You, the Living

A master of the comic-miserablist mise-en-scène, Roy Andersson stages some of the funniest and/or most despairing scenes this side of Buñuel (to name only the most obvious influence). Or rather stages tableaux, since his latest feature, You, the Living consists of a few dozen mostly static shots in which both the misery of the characters (always apparent to them) and the absurdly humorous nature of their plight (only discernible by the viewer) are built directly into the staging. Eschewing anything in the nature of narrative progression, Andersson trains his pitiless camera on a cross-section of a Swedish town’s overweight, underpaid, worn-down denizens suffering their daily humiliations, fixing them in medium or long shot against a backdrop of the drabbest color scheme (beiges, off-whites, faded yellows) imaginable.

In one scene, a character blows a solitary tuba while sitting on a kitchen chair, the gold of the brass instrument shining out like a rare beacon against the apartment’s sparsely appointed interior. His wife enters the room, screaming, but the man continues playing, undisturbed. The next shot finds his downstairs neighbor banging a broom handle on the ceiling to shut him up but only succeeding in dislodging a lamp and chipping away at the plaster. The comic pay-off comes in the third shot in the sequence where a neighbor watches from a nearby balcony. Taking in both of the previous scenes at once, the long view brings with it the comedy of futility as one man pursues his solitary means of enjoyment while alienating those around him, and another compounds his frustration with further reminders of his total impotence.

Our lone tuba player is far from the only musician in You, the Living where music becomes one of three potential wards against a total capitulation to misery. Many of the film’s male characters play instruments and several participate in various New Orleans-style ensembles and marching bands, while two of the female characters are granted vocal solos of their own. But despite the occasional coming together for the shared performance of music – the communality of which is undercut by a mid-coitus monologue in which one musician exposes band work as nothing more than a not-very lucrative job – the men’s playing is usually seen as a solitary activity that annoys their wives and neighbors, even as it brings them isolated moments of pleasure.

Another possible means of escape in You, the Living is through the medium of dreams. But there’s no guarantee that these dreams will be pleasant. One character relates a particularly vivid nightmare – which Andersson then dramatizes – in which his failed attempts to enliven a dinner party by staging the old parlor trick where he pulls out the tablecloth from under the dishes leads to his execution by electric chair. Again, the comedy is all in the mise-en-scène: the dull guests arrayed around the absurdly elongated table, our hapless man making several futile adjustments to the china before proceeding, everyone aware throughout the preparations of impending disaster.

But dreams may also serve a positive function, even as they provide but a temporary escape from reality. In an unexpected moment of sublimity, a young woman relates her fantasy – again dramatized by Andersson – in which she marries the lead singer of a local rock band, a man who in real life had jilted her and for whom she still pines. As the girl rests happily on the bed in her wedding dress, her man sits on a kitchen chair wailing away on his guitar and tossing smiles her way, the scene redolent of a genuine domestic bliss. Eventually we notice the scenery outside the kitchen window changing and we realize that their apartment is moving along tracks as if it were a train. When they pull into the station, there’s a crowd of people – comprised of most of the characters we’ve seen so far in the film – greeting them warmly, pleased to catch a glimpse of the happy couple.

For Andersson, the final means of coming to some sort of acceptance of a world of woe is to adopt an absurdist’s perspective on the proceedings. While none of the characters in You, the Living seem cosmically aware enough to pursue such an option – those with some self-awareness, such as a worn-out shrink, simply bewail their fate – the filmmaker himself takes up this viewpoint, boldly transmitting his perspective to the audience. To be sure, it probably wouldn’t seem very funny for a fabric salesmen to sell an elderly couple a piece of material while bemoaning a recent fight with his wife, but because the director frames him against a comically massive wall of samples and because we’ve just seen his wife expressing similar regrets in the previous scene, the set-up refracts the situation into something like a cosmic joke. In fact, this sense of humorous absurdity – along with a total commitment to his worldview – is what prevents Andersson’s undeniably bleak orientation from turning his film into a dismal wallow. Without this comic perspective, You, the Living would be little more than a work of pointless miserablism; with it, it takes its place alongside such wonderfully strange objects as George Lewis’ Homage to Charles Parker and Herman Melville’s Pierre, one of those rare and inimitable works of art.

New Releases: Beeswax and Paper Heart

My latest reviews for Slant Magazine cover Andrew Bujalski's winning new feature Beeswax and Nick Jasenovec and Charlyne Yi's less accomplished investigation into the nature of love, Paper Heart. Read accordingly.

In other news, my good friend Javier Milligan who runs the fine website EnlightenMeNYC recently asked me to participate in an interview about my activities as a film writer, my approach to criticism and other related topics. The results have now been posted at his site.

Lorna's Silence

By now the departures of Lorna’s Silence from the Dardennes Brothers template have been well-documented: The partial abandonment of the filmmakers’ trademark following shots, the switch from super-16 to 35mm film, the reliance on crime-drama plotting, even the introduction of a few seconds of extradiegetic music. Since its debut at Cannes last year, the Dardennes’ latest has seemed to get it from both sides, damned simultaneously both for the above-mentioned changes—particularly the heavier reliance on narrative, seen in some quarters as a move towards the middle—and for being yet another closely observed, tension-riven drama about a working-class character stuck in a set of precisely defined social circumstances and seeking some sort of redemption—in other words, another Dardennes Brothers film.

