SFIFF53 #2: Everyone Else

by Ryland Walker Knight

Nothing's sounder: Birgit Minichmayr won the Silver Bear for Best Actress at Berlinale 2009 for her performance in Maren Ade's Everyone Else. Ade's film works because of the performances of both lovers acting out in different and not quite complimentary ways. But Minichmayr uses her body to go with her face and her voice to make her Gitti not come alive—it's a film of presence, or immanence, so "becoming" never happens, though the story does chart a sort of trajectory towards understanding—so much as, well, feel like a real person. Or, you get a sense of everything inside and behind her without a mention of any history (of old lovers, of youth) or much explaining. Everything registers on the surface—on her body, in her gestures—even her defenses, her silent treatments.

It's really hard to talk and/or write about this kind of acting or this kind of direction of acting, you just sense it; it's an energy or a verve you pick up on or not. But it's not an affect since this is not a film of faces; or if it is an affect its not made into images the way, say, Cassavetes could because Ade mutes things the way Cassavetes always amplified things. Nor is it really a film of bodies, though it is a film of actions and, again, gestures. It's a recording, primarily, with a few ideas about the fluidity of form and off-camera space. Its best, laugh-out-loud joke about spatial awareness (or lack thereof) dictating character is filmed like it happens, like an accident, without grace over a shoulder. It's pragmatic filmmaking, the camera in service of its subjects and largely free of anything like a style or a tic-trait or a tripod. Its duty is just to be there.

All Ade seems to want is to watch these people (these young people) amble about in the sun. For the lighting, either that amber of the Sardinian sun or the indigo of a bedroom at night, is the most interesting thing about the images. The sex scenes, for example, are hardly lit and shot in one take without close ups; not exactly the "sexy" stuff of, say, Bad Timing, though its intimacy is not without its sexiness. Or that room with the knick knacks registers just white, its pale walls and shelves another way to say this mom's passions aren't passions but filler, time-killers; this extends to her music collection, which is aptly trite; but it should be noted that nothing in this room is played for laughs. In fact, for all its jokes and on-screen laughter, nothing's truly played for laughs. Not that laughs are necessary, but it makes all the goofy stuff look a put-on, like these people can never remove a mask. And that's the brilliance of Minichmayr's performance (and I supposed Ade's direction): to give the feeling of layers, or intentions never voiced nor exactly seen.

After a prologue that shows Gitti already acting out, or only ever acting, though she's also giving directions on how to act to a young girl, things start happy enough. It's a vacation, the sun shines and they barely wear clothes. But that erodes just as soon as can happen (and how can it not happen?) as its stories' wonts. So as things get said, other things are left unsaid, and fissures begin. New masks grow, and Minichmayr stops sitting with her legs open, starts crossing her arms more. The couple stops embracing as much, they walk apart; interaction is forced. The relationship doesn't crumble or implode so much as evaporate, or dry up, which is seen in reverse as the deal breaker is when Gitti gets tossed fully clothed into a pool after a disaster of a dinner party. Minichmayr exits the pool cutting her eyes across it, tugging at her clinging dress, and inside she doesn't dry off. Instead she jumps out a window. Where it goes from there should be no surprise, but its limp-limbed finale may clamp you enough that the last line jolts some hope into your mainline. After all, it's about something truly cinematic though it's shot, again, like an accident over a shoulder or two: it's a plea to be seen.

[Already released in New York City by IFC, Everyone Else plays SFIFF three times, all at the Kabuki: Sun, Apr 25 at 8:45pm; Tue, Apr 27 at 3:30pm; Thu, Apr 29 at 6:15pm.]

Last Lost: "Sundown"

by Ryland Walker Knight

Well, cool. There were some risks taken, some serious crazy, and some killings. Brutal fucking murders, even. A ruthless episode that started slow and crescendoed somewhere beyond Apocalypse Now with this new Kurtz I'm calling Dark Locke not a raving nobody stuck in his temple of doom but heading out into the jungle, ready, smiling at his good fortune to gather a crowd and, it seems, pull the wool a little over a lot of eyes. That is, this week was a big step forward towards real consequence and conclusion. Not only that, we got to see the end of that goofy odd couple, Dogen and Lennon, and we didn't have to really deal with Jack. Bonus: Kate's looking a fool, and useless, a sheep forever and hardly clothed wolf-like.

But Locke's that reversed, and easy, or more: not just a wolf wrapped in a smile but a smoke monster aching to wreak havoc. And, like a good chess player, he parried and fell back and then struck from a new angle to topple the other side. Of course he chose the arrival of darkness as his deadline.

This was the first week since the opener that the sideways, 2004-prime story-line held much interest for me, even if it was later in the episode as things lead to a different (and decidedly smaller) execution. Sayid's new story seems the most like his old one, which sets him apart again, though to be fair we haven't had much of Jin and Sun in 2004 yet—and you just know they'll play a major role in the pathetic appeal of the finale. (A finale, the promos remind us, only 10 episodes away. Time flies indeed. Not that I'm really counting down things.) After all, when Sun appeared by surprise late in the episode, it was easy to get a jolt of "almost!" when she asked Kate if Jin was present at the temple. I'm ready for this reunion to be cornball but I also wouldn't be surprised if, like with Sayid, it to turn on dark histories.

Most of the show was about Sayid trying and failing to prove his worth as "good" in situations set up by "evil" men. His whole storyline hinges on that declaration to his lost love, who is now his brother's wife, that he spends his days trying to wash his hands of his past actions. Of course, when he's asked to forget some wrong doing, he answers, "But I can't," and kills the man who asked. (Funny to see the tables turned on that smarmy Martin Keamy who, in his time before on the show, was just as ruthless.) On the island, Sayid flips his relationship with Dogen around, no longer at his mercy; after allowing Hiroyuki Sanada a monologue about his not-fateful arrival on the island (Jacob beckoned him, too, after a tragedy he caused), Sayid says he elects to stay in the temple, which we clearly see wasn't in Dogen's mind. Further, it suggests all good is gone, as predicted, and Dark Locke has recruited another all-too-willing bruised soul.

Lost has always loved its dichotomies. But what's fun is that the show always fudges those lines. Nothing's so arbitrary as a strict either/or on the show. Somebody's transgressing something, making "sides" look closer (or more mirrored) than they appear. Also, it's clearer all the time just how little agency's afforded in this show. Most people are manipulable; especially our "Losties." In fact, when was there a time when one of these dudes acted completely on his or her own? Has it happened? Or was Dark Locke right in that cave? Has everything been orchestrated until now? Was Charlie supposed to die by making that choice? His hand sure seemed forced if he was to protect the girl and the baby he loved. And look where that got them. The baby's an orphan, practically, though he's living with some relative, and the girl (the mom) is a lunatic hell bent on killing anybody who may or may not have had a hand in disappearing her baby boy.

I'll say this: Emilie de Ravin was much better this episode. She ate the walls around her, but at least she looked like she was having fun hamming it up as Cooky Claire. Maybe acting opposite Terry O'Quinn opened her up a bit. She's only got about one move, or maybe two, but she really went for the one note of nutso this week. The way she looks up at Kate says "calculation" as much as "sheer enmity." And that was followed up by "cookoo" when she beckoned Kate with a promise of safety away from the onrush of the smoke monster's hurtling trail of electric clicks and, well, slaughter.


It's amazing how much of the show has been setting up massacres, building an association only to rob you of it so you leave it, lost. (Yep.) Everybody's blanched now. I dig it.

Lost Light Lewton: Cat People + The Seventh Victim

by Ryland Walker Knight

[PFA's got five double bills of Val Lewton pictures over the next few weeks. See the line-up here. I've never seen any of them on a silver screen until now, so here's a little catalog/tour of this new angle on things. If you want to play along at home, the films are all on Netflix thanks to this handy box set.]

Cat People proved more popular, as ever, but The Seventh Victim's got audacity and depravity and terror in spades and in shadows all its own, all the deeper and deleterious. In more surprising turns than the Tourneur, this later, odder picture may also be the best argument for suicide ever put on film: the act is never not selfish, but the film seems to say that death's end can be a welcome and necessary release for some souls. Alternately, the sidelines of this Victim (most of which masquerade as the "a-plot" though the most poignant claims its right to speak near the close, as an aside) chant a hymn to living—in the world, with its vicissitudes and with its frights, without fear for the diurnal. But there is a pressure in this world, a cloud clamping its spirit, and it begins with the film's opening epigram, attributed as "Holy Sonnet VII" to Jonne Dunne (natch & sic): "I runne to death, and death meets me as fast, and all my pleasures are like yesterday."

The film begins in this plot, following little sister Mary (Kim Hunter's all eyes) as she searches for her missing sibling, Jacqueline. Robson and Lewton (and DeWitt Bodeen and Charles O'Neal) keep Jacqueline off screen for as long as narratively possible, and her first sighting is the briefest tease possible, which fits and throws fools for fits. She's more an idea than a person that way, kept intangible even when cloistered, impervious to the whole ball of wax rolled about her, including love. Every angle on her in the world is some kind of leeching, a pedestal or a clamp or a knife. That is, through its increasing ellipses, all things fly by like in life and demands pile up, the picture puts us in her paranoia, inside her depression, and all we understand is all that pressure from without. Mary's plight is motivated by saving her own skin, not her sister's, and once it's locked secure with that perverse reversal of fortune that is the love of Gregory Ward (Jacqueline's husband), the film drops her significance. She's played "naive" and kept a doll, at the world and Ward's surprisingly tender mercies. But it's the banal prejudices of these "betters" that keep Jacqueline tethered to life; we slowly see that their concern is just as selfish as her need to escape. It's about control, not debt. It's devastating precisely because it makes sense why this beauty might want to thud dead alone in an empty room. (So sad that Jean Brooks, too, was similarly unfit and unhappy.)

—not quite bottled, or adrift
Control is of course the theme in Cat People, too, as its Simon Simone fails herself, but that's more or less unavoidable. We are beasts of lust, the film says, bent to prey on each other. It's a fantastic metaphor, and the film's so gorgeous you can easily forget how wonky it unfurls. You cannot forget, however, how Simone's Irena does herself in because she can't handle her truth, her history, her instincts. Things get fudged all the time and every image moves eight ways; as with Victim, each scene is laden with significance to pull interpretations in as many directions as possible. See, it's not just about sex, which is where Schrader failed. Of course, sex is a huge part, and the only problem I'd pose with these two films is their rather typical structures (though each climax is muted) date the film's view on women, and sex, in obvious ways—but that's like complaining that Chandler used sentences not stanzas. Besides, any time you can turn dread productive, as with The Seventh Victim's interrogation of the death drive, you've got a curious object. If I owned the DVD, I would like to look at just how blocky the film is, how its connect-four space links up lines of thought, and how that searchlight does cleave the picture to signal the descent. After all, even the girl looking for one last night on the town has to go down (some stairs) to find it, to find some last laughs.