My original review of Son of Saul wasn’t that great. I, at the time, did not have necessary knowledge or experience to cover the film. Not in my overall appraisal of the film (I stand by choosing it as the best film of 2015), but in my inability to actually write a fully functioning reason as to why it felt like it did. It’s been about a year, a year where I’ve learned a lot, graduated from high school and tried to develop my writing style and that lead me back to viewing the film again. The feelings I felt were as clear as when I first saw the film. Horrifying, suspenseful, unrelenting. I tried to put my finger on why exactly though and then it came to me. The content of the film is horrifying (it gets worse the more you see the movie and the more you notice) but if a single component of the film was lacking I don’t think the film would be so engaging. A component that forces the audience to stare into the abyss that Son of Saul presents us with and be moved. Son of Saul is suspenseful in its depiction of a literal hell because makes that suspense physical, forcing the audience into a trapped sensibility that never lets go of them. Yet how, on film, do you make suspense physical? Suspense isn’t a literal concept that exists as something physical in the real world. It’s simply our feelings of fear and anxiety as we await something. Physicality can be assigned to such emotions but that requires an abstract line of thinking, which is simply something that Son of Saul lacks. Abstraction is not for such an unrelentingly realistic work. Son of Saul does, however, use the film form to create suspense and it does so through a tool that many people viewing the film might overlook: the aspect ratio. The first thing that one notices about Son of Saul, other than of course the subject matter, is that the frame isn’t wide. In fact, it is 4:3 and almost always close-up on the face of Saul, the sonderkommando at the center of the film. This aspect ratio has two effects. First, it gives the film a distinct style and focuses the audience’s attention toward that subject of the film. Second, it also creates all the suspense that the film will ever need. The frame compresses in on Saul, making the events on screen seem infinitely claustrophobic. The audience is forced to only observe the horrors from a thin lens, always tempted by the full extent, yet almost never fully witnessing it, much like Saul is experiencing the horrors by shutting them out. The tight ratio also always gives us the impression that Saul is being watched specifically, honing both our attention span and the attentions of the other characters to Saul. The mere suggestion by the aspect ratio of Saul being caught trying to hide a body or helping a small resistance, and the consequences of being so, leads to suspense. The ratio often keeps characters that are addressing Saul from appearing to the audience until they are specifically addressing him, keeping us on our toes of whether or not the next person will be someone harmful to Saul or a helper. You jump every time a new person appears on the screen. The claustrophobia of the frame can also be interpreted as representative of the claustrophobia of the camp and the crowds that are forced in and out of them. All this leads to a cocktail of paranoia and anxiety for the audience, as we watch Saul travel through hell on Earth. Without its 4:3 aspect ratio, Son of Saul would not be as good as it most certainly is, and the use of aspect ratio to create a physical suspense is something that I hope we see more directors using. Bibliography: 1. Son of Saul. By László Nemes. Perf. Géza Rohig. 2015. DVD. Take a look at this trailer to watch the 4:3 aspect ratio.
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Eileen Chang’s Lust, Caution is a taut story of suspense. The beginning of the story starts at a Mojang game, but as you know if you’ve read the novella, there’s much more going on than just that. The novella first establishes the game, describes the women, then contextualizes the setting of Japanese Occupied Shanghai and then allows the scene to play out as Mai Tai-Tai bickers with the entourage Yee Tai-Tai, the wife of an important military figure in the Japanese army, Mr. Yee. The conversation grows into something of a suspenseful ordeal as the women’s personal lives are laid out giving us more and more context, but also letting us know the thoughts of Mai Tai-Tai. The amount of information that is running through her mind, the intensity of her thought are represented through Chang’s writing. Her mind is not on the game, but on the little details that could eventually get her caught. As the previously inconspicuous, but still suspenseful start of the story spells itself out, suddenly, the line, “It was getting far too dangerous. If the job wasn’t done today, if the thing were to drag on any longer, Yee Tai Tai would surely find them out,” (Chang 11). The moment almost comes out of nowhere and the surprise adds suspense and context in both the sense that Mai Tai-Tai and Mr. Yee have become lovers and insinuating the reality that Mai Tai-Tai (whose name has also been mentioned as Chai-Chi) is, in fact, a spy, working with a group of insurgent students attempting to murder Mr. Yee. The novella spells out the moment easily using the rules of a novel. After setting up the context, it never focusses on the game and in doing so allows for the suspense of the wealth of detail that Mai Tai-Tai must keep in check, to keep the reader themselves on the edge of their seat.
How do you make that work on film though? Ang Lee’s adaptation of Chang’s work from 2007 is one of the best films ever made, but it begs the question as to how a director could capture the same suspense in the format of film. Lee can’t use the same techniques as Chang does, which brings us to what he can do. The film starts much like the novella, first contextualizing the time period as Japanese Occupied Shanghai. This establishes the setting, but it cannot establish the tone. As much as the men with guns tell us that this is a dangerous time, they can’t tell us what the story is about or the intimate emotions of our protagonist. Ang Lee, cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto, and editor Tim Squyres are all up to that task. The scene we are looking at (let’s refer to it as the mahjong scene) runs approximately 9 minutes long and keeps us in suspense for that entire period of time. The scene begins with a servant bringing in food to the four women playing mahjong. For the next nine minutes, almost the entire time will be focussed on all these women, supposedly friends, but really in the game enemies, masking their contempt for each other and the intensity of the gamble by making small talk. Most of it is very unassuming, but Lee directs the sequence like an action scene. After the servant puts down the tray of food, we smash cut hard into the table where all the women are reaching in and organizing the tiles. The event seems mundane enough, but the transference from the moment of stillness, as the food sits there, to this moment of disorienting movement takes us by surprise. Also by the Kuleshov Effect, it almost gives the woman a ferocity as when juxtaposed with the previous frame of the food sitting, the women’s hands, create the illusion in our minds of them furiously clawing at the food, as much as they are clawing toward the mahjong tiles. From moment one, Lee has thrown off his audience. We understand that there is a suspenseful element to the scene, and that, much like Mai Tai-Tai in the book, we will have to be on our toes the entire time watching for this energy. Lee does something in the scene that not many directors do in such a close quarters activity. He goes in for a close-up of the table that is almost constantly moving. Not only is this disorienting (it too follows a frame that has some stillness to it), but it also allows for the energy of the game to be captured. As the camera whips across such a small space it seems to be building energy that becomes destructive because, after this quick movie, Lee pays off the energy by allowing us to become comfortable with the fluidity of it for a few seconds and then cutting again, halfway across the table, disorienting us further. The conversation has started by now and the women are out for blood. Lee is too. He draws us into the scene through allowing us to become comfortable with the established rules of the editing and camera and then he breaks them, disorienting us and putting us more on guard for when the next cut will come. It’s this continuing subversion of the editing and increased pacing of the scene (the cuts get faster and faster) that keeps the scene shooting forward. Just whenever Lee has you engaged through close-ups showing the woman speaking and giving each other quick contemptuous looks, he throws you a curveball and does a wide shot but not for too long. This wide shot then cuts even closer with the blurry profiles of one woman obscuring the face of another. Even without the dialogue, we can tell that there is an antagonism. Whip up, down, up, hard cut. Action, reaction all in the same shot as one woman in the game clenches a small victory. A continuous blend of elements that keeps the audience as much on its toes as Mai Tai-Tai must be. Handheld whips on the table. The cutting gets faster, the women’s faces are easier to see, and then back to a wide shot. Words are personified by camera movement, punching toward the characters. This isn’t just a game of wits. This is a brutal fight. There is only one disruption to the scene, a lengthy one where Mr. Yee exits a torture chamber and is driven home, returning to the women. It lasts approximately a minute and a half. It serves as a lengthy break from the suffocatingly small space of the women’s mahjong game. The film is almost teasing us here, showing the results for any spy going against the Japanese, but also drawing us out the game, obscuring our view from it, leaving us with questions as to what will happen? Then Yee enters the scene he seems to dominate it. The women spend most of their time either looking down at the table away from him or up at him and he’s always looking straight down on them. It’s a moment of great intensity as the woman continue to play. Suddenly, having shared an exchange in a glance with Mr. Yee, Mai Tai-Tai excuses herself. When she says what she needs to the hands in the middle stop dead. She has to leave, but there’s something further going on. Something more intense. So intense that the energy of the scene, the moving hands of the four women, suddenly comes to a standstill. This is effectively the end of the scene as it returns for about a minute to its normal roller coaster of editing. Lust, Caution as described above is a story about the intensity of the little details. The climax moment of the film comes from a moment that is quite subtle, in both the book and the film as Mai Tai-Tai for just a moment breaks her cover to warn her love, Mr. Yee, that he needs to run. This opening scene of the woman all talking and playing mahjong was as an intense start to the film, capturing the pressure on a woman ready to take part in an assassination of the only person she feels passion with, with only the movements of the camera and the editing. It’s a masterclass of filmmaking and a showcase for how the suspense of this novella can be transferred into film so authentically. Bibliography:
I want to preface some of the words that I’m about to write with the fact that I do very much enjoy LA LA LAND. I ranked it as #4 of my favorite films and think that it is a genuinely watchable movie that takes you up with it and really has spectacular timing and pacing, but I also want to highlight the way that LA LA LAND is almost so effortlessly entertaining that often is so to its detriment. That might sound like a weird phrase. How can something be entertaining to its detriment? Well, that’s where the concept of tonal dissonance comes in. The characterization of LA LA LAND creates dissonance.
