Bifocal
It isn't as if the life of Vincent Van Gogh hasn't been adapted for the big screen before. Lust for Life was Vincente Minnelli's lusty take (based on Irving Stone's novel), with Kirk Douglas holding little back as he strained to suggest Vincent's intensity; Robert Altman's Vincent and Theo focused on the relationship between the Van Gogh brothers and their destructively parallel trajectories; Maurice Pialat's Van Gogh--easily the most unsentimental of the collection--presents a harsh uningratiating view of a harsh uningratiating artist, avoiding the traditional highlights (including that ear thing) and dwelling on more quotidian activities--Pialat doesn't even make much effort to show the paintings, or approximate Vincent's unmistakable style onscreen.
So what does Julian Schnabel's latest bring to the party?
(This is part of the 10th Cinemanila International Film Festival which is ongoing until Oct. 29 at the Gateway Cineplex 10, Gateway Mall, Araneta Center, QC.)
If you could see all through my eye
Le Scaphandre et le papillon (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly) is based on a book by Jean-Dominique Bauby (Jean-Do, as friends call him) who suffered a stroke, fell into a coma for twenty days, and woke up with a rare condition, "locked-in syndrome." He could think, smell, hear (faintly), see, but couldn't move a single muscle in his entire body with one exception--his left eye.
Schnabel tackles head-on the challenge which one filmmaker or another has dreamed of, telling a story almost exclusively through a single point of view (Orson Welles planned to film Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" this way; Robert Montgomery actually succeeded with Lady in the Lake (1947), even if the results aren't always compelling). Schnabel succeeds, perhaps not completely, but more than any previous filmmaker I can think of, with the first forty minutes almost exclusively told through Bauby's left eye (exceptions include a brief flashback, and a harrowing sequence where Bauby's immobile right eye is being 'occluded').
Welles' and Montgomery's problem, of course, was in attempting to create the illusion of the protagonist's point of view as an uninterrupted shot (with all its accompanying technical and dramatic difficulties). We know of course that this isn't so--our view is constantly interrupted by eyeblinks and sudden shifts in attention (the eye moving too fast for images to register clearly); it's obscured by eyelashes, momentary blurring, even tears. Schnabel (with the help of cinematographer Janusz Kaminski) painstakingly recreates each of these effects with cinematic analogues, using jump cuts (for blinks), flickering shadows (for lashes), out-of-focus lensing and smeared imagery for blurring and tears. Then there are subtler effects, like cutting off the heads and shoulders of people talking to Bauby, to underscore the fact that his view of the world comes entirely from one eye, and that the eye is unable to move.
But Bauby's eye is only half his capability to apprehend and comprehend the world; the other half is his inner eye, which surveys the double realm of memory and imagination. Schnabel conceives of memory as looking like old film footage, with handheld camerawork and the slightly washed-out colors of old Super 8; imagination is granted an altogether different look, with gliding camera moves (suggesting a freedom he doesn't have), opulent colors (suggesting a voluptuousness he can't feel), crystal clarity, and the occasional, defiantly surreal image (a wheelchaired Bauby on a wooden platform standing in the middle of an ocean; the wind whipping a woman's hair into a frenzy of seething serpents; Empress Eugenie running and Nijinsky leaping through the corridors of the hundreds of years old hospital). Perhaps the single most inspiring shot is that of a gigantic iceberg stretching from one side of the screen to the other in all its detailed majesty, collapsing slowly into the ocean; by film's end the process is reversed, and the shards of ice leap up from the boiling seawater to re-form, jigsaw-puzzlelike, back into the glacier--a more bravura image of reversal, renewal, redemption, of defiance in the face of entropy, would be difficult to find in recent cinema.
Audio at the very least makes up half of Schnabel's arsenal. When people talk to Bauby, we hear them through the film's standard stereo track, complete with ambient outdoor or indoor sounds; when we hear Bauby talking to himself it's as if he speaks in a locked room, a small one at that--we can sense the room's size (or lack of) through the voice's reverberations (or lack of).
The soundtrack, which includes Bach and pop standards like Charles Trenet's "La Mer" and Tom Waits' "All the World is Green," betray Schnabel's film-literate orientation (I wouldn't know about the real-life Bauby). He includes excerpts from the lush piano score of Stanley Kubrick's Lolita (1962) and from the score of Francois Truffaut's Les Quatre cents coups (The 400 Blows, 1959)--in particular the piercingly beautiful passage when Doinel rides the police van through the night streets of Paris, and the city never looked more magical or unreachable (no accident, I suspect, that the excerpt was taken from Doinel's last night before incarceration). At one point he calls his favorite spot in the hospital--an open terrace looking out on a small suburban town--his Cinecitta, after the famed Roman studio, and indeed there's something of the stage, or dais, or podium about his vantage point, something of the artificially miniaturized studio set about the town in view.
