A Girl and a Gun

The Old, Old Stories

Two of the most ancient plot-lines in the history of story-telling are reworked in a couple of recent films, and scrape by to the extent they do not so much on originality--what new was there to say?--as on excellence of treatment, especially in the playing. 

I missed Sally Potter's last, The Man Who Cried (2000), and was not a rabid enthusiast of Orlando (1992), although I rather enjoyed The Tango Lesson (1997), admittedly in large measure because Pablo Verón was such an astonishing dancer.  Yes, which just opened in the States, is built around girl meets boy, girl loses boy, then tries to win him back.  Well, Potter had Joan Allen as the girl, which is going to help almost any picture, and Simon Abkarian, a Lebanese-born Armenian, is a refreshing new presence.  She (the only name she is given in the film) is a scientist locked into a disastrous marriage with Sam Neill--who gives a quiet, utterly persuasive performance--in London.  The husband is tom-catting around, she's humiliated and feeling abandoned, and along comes the Abkarian character, known only as He, a chef who has left war-wracked Beirut, and a career as a surgeon, for a more stable if less satisfying existence in the west.  They have a passionate affair, but She, although born in Ireland, grew up in the US, and he comes to see her as standing for all the racist, militaristic, oil-hogging Americans who are making Muslims everywhere miserable. 

Much has been made of the fact that Potter's script is in verse--iambic pentameter, occasionally blank, occasionally rhyming.  I didn't find that a problem of significance (except for the rhyming, which was sometimes distracting); the three leads took some clever writing and turned it into near-conversational English.  Problems with the dialogue arose not from it being in verse, but from it now and then being freighted with philosophically ponderous passages.  The difficulties I found with Yes stemmed from a maid who stands in for a Greek chorus, unsatisfactorily; the editing and use of gimmicky camera work (far too much slo-mo and herky/jerky/blurry cutting); and the fact that Potter can add very, very little to a story that has been told very nearly to death.  It's the one with the moral: life is hard. 

I suppose she was trying to give it a little contemporary ambiguity by making She and He not entirely likeable characters.  We sympathize with She, but with great effort; this is a woman who is the chapter out of your college freshman psychology text entitled "Narcissism," unable to go more than a breath or two without thinking about her own needs, placing herself at the center of the universe, and thus ignoring at crucial moments a supposedly beloved god-daughter and an aunt she claims to adore.  In the end, we're on her side, but it's hard to have much faith in her ability to manage her future.  He is charming and a bit of a victim, I suppose, but his anti-westernism (which seems to come out of nowhere from a man who has supposedly lived in the west for some years) has a bumper-sticker, sloganizing quality to it.  At least Potter leaves it to us to deal with these complications and to make up our own minds about the characters rather than hand us a neatly-tied package ironing out all the wrinkles.

Pablo Virzì's Caterina Goes to the City (2003, the literal translation of the original Italian title, playing in the US as Caterina in the City) is even more shiny with use: it's the coming of age story, here centered on an Italian girl of perhaps thirteen when we first see her.  Her family lives in a provincial town, but her father, a teacher and a massively insecure man who compensates with aggressive nastiness (the performance by Sergio Castellito is very fine), is transferred to Rome, where his only child goes to school.  There she is energetically recruited first by the "political" faction of girls, the ones with left-wing parents who spend their weekends at demonstrations, and then by the rich girls, who spend their weekends shopping and partying with drugs and sex.  Virzì doesn't have anything new to say here, but we get the old bromides with a smile, some occasionally crackling dialogue, and fine performances from the youngsters, who would help anyone toying with the idea of reliving adolescence grounds for a swift negative decision.  I am thinking especially of Federica Sbrenna as Daniela, the daughter of a deputy minister, and the soul of meanness and manipulation who bears far more than a passing physical resemblance to a younger Britney Spears.  We have every confidence that complications will be sorted out, more or less positively, by the end, and they are.  You have to be a real sourpuss not to find Caterina sweet, but its nutrients are thin and not going to last you long. 

Art in Hollywood

A few years ago, I heard David Mamet give a reading at the 92nd St. Y in New York, a last-minute replacement for Sam Shepard (I think the audience got the best of the deal, but onward).  In the Q&A, Mamet--fluent, amazingly quick, witty, funny--was asked the difference between working in film and working in the theater.  His answer: "The biggest difference is that when I'm working in film, I know the guys across the table who are trying to fuck me are wearing more expensive watches than I am."

Mamet has published an essay in the June issue of Harper's, not available online, but well worth the newstand price, called "Bambi vs. Godzilla: Why Art Loses in Hollywood."  It's not blindingly original, but it is so well written, and ranges so far afield into our economic and cultural premises and preoccupations, that I found it one of the better things I've read on a subject which has been under critical examination for nearly a hundred years. 

Top Forty? Surely You Jest

We all like to read criticism with which we agree: "see, I was right all along" is pleasant enough.  But there's no blinking that we also love to read criticism with which we strongly disagree, criticism we know is flat-out wrong, which gives us unlimited latitude for grumbling, speechless outrage, and nourishes that part of us which enjoys saying, "Can you believe there are people in the world this stupid?" 

I only today ran across something--not criticism, but a list by critics--that's apparently from last year, although it's not dated in any way I can see, a ranking of the forty best living directors.  Seven film critics who contribute to The Guardian rated filmmakers still breathing (some of them barely, but let that pass) on the following criteria: substance, look (of their pictures, presumably not of them personally), craft, originality, and intelligence.  Who came in first, you're dying to ask me, if you're not familiar with the results.  Well, number one, by a nose, was David Lynch.  Hoo hah.  Equally laughable was Martin Scorsese as number two, although there was some reservation expressed that "the heavyweight champion of American movies is no longer punching his weight."  I won't repeat my views on the decline and utter collapse of Marty, the tireless self-promoter, although you can get the sense of them in an exchange with Aaron over at Out of Focus here.

There are a lot of important names on the list which deserve recognition, and the European perspective of The Guardian means that we get people not well known in the US, which is laudable.  But the rankings themselves are incomprehensible.  How in the world could Lynch and Scorsese rank above Wong Kar-Wai (14), Pedro Almodóvar (15), Paul Thomas Anderson (21), Richard Linklater (31), Lars von Trier (polarizing, but hardly a mere 37th), and Gus Van Sant (who has brought forth some wretched films, from Good Will Whatsisname to Finding Forrester, but whose Elephant is worth Scorsese's whole output since The Last Temptation of Christ, 40). 

Read it and snarl.

The Evil Empire

The CEO over at lancemannion has addressed himself to a hardy perennial of our preoccupations, the current status of the creature "movie star."  He names the acknowledged stars of yesteryear (Fonda, Stewart, Grant) and sees the succession passing, pathetically, to Pitt and Jolie.  But the crux of the argument, correctly I believe, is that the great ones had vehicles that were decently put together--solid script, good direction--while today's star films are slapped together around special effects and a collection of slam-bam scenes. 

True enough, but how and why did this happen?  Let me see if I can help to frame the discussion a little.

The changes in movies were, as usual, traceable to changes in our society.  First, there was education.  After the war, it was hard to find anyone who didn't believe that a college education should be available to anyone who wanted one and was minimally qualified, a view much reinforced by the GI Bill, one of the more progressive pieces of legislation of the century.  This belief took hold because people had come to recognize that college was the great line of stratification in this country; without it, you didn't as a rule do as well as with it.  But the emphasis was increasingly upon getting a degree, or more than one--passing exams, getting good grades, graduating, passing entrance exams to professional school, getting certification that licensed you as a qualified engineer or accountant or dentist.  The emphasis upon learning for its own sake, or for the sake of sharpening your mental acuity (learning how to read and write, lost arts in much of our land these days), simply disappeared.  By 1970, I found an alarming number of students who tried to cajole me out of a poor grade by saying, "If I don't get a good grade in your course, then I can't . . ."  People didn't read because they particularly liked to read, but because certain reading was assigned.  And while once a book was recommended as "well written," or "a good story," or having "terrific characters," now it was recommended as a "page-turner," something you "can't put down," although I have often found a substantial benefit to putting a book down and thinking about what it was saying. 

Amidst all this, television, with its unmistakable similarities to the franchise outlets serving junk food that corresponded with tv's rapid and lamentable intrusion into our lives: both were cheap, convenient, required no critical faculties to get your quick sugar hit, and disastrously under-nourishing.  And, of course, both were absurdly popular.  The new medium, to which the title of this piece refers, was perfect for the new educational approach: what you were watching didn't really matter, you'd forget it in no time, it was broken up for you in convenient, bite-sized pieces, and its whole point was not this program or that, but something common to them all, something deeply American and in tune with the post-war economic boom.  Perhaps the biggest revelation of my early life was a year spent in France during the early '60s.  French television was state-operated, and without commercials.  I was immediately stunned to realize how much of the great American pastime was given over to selling. That always has and always will be the central point of television.  Anything that gets in the way doesn't last.

Television was entertainment, or at least distraction, for a nation going lazy, getting intellectual arteriosclerosis, and not giving a damn.  There was success to be pursued, money to be made, a family to get started, a house in the burbs to be purchased, "Bonanza" to watch that evening.  For all that, tv put the hurt on movies very quickly, and the industry had little choice but to respond by creating a roughly equivalent product (which could then be appropriately cut up and packaged for sale to television, often the only thing that got small movies over the financial hump).  Movies were becoming television on a large screen, and though they were not entirely subsumed--think early Scorsese, think the first two Godfathers, think Altman--it wasn't long before Johnny Carson was hosting the Oscars. 

Movie producers believed that their product required star presence for the simple reason that movies had always had star presence.  (The fact that a number of successful movies in the 1960s and early 1970s featured performers who were not yet stars by any stretch of the imagination was irrelevant.  They were quirks, lucky throws of the dice, not to be seriously considered.  I have in mind The Graduate, Bonnie and Clyde, Easy Rider, Nashville, to name a few.)  But the long-standing immortals were, alas, proving mortal, and with the exception of Clint Eastwood, whose trigger-pulling talents led at the box office for year after year, nobody comparable to Wayne or Grant or Stewart was up there on the marquees.  Nicholson, Streep, De Niro, Hoffman were all real actors who insisted on some heft in their films, but heft--at least in terms of story, themes, treatment--was in much shorter supply. 

What we got instead were new performers who became stars by default for the sole reason that their pictures had made money.  The archetype here is Rocky, where an unknown by the name of Stallone tweaked the underdog string that seems to reside in the American DNA, and the producers started putting numbers after the title and zeros after Stallone's salary.  The junk food movie had been around forever; the junk food blockbuster really came into its own in the '70s, a phenomenon solidified by Star Wars (peel away the thrill you felt at age nine when it came out and look at it critically: second-class French fries).  There were stars in these things, or people the producers hoped would become stars, but they weren't very important.  What counted were the special effects, the noise, the over-the-top incidents, and over and above all that, the marketing.  The best marketing had some kind of cultural hook to it (based on a comic book, another movie, a "true story," usually a guarantee of uplift and blandness, a best-selling novel, a television program) and at least one personality with name recognition--the director (Spielberg, Scorsese, all those filmmakers who have given up making films in order to organize events at ten dollars a ticket) or the star (our somewhat less muscular latter day version of Stallone, Tom Cruise, is a man who can act--see Rain Man, The Color of Money, and Magnolia--but perhaps understandably prefers to rake in $25 million a picture for keeping his talent under wraps). 

In these circumstances, is it any wonder that today's "stars" look a little puny, and never seem to perform up to the standards set in a different historical environment altogether?   

Life Goes On

A short piece in the Guardian Unlimited's robust online film section alerts us to the fact that the new Halliwell's Film Guide annual, while compiling a list of the thousand best films ever, put up Tokyo Story (1953) as the best of them all.  Since I think it's a fool's errand to argue the merits of films at the very highest level, the ones that are to all intents and purposes perfect, I can't exactly agree; but if you had to choose from the best of these (my own list is here), you could make as good a case for Yasujiro Ozu's masterpiece as any of them.

Tokyo Story is a quietly-stated study of family: the elderly parents come to visit children and grandchildren in a rare trip to Tokyo; the children find them an intrusion and a bother and don't have much time for them in the midst of getting on with their own lives, the grandchildren scarcely know who these people are, and the old couple don't wish to be a burden.  Ozu presents this story wrapped in an unobtrusive context of the aftermath of war and the ongoing modernization of Japanese society without ever losing the focus on family, its inevitable strains and disappointments, its inescapable centrality in our lives.  There's not a false note in the film, although having said that I can't think of a single false note in any of the fifteen or so Ozu films I've seen over the last thirty-plus years.  He understood exactly what he wanted to say and how he wanted to say it and was in complete command of his artistic vision. 

The presentation was as important as the story and always a part of it.  Ozu's camera rarely, if ever, moves (once, as I recall, in Tokyo Story), and his compositions tend to be static and unconventional.  Many of his shots are taken from about three feet above ground level, flattening out any three-dimensional illusion and giving space a different shape.  At the same time, he films conversations--a large part of all his films; these are not car-chase extravaganzas or samurai battles, but observations of contemporary middle-class life from the late 1920s when he started directing until his death in 1963--not in reversing shots, first behind one interlocutor, then the other.  He often sets up people in a row, facing the camera or back to it, and they talk without looking at each other.  Scenes do not fade out, but simply cut, often to what amount to brief still lives: the interior space now vacated by humans recently there, laundry hanging on a line and flapping in the breeze, a railroad station.  Often these interstices are oddly but powerfully affecting, full of unspoken emotional content.

Tokyo Story is a sad film.  The old couple see quickly that they're in the way, and while they try not to show their hurt, toward the end the man goes on a little bender and reveals his feelings about it.  The grown children have moments of remorse about being too busy to deal with their parents, but also accept that such is life and there's nothing to be done about it.  When the couple return home at the end, the woman becomes unexpectedly and seriously ill, and now it is time for the children to make a visit.  She dies.  Everyone grieves, especially her widowed husband, who regrets he didn't treat her a little better.  The camera picks up a boat on a river just out the window.  Life goes on much as it always has.  The End.  As you absorb the mood of composed resignation and harmonious acceptance with which Ozu conveys all this, you may realize that you've been weeping for some time. 

Not all of Ozu is so melancholy--his 1932 comedy, I Was Born, But . . . , is uproariously funny and he remade it in 1959 and in color as Ohayo, a film about farting.  But even these films were about important life episodes, a sort of passage by young boys in their understanding of their father and the real world in which he had to live as opposed to the play and fantasy world of their antics.   What I regard as his best work deals with people making their best efforts to come to terms with a life that is intractably organized to frustrate most of those efforts, because that is the way life is.  Two of his long-standing and best performers who best conveyed this situation are in Tokyo Story: Chishu Ryu as the elderly man, and Setsuko Hara as his daughter-in-law, widow of his son killed in the war.  Their tact and grace are incomparable, here as elsewhere; have a look at them as widowed father and unmarried daughter in Late Spring (1949), which contains a devastating, and perfectly understated, ending, one I guarantee you will not forget .

Criterion Films has a very fine two-DVD set on Tokyo Story, with a pair of documentaries on Ozu, one covering his entire career, including interviews with many people who worked on his films, and one with tributes from a number of well-known directors.  For much more on this singular man, try here.

A Little Gem

It was pretty hard to take a film away from Michel Simon, the great French actor first seen on the screen in 1924 and in more than a hundred films over the next fifty years.  But Claude Berri did it in his first feature, The Two of Us (Le vieil homme et l'enfant--The Old Man and the Child, 1967).  Simon's best roles tended to dwarf the films themselves because the man was so outsized, physically, emotionally, vocally, and even Renoir had trouble making us remember much about Boudu Saved from Drowning (1932) beyond Simon's work in the title role.  Simon was in his early seventies when he did this film, and he attacks his part with all the energy of a man half the age and all the canniness of one who's been perfecting his craft all those years.  Berri's work, however, was a fully realized work of art with an astounding nine-year old named Alain Cohen as the child, a setting (German-occupied France, 1943-44) that raised large moral issues, and beautiful ensemble playing.  Simon's character is important, but also only one part of a picture of la France profonde sketched in with great skill and attention to detail, all in only eighty-six minutes.  For instance, the schoolroom scenes alone go a long way to convincing us that the peasant youths being glorified by the Vichy regime were for the most part ignorant brutes. 

The Langman family (the surname with which Berri was born) is Jewish, and Claude is an only child--loved deeply by both parents, but rambunctious, given to acting first and thinking second, an impulse I am told is common at that age although of course I never indulged myself in it.  He is constantly in trouble (fights, shoplifting, that sort of thing), which brings public attention to the family, precisely what they do not want just as the round-ups of Jews escalate.  The family moves from town to town, but Claude keeps it up, and the father is driven to distraction.  When Allied bombing begins to follow them into the provinces, the safety factor is only made worse.  A sympathetic landlady has parents in their sixties who live in the deep countryside and are willing to take the boy in.  But there is a complication: her father is a right-wing die-hard, a supporter of Pétain (he claims to have fought under the Marshal at Verdun), a man who identifies France as having four "natural enemies: the English, always!  The Jews, the Freemasons, and the Bolsheviks."  So Claude changes his last name, learns the Lord's Prayer, and is instructed never to show his "birdie" (circumcised).

It turns out the Pépé (Gramps) is politically as advertised, but also a good deal else: he loves animals, and most especially his aging dog, Kanou, to the point of being a vegetarian; is playful, a fount of goofy old songs, embroiders every story about his exploits to make them more entertaining, loves nothing better than a good laugh, and for all that the Jewish slurs never stop, protective of Claude.  The boy suffers them with difficulty for a while, but figures out a way to get even that is just right for a clever nine-year old, all the while keeping his secret. 

After a year, the Allied invasion at Normandy begins, and Pépé mourns--in part, because it will send the Marshal and his authoritarian regime packing; in part, because it coincides with Kanou's demise; and in part, because the end of the war will mean that Claude will return to his parents.  Which is of course just what happens.  They come to pick him up, and the sadness in Pépé and his wife is nearly overwhelming: someone who had become essential has been taken out of their lives.  But it is Berri's final touch, which has actually been coming for a long time but still catches us unprepared, that the departure is not accompanied by any revelation of Claude's Jewishness.  It's become irrelevant, and the movie's fundamental tact and decency reside in sparing us the sort of all-men-are-brothers speech which every Hollywood scriptwriter surely has in a file drawer.  We leave the theater loving Claude and Pépé the more for valuing what they have over anything else. 

Berri went on to much greater fame as the director of Manon of the Spring (1986) and Jean de Florette (1987), among other, much bigger films, but I don't think he ever surpassed this one.  There is a lovely little appreciation by Truffaut here, worth your time.  The Two of Us finishes a short run at New York's Film Forum today,  and there will be brief screenings in San Francisco, Seattle, and Chicago; check the Rialto Films site for dates and theaters.  Alas, there is no DVD, which is a crime I hope Rialto will rectify as soon as possible. 

Anne Bancroft (1931-2005)

The obituaries of Anne Bancroft, who died yesterday at seventy-three, have mostly emphasized her rigorously independent, self-reliant streak, a woman who recognized reasonably young that if you took any of what the New York Times calls bull----, from anybody at any time, you had only yourself to blame.  Interestingly, although knowing almost nothing about her personally until these stories marking her death, that is the premier quality I would have identified in her as an actress.  Again and again, her characters staked out positions in her own terms, and struggle with maintaining them as the characters might, you could sense her inner strength and commitment.  Whether or not the character was conventionally sympathetic or not, you could not help but admire the resolve.

Obits have largely emphasized her peak years as the 1960s, and truly The Miracle Worker (1962) was stunning work, one of those rare Oscars that deserved the recognition; she was also extremely fine in The Pumpkin Eater (1964) and of course as the legendary Mrs. Robinson, immortalized by her own talent, Dustin Hoffman's skillful pose of bewilderment in the face of middle-aged lust (Bancroft was only thirty-six at the time), and Paul Simon's lyrics, in The Graduate (1967).  But if you overlook The Turning Point (1977) and especially 84 Charing Cross Road (1986), you're missing out on some of her best work.  I'm especially fond of the latter film, in part because she so faithfully translates (not copies, translates) the voice of Helen Hanff's book of the same title into the cinematic idiom.  I think the book is still in print, and if you love books and don't know it, get acquainted.

The depth and texture of Bancroft's best work makes a great deal of what passes for acting throughout the length of her career pale.  She was a dedicated artist with the talent to match her devotion to her work; not many of those around. 

A Royal Triumph

The two new releases I have seen this year that tower above all the rest are both French.  Agnès Jouai's Look at Me is a scintillating comedy of manners, and we should be so lucky as to see an American film this good in the rest of 2005.  But even it is dwarfed by Arnaud Desplechin's Kings and Queen (Rois et reine),  which opened on a grand total of five screens nationwide beginning May 13 and in its first two weeks grossed just under $50,000, a take which I suspect would not cover Angelina Jolie's weekly collagen budget. 

Nora is a devastatingly beautiful thirty-five-year old art gallery owner who begins by telling us, in voice-over narration, some pertinent facts of her life thus far.  We start seeing  some of the events of earlier years in flashback and dream sequences, and we meet some of the people she mentions.  Much of what what we learn in these ways either contradicts or raises serious doubts about the truth of what she tells us at the outset; to complicate matters further, some of the flashbacks contradict what earlier ones have appeared to tell us.  In parallel sequences, we follow the adventures of her former lover, Ismaël, most of which take place in a mental hospital. 

The dramatic engine of the film is the illness of Nora's beloved father, a writer being rapidly devoured by cancer of the stomach and bowel.  As the disease inexorably takes him toward death, the flashbacks take us through earlier crises in Nora's life, her struggle with what to do about her ten-year-old son, Elias, born to a lover who died before his birth, and Ismaël's efforts to get himself from the hospital (where it is not entirely clear he does not belong, at least at the outset).  But every scene colors what we think we know, either by substantive information or by shadings and hints or by visual references.  Desplechin uses every trick in the book--camera work, editing, music--and acknowledges cinematic influences from Bergman to Hitchcock and Woody Allen.  Kings and Queen is two and a half hours in length, but so much happens in every engrossing scene that it's over before it begins. 

I am obviously going to some lengths here to keep from springing any of the major surprises that Desplechin pulls out of his hat; this summary is therefore bound to sound a little abstract.  But I do not know of a film that, for all its allusions to literature and art and classical mythology and philosophy and psychoanalysis, is more a celebration of the concrete, the vast collection of detail that makes up the richness of human life.  It is messy, but only in the way life is messy, littered with ambiguities and paradox and uncertainties.  In telling this beautiful and absorbing story, Desplechin is hugely aided by stunning work from a big cast.  Most on view are the two leads, Emmanuelle Devos and Mathieu Amalric, both of whom repeatedly find new depths and dimensions to their characters, but they are aided by terrific work in smaller parts by Hippolyte Girardot as Ismaël's antic lawyer, Jean-Paul Roussilon as Ismaël's father, and Else Woliaston as Ismaël's shrink.

In New York, Kings and Queen--the title suggests the four males in Nora's life, who turn out to be not the four you might identify at the outset, typical of the film's sleight of hand--is playing at the Cinema Village on 12th Street.  If it departs before you can get there, as I urge you to do, mark it down on your Netflix wishlist for when the DVD makes its appearance. 

Real Life

This shocking bulletin just in from A.O. Scott in today's New York Times: American distributors have picked up few of the interesting international releases shown at Cannes this year in part because of US filmgoers "shy away from anything they think will be difficult or disturbing."  The doggedly sunny Scott insists that he is hopeful of a turnaround, although for my part it is hard to find any grounds for such hope in a culture so reality-denying, self-referential, and--to borrow a term recently applied to us by British novelist Hilary Mantel--"God-besotted."

Consider the fate of Time Out (L'emploi du temps, 2001--the French title means timetable or schedule), a very fine little study of work in the modern world which made the festival circuit in Europe before an indifferent US release the following year, although in general critics here loved it.  Vincent is a fortyish father of three living comfortably in southeastern France.  Why then does he sleep in his SUV and lie to his wife about his whereabouts and doings in the course of the day?  This being France, we may guess a romantic entanglement, but it's something more serious.  Actually, Vincent has been fired from his job in a management consulting firm and cannot bear to tell his family, principally because of his morbid fear of "disappointing."  Trying to put a bright look on his future, he hints at a new job in nearby Switzerland, where he actually goes--ostensibly for an interview, but actually just to work up enough specifics and jargon about a non-existent job in a non-existent organization.  His wife, his children, his parents are all delighted.  Then things get worse, because non-existent jobs pay notoriously low wages.  So Vincent dreams up investment "opportunities" associated with "his firm" which he pitches to close friends, old school chums and others who trust him, and uses the money to live on.  This scheme can only result in disaster, which Vincent refuses to face. 

There are a few rough spots here, especially the ease with which Vincent attracts his imprudent friends to these essentially blind investments--has nobody in Europe learned anything from the American high-tech bubble of the late 1990s?--and with which his intelligent, curious wife is distracted from trying to find out more about his work and how he spends each week over the border.  There is also an ending which resolves, or appears to resolve, matters a little too neatly.  But Time Out is more a matter of atmospherics and psychological textures than of razor-sharp plotting.  It captures the anomie of contemporary middle-management capitalism, where you never know quite what you're doing for whom and whether it's a good thing or bad, where work is involved more with abstractions than with production of goods and services.  Vincent admits that he never really cared that much for his old consulting job, that the part he really liked was being in his car, driving to and from work--enclosed, in control, doing something concrete and measureable.  We can see, then, why spending his time driving back and forth to Switzerland and to other cities in his region he is comfortable, able to ignore the contradictions of his life. 

The mounting, but still quiet, tension of the film was engrossing and made more so by Aurélien Recoing's portrayal of Vincent.  We can feel his helplessness, his emptiness, his desperate fear of being diminished in the eyes of his family, of having to face the consequences of his own disastrous decisions, feel it all without finding it unbelievable that he has put himself in this spot.  It is precisely the fact that we have all denied what we know to be reality at some time or another that makes us recognize and sympathize with this man's plight, though in the process it is just possible we will encounter concerns within ourselves about how worthwhile our work is and whether it appropriately rewards us on non-material levels--concerns we may prefer not to bring to the surface.  The film is certainly "difficult and disturbing," which is of course why it stays with us, and should, in a way escapist trash never can or will.  I have heard, times without number, people say that when they go to a movie (or read a book), they are looking to be set free from the cares of everyday life for a few hours.  Fine, except that, like any immoderate diet, this one will have its side-effects.  Art exists among other reasons to connect us with humanity, including that part of our own that we may have lost touch with because we have lost the sense of our common humanity with our fellows.  Good reason for not turning off our brains and for looking around, seeing what the world has to offer.

Along very much the same lines, Jim Shepard--whose film writing every few months in The Believer I am coming to see as essential--has a terrific piece in the May issue called "Saving Private Ryan and the Politics of Deception." His closing argument includes these lines: ". . . we're being fooled because we've chosen to be entertained, rather than be made to think.  And since we've chosen to be entertained, rather than to be made to think, we're not really being fooled. . . .  It's not news that we're trained by our popular culture to accept pleasant fictions.  It is discomfiting to have to acknowledge every so often, though, just how happily complicitous we are in our own hoodwinking." Sorry, no link to the full article available without subscription.