Colin Marshall

Happiness (Todd Solondz, 1998)

In Errol Morris' Fast, Cheap and Out of Control, an interviewed lion tamer claims that the chair is such a useful tool of the trade because, if thrusted at a lion, it confuses them: they see four distinct points approaching and can't decide which to attack. Todd Solondz's filmmaking technique is a bit like the lion tamer's chair: it comes at an audience from so many angles that detractors can't be sure what to detract and supporters can't be sure what to support. (Having recently finished viewing his entire catalog, I indentify as a Solondz supporter.) Happiness, for instance, has pedophilia, infidelity, misogyny and frustrated adolescent hope for ejaculation. (There's more, to be sure, but those are just the major themes.) What it doesn't have is a moralizing perspective. Just as Tim Roth could so easily have made The War Zone into yet another Victory Over Incest^TM, Solondz could have made this movie into, I don't know, a bold statement against drugging kids and having sex with them. Yep, that takes courage.

Nor, it need hardly be said, is Happiness pro-pedophilia. (Now that would take courage, though it would be a more imaginative mind than mine that could dream up how to pull it off.) It has no particular stance on pedophilia, nor the middle-aged suburban psychologist dad who commits it on his son's pal. Nor does feel the need to refrain from trying to express to its audience the worshipful attraction the pedophile dad harbors for this kid or the overwhelming anticipation of his consumption of his drugged sandwich — or the unbearable anxiety that he might not eat the sandwich at all. We don't all lust after 11-year-old boys, but we've all felt that about something.

I'm sort of glad I didn't watch this movie at the time of its release; in a teenage mind, I'm sure Solondz's faintly squalid, often perverse milieu, though it extends to the city, resonates as one of those tiresome behold-suburbia's-seamy-underbelly wails, a cynical faux exposé of the squeaky-clean village teeming with randy cab drivers, obscene phone callers, murderous spinsters and dads who rape your baseball teammates. Though not yet at full maturity — I doubt I'll ever go so far as to reach that — I've long since passed the age at which one suspects — hopes? — that beneath all civilization's façade lies a dark abyss of nihilistic hostility and sexual deviancy which would only be exposed if adults would just stop being so hypocritical, man. (I considered simply writing that off as one juvenile belief among many, but it's really more the essence of all juvenile beliefs.)

Indeed, I could go on for quite a while about what Happiness is not. Just as Solondz refuses to overtly judge his characters and their actions, he also refuses to nail down precisely what sort of a filmic project he's engaged in. There's his cast of exaggerated losers on the one hand, but on the other is the unusual look and feel with which he presents them. I've struggled to find a proper descriptor, but perhaps the best way to describe the larger surface of Happiness is to call it an homage to daytime cable TV movies: near-parodic manneredness, cheap-looking yet just-so decor, brightly lit and almost theatrically-staged mise-en-scène, plus a score so on-the-nose that it breaks the boundaries of irony and comes around the other side.

So, like a tamer's lion, I'm confused about what the picture is. Unlike the lion, I enjoy that confusion. A friend called the film a "grotesque fantasy", and that strikes me as about right, though it seems to me that Solondz is best when riding the line, leaning so far to one side that he's one misdirected breath from hitting the hard pavement of the ridiculous. Actually, throughout Happiness, he does topple to the ground a few times: his characters start out unreal enough, but in certain moments the combined effect of their elaborately constructed nature and the film's fake-y aesthetic becomes too much to take seriously. But at least his small failures are triggered by overreach than underreach; insufficient ambition accounts for the most, and worst, cinematic sins of our time.

The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (Werner Herzog, 1974)

Outside the Anglophone world, The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser has a far superior title: Jeder für sich und Gott gegen alle, or Each for Himself and God Against All. Search me as to the reason behind the relabeling — even Herzog's commentary isn't clear on the issue — though perhaps the U.S. