Synecdoche, NY(2008): dance of the wounded

 Director: Charlie Kaufman(1958--)

When I first saw this film last year my reaction was, "what a morose guy"( the Kaufman character). Ebert described it as a great film which needed to be seen twice. And I have become humble enough to realise that some films are not mere movies but serious artistic creations deserving the same degree of respect as a work of litrature. The long pending second visit was materialised today.

If cinema is to be more than mere entertainment to kill time, one may on occassion need patience to ferret out the treasure. Why should it be necessary for a film to have a plot, any more than Ullyses did ? All that is required is that it should have something to express, express it, and express it well. It's better for a creation to be  hard to understand than to be not worth understanding. Life is too brief to fritter on triviality.

To quote from Ebert's review:

"The subject of "Synecdoche, New York" is nothing less than human life and how it works. Using a neurotic theater director from upstate New York, it encompasses every life and how it copes and fails. Think about it a little and, my god, it's about you. Whoever you are."


I cannot make any claim to have understood the film, or to have even followed whatever plot is there, or to have been able to distinguish dream and reality--or to have shared the perception that it was as extraordinary a film as the great critic found it.

What is sure is that it was never a drag as many action films are ( which at this time of year usually give me  dejavus ). There is something interesting in every scrap (green poo) and the scraps are loosely strung together as is our ordinary consciousness, hopping from one thing to another. Elation, gloom, hunger, boredom, etc follow one on top of the other shifting kaleidoscopically from moment to moment. The film never fails to be interesting in it's observation of the. mundane occurences of everyday life. Our seemingly banal existence is always underlined by deep anxieties-about worthiness, sickness and mortality.

Caden Codard( Philip Seymour Hoffman), a scholar, is abondened by his wife Adele and daughter who proceed to Europe where she finds success and acclaim as an artist. Caden in the middle of his various abortive romantic entanglements and numerous ailments recieves a McArthur grant ($500,000 payable over five years in quarterly installments) to pursue creative work. He sets himself the task of creating an ambitious drama to capture life in it's entirety. The present film is that drama. This  enterprise, lasting for two decades is the fulchrum of the story, in the course of which he loses his parents, his daughter as a young woman from "tattoo poisoning", remarries, has affairs, while the drama in the making progresses tortuously, year afte year. The dreary tale is punctuated by several dreary funerals, an attempted suicide and a successful one. And....curtains.

Along the way there is pathos, humour, surprises,  always a what-next feeling, tragedy, boredom--it's a variety show. It's a play within a movie within the drama of life. It is an exploration of the inner universe. The drama which the film is about, the film itself and the drama that is life--they are all one. As Ebert puts it, the title says it all.

Hoffman's portrayal of "the seven ages of man" is electrifying. He is always supressing a sob, always on the brink of tears, in  perpetual mourning.

Ordinary life is in fact anything but ordinary. It is in fact the greatest of wonders.

To quote from the drama within  the film:

.....even though the world goes on for aeons and aeons, we are here for a fraction of  fraction of a second. Most of your time is spent being dead or not yet born. But while alive, you wait in vain, wasting years waiting for a letter or a phone call or a look...


Perhaps it is with compassion that the film-maker has glimpsed the comedy-human-- people, all of us, in our desperate gasping to find meaning in the finitude of our existence. To become human beings from human animals. It's funny, it's pathetic, it's downright tragic, and above it's very mysterious.
 
Another quote from the script:
 
....what was once before you, an exciting and mysterious future, is now behind you--lived, understood, disappointing. You realise you are not special. You have struggled into existence and are now slipping silently out of it.This is everyone's experience, every single one.The specifics hardly matter. Everyone is everyone. So you are Adele Hazel, Claire.And the people who adore you stop adoring you. As they die,as they move on, as you shed them, as you shed your beauty, your youth, as the world forgets you, as you realise your transience, as you begin to lose your charactristics one by one, as you learn there is no one watching you....
 
Perhaps the message is that men are born to sorrow. But how true? The defiant and optimistic fire of Beethoven is missing in this Synecdoche.

Twice was not enough. I have to come again. There is nothing of the trivial here. And as Ebert says, the third time will be sheer enjoyment.

Synecdoche: the word implies a part which represents a whole like "a pair of hands" represents the whole person. As a drop has the qualities of the sea, so one life represents all lives.

Roger Ebert's review 

Nostalghia(1983):dreams, visions, longing

Director:Andrei Tarkovsky(1932-86);Language;Russian/Italian; Duration: 124 minutes 

My third Tarkovsky film. The most magical. If you are looking for an entertainer to go with your pop-corn and coke, this may not be the best option. But if you are willing to invest two hours of patience and suspend all judgement (lack of plot, translucency of theme and intention) you may  carry home imprints of the sublime and ethereal.

To start, the title Nostalghia is not a mispelling. To quote Tarkovsky( nostalgia.com, ):
"The title of the film, for which the word "nostalgia" is only a very insufficient translation, indicates a pining for what is far from us, for worlds that cannot be united. But it is also indicative of a longing for an inner home, some inner sense of belonging....."

In other words nostalghia here stands for an overpowering, painfully beautiful, nameless yearning rising from the depths of life, a disabling sense of emptiness and loss. In the film this feeling is symbolised by an expatriot Russian's pining for his Russian family and home, oblivious to the beauty that surrounds him in Italy.

Gortchakoff is a Russian scholar staying in Italy with the aim of studying the life of a seventeenth century Russian composer who chose to return to serfdom in Russia rather than enjoy acclaim in Italy. After his return he took to alcohol and commited suicide. Tarkovsky too was an exile from the USSR when he was making this film and had to leave his son behind. Hence the film is in essence intensely autobiographical. In Italy, Gortchakoff is overtaken by the eponymous emotion and is oblivious to the ravishing beauties of the Italian countryside, historical buildings, ramshackle dwellings and the Petrarchan beauty and advances of his translator companion, the beautiful Eugenia. The other important character is Domenico, a madman-seer in whose single minded convictions and faith Gortchakoff finds a mirror of his own state of life.

In the final famous scene of the film we find him engaged in the  carrying a lighted candle across an ancient Roman bath, a somewhat difficult task( taking eight minutes and which has exhausted the patience of many a Tarkovskite though in the spiritual context, it ought to be as exciting, say, as the chariot race in Ben Hur).

The imagery is of a breath taking beauty like a brew of ancient vintage. Ghostly Russian countrysides glimpsed through a half open door, women at prayer amidst a myriad dancing candle flames, worn Roman corridors flanked by pillars, and the last transcendental image of the Russian homeland which is similar to that earthly island floating on the planet Solaris--it is paint, it is  poem, it is  lens, it is soul.

Tarkovsky is a philosopher. He is a man with a vision. He sense not only the incompleteness of modern man, but also his capacity for completeness.

Tarkovsky is a voice from the future. It's a voice of the spirit, a voice for faith. The candle carrying scene is an act of spiritual assertion.

Man can become a human being.

To quote from nostalgia.com again:

"The only meaning of life lies in the effort that is demanded in growing spiritually, to change and develop into something different than what we were at birth. If we during the span of time between birth and death can achieve this, in spite of the fact that it is difficult and that progress may seem slow at times, then we have indeed served humanity."

Citizen Kane (1942): at the shrine

Director: Orson Welles (1915-85); duration:114 minutes

It requires a measure of audacity to write about this most famous and admired of all films but then what are films for but to see and enjoy, and what harm can a bit of additional appreciation do, even though one may start with a favourable preconceptions the size of a mountain? After all I could list a number of celebrated films which have turned out to be more educative than enjoyable. I saw Kane yesterday (for the second time) and I found it as rivetting and racy as a Tarantino thriller with a comparable amount of loquacity thrown in. The minutes flew.

I still remember my first viewing maybe five years back and remember being transfixed by the opening shot. Let me pay my homage to this greatest of opening shots. Time is night.  An iron grill of a gate, sombre in the darkness.  A "No Trespassing" sign (there will never again be such a no-trespassing sign!) and the camera travels upward revealing the letter K (for Kane). In the background Xanadu, a palace on top of a  mountain, looming  gothic.  Xanadu is "world's foremost pleasure ground and the costliest monument since the pyramids which a man built for himself"(quote from the film). The camera moves up and up as though on a flight of stairs till it reaches a lighted room: the chamber where Kane is dying. The funereal music that opens the film also seems to signify that death the visitor is knocking at the door. It's already over.The music is reminiscent of Schubert's sombre lied "Death and the Maiden .The closing shot of the film is equally memorable, as the thick sooty smoke rises obliquely backward as if in the monumental triumph of indiscriminating death to the chords of the same dirge as at the open. The ascending column of soot is reminiscent of the gurgling  chimneys of Auschwitz in Schindler's List ,

But all is not sombre between the covers though it we do see all the merriment and brave posturing in the light of the already revealed ending. The film is based on the life of Hearst, a (then) contemporary press magnate . The film opens with Kane's lonely death, surrounded by nothing but his acquisitions. We are then shown a 10 minute newsreel narrating the events of the celebrity's life: his enormous wealth, his great influence by virtue of the power of his yellow journalism, the abortion of his political ambitions, the failed marriages, the decline of his businesses during the Great Depression, and the lonely end years.

The movie plot hinges on the mystery of the last words he spoke: "Rosebud". Thompson, a reporter is assigned the job of fiding out  the significance of these mysterious words as a key to discovering the man's personality.

This is but the skeleton. There is magic and mystery in this film.

First and foremost it is in the architecture of the plot, supported by sublime cinematography. It is the portrait of a man, the drama of a life, and a parable of Life. The story is non sequential and the past, present and future collate with each other not as it happened but as it must have flowed in the mind of the young and precocious director. It is a whole made of pieces and the pieces join together in a perfect fusion, like the pieces of a jig-saw, giving us a wrenching and pathetic portrayal of human destiny. As the story proceeds, the man unpeels, layer by layer.

The story proceeds with unrelenting energy and speed without stopping for a single breath or wasting a single shot. Each moment  seamlessly unfolds the next as though derived from an unfaltering inner spring of  inspiration. This quality of compressedness, a density which is able to express a lifetime in two hours without leaving out anything is an achievement in human portraiture reminiscent of sixteenth entury drama.

Much has been written about the inspired black and white cinematography. It is a poetry of camera so one must content oneslf with a few examples. Snow falling on a cottage turns into a glass paperweight. The camera descending on the drunken Susan. The cathedral like library which houses Thatcher's archives. The encounter of  Kane as a child with his future guardian. Kane in the hall of mirrors.

It is indeed the hypnotic vision of a prodigy of  five and twenty-Welles' age when he made the film. Worthy of the author of  "Kublai Khan" , who built the wondrous Xanadu.

Kubla Khan by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Roger Ebert's review

Simon of the Desert(1965): the triumph of flesh

Director: Luis Bunuel; language: Spanish; duration:45 minutes

This is based on the life Simon who lived in the sixth century CE and is said to have spent a number of years on top of a tower as a penance. The director of this film was against institutionalised religion and the present anti-climactic short film may be taken as a vicious attack on religious hypocrisy. It also underlines the vanity, masochism and selfishness which underlies ascetism.

The movie starts with Simon performing a miracle wherein an amputee's hands are restored. The first use he makes of his hands is to slap his son.

At various other times we see him chastising  people for their lack of piety. He even refuse to respond to his mothers love who lodges herself near the tower.

His own self immolation seems severe as he goes for days without food and water, living on next to nothing. His singleminded sincerety is beyond doubt.

On various occasions he is visited by the devil assuming the shape of a young and beautiful woman trying to distract him from his austerities. In her final visit we find the she-Satan climbs atop the mendicant's tower trying to lure him into sensuality.

In a sudden turn we see a flying aeroplane and then we are transported to a modern disco club where we find Simon and the she Satan dancing vigorously. And then he is sitting smoking a cigar as the film comes to an end.

It is a powerful attack on the clergy indicating that below the cloak things are very much the same if not worse. Bunuel ridicules religious posturing, the insincerity and falseness of religious professionals, the lack of genuine humanity which is buried deep in it, even the best kind.

And the beast cannot be exterminated, not even by standing on towers for decades. You can only shove it beneath the surface, thence sharpening his teeth all the more.

Humanity lies not in the extermination of the animal aspect but in it's civilisation.

Woman in the Dunes(1964):the sand is coming

Director:Hiroshi Teshigahara(1927-2001);  Language: Japanese;( Suna no onna); the film is highly commended by the director Andrei Tarkovsky and by Roger Ebert.

Two comparisons immediately spring to mind. One is with Albert Camus'  famous essay "Myth of Sisyphus" (depicting a human being doomed to a life of endless, purposeless activity, as many of us may experience our own lives to be). The second is with David Lean's 1962 film, "Lawrence of Arabia" for the grandeur of it's desert photography. Perhaps it's more appropriately described as the story of the redemption of an entymologist.

The young amateur scientist, otherwise a teacher, is out on the sea shore spending his leave looking for a variety of beetle which will bring him recognition from the community. By a chain of circumstances he finds himself housed with a young and beautiful woman living in a dilapidated cottage. The cottage is at the bottom of a sandpit abou 10 metres deep. Having accepted hospitality for an overnight stay, he finds himself a prisoner. Provisions and water are periodically lowered by the neighbouring villagers. It dawns on him soon that here he is to remain indefinitely.

The husband and daughter of the woman have recently been buried in a sand storm. It is a strange kind of sand. It is moist and whatever it comes into contact with will decay in days. At night they work together to shovel it as well as sift it for sale by the villagers. The cottage has to be protected at any cost since if one falls, so will the others.

He makes some attempts to scale the modest height of the sandpit ( since he is desperate to return to the city) but the material is as crumbly and amorphous as an anthill and there is no possibility of scaling the wall. At one point he does manage to escape by means of an ingenious contraption but  is caught by his detainers and back where he started. He tries to trap a crow to act a carrier pigeon but this also doesn't work out.

But it is the sand which is most interesting. Throughout the film the howling and blowing sand storm forms the musical score with a minimal of additional notes. It is a sand which flows like a liquid, advancing like a river in spate, at times heaving and swelling like the surface of a sea. It rains sand through the cracks in the roof of the cottage. The nights are devoted to bailing out the encroaching onslaught of sand.

The couple roughs out the physical realities of this survival struggle, bound only by the common elemental enemy and powerful eroticism. The woman is reconciled to remaining there for the rest of her life.  He remains steadfastly desperate, at one point even willing to perform sex in full view of the villagers as a price to be allowed to see the ocean for a short while. Let us go no furthur with spoilers.

Interpretations? The terms avant-garde, neo-relistic, existential have been used for the film, whatever that might be. Interpretations must be tentative and provisional, because anything which can be interpreted must to that extent be limited.

It has the form of a parable, in the starkness and simplicity of the narrative and disregard for logic of details. Man against the power of chaos, the relentless advance of time, the chasm beyond? The storms are the storms of human passion and the quicksand which gives way below our very feet is our own absence of moorings.

The entomologist wanted his name in a book, fame and recognition--a return to the glittering city. He is willing to trade whatever sense of honor he posesses (though he starts off as a decent enough individual) in return for fulfilling his desire for life, glimpses of the outside world. The woman is on firmer soil, reconciled to her destiny of eternal, repetitive, thankless labour. The villagers in their masks are the inner demons.

Like Watanabe in Ikiru, he finds a foothold in the ever shifting sand.