To read the rest of the article, please continue to The House Next Door.

New Releases: Funny People and The Cove

There's no shortage of interesting films hitting New York screens this weekend: Import/Export, Lorna's Silence (check back for review on Friday), You, the Living, Thirst (which, come to think of it, wasn't very interesting at all), and two films I covered for Slant and The L Magazine respectively, Funny People and The Cove.

New Releases: California Company Town, Loren Cass and Off Jackson Avenue

My latest reviews for Slant Magazine cover California Company Town, Lee Ann Schmitt's excellent cine-tour of deserted ex-industrial villages dotting the west coast landscape and Loren Cass, Chris Fuller's intriguing, but only partially succesful, debut feature, both opening this week in New York, as well as John-Luke Montias' less accomplished Off Jackson Avenue, currently playing at Manhattan's Quad Cinema.

Parade

A live performance is only as good as its audience – especially when that audience is called on as an equal participant in the show. Such is the working principle behind Parade, Jacques Tati’s final completed picture, a 1974 video project that finds the filmmaker returning to the live performance of his pre-film roots. Following his run of four movies featuring and eventually exhausting the possibilities of his comedic alter-ego M. Hulot (which along with 1949’s Jour de Fête comprise the entirety of the director’s features), Tati channels his music hall background, staging a variety show of pantomime, music, sleight-of-hand and rodeo both in front of and in tandem with an approving crowd, comprised of both passively observant audience members and ringers in the form of actors and performers.

The film’s privileging of the audience’s role in the comedic process is highlighted from the start when, before the show begins, Tati’s camera follows a group of motley-clad young theatergoers wending their way into the building. One wag picks up a traffic cone and places it on his head to the amusement of both his friends and, presumably, the film’s audience. Picking up his example, another theatergoer follows suit. So when, after the crowd is seated and we’re treated to an opening musical fanfare, Tati makes his first appearance as master-of-ceremonies and announces, “It is our great pleasure to introduce a show which everyone is invited to participate in. The performers and clowns, and you and I,” we've been well prepared for this communal approach to the creation of comedic spectacle. In fact, we've already seen it in action.

The audience’s participation in the performance runs the spectrum from privileged private moments which unfold undetected by the “official” performers (as in one gag where a man removes a motorcycle helmet obstructing the view of another spectator only to reveal a more obtrusive mass of red hair) to complete co-option in the staged spectacle (a sequence where audience members are called on to tame a bucking mule in the ring). But the meat of the project lies in a middle-ground in which members of the crowd become “spontaneously” involved in the planned performances, even as the interventions are clearly staged by Tati.

As the action unfolds on stage, the filmmaker repeatedly cuts away to the audience in close shots of such intimate proximity that we can make out the private asides spoken by the individual viewers. A group of audience members emerge as actual characters; the frequency of their appearance and the pride-of-place given to their reactions mark them out as being equally central to the film as their on-stage counterparts. Eventually these men, women and children become involved directly in the spectacle. In one memorable scene, a group of stage magicians hilariously botch a disappearing act. Cut to the audience, where a muttonchopped young man shows ‘em how it’s done, wowing the crowd with his far more successful feats of legerdemain.

Still, Tati himself, as the grand homme of French comedy, remains a privileged figure throughout, never interrupted by the audience. As he performs his legendary pantomimes – mimicking a tennis match or a round of boxing – the crowd laughs respectfully, but always keeps its distance. (The exception: in the tennis sequence, the audience members, unbidden on-screen though clearly cued, move their heads back-and-forth to follow the imaginary volleys). And where the other acts are shot in such a way as to suggest the proximity of audience and performer, Tati films himself against a far more distant backdrop, the crowd becoming little more than a mass of indistinguishable faces.

But it’s the audience – and particularly its youngest segment - that has the final word. After the show ends and everyone – performers and audience alike – has cleared out, two children who've been prominent members of the audience take the stage for a final romp, suggesting both the continuation of the comic tradition – Tati was nearly 70 at the time, his moment nearly passed – and the final democratization of the performance space, fulfilling the director’s working principle that, as Jonathan Rosenbaum points out in his essential essay on the film, “amateurs and nobodies… are every bit as important, as interesting and as entertaining as professionals and stars.” As performer, Tati remains every inch the star as he commands the stage, but as a filmmaker he generously cedes the spotlight to clowns, musicians and viewer alike, thus re-thinking the essential relationship between not only Parade’s on-screen performance and on-screen audience, but between the film’s movie-going audience and the spectacle that Tati has arranged for them and, at least on the metaphorical level, invited them to participate in.

*****

I was recently asked to participate in a survey at The One-Line Review, in which each contributor was called on to make a personal list of the 50 greatest films, the collective results then tabulated. For my list, I limited myself to one film per director, with two exceptions. I included two films directed by Leo McCarey because Duck Soup seems to me more of a Marx Brothers picture than a McCarey picture and I included two Dreyer films because there was no way I could leave off either The Passion of Joan of Arc or Gertrud. The list can be found here.

Post-July 4th Link Round-Up

My latest set of links covers an uninspired romantic dramedy opening only in L.A. (Weather Girl) as well as two faves playing on the N.Y. rep circuit, Tsai Ming-Liang's The Wayward Cloud and the film that gives this blog its header background, Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris.