar gift -- specifically, his restraint in ladling out huge dollops of back story to queue us up to the present -- places the story in the heart, asking only for your rapt attention. He does this so well that I imagine the only better way to watch one of his films would be as a native speaker of the language.

Familiarty with Spanish customs seems an almost negligible dimension, though, so it sounds just as plausible that, other than the slight inconvenience of non-speakers having to read subtitles, his films are seamless and character-based enough that the audience loses very little by virtue of that. And that, to me, is what really makes Almodóvar stand out among his peers and predecsessors. Not many non-English speaking directors -- nor, even non-Hollywood, for that matter -- can claim the kind of fanatic love and loyalty while also reaping the benefits of a very wide audience. Indie directors would be accused of mainstreamism and many foreign film directors would be accused of a cultural watering-down of their vision.

But Almodóvar is Almodóvar, world without end, Amen. Or so it seems...

Anybody disagree or have an insight? I'd like to do something different this time, and open this up to discussion before proceeding with the usual straight-forward review.

Bresson & Akerman, briefly...

The first hopefully useful note is that if you find yourself shopping a lot at Criterion and eating more Ramen noodles and saltines, etc., as a result of that, you may want to consider seeing what you can grab at DVD Planet where, for example, I just picked up a copy of Robert Bresson's Mouchette for $28.87 (including shipping) as opposed to the 10-20% savings plus tax on the $39.99 I would have paid at Barnes & Noble... I don't like to talk about money, but there it is.

Also, I found a great article over at Rouge on Akerman. You may read it here.

Audience/Screen Relationship ...is life.

So there's been some talk about the role of the viewer in the filmic experience -- not just the actual watching of the film itself (i.e., just showing up), but the bio-rhythms that each individual brings to the screen, the state of mind accompanying and interplaying with and against those bio-rhythms and the importance of these factors in the filmmaking process in general. Mostly, this sort of discussion has been just hinted at and kicked around, and a couple of oscillating examples can be found over at Tucker Teague's (a.k.a cineboy) and at an early blogathan post by Marina.

I feel like writing something on all of this, but haven't made any concrete decision yet what exactly that will be. I will have something soonish...

Temps en Je, tu, il ...elle (par Chantal Akerman)

The following entry is for the Unspoken Cinema Blogathon..

Enjoy, folks...

If you've never had the chance to experience an Akerman film, especially this one, then you have missed out on a rare chance to glimpse both a fine madness and a stark honesty about the human experience at once. Without spoiling it for anybody, the film exists in three parts defined by locale and the relationship of the character (who feels often more a subject than a person) with the viewer, the setting and the other two characters in the film -- from whom, remarkably, we derive less of the subtext than we do from the filmmaker herself in the lead role. In the first part, she exists in a room that she empties of its furniture to make larger, writing and writing a letter so rambling and long that it is to the world of love letters what Berlin Alexanderplatz is to the world of fictive film. Living on powdered sugar and clothes that are more often off her than on, we witness her unobstructed expression of the deprivation and self-isolation that love can manifest in us.

Akerman's great pains to occlude our sense of time during this first third acts as one of the great boons of contemplative cinema. In a way, it is more real than "real time" because when faced with any kind of suffering or challenge, we so often seek refuge in some amount of disorientation. At times, she narrates her own actions in the room before she has enacted them; sometimes, after. Either way, the suggestion adds a great layer to this film of feminist deconstruction, this cinematic act of contemplation. By asking us to watch and listen out of sync, the film achieves its intended effect as a piece of contemplative cinema -- or, what the natives are calling CC these days -- because, less important, her actions retain their sense of survival and grubby familiarity without overshadowing the suspension of disbelief.

Within that suspension of disbelief, the filmmaker works her magic. Her state of mind and emotions are not obvious or even alluded to; her purpose (whether for being in the room or on this earth at all) is not mentioned. What Akerman does is invite her audience to participate in the extraordinary everyday-ness of lying in a room and writing a letter. At one point, she even spreads each of the pages around as though they were index cards, using sticky putty to place them firmly on the floor in an order of rows and columns. What a commentary on human activity, on the fluid ordering of our worlds in the attempt to exert control and finiteness to life. When she finally leaves the room to venture into the second act, she hitches a ride with a trucker and makes herself a sounding board for his life's story. She doesn't speak herself. We have heard her voice only through the first-person narration of the first act, and Akerman keeps it that way.

Not until the third act, in which she arrives at the doorstep of the woman to whom she has written the letter, do we see the connection of sound to character. Many reasons pepper this procrastination, all of which could be pondered to death, but I'd like to consider -- above all else at this juncture -- the role of time. Where time was an obstacle to be subdued and imbued with persepective in the first act, it has become an obsolescence of minor detail in the second. No rush characterizes the middle act, her journey to reach her lover and glean her reaction. He talks, she listens and smiles. They stop to eat, and she eats. The journey will take as long as it takes because that is how time works, the filmmaker appears to be saying, but the contemplation has all but receded into a minority of its own. The truck driver contemplates his own life in his own words, rather differently from her.

And it is here that I can't help but observe some irony in that what is meant to serve as an aural and visual relief -- some narrative enters as they travel and reorients the viewer, and some comedy arises from this new character's monologue -- actually signals the ebbing of the contemplative life that Akerman sketched for us with such great care in the first act. His life and personality are different, true; but beyond those definitions, this truck driver lives in the now. He does not suffer, and yet the viewer feels a loss of the intimacy and true-ness his passenger provided before they met. Perhaps one of the more humorous and telling aspects of Je, tu, il ...elle, though, arrives in the third act with specific regard to time. Our character spends all this time arriving at her destination only to have to leave it again so soon. It speaks of the brevity of all such action and motivation, of the unimportance of all time -- except where it is spent in exploration of truth.