The effect of Bauby speaking out to correct or contradict or protest the images fed to him by his eye can at times be humorous (as when a hospital staff turns off the soccer game he's watching) or heartrending (as when he begs them to leave his right eye alone). It's the helplessness, you imagine, of Montresor rattling his bells inside his walled-in tomb, in Edgar Allen Poe's "The Cask of Amontillado," or of Emily Webb mourning the wasted ruin of her life in Thornton Wilder's play Our Town. it's the helplessness and isolation we all feel at one time or another, that we somehow can't fully engage the outside world in the manner we'd prefer, that the universe is a complex and hostile and unknowable place, that we somehow can't connect with one another, no matter how hard we try. Of course, Bauby could only appreciate what he has--or had--just when he's lost them; he seems to connect best with other people, especially the mother of his children Celine (Emmanuelle Signer) only when that connection is at its most physically challenging. It's not the medium that matters, Schnabel seems to tell us, but the content, and the passion with which one wants to communicate said content.
Or is it as simple as all that? Perhaps Schnabel means to say that medium does matter, that it's the daunting nature of the challenge that forces Bauby to reach out and 'touch' someone. One only has to sit down and see the film, appreciate how natural Schnabel's effects can be, how effortlessly he lets us slip--that's the proper word, I think--into Bauby's shoes (suit, if you like), show us what Bauby's thinking, what he's up against, and what, most of all, is at stake. If the film has any power, if it maintains such a masterful grip on our emotions and imagination, that may be because Bauby's situation is really ours (considerably exaggerated), and his story, realized through Schnabel's tremendous filmmaking capabilities, is our own--we hear him speak for us in his locked-away voice, watch him look for us with fear and wonder at a strange, at times hostile world using his restlessly roving eye. Interesting--ironic, even--that on its journey from page to screen the film's very story underwent mediation, distortion, transformation. According to an article in online magazine Salon, the women in Bauby's life served radically different roles--the mother of Bauby's children (real name Sylvie de la Rochefoucauld) visited at most a few times, while Bauby's gilrfriend (real name Florence), depicted onscreen as being too frightened to actually go and see him-- was at his side every day. Should we dismiss the picture for its lack of accuracy, or call the news story a slanderous hoax directed at an international boxoffice success (funny how people rarely if ever sue an international boxoffice failure)? I say this: the truth must out, the truth must be known and told and retold alongside the film's screening venue--one must be aware of Bauby's real story, same time one must appreciate the film's many felicities and innovations. It's a mixed bag of truth and delusion and invention, but then, so is any film, and so are we alll. Allow me to put it on record, say it aloud as plainly as I can: Le Scaphandre et le papillon is easily the best film of 2007 and Julian Schnabel, with his slim portfolio of films, arguably the finest filmmaker working at the moment.
First published in Businessworld, 10.22.08
Le Schaphrande et le papillon (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, 2007) has got to be one of the best films last year. I vividly remember Schnabel's Before Night Falls (2000) (aside from being what I felt was the finest performance Javier Bardem's ever given (still feel the same way), it was an unforgettably lyrical film); with this Schnabel if anything proves that he is one of the most graceful filmmakers alive (his free-floating, off-the-cuff camerawork recalls early Polanski, particularly Noz w wodzie (Knife in the Water, 1962)). The point-of-view shots are amazing, as much for what they obscure (out-of-focus filaments suggest wayward eyelashes; watery distortion indicate tears) as for what they reveal (when a pretty woman comes up close, his gaze invariably falls upon her cleavage); even the way he segueways from first person to memory to third person to fantasy is brilliant.
Love the in-jokes--a bit from Les Quatre cents coups (The 400 Blows, 1959) and a snatch of Lolita (1962). What's not to like?
Some critics have complained of the claustrophobic quality of the storytelling, but who wants yet another standard-issue disease-of-the-week flick? Schnabel fits form to Jean-Do Bauby's (Matthieu Amalric) straitened circumstances, his restless intelligence (represented by a constantly agitated eye) unable to escape the cyclopean point of view except through memory or fantasy (the point is driven horrifically home when the doctor declares his other eye 'problematic' and recommends that it be 'occluded'--and we watch, every bit as helpless as the desperately pleading Jean-Do, when the recommendation is carried out).
Is there a place in the world for such personal cinema, such specialized, interiorized stories? But Jean-Do's story isn't as extraordinary as we might like to think: consider the depth of the gap between one person and another, the way we constantly struggle to hear, or make ourselves heard, and our constant failure at perfect communication (which we continue to strive to do, nevertheless). Jean-Do's story resonates because it's our dilemma, mutiplied a hundredfold; in his case he has the stubborness and energy and yes, selfishness to overcome his hurdles, to call out to us one more time in the form of an extraordinary book. Which Schnabel has transformed into an equally extraordinary film.
Comrade X (1940) is maybe not better than Ninotchka (1939) but can it, well, actually hold its own? Vidor is not Lubitsch--i'd hate to even begin to compare the two--but if Vidor doesn't have The Touch, his comedy (very possibly made to cash in on the success of the earlier flick) has more teeth; fact is, the prison and execution-squad sequence comes across as a black-comedy version of something Graham Greene might have written, set in South America. Plus I doubt if Lubitsch has done much in the way of action sequences: here, Vidor throws in a vigorous chase involving a battalion of dancing tanks (how did they do that--remote-control models?) that's a real delight (think Spielberg in 1941 mode, only really set in 1941).
And then there's Lamarr, who's definitely no Garbo; if anything, I think she's even more desireable. Garbo's a beauty, of that there's no doubt, but it's a Teutonic kind of beauty, heavy-spirited and unattainable. Lamarr has a sweet sensuality you can to walk up to and touch, with just enough hint of European mystery to make that walk forward feel daring, dangerous even.
So there're rumors she and Gable didn't get along--so what? I'm not noticing the lack of chemistry; all I can see is Lamarr heedlessly planting kisses on Gable's chiseled mug every five minutes, and thinking I'd love to shove that guy aside and take his place, I really would.
Abraham Polonsky's Force of Evil (1948) is, in every sense of the word, awesome. It's set in a great city of steel and stone (Manhattan, of course), only there's a weirdly comic mismatch because crawling all over this tremendous construct are flawed, tiny creatures, eking out a living. Joe Morse's (John Garfield) relationship with his brother Leo (Thomas Gomez) is a case in point--they're constantly bickering, but Garfield can't help keeping an eye out for the man, nevertheless. Is Joe the evil brazenly declared in the title? Maybe, but what about his concern for his brother? Is Leo evil? He has principles, but he's basically running an illegal business. How about Ben Tucker (Roy Roberts)? He comes closest to personifying pure evil, but even he has his Achilles' heel, in the form of Edna (Marie Windsor), who has eyes for Joe.
Polonsky takes an eloquent script (by Ira Wolfert based on his novel (with additions by Polonsky)) and fashions a terrific noir from it: grey, drab on-location exteriors match equally drab interiors; when danger lurks, it's high-angle shots and expressive shadows; when danger steps out in the open it's all quick cuts and abrupt, point-of-view shots. Polonsky (this is his debut as a director) orchestrates all with a confidence and elegance Martin Scorsese can't help but admire.
Then there's the finale, which can only be described as something out of Dante, a descent into a hell if not exactly frozen over, just a few degrees short of it. Joe climbs down past massive structures and vertiginously steep staircases to end at a desolate beach, where he faces the basic fact of his life thus far, and realizes what he must do in response. A great film, absolutely.
And finally (with thanks to Dave Kehr for pointing it out), this brilliant review of Murnau's Sunrise. It's critics like these (okay, maybe not a critic--but what's he doing putting forth on this subject, anyway?) that make me so optimistic about the future of cinema.
Some thoughts: maverick opinions are not of themselves valueless--actually, I think all opinions are equally of value (or are equally valueless); what adds substance and authority to an opinion is the thinking that brought the writer to that opinion, and O'Neill's way of thinking is, to put it politely, not exactly reasoned, logical, or even well informed. If instead of just noting the film's high reputation he showed some understanding of why the film's so highly regarded, then proceeded to show why such regard was flawed, why, he may have something.
It's not as if it's a perfect film, after all. Many sequences are justly famed (the tracking shot that reveals The Woman From the City; the tram sequence (Murnau, shooting through the tram windows which somehow refract the images of the surrounding forest just so, manages to give the trip a floating, dreamlike feel); the gigantic sets of the city). The story is simple, even for silent films, even for Murnau--Man, Woman, other Woman, basically--but Murnau takes advantage of Hollywood's considerable resources to create a mostly reality-based (if hugely exaggerated and stylized) vision.
Maybe my biggest problem with the picture are the subtitles. They're obvious and hokey, even for the time, even compared to Griffith's (and Griffith could be unbelievably sentimental); worse, Murnau went on to animate his titles. The effect is not unsimilar to underlining what's already obvious, highlighting it with three different color markers, then sprinkling all with glitter; if anything, I suspect the sense of over-the-top melodrama one has of the film comes largely from the titles.
Don 't get me wrong, I love the film; it's just not my favorite Murnau (that would be Faust (1924), with its opening image of a magnificent bat-winged Emil Jannings, looming over a volcano (that image has influenced films as diverse as Disney's Fantasia (1940), Spielberg's Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), Ridley Scott's Legend (1985)), its passages of Faust flying over blasted landscapes (inspiration for some of the finest passages of John Boorman's Exorcist 2: The Heretic (1977), and its final heartbreaking sequence of the beautiful Camilla Horn, struggling to survive a winter storm with her bastard child).
Still. Not a big fan of the Oscars or of its organizers, but even they and their running media dogs should know better than to nip at the long-dead hand that, if it isn't exactly feeding them now, did much to create the reputation of quality they enjoy (and have almost entirely failed to uphold) today. Shame on them--on Cameron Diaz too, incidentally, for involving herself in such cheap shots (she should grovel on used razor blades for a chance to star in a film anywhere near as great as Sunrise).