The most unfortunate thing about LA LA LAND is that it often fights itself. The candy-colored sheen of its beauty is so actively engaging and entertaining that it shrouds the moments of flaws to its characters and creates a tone for the film that is much more fun rather than the somber character study that it seems to go for. To show this dissonance we will highlight moments that Sebastian (Ryan Gosling) and Mia (Emma Stone) have in the film. Let’s start with Seb. The first comes in his explanation of jazz in The Lighthouse Bar. He attacks the moment with passion, with defensiveness, and when confronted with the idea that jazz is “relaxing,” he fires back, “It’s not relaxing. It’s not, It’s not. Sydney Buchey shot somebody because they told him he played a wrong note,” (Chezelle). This is on one hand a funny line, but it also is incitefull to the character in front of us. Seb, for lack of a better phrase, wants to shoot somebody. Not in the literal sense, but in the passion of the moment, Sebastian could shoot somebody over jazz. Much of the way that the film frames his character’s defense of the art form is in a positive light (which in hindsight may be a flaw), but that’s actually not the reality. Sebastian seems to be a man in a mindset of over encompassing passion for jazz, so much that he actively is going to work against his self interest to do so. When Keith (John Legend) tries to explain to Seb, “How can you be a revolutionary if you’re such a traditionalist?” (Chazelle) he’s actually bringing up a good point. Sebastian really does need to stop attempting to die on this particular hill because it is not beneficial to the art of jazz, nor beneficial to Sebastian himself. If Seb continues to run in place with the art form, it will undeniably die. The romanticization of old jazz that comes with the light sheen of the movie almost starts to contradict this, with the drama being formed out of the dissonance. Unfortunately, the dissonance is still present eating away of the core of the movie. And the demise of jazz slow starts to come in the film. No matter how great Seb’s (Sebastian’s jazz club) looks in its success, the film explicitly tells us that this is not necessarily the case, the line in the film is, “Not too bad is great,” (Chazelle). This is the resignation that the club isn’t actually doing well, but Gosling is, which isn’t necessarily the best thing for him as the future goes on. Much like the film that he’s a star in, Seb is almost too passionate about his art of choice. Again, the framing is generally positive, leaving the audience to, at a superficial level, champion Seb’s success, but also at a deeper level, resent it. We know that Seb will never truly be free of his affliction toward jazz, and on one level he knows it too. Mia probably does as well, but her view of Sebastian is much more Romantic and romantic. This will keep him going and going until ultimately Seb’s closes and Seb himself is left playing his piano in his apartment again. I understand that this view is pessimistic, but there is evidence toward it throughout the film. Then there is Mia, who is ultimately successful, but in a way that seems superficial. Mia, as the film goes on seems to sink more and more into the superficial and almost empty emotions of the dreamers Hollywood that we are promised. The film in this way is almost trying to show us that the Hollywood that the dreamers of its opening number, “Another Day of Sun” sing of does exist, but it comes with a cost. Mia, by the end of the film, lives in a large house, divorced from the idea of Hollywood being a dreamers land. As the good man (Neil Gaiman) wrote it, “But the price of getting what you want, is getting what you once wanted,” (Gaiman, Sandman #19). Instead of living in a world a startling music numbers, she lives in a happier world of a family, but she still every once in awhile wants to escape back into the passion that fueled her earlier days as an actress. The final prelude doesn’t seem particularly about escaping back into just the love that Mia and Sebastian had, but escaping back into the idea that Los Angeles is a place of wonder. A place where dreamers can take part in a technicolor musical number. That place to Seb and Mia doesn’t exist anymore, and they can only return to it through each other. But the film never accesses the darker tones to its characters, necessarily. The film instead goes for an aesthetic drunk on the stylistic trappings of the musical work of Jaque Demy, and never seems to overcome that to actually turn into a film about the flaws of these people. The dissonance of the film is caused by the fact that as the film plays you can feel the inner depth of the characters fighting to break out of the aesthetic binding it together. It’s a good dramatic hook, but it makes the film harder to love with the sugar high passion it wants you to love it with so badly. I appreciate LA LA LAND. I think it’s a startlingly entertaining, beautiful movie, but it’s not perfect, in the way that it seems to fight its own depth by wanting desperately to entertain. Bibliography
“Ambient” may have first started out as a word that described a style of music, but it has seemed to move on to other forms of art. This often happens. If an idea or expression can be expressed very well in music, which while infinitely complex, is a building block of many other forms of art such as film, it can most likely be very well expressed in other forms of art. This can easily be applied to film for example. As I sat in the bottom hallway of my vast school discussing Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life with a friend, he mentioned that he didn’t prefer Terrence Malick making “ambient films.” This is a fair criticism. As Malick has drifted from his more “grounded” filmmaking, many have been very questionable of the filmmaking trend that has taken over him, with my friend calling it “boring” and nonsensical. Yet, what is ambience and what can it can do for a film?
Ambience, as described in the dictionary, is a form of art (well music, but as described above I’m pretty sure that term can go anywhere) with, “...no persistent beat, used to create or enhance the mood or atmosphere.” This is an excellent description of the late stage work of Terrence Malick. He’s become defined by the floaty cinematography that he seems to harness from Emmanuel Lubezki’s id form. Defined by the classical music that he easily understands can carry a scene more than even his actors can. Defined by the soft, nurturing voiceover of his protagonists. All of these factors define the ambient nature of his filmmaking of late and they all provide sufficient examples to why some will absolutely hate this style, but to those that can reap the benefits, these factors can provide an ever entrancing experience. Ambience can be limiting as it can put a limit on the audience's understanding of the characters (and let’s face it sometimes it’s just annoying), but that’s not the question that should be asked of these films. The question should really be what can this ambience do to expand on film and how the limitations of ambient filmmaking can make a better film. Again, as I’ve written multiple times, filmmaking is ultimately the craft of creating emotion for the audience out of thin air and ambience can do that in a way that many other films cannot. It immediately breaks down the complications of creating effective montage and story because by the nature of ambience there is not much of a story, no real persistent beat, just mood and atmosphere. One of the most emotional things about film is that mood and atmosphere and by taking away the weight (though it can be very useful) than an intimately structured plot can put on a film you eliminate a filmic barrier that is put between the audience and the emotions of the film. Of course, in some ways a deliberation of plot can provide a more emotionally honed experience, but there’s a freedom to ambience. Consider the overwhelming amount of filmic information that is taken in over Malick’s second most recent film Knight of Cups. There is some slight semblance of structure, as the main character moves through multiple women, but there’s more to it than that. Ambience, by nature, is confusing because it lacks some structure. This is replaced with a raw sense of reality though. Something special about the unfiltered jumble of images and music and whisperings that Malick displays on screen is that you never feel like there could ever be an actual film crew there. There’s an unfiltered emotion to even the little touches because it never crosses the mind that these pictures are manufactured. This is simply the world, as it is, emotion as it is, in all it’s jumbled and bipolar form presented to us on screen. In Knight of Cups for example the ambience engages the audience in the noticing of tiny details and lines all mixing in the personification of the dreamscape/hellscape of Los Angeles brought to life with such fervor in that film. The fact that Malick is progressively getting more and more cryptic over time is fitting in this context. He’s attempting to get closer and closer to the idea of pure filtered emotion with The Tree of Life blending both emotional and strong narrative features tapering to just emotional by the end, To The Wonder moving into less of a narrative, Knight of Cups using just a semblance of structure, and Song to Song moving into even more explanation of characters through ambience. Yet, his films always seem to be getting more and more emotionally true. In Badlands or Days of Heaven (Both great) I feel the manipulation of emotions detached from the characters, as with most films. I feel the hilarity, the sorrow of the story, but in The Tree of Life, To the Wonder… etc, I feel the characters emotions run through me, not just the emotions that the film wants me to feel and in that you can find solace, anger, and happiness that you could never have dreamed of. With that, I wish to leave you with a description of the best transition in any Terrence Malick film. There is no easy way to track it down specifically in the screenplay, but the moment appears at the start of The Tree of Life. The very first scene. A large celestial body of orange appears on a screen. Whispers are sent out from a man. Whispers put out in the universe. The screen fades to black. Suddenly, “Funeral Canticle,” starts to play and a beautiful image of childish innocence explodes onto the screen, joyous in her ignorance of the ever expanding grief of life and the universe. The moment is serene and happy and