January 18, 2010
Alain Resnais (French Film Directors) by Emma Wilson
In Alain Resnais, author Emma Wilson presents an incisive and comprehensive analysis of Resnais's recurring themes of memory, plasticity, construction, and fragmentation. By placing contemporary history within the broader context of capturing internal states and subjective reality, Wilson proposes a means of reconciling Resnais's more experimental, overtly political postwar films (through the 1960s) with his later, more hermetic and theatrical aesthetic, where the collective trauma and projected desire of his early films pave the way for the nostalgia and lyricality of his post Stavinsky work:
Resnais is fascinated by mental or subjective images, the virtual reality which makes up individual consciousness and is itself composed of both what we have known and what we have imagined. This interest in the finest workings of the mind - in the mind itself as an internal cinema where images both virtual and real coexist - calls for an extraordinary reshaping of cinema and rethinking of the capacity of film to show us reality as it is imagined, as well as lived.
Beginning with an analysis of Resnais's short film documentaries from 1948 to 1958 - which range from such seemingly diverse subjects as artist profile (Van Gogh and Paul Gauguin) art (Guernica), culture (Les Statues meurent aussi), the Holocaust (Nuit et brouillard), the national library system (Toute la mémoire du monde), and polystyrene manufacturing (Le Chant du Styrène) - Wilson argues that the documentaries are integrally connected by the idea of (re)animation. In Guernica, the fragmentation of the painting reflects the inadequacy of representing collective trauma that foreshadows Hiroshima mon amour. In Nuit et brouillard, the juxtaposition of photographic stills with film footage creates ambiguity between life and death that, in turn, evokes the tragedy of the concentration camps. In Les Statues meurent aussi, the film is less a survey of African art than a reflection on cultural phantoms that have been lost in the face of colonialism and commercialization.
The death of statues is illustrated also in the opening images of the film where we see statues from western art, fragmented, the title seeming to refer to a Proustian sense of the friability of even hard matter, through time. In both motifs in the film, statues are rendered peculiarly animate (in particular, in Resnais’s moving shots which circle the material objects). Resnais introduces this uncanny theme of hesitation between life and death, flesh and stone, which will recur in his films as he shows ash-covered figures in Hiroshima, statues and shadows at Marienbad. In Les Statues meurent aussi, this material concern shadows the more trenchant awareness of the loss and embalming of a living civilization.
Moreover, in highlighting the symbiotic relationship between the living and inanimate in Hiroshima mon amour, Wilson introduces the idea of dislocating trauma from a specific, personal (and cultural) level towards a more amorphous, collective consciousness that runs through Resnais's films, a theme that is also captured in her analysis of Toute la mémoire du monde :
In Toute la mémoire du monde, Resnais propagates a notion of collective memory, of a ‘mémoire universelle’. He shows, obliquely how the shots of his own films are always already familiar, part of this cultural meting-pot or memory bank. His films will recall torture scenes in Goya, the bodily horror of passages in Kafka. His will be a collaged art, glimpsed first by a wider public as he edits together Van Gogh, pursued in the editing of Guernica and Nuit et brouillard. Resnais's response to the traumas of the twentieth-century history is particular: he recognizes the fear of forgetting, the blow dealt to memory, yet retains and refuses to relinquish the resonances of art, literature and popular culture, the fabric from which cultural memory is continually re-shaped.
In the chapter on Hiroshima mon amour, Wilson insightfully argues that the dislocation is manifested in Resnais's films through cities that are as equally identifiable through images of iconic sites as they are interchangeable in their representations of urban spaces. In Hiroshima mon amour, the A-bomb dome is juxtaposed against the city's rebuilt commercial district, creating parallel strands of time that mirror the protagonist's unreconciled personal and collective memories of Nevers and Hiroshima.
Similarly, Boulogne and Algeria are also integrally connected in Muriel ou le temps d'un retour through suppressed personal and collective trauma, an intrinsic violence that Wilson proposes is revealed through Resnais's jarring editing and soundtrack that reinforce the atrocity of the Algerian War through the film's idiosyncratic aesthetic of "visual mutilation".
In her essay on L’Année dernière à Marienbad, Wilson provides an insightful analysis on the implication of Resnais's creative disagreement with screenwriter Alain Robbe-Grillet over his decision not to film the climactic rape sequence and instead, culminate the scene with a repeating shot of A opening her arms to X. While on the surface, the substitution radically transforms A's station from victim to liberated woman, Wilson argues that the action is ambiguous and unsettling, implying a dark psychology more in-line with folie à deux than feminist icon:
For me, there is no liberation in L’Année dernière à Marienbad, thought here may be an act of transgression, and movement into the unknown. What is radical about the film is not the liberation of A, about which I am doubtful, but its gradual intimation that she, like the heroine of Hiroshima mon amour may seek a love which devours and deforms her, that she may be an actor and not an object in the relation that is generation by the dialogue between lovers. This is disturbing to X, disrupting his authorship, letting him be fantasized as rapist by his lover. Yet it is also, surely, disturbing to A - and to the viewers - who see her participation in a fantasy by which she is destroyed.
Posted at 5:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Filed under 2010, Film Related Reading
January 9, 2010
Favorite Films of 2009
After a semi-accidental unmasking at a NYFF panel in 2008, it seems natural that Benoît Jacquot's Villa Amalia would be the first film I had seen in 2009 that would resonate with me, a film as much about abandoning identity as it is about finding one’s place in the aftermath. In a sense, the films on this year's list also revolve around the theme of identity, whether reconstructed through the imperfect prism of personal and cultural history (The White Ribbon, Independencia, The Beaches of Agnès, and Broken Embraces), or constantly redefined by the roles and spaces (and junctures) that they inhabit (In Comparison, Ghost Town, Everyone Else, Sense of Architecture, and 35 Shots of Rum).
Favorite Films (in preferential order):
The White Ribbon (Michael Haneke, 2009)
In Comparison (Harun Farocki, 2009)
Independencia (Raya Martin, 2009)
35 Shots of Rum (Claire Denis, 2008)
Villa Amalia (Benoît Jacquot, 2009)
Ghost Town (Zhao Dayong, 2009)
Everyone Else (Maren Ade, 2009
Sense of Architecture (Heinz Emigholz, 2005-2009)
Broken Embraces (Pedro Almodóvar, 2009)
The Beaches of Agnès (Agnès Varda, 2008)
Honorable Mentions (in alphabetical order):
Bellamy (Claude Chabrol, 2009)
Eccentricities of a Blond Hair Girl (Manoel de Oliveira, 2009)
Liverpool (Lisandro Alonso, 2009)
Police, Adjective (Corneliu Porumboiu, 2009)
Wild Grass (Alain Resnais, 2009)
Close Contenders:
The Hurt Locker (Kathryn Bigelow, 2008)
Un Lac (Philippe Grandrieux, 2008)
Ne Change Rien (Pedro Costa, 2009)
Revanche (Götz Spielmann, 2008)
Sacred Places (Jean-Marie Téno, 2009)
New Discoveries:
Seventeen (Joel DeMott and Jeff Kreines, 1983)
Torero (Carlos Velo, 1956)
Death on a Full Moon Day (Prasanna Vithanage, 1997)
Paria (Nicolas Klotz, 2000)
On the Passage of a Few Persons Through a Rather Brief Unity of Time (Guy Debord, 1959)
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Part of Senses of Cinema 2009 World Poll.
Posted at 11:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (5) | Filed under 2009
December 28, 2009
Marguerite Duras (French Film Directors) by Renate Günther
In Marguerite Duras, author Renate Günther examines Marguerite Duras's films from the perspective of interweaving politics and memory that runs through her body of work. Born in Gia-Dinh in French Indochina (now Vietnam), the only daughter of emigrant teachers Emile and Marie Donnadieu who moved to the colonies in search of a better life, Duras's early life would be marked by the intersection of the personal and political - first, as a member of the working class who better identified with the indigenes than with other colonialists in their exclusion from bourgeois colonial society (especially after the family fell into poverty following her father's death), and subsequently as a young woman in occupied France who became involved with the resistance and the plight of Jewish people in World War II. Indeed, even her adopted pen name of Duras, assumed from a childhood village where the Donnadieu family had resettled after her father's illness, reveals an element of autobiographic fictionalization that characterizes her work:
Although Duras transformed her experience into art, she did not do so by simply telling the 'story of her life', as she did not believe that the chaos of memory could or should be subjugated to the contrived order of a linear and logically structured novelistic or filmic narrative. Instead she isolated significant moments in her life and condensed them, in fictionalized form, into the recurring scenarios that run through the texts of her films. This repetition with variations of the same core material is one of the hallmarks of Duras's work, as she creates clusters of references through which texts and films mirror and transform one another.
A familiar instance of this process of fictional condensation and repetition is embodied by the recurring iconic character, Anne-Marie Stretter who appears in Duras's novels La Ravissement de Lol V. Stein, Le Vice-consul, and L'Amant, and also in her film, India Song. Inspired by Elisabeth Streidter, the wealthy, strikingly beautiful Swiss wife of a provincial administrator whose daughters were close to Duras's age (as well as the unrequited object of desire of a young man who committed suicide), Stretter not only represented the socioeconomic ideal of the colonial bourgeoisie that the Donnadieus were excluded from, but also Duras's ambivalent relationship with her mother, whose attention and devotion were largely lavished on her eldest brother, Pierre, at the expense of the younger children.
However, rather than creating fictionalized versions of autobiographical episodes, Duras emphasizes the disjunction through dissociation, desynchronization, and non-linearity, creating the aesthetic of voix off in which off-screen voices are used in lieu of synchronized sound to accompany the visual track and maintain separation between image and sound:
Duras's filmic technique, then, illustrates her view that cinema is not a transparent reflection of the world, but a highly complex construct which should be presented as such. But the gap between voice and image does more than merely show the artificial nature of cinema. It also creates an unsettling feeling of dislocation within the spectator's own sense of identity which, for the duration of the film, loses its usual cohesion and unity. Duras's films demonstrate that the notion of a stable coherent self or 'subject' is, in fact, an illusion which, in Western patriarchal cultures at least, has been used by dominant social groups to reinforce their position of power over those who have been defined as 'the object', 'the other'.
As with the fictional incarnation of Stretter, the composite autobiographical episodes from Duras's childhood would similarly form the recurring image of the beggar woman whose fictionalized biography is recounted in India Song and Son nom de Venise dan Calcutta désert: a desperate Vietnamese woman, near death, who had handed her equally gravely ill child over to Duras's mother (Duras ended up caring for the child who died a few days later), and an emaciated, screaming beggar woman known as "la folle de Vinhlong" who, for Duras, symbolized the fear of mental illness (and implicitly, the sense of helplessness) that she harbored throughout her life. But more importantly, the beggar woman also represents a stateless and disenfranchisement that expound on Duras's recurring themes of class and division, as illustrated in her transposition as a drifter in Le Camion and more loosely, by the unseen, immigrant sanitation workers who sweep the pre-dawn streets of Paris in Les Mains négatives:
The theme of racist oppression and exclusion in Le Camion is also reflected in the film's location, since the lorry's journey takes us through a region inhabited entirely by immigrants, including a large Portuguese community. As Duras explained, the latter used to live in caravans near the railway station at Plaisir, but were evicted and rehoused in the grandes ensembles, the blocks of flats which we occasionally see in the film. Exiled from their native country and subsequently excluded from mainstream French society, the immigrants are condemned to live in this desolate landscape, evoked in the text by the woman's repeated vision of 'la fin du monde', 'the end of the world'.
Indeed, inasmuch as Duras's films all contain a political dimension, Le Camion is perhaps the most overtly personal response to a political autobiography - her own estrangement from the PCF (Parti Communiste Français) - featuring a truck driver whose hardline membership in the PCF unconsciously perpetuates the artificial divisions inherent in a monolithic identity:
This denunciation of political power in Le Camion begins with Duras's vehement criticism of the PCF which can be traced back to her resignation and subsequent expulsion from the party in 1950, after her seven-year experience as a fervent activist. The sense of loss she experienced following this episode was exacerbated by the fact that for her the PCF had become a substitute family, creating a strong personal identification in addition to her political commitment.
Similarly, Nathalie Granger also represents a personal and political convergence, this time, within the context of the post 1968 French feminist movement, the publishing of the solidarity petition in Le Nouvel observateur in 1971 to protest outdated abortion laws from the 1920s, and the 1972 mass demonstrations in Paris against the trivialization of rape in the French judicial system. Citing the duality intrinsic in the women's insular environment, suggesting both imprisonment and utopia, repression and violence (reinforced through the broadcast news of escaped convicts that accompany the extended shots of domestic chores), Günther provides an insightful and exhaustive deconstruction of the film's structure and its process of illustrating, diagnosing, and finally refiguring the mechanics of social class and gender roles.
The notion of gender as performance is clearly relevant to Nathalie Granger, as Depardieu's slightly exaggerated gestures and facial expressions constantly remind us not only that he is an actor, but also that the male figure he represents is acting out the role of the salesman as part of this gendered spectacle. The sharp contrast, furthermore, between the man's initially confident performance and his subsequent vulnerability in front of the women also foregrounds this discrepancy between his spurious masculinity and the fundamental humanity he shares with Isabelle and her friend. It is evident, then, that the women's implicit violence is not directed at the man personally, but rather at a society that imposes such a rigid prescription of gendered behavior on a multitude of different individuals.
...At the end of the film then, Duras transcends the barriers of both gender and class by creating a relationship of mutual understanding between a working-class man and two middle-class women. The oppositional categories of the Symbolic order become irrelevant, as the man reconnects with his 'femininity', just as the women's anger and violence are an expression of their 'masculinity'.
Posted at 10:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Filed under 2009, Film Related Reading
December 16, 2009
Los Condenados, 2009
The delineation between reality and mythology, ideal and application also provides the catalyst for Isaki Lacuesta's first fiction film, Los Condenados (The Condemned). The rupture is prefigured in the opening image of a gaunt, Argentinean expatriate, Martín (Daniel Fanego) undergoing a CT scan at a Spanish hospital, the implication of cancer suggesting a hidden, indefinable turmoil that continues to haunt the consciousness. For Martín, the sickness resurfaces in a message from longtime friend and former guerilla fighter, Raúl (Arturo Goetz), inviting him to an excavation of mass graves under the ruse of a university-sponsored archaeological dig in the remote countryside to search for the desaparecidos, in particular, a comrade named Ezequiel who went missing after being kidnapped by the state some thirty years earlier during the "dirty war". With Ezequiel's widow, Andrea (Leonor Manso) and mother, Luisa (Juana Hidalgo) in tow, Raúl has also enlisted the aid of Vicky (María Fiorentino), a dissident who, like Martín, had been held captive in a network of undisclosed jungle prisons. Idolized by the younger generation, especially Vicky's son Pablo (Nazareno Casero), Martín's complacency and distraction proves a stark contrast to his reputation as elusive rebel leader and ideological godfather - a friction that forces them to re-evaluate their own imperfect memories over their mutual, buried past. In its elliptical, organic structure and images of the jungle as a metaphor for interiority, Los Condenados suggests kinship with Lisandro Alonso's Los Muertos and Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Moreover, inasmuch as Vargas's homecoming reframes the intrigue of his past into the banal in Los Muertos, Martín's journey also represents a demythification. Curiously, it is this dismantling of the heroic myth that also resolves the mystery of the disappearances, confronting the romanticism of failed revolution and, in the process, reconciling the hidden spaces between history and memory.
Posted at 8:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Filed under 2009, Spanish Cinema Now
December 15, 2009
Torero, 1956
Refining the theme of documented reality and reconstructed history introduced in his earlier film, Moroccan Romance, Carlos Velo's reflective and ecstatic Torero is equally an autobiography on charismatic Mexican bullfighter, Luis Procuna, and an unvarnished examination of bullfighting culture. Presented as an extended interior monologue as an anxious Procuna prepares to return to the ring after a prolonged absence caused by injury, as well as the unexpected death of cerebral, renowned Spanish bullfighter and admired contemporary, Manolete, the film seamlessly interweaves past and present, archival footage and re-enactment. Chronicling Procuna's rise from abject poverty (underscoring the correlation between bullfighting and escapism that also runs through Llorenç Soler's 52 Sundays), makeshift training, inauspicious debut, and personal and professional milestones, Velo incisively captures the ambivalent, often contradictory nature of the collective spectacle, where the relationship between the bullfighter and the audience proves to be as fickle and mercurial as the bulls themselves. Velo illustrates this ephemerality through two near real-time sequences that figuratively bookend Procuna's career - first, as a third-billed performer who emerges from the shadows after injuries cut short the main attraction, then subsequently, as a famous bullfighter nearing the end of his career who is goaded into returning to the ring, only to be jeered when his performance proves to be cautious. Juxtaposed against images of Procuna's humble aspirations - his childhood home, his mother's memorial, his loving family - Velo presents as thoughtful allegory for the fragile, often arbitrary delineation between humanity and mythology, where transcendence, like truth, lies in the inconstant eye of the beholder.
Posted at 4:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Filed under 2009, Carlos Velo, Spanish Cinema Now
December 14, 2009
Almadrabas, 1934
Carlos Velo and Fernando G. Mantilla's quietly observed documentary, Almadrabas loosely prefigures Agnès Varda's La Pointe courte in capturing the rhythm and rituals of a small fishing village. Ostensibly titled after the Moorish word describing the structure of nets, the film follows the product cycle of canned tuna - from the fishermen who go out to sea to trawl the ocean, to the fishmongers who clean and dress the fish for curing and sale, to the cannery workers who cook, season, and package them in tins for export. As the title suggests, Almadrabas also illustrates the interconnectedness of the village, both as a close knit community and as workers contributing to the town's primary industry. In a way, Velo and Mantilla's idiosyncratic use of amplified ambient sounds, most notably in the cadence of water droplets and the undifferentiated white noise of machinery, anticipates Ritwik Ghatak's use of allusive sounds as a reflection of internal states. However, rather than imposing a psychological framework, Velo and Mantilla allude to an integrally sociopolitical context in their juxtaposition of village life and commerce, figuratively aligning the circumstances of the villagers with those of the hapless fish captured in their highly efficient nets, destined to feed the insatiable appetites of an anonymous, consumer-driven global economy.
Posted at 8:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Filed under 2009, Carlos Velo, Spanish Cinema Now
Moroccan Romance, 1939
Filmed during the Spanish Civil War, Carlos Velo and Enrique Domínguez Rodiño's Moroccan Romance (Romancero marroquí) bears the imprint of Robert Flaherty's ethnographic documentaries in its distilled (if manipulated) images of a distant, exotic - and exoticized - culture. Part colonialist travelogue on aspects of life in contemporary Morocco (and implicitly, the benefits of imposed western culture on the native population in such areas as medicine and the local economy) and part recruitment propaganda extolling the virtues of a franquista revolution, the film reflects what author Marsha Kinder describes as the idiosyncrasies of Spanish documentary in its malleable fusion of real and constructed history. Composed of seemingly disparate segments - a panorama of Morrocan customs, a human interest story on a Moroccan farmer, Aalima, who volunteers to serve in Franco's army, a youth march in Spain - the film's fractured construction invariably reflects its complicated production history, specifically, Carlos Velo's precarious role as a leftist republican covertly working on a commissioned project that promotes a nationalist agenda. Forced to flee the protectorate before the editing of the film to avoid exposure (Velo would eventually live in exile in Mexico), Velo nevertheless asserts his unmistakable aesthetic in the spare compositions and textured landscapes that capture the quotidian, even as jingoistic sermons on colonialist unity, romanticized images of war, and a sobering epilogue depicting youth military exercises that trivialize warfare as a series of role-playing exercises undercut the film's essential, humanist tone.
Posted at 5:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Filed under 2009, Carlos Velo, Spanish Cinema Now
November 21, 2009
The Overcoat, 1952
In an early sequence in Alberto Lattuada's The Overcoat, the mayor (Giulio Stival) relishes the idea of history having to be rewritten as a result of an archaeologist's discovery of ancient artifacts that had been unearthed during the groundbreaking of his commissioned, large-scale urbanization project. Designed to transform the landscape of the town's main square - one that strategically obstructs the view to the impoverished, outlying suburbs - in time for a dignitary's official visit, the project receives overwhelming support from the council despite its steep price tag in the belief that the investment would elevate the city's status on a national level. This idea of exploitive economics and window dressing as a means of gaining respect and dignity also foreshadows the plight of lowly office clerk, De Carmine (Renato Rascel whose reluctant purchase of a handsomely styled, fur-trimmed overcoat from the local tailor (having been unable to convince him to repair his well worn, but still functional overcoat) unexpectedly gains him entry into the rarefied world of high society. Retaining Nikolai Gogol's idiosyncratic fusion of social commentary, wry humor, and gothic tale, Lattuada, nevertheless, diverges from the dreamlike narrative of Gogol's short story, and instead, frames De Carmine's bumbling encounters as a realistic, if satirical, exposition on the arbitrary and superficial nature of privilege and exclusion. Transplanting Gogol's cautionary tale from nineteenth century St. Petersburg to contemporary Italy, Lattuada creates an incisive allegory for the underlying reality of postwar reconstruction and its inequitable human cost under the illusion of collective rebuilding, cultural development, and social progress.
Posted at 8:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Filed under 2009, Alberto Lattuada, Ancillary Film Notes
November 2, 2009
A Lake, 2008
With a Russian cast, minimal French dialogue, and geographically ambiguous setting, Philippe Grandrieux's A Lake (Un Lac), like his multilingual preceding film, La Vie nouvelle, expounds on the notion of a borderless cinema - one that not only dismantles the man-made frontiers between nations and cultures, but also the boundaries between image and sound, material and light, logic and instinct. And like the indeterminate chronology of La Vie nouvelle, A Lake also takes place in a hermetic environment that seems equally primordial and post-apocalyptic, where human interaction is reduced to its essence: a knowing glance, a comforting touch, a frenzied exertion, an anguished cry.
In A Lake, the figurative Garden of Eden is a barren, winter forest shrouded in mist where a lumberjack, Alexi (Dmitry Kubasov) lives in a remote cabin near a lake. Prone to increasingly frequent bouts of epilepsy, Alexi's trips to the woods are as much a necessary ritual for survival as it is a rugged communion with nature, often ending up burrowed by convulsions into the snow until the seizure passes and he is able to walk home. There are other members in the household - a blind mother, Liv (Simona Huelsemann), a returning father, Christian (Vitaly Kishchenko), a younger brother, Johannes (Artur Semay) - but they all remain in the periphery, drifting in an out of his searching gaze, and only his sister and soul mate, Hege (Natalie Rehorova) can penetrate his frustration and despair over a body that continues to betray him. It is a lonely, if reassuring and predictable existence until a stranger, Jurgen (Alexei Solonchev) comes into their lives and, like the felled trees in the forest, momentarily, but irreparably, disturbs their fragile paradise.
Loosely reminiscent of Aleksandr Sokurov's Mother and Son in its invocation of Caspar David Friedrich's gothic landscapes to convey a sense of profound isolation, intimacy, and longing, A Lake, nevertheless, remains very much a Grandrieux film, bearing his singular imagery of synaptic, perturbating camerawork, defocused framing, and liminal compositions that transform everyday movements and rhythms into a frisson of textured, abstract impulses that feed the senses. Eschewing the moral ambiguity and transgressive nature of his earlier films, A Lake also represents an aesthetic shift in Grandrieux's cinema towards the idea of nature as integral character: a transition that is implied in Alexi's recitation of a passage about the unity of the soul between man and beast, as well as his lack of dominion over the ephemeral forces of nature. It is this image of humanity receding into the environment that ultimately creates the visceral poetry of A Lake, capturing the body as landscape in all its gestures and paroxysms, contours and spaces, violence and ecstasy.
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First posted on AFI Fest Daily News, 10/01/09.
Posted at 2:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | Filed under 2009, Ancillary Film Notes, Philippe Grandrieux
October 18, 2009
Broken Embraces, 2009
Ingeniously constructed as parallel metafilms - one, Ray X's (Rubén Ochandiano) behind the scenes documentary that illustrates the intersection (and disjunction) between reality and fiction; the other, Mateo's (Lluís Homar) reconstruction of a doomed film project made 14 years earlier that reflects the role of the filmmaker as archaeologist and conjurer - Pedro Almodóvar's wry, multivalent, and voluptuous Broken Embraces is also a poignant rumination on grief, guilt, and loss. The theme of duality is prefigured in Mateo's adoption of the name Harry Caine, his screenwriter alterego, after a tragic accident that left him blind, as well as office secretary, Lena's adoption of the pseudonym Severine (in a playful nod to Luis Buñuel's Belle de jour) when she moonlights as a call girl to help pay for the mounting expenses incurred by her father's terminal illness.
This assumption of persona is also implied in an early episode of Lena trying out assorted costumes that emulate iconic images of Hollywood actresses as part of her screen test for Mateo's film project, Girls and Suitcases (a reflexive reworking of Almodóvar's earlier film, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown), simultaneously evoking Blake Edwards's Breakfast at Tiffany's in Lena's literal and figurative prostitution to her employer turned lover, Ernesto (José Luis Gómez) that is as motivated by financial necessity as it is by gratitude, as well as Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo in Mateo's attempt to conform Lena to the image of his creative vision and desire. It is interesting to note that the idea of projected desire is also revisited in the episodes of Ernesto spying on Lena through his son's unsynced documentary footage with the help of a neutral lip reader - an image that not only finds affinity with Chantal Akerman's recurring theme of "who speaks for the woman", but also converges into a sublime double projection when Lena enters the room and repeats her on-camera declaration in person, in essence, supplanting the image with the real. It is this transformation that perhaps best captures the haunting closing image of a reinvigorated Mateo against a magnified, recovered footage from the accident - revealing, not only a longing to suspend time and reconfigure the past, but also, in casting his own shadow against the projected image, an invocation.
Posted at 2:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Filed under 2009, New York Film Festival
