robert carlyle film festival: the beach

Back when I worked at the bookstore we used to hand-sell this book like mad. Smart hipsters would come in (this was Portland at century's turn) asking for a summer read and we'd head straight for Alex Garland. It's the story of a kid searching for adventure in Thailand, being given a map to a secret Shangri-la by a crazy man just before he offs himself, then taking a beautiful French girl and her boyfriend with him on a quest to find the place. This was Garland's first novel, he was still a kid, really, but his voice was already strong, his narrative well-structured, his hunger for philosophical inquiry ignited, his sensibility a little stranger and smarter than most, and he hadn't yet launched into wild-exploration mode as he did with Tesseract and Coma, worthy works but less readily accessible than the Beach, lacking in its buoyant, dangerous vivacity.

Then the movie came out, and we couldn't give the damn thing away.

I missed it in the cinema at the time, and now I wish I hadn't. It seems to me (from my far-off recollection) that it follows the letter of the novel rather exactly, while missing its spirit almost completely. The then-nascent Danny Boyle gives it the interestingly-skewed but lushly beautiful cinematography and flow of a music video, and when you're done, that's what it feels like you've seen.

That's too harsh, though. It has more to offer than I thought. Boyle is intrepid at the helm, albeit navigating down an ill-chosen canal; Tilda Swinton gives Sal, the island's Big Kahuna, a bold and cryptic turn which is entirely appropriate and delivers her with such lucid comportment that the character feels full and true despite limited screen-time. DiCaprio, on the other hand, misses plumbing that deep well of inner darkness the hero needs to plumb in order to carry the story.

All in all, the movie loses the book's creeping, Lord-of-the-Flies sense of menace and we wind up with a cadre of Euro-narcissists in their own private seaside resort, making it difficult to care about outcomes.

Robert Carlyle plays the catalytic trickster who calls himself Daffy Duck, takes a shine to the serious young hero (a hero more thoughtful in the book than the film, in which he seems less introspective than the plot requires) and leaves a map to paradise as a parting legacy before opening his veins in a squalid Bangkok bedsit. He has only one scene then a sort of reprise as a dream-character later, and brings to it all his psychotic intensity, which is considerable. Boyle lights him well in his early scene, eerily and strongly, because this instigating moment is crucial, and if we don't buy it, the movie is a goner.

But we do buy it, against the odds, since the script seems, well, daffily lightweight in its logic, having lost in translation the truth of yearning communicated in the novel. When Daffy speaks of the perfection of the beach, a perfection which has driven him somehow mad, the weight is in the delivery, not the words themselves. Carlyle has once again so thrown all his heft into his role that he drags the script up a notch with him through sheer torque and will-power.

His magic doesn't stretch far enough to save the film, of course, which is, however, not the catastrophe I was always led to believe. And sometimes even a bad movie leads to good things: in this case, the later fruitful pairing of Garland and Boyle in 28 Days Later and Sunshine.

last night's history of filmmaking double feature: shadow of the vampire and safe conduct

Shadow of the Vampire begins with a question that we've all asked ourselves at one time or another: what if Max Schreck wasn't an actor at all, but really was a vampire? Director E. Elias Merhige takes us onto the sets and locations of Nosferatu as FW Murnau (John Malkovich) creates the original classic vampire film with the help of a real vampire. It sounded like some kind of heaven to me, but there are really only two reasons to see it: to hang out on these German film sets in 1921, which feel marvelously real, and for Willem Dafoe's fantastic performance as Schreck. He's genuinely chilling, he's surprisingly funny, and sometimes both at once. Some of the supporting cast is inspired, like Cary Elwes as the cameraman/dispenser of pharmaceuticals, but Malkovich is, as usual, a little annoying most of the time. And the script makes very little sense, particularly in the final scene of madness when Schreck demands his promised tiend and a ridiculous battle ensues between heartless vampyr and heartless filmmaker.


Safe Conduct is funny and smart and very well-paced, which, at nearly three hours, it must be to survive, starting off at a fast clip and later mellowing so that we may spend more relaxed time with our hero (Jacques Gamblin). This is the life of a filmmaker in Paris under Nazi domination. Does one work with the Hun? or abandon one's craft for the duration? or secretly work against the oppressor from within his own system? The questions are hard, the caveats appended to any answer offered are troubling, and director Bertrand Tavernier doesn't shrink from the complexity of it, although he is also not averse to sprinkling a little sentimental fairy-dust, either.

It has Tim Piggott-Smith in it, always a good thing, in a wonderful late segment in which the hero, having spontaneously stolen some Nazi documents, finds himself bundled off to England by the French Resistance to convince the chummy, hard-nosed, tea-drinking Brits that he is no German spy trying to pass off false information. The best of it is that good and evil are not simple: every seemingly heroic act is going to rebound against somebody, either the perpetrator or an innocent, and the perpetrator must choose whether to confess his crime or watch an innocent suffer for it. It's beautifully filmed and the details feel true. It's a little pat, a little too well-tied-up, a little too much an encomium to France's Greatest Generation to feel completely satisfying, but for an exercise in tribute and sentiment it succeeds remarkably well.

must-see classic horror films

Don't Look Now: (1973. dir: Nicholas Roeg) I'd be hard-pressed to think of a bolder one. The bulk of it is set in Venice, and not the pretty, touristy Venice we're used to seeing: this is the Venice after the season ends. You can practically smell the standing water, feel the moisture in your bones. This film changed my life when I saw it as a kid; you might say it scarred me. It was the first time the Yeatsian concept that following one's destiny might not always be to one's benefit ever occurred to me, and I trusted life less after that. The movie employs an easy pace, a slow build-up to a powerful climax, and has one of the most realistic sex scenes ever filmed, between Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie, both at high points in both their respective charms and creative powers.


The Uninvited: (1944. dir: Lewis Allen) This old-fashioned ghost story (based on a surprisingly engaging and sometimes shiver-inducing book by Dorothy Macardle) stands apart from today's horror because its tone is is so heartily, healthily English. A brother and sister (Ray Milland and Ruth Hussey) rent a house on the Cornwall coast then have to delve into its past to try and exorcise its ghosts. They're the kind of children-of-Churchill, we-survived-the-Blitz English folk that used to show up frequently onscreen, and that gives the movie a hardy, chin-up-through-hard-times, wisecracking tone which blunts the force of any true horror, but inspiring pessimism was not the point of the genre then so much as coaxing up pleasant shivers, as this does. It also dishes up a well-written mystery. The b&w cinematography is deep-velvet gorgeous; it won an Oscar, in fact. I was lucky enough to see this the first time on the big screen in an arthouse somewhere, and it's truly one of the more seductive haunted houses you'll ever see, with its vast windows overlooking rocky cliffs and crashing waves and its spiral staircase which all pets avoid. A real stunner.


Black Christmas: (1974. dir: Bob Clark) Wow. Talk about seminal. How did I go so long without seeing this? It's one of the great grandaddies of the slasher genre. Girls in a sorority are plagued by (truly chilling, even after all these years) violent, anonymous phone calls, and Christmas break becomes an adventure in horror. These girls are not interchangable; you care about them and really, really don't want them to die. The red herrings are well-placed and well-developed, and the ending is utterly chilling.


The Innocents: (1961. dir: Jack Clayton) I do not hesitate to call this one of the best horror films of all time, and better than the book it's based on (Henry James' Turn of the Screw). The elements are consummate: the richness of its chiaroscuro, the jaw-dropping mastery in the conjuring of the invisible world and the all-important, unanswered question: is it psychological, or ghostly? The use of silences, as when the drone of insects suddenly stops. The eerily precocious way these child actors (the incomparable Pamela Franklin and Martin Stephens from the Village of the Damned, aged eleven and twelve respectively) have about them, throwing long fingers of doubt across their apparent innocence. The ending is absolutely devastating every time I watch it. Full five stars, no question.


Dust Devil: (1992. dir: Richard Stanley) Ye gods. Flawed but fascinating. I think if Richard Stanley were to remake this every ten years, it would be the most fantastic experiment in filmmaking that the world has ever seen, but it HAS to be Richard Stanley, and he HAS to have full control over the project. Somebody with money and power, make it so. Meanwhile, in this original, "Director's-Cut" version, there are images which will stay seared into the fabric of my brain forever. The aftermath of the first murder, with our mythic antihero arranging the entire house into a gory but precise artwork of exact details in order to fulfill his ritual needs and prolong his life, for instance. And, again, when he falls in love with one of his potential victims, and the power of it manifests in far-off explosions and the skittering of objects across a table-top. It lacks unity, this film. I understand that its filming was problematic, the editing process more so, plagued with all manner of troubles, and you can feel it in the final product, but it's still a classic, deserving our continued attention.

movies in praise of yearning

In the City of Sylvia: (2007. dir: Jose Luis Guerin) A young artist makes a pilgrimage to Strasbourg on a quest to find a girl he'd met briefly six years previous in a bar. It sounds like nothing much. Instead, it's the framework upon which Guerin hangs a truly unique and delicately filigreed sequence of perfect, intimate shots. The unnamed artist himself is not so much suffering a yearning for Sylvia as he is using her as catalyst for an adventure in the scrutiny of women. We see all manner of women through his eyes, and the camera has no qualms about lingering longer than any American camera would dare, Malick-like, on some fascinating image: the back of a girl's stationary head, for instance, as her long, straight hair is whipped in the wind. We watch a long still-life on the endtable in a motel room at night, with a key and a crucial map drawn on a bar napkin, watch as headlights pass and alter the lighting across it in pleasing ways. This camera also plays games with us: in a long scene at a cafe where nothing happens except that the artist watches the people there, we see a two-shot of a man and woman sitting silently next to one another, facing forward, and we assume they are together until the woman sets down her drink and rests her head on the shoulder of the man on her other side. Although one senses that not finding Sylvia may be a better thing than finding her, the film itself is a paen not to the pain of yearning, but to its joyful side and the creative inspiration which rises up from it.


Terrence Malick: With the exception of Badlands, whose characters are too non-introspective perhaps to yearn properly, all Malick films incorporate heavy yearnings woven into their fabrics. Think of Sam Shepard silently falling in love with Brooke Adams' dark beauty in Days of Heaven from his distant hilltop, then of Richard Gere luring her from her husband's bed on a later evening. In the Thin Red Line, Ben Chaplin's soldier pulls himself length by length through an endless war using thick strands of daydream about his beautiful wife, then finds himself foundering and bereft after she writes him a terrible letter. The New World, perhaps the world's masterpiece of yearning, has at its center a breathtaking sequence in which Pocahontas yearns herself crazy then to the brink of suicide over her lost Captain Smith, only to find her salvation in one gorgeous moment of divine grace.


In the Mood for Love: (2000. dir: Wong Kar Wai) Much ink has been spilled about the beauty and grace of this symphony in forlorn and unfinished love between Mr. Chow and Mrs. Chan. It falls somewhere between a stately minuet and a very intimate, very sensual samba. In moments more like a fashion show than a film (we spend a lot of time watching Maggie Cheung's lovely ass in gorgeous '60s sheaths as she walks out of rooms and up stairs), it nonetheless provides the long-lived melancholy of impossible love with an indelible language of its own.


Destiny: (1921. dir: Fritz Lang) This is one of those early triptychs, like Paul Leni's later Waxworks: Lang uses the overstory of a zaftig madchen playing a game with Death to win her round-faced lover back from the underworld as a framework to hold three stories of crossed love which traverse the globe and history. The exquisite sense of longing here does not emanate from the ostensible heroine, who seems to be seeking her lost lover more out of a confusion about what to do with herself in his absence than some deeper, more legitimate feeling, but from der Tod himself, strikingly played by Bernhard Goetzke, whose stony face communicates an anguish of longing to break out of his dreadful role. The legend is that Lang was inspired to this film by a dream he'd had in his youth, and what it lacks in depth it makes up for in compelling images, like a girl walking up stairs framed by a mysterious gateway after she's taken poison.


Damnation: (1988. dir: Bela Tarr) Even more heavily stylized than the Wong Kar Wai (heavy in more than a single sense), Damnation is a slow-moving study in shades of gray. It moves at about the pace of hardening cement inching down an inclined plane, enjoying the pleasures of textures and framing as it goes. It doesn't so much praise yearning as wallow in it, as a man might dive into a water-tank and revel in the waters as his strength leaves him, all the while knowing the walls are too steep and slick for him to climb back out, and that he will die there.

Karrer (Miklos Szekely B.) treads heavily through a Soviet-bloc town made out of concrete, rain and mud, bearing like Atlas the weight of impossible love, or rather the impossibility of love. His beloved is a Nico-like chanteuse who sings sitting down, her hand covering her face, her song so weighted with despair it can hardly emerge. This is a bleak, Slavic brand of yearning, hardened and flattened into a sort of walking damnation, its cause equal (and equally cruel) parts inexorable fate and human caprice. In fact, it is so very bleak as to play as a sort of joke, like a Bergman parody in a Woody Allen film, and I wonder if there is not a strong undercurrent of satire which fails to register because I am experiencing it through the distancing medium of subtitles, and the culture gap of having grown up in the mercurial giddiness of capitalist America.