the ambience captures the moment with startling clarity. As we see the girl contrasted with the ambient imagery of the celestial body, we don’t just see the incredible happiness of her ignorance. We feel every bit of it. When approaching the work of writer/director M. Night Shyamalan, I heard one thing as a decided fact, “He made three great movies: The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, and Signs and then in 2004 started to slowly rid himself of all that good will for thirteen years. I say thirteen because his most recent thriller, Split, has been on top of the box office for the past 3 weeks. It’s also a REALLY solid piece of work. I also say thirteen because Signs wasn’t his last good movie before his streak of bad movies. In fact Shyamalan made one movie that was overall better than Signs before everything fell apart, and if you know your timeline you’ll know that I’m talking about 2004’s The Village.
Now, the second question you should be asking yourself is why The Village? This was the movie that Shyamalan lost it on. This was the movie that made us think it was a horror movie and turned out to be a suspenseful love story, this was the movie that made us pissy because we guessed how it would end? What the hell is wrong with you for thinking it’s so great? Well, that’s simple. Let me ask you a question. What does film mean to you? Film to me is a tapestry of images to tell a story in a way that will be cathartic and emotionally satisfying for the audience. The film’s quality should be determined by how it makes you feel rather than the way that it irons together or coherently flows. I do understand that plot inconsistencies could be a big deal to many, breaking the magic of a movie for them. This is often the reason why The Village is cited as a bad movie. Yet, I’ll always disagree on that. The Village is a gorgeous, emotional experience, that while flawed holds up remarkably well. Why? Because emotions can cover the flaws of a film. That’s the type of movie that is made in The Village. An emotionally draining, intensely beautiful experience that takes chances and pays off on almost every single one. To those who don’t think that’s true, to each his own, but to me there’s something true to the cinema of Shyamalan’s monster movie effort. Something disturbing about the way it manipulates its audience. Something fascinating. And yet there are still maligned sequences to the work, notably one involving a confession of love, one involving a violent silence, a few involving exposition dumps, and one involving a Spielbergian use of suspense. Why these sequences are disregarded I’ll never know, but let’s take a lot at them. To understand the scenes we need to understand the plot and all of the moving parts to the work, as well as the meaning of many of the turns that the story takes. First, subversion must be addressed. A key to Shyamalan’s well rated works was an astute knowledge of the genres that he was working in. Both The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable (cough’ damn near masterpieces cough’) are films that know their genres. They know the expectation for both the straight drama and the supernatural elements in their genre and manipulated the audience to an emotional breaking point. A superhero film slowly using the stereotypes of established tropes to subtly hint toward the ending? Great! The fact that all of it paid off emotionally in those films? Even better. Signs has a lack of subversion which makes it’s flaws more glaring. It was an alien movie and it was simply that, which allowed the idiosyncratic nature of the dialogue and the characters to show. There’s nothing else going on except a riff on the oddities of alien movies and the prophetic nature of children and God. Then there’s The Village where there’s expansion rather than subversion. Often, the lack of subversion seems to warrant a lesser film from Shyamalan, but it doesn’t. It’s hard to subvert the idea of the monster movie. The monster movie, doesn’t usually have very much going on. Our characters, the fodder for the monsters, arrive into the frame, they are executed one by one after an inciting event, their actions building the character around them. There’s not much depth to that. Not much going on in the monster movie, unless the message is unsubtly draped over the film. This has made for incredible works and yet none bring the same narrative depth as Shyamalan’s The Village. The Village is an easy film to try and immediately mark as subversive, but rather coy in its subversion, but that may have never been the point. Sure, Shyamalan might not have much to “say” about monster movies in the way that he did for ghost stories and superheroes, but the overall complexity built on top of the basic structure makes up for that. The entirety of the opening 50 minutes the film intentionally convinces us that the film is a monster movie of a simple kind, but it is still ever more enticing and exciting. The film exists in a town in the 1800’s (supposedly) where the townspeople are kept in the village by the threat of monsters called Those We Don’t Speak Of. Bryce Dallas Howard is our star, a blind girl named Ivy and Joaquin Phoenix plays Lucius, the love interest who wishes to venture into the woods, which are the monster’s domain. The monsters are scary and the actors in their characters are wonderful, and yet the true monster of the film hangs at the fringes. This does require that I reveal what exactly is the monster in its most vicious form: the humans themselves. It is revealed later in the film that the monsters and the fear are all things orchestrated by the Elders, as they attempt to shelter their children from the outside world. They instruct their children to destroy things that are red (connoting lust, love and passion) because it will draw the monsters into the village. This sheltering manifests itself in a great sequence of scenes as Kitty Walker (Judy Greer) explains to her father Edward (William Hurt), that she loves a boy and wishes to marry. It is soon revealed that she wants to do so without having the permission of the boy to which her father responds that he consents but she needs to ask the boy first. This leads into the first emotionally charged and beautiful number of scenes of the film. Kitty approaches the man, Lucius (Joaquin Phoenix) and in an emotionally stunted way joyously confesses her love to him. “I love you Lucius. I love you like the day is long. I love you more than the sun and moon forever. And if you feel the same way, we should not hide it any longer. It’s a gift, love is,” (Shyamalan 25) This is a moment that I feel like many would have laughed at, but it’s important to consider the emotional response that this warrants. There’s an unwanted sincerity in Kitty’s voice that is uncomfortable. This isn’t how it’s supposed to work. The innocence is so abundant in her life that she cannot function in a way that is easily digestible by the audience. This is the case with many of the characters and it often becomes a point of speaking that they talk oddly and innocently. This, I feel is intentional. There’s a quiet, scared quality to their voices unless they finally get a disorienting moment of joy like this one. The camera just sits there making us watch. Laughable is the farthest this is from. This is a person who doesn't know how to feel. A person who believes that the color red draws creatures that could murder her. A person trying to understand the concept of love. A spectacular smash cut breaks the audience in quickly into looking deeper into the emotions of the characters. The Village is made up of many moments like this, that ask you to look deeper into the emotions of the characters because they too often don’t speak to each other about their true intentions. There’s a suspense to the repressed nature of all of it. Lucius calls to his mother in an intense conversation “Sometimes we don’t do things- yet others know we want to do them- so we don’t do them,” (Shyamalan 45). Powerful statements, delivered in a confused inflection, creates narratively complex characters which covers up many flaws in the film. Excellent direction and cinematography helps as well. The few scenes of violence as a result of this repression also contributes to this. Noah Percy (Adrien Brody) is a mentally challenged man, who, fueled by his ignorance and his own problems is unable to understand the consequences of the love that he feels and the violence that he doles out and is more terrifying than any monster could be. The moment when he actually stabs Lucius ( thought to be the main character for the past 50 minutes) is a masterclass of calming violence. This is a monster film and it’s just taken its first victim. The shocking moments aren’t full of the screams and the noise of Those We Don’t Speak of, but the silence that it takes to calmly slide a knife between the ribs of a fellow patron. The silent horror that comes with that. I find it interesting that Shyamalan dares us to be scared at the moments of large flamboyant sound when in fact the scariest and most harmful moment of the film comes with a peculiar silence. Silence shrouds many scenes and connotes fear all the way through. Second viewings of the film allow the silence to become even more terrifying and special as the film affords many moments of quiet whispering talk. Shyamalan makes films like this often, where the mood is thick enough to deal with the overall flawed plot structure that he presents. Just watch the wave sequence in The Last Airbender and tell me that he’s a bad director. Watch the ending of Split, watch damn near anything except all of The Happening, Lady in the Water and The Visit and you’ve got a well-directed piece of work. Many people had a problem with the structure near the end of the picture citing an overuse of exposition as the main detractor as well as the revealing too early of what the monsters are The monsters are the elders in elaborate suits. This is all revealed in long exposition that is delicately captured in brutally emotional sequences that bring more and more to the forefront about the true manifestation of the “monster.” This exposition is often regarded as the moment when the movie stops being as excellent as it previously was. But that is not the case, Shyamalan and his great actor William Hurt create a scene that seems poetic in its exposition. The use of a handheld cam as they walk displaying the beauty of Hurt’s performance infuses the scene with an ebb and flow that keeps the audience riveted, ever more spurred on by the wonderful score. It may be a little much, but the welling of emotion coming from the acting and direction is undeniable. The scenes of large expositions also work especially well because they use the Spielberg technique. The background is always moving, the score is always drifting along emotionally and lightly. There’s always something pushing the calm melancholy of these characters. The actors are always intense. There’s a luscious quality to even the most stagnant moments of the screenplay. There’s such an emotional tone to Hurt and the other actors throughout the film that is impossible to ignore. Many seem so muddled and confused. On the edge of tears unable to comprehend the emotions that they are burdened with. This is a film of monologues often, mainly because Edward wishes to display a reason for their actions. Near the end of the film Hurt tells the Elders to their horror that he has allowed Ivy to venture into the world to get medicine for the dying Lucius, and the handheld cam returns as Hurt proclaims in one of his best scenes, “Yes I have risked, I hope I am always able to risk everything for the right and just cause. If we did not make this decision-we could never again call ourselves innocent,” (Shyamalan 105). These scenes are cited as those too heavy handed for the movie, and yet Hurt’s genuinely intense performance and the handheld cam putting him in a corner surrounded, lashing out beautifully and verbally at the other Elders as James Newton Howard’s score squeezes the melancholy of their decision out all but covers up the lack of subtlety. These are people that can only wait silently for their paradise to either fall apart or stay together. Elements like these coming together cannot help but make up for the contrived twist going on in the larger plot machinery. This brings me to a scene that many do not enjoy, the attack by the monster in the woods. Most people shrug the scene off as a badly structured scene that is unrealistic, citing the guttural noises that the monster (actually Noah Percy) makes as unbelievable, and the overall fact that the audience knows that the monsters are not real. That said, it’s still one of the best scenes of the movie, and of Shyamalan’s career. Why? Because much like with the exposition scenes, a sense of swift, suspenseful filmmaking can make a scene work. Here this is done perfectly. So, here’s the setup. Ivy, knowing that the monsters aren’t real and that there is another town with medicine, ventures into the woods. We suddenly see that color red. Red has been said to draw Those We Don’t Speak Of. This should immediately put our guard up. Even not considering the terrifying implications of one of the creatures actually attacking Ivy (i.e. that an elder or townsperson is trying to savagely murder her), the film has taught us to fear the color red. Then slowly the camera turns around to reveal the creature, red-cloaked and not immediately scary. An animal. That’s not the end of it, though. Shyamalan lets us know there’s more urgency as he starts using a handheld camera. The composure (and the composition, much of the calmer moments of the film use dollies and tripods, while the intense moments allow for a more handheld use) of the safe village slowly fades away as Ivy, blind, starts to make her way behind a tree. The camera obscures the creature not letting us see it until we slowly realize that it has swiftly and quietly made his way to the tree. The following moments as Ivy makes her way from the tree into an area of little cover brings greater suspense, and then a moment of silence. We see the creature standing still, wondering intently whether or not it is there to attack Ivy or help her. This could in fact just be a townsperson there to guide Ivy along. Silence fills the screen. And then it runs at her. The moment is wonderfully executed. We’ve seen the “calm before the storm” many times in film, but Shyamalan lets the silence go on just a little long. It becomes meandering, almost to the point of boring. Comforting, like the calmness before the shark pops up and scares Brody in Jaws. There are many seeming plot and diegetic inconsistencies (let’s call them logical leaps to simplify) to this scene, but you don’t often see them through the allure of the fear that it is all steeped in. You’re welcome to disagree with me on the complexity and richness of The Village but the more than ever now, I am impressed by its beauty and narrative ambition. This is a monster movie and a flawed one that builds a beautiful atmosphere and story into the construction of the monster movie. BIBLIOGRAPHY
The first time I saw The Lobster, (still one of the best films of the year if you’re keeping track), the craft of filmmaking and the way that it’s director, Yorgos Lanthimos, created expectation and then shot that in the foot on camera multiple times stuck out to me. This is a film about deflation and the way that relationships are not just built on a few things, but many. Something that I noticed as well during the film was the fact that it seemed cold, and empty, but not in a bad way. There seemed a great craft in this. How though could cold and empty be of good craft? Aren’t movies in fact supposed to provide entertainment through catharsis? They do,The Lobster is just entertaining in an odd way.
The second time I saw The Lobster, I had the great opportunity to see where this entertainment came from, and how such an odd film aesthetically, isn’t really odd at all, but actually quite familiar to the thematic blood that one finds in one of the greatest novels of all time: Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. What an odd comparison, but the same craft that Gustave Flaubert contributed to his classic novel of contrasting realism and Romanticism, is used by the screenwriters Yorgos Lanthimos and Efthimis Filippou to build their story of love and violence in The Lobster. But on that note we need to dig a little bit deeper, and while it’s not the deepest similarity we need to look at characters and the way they interpret the world. The world of The Lobster requires that all people must have a partner, or they will be sent to a hotel where they stay for 45 days. At the end of these days if a partner has not been found, the person in question will be turned into an animal of their choice and released into the wild. David, the main character has just been left by his wife of 12 years and has now come to the hotel with his brother, who is now a dog. Madame Bovary lives in a world where she’s given by mainly herself and outside sources a sense of unrealistic Romanticism for both the world and mainly love. She thinks she lives in a large wonderful world, but actually lives in a bleak farm town, that is too plain for the likes of her. Both of these characters are basically the same, but in The Lobster, the ignorance afforded to Emma Bovary is more of a cultural sickness. These are people living in a dull, almost flat looking world that think that things like encompassing love exists and bright colors, much like Emma Bovary. The cinematography, beautiful done by Thimios Bakatakis, in The Lobster shows the world to be oddly cold for as impassioned that the characters seem. The faults of Emma Bovary are the faults of the society here, and the results are just as jarring and hilarious. The similarities of character and interpretation in the world almost seem superficial when one considers what really ties together these two works of art. This comes in the way they are presented to the audience. I said earlier that The Lobster took a lot from Madame Bovary, this coming in the way that both works create humor through deflation. Consider the moment of Madame Bovary when Homais, the pretentious pharmacist writes a letter detailing the great achievement of the clubfoot operation that Emma’s bumbling husband has just performed to disastrous effect (not that Homais or most characters know this yet) only to be interrupted with the realistic and unnerving statement about the patient “Help! he is dying! I am going crazy!,” (145), is almost no different in style of deflation than the moments of expectation building to deflation in The Lobster, such as a moment between two women one’s final day before her transformation. The moment is difficult to explain quickly, but two women characters who we as an audience perceive as excellent lovers, in that they seem to have an actual friendship connection, rather than the black and white attraction of similarities that the rest of the society is built on, are meeting for the last time before one is turned into an animal, the other having found her partner on the basis that they both got bloody noses from time to time (ie. black and white attraction of similarities).. The partnered girl reads her a letter of great intimacy: THE LETTER “We always sat together at school, and when I had a problem I always came to you because you had the best advice. When we didn’t manage to find dance partners at the school prom, the fact that we were together at that difficult moment gave me strength. I’m sorry that things have come to this. I’m sure if you had a few more days you would find someone just like I did.” These do not seem to be words of a friend, but one of a lover. This is intimate and beautiful stuff that coupled with the actresses performances brings the audience to Romantic high...but it turns there at the ending doesn’t it. “...find someone just like I did.” It turns and the realism of the moment is heartbreaking, yet funny. It’s frustrating. The letter reads to it’s end as a somewhat pompous, stuck up contemplation of how the writer will remember her good friend, and the other girl smacks her. Realism has trumped our feelings of Romanticism, Flaubert and Lanthimos are playing the same game, and with equally cold but tickling results. Both works are in essence about making the audience feel the way the characters do and the Romantic sickness of The Lobster and Madame Bovary are one in the same as well as the way they use emotional manipulation to deflate in inspiring and hysterical ways. Bibliography: 1. Flaubert, Gustave. Madame Bovary. NA. Norton, 2004. Print 2. Lanthimos, Yorgos. Filippou, Efthymis. "The Lobster." Film script. 2014 |
AuthorStephen Tronicek. Archives
July 2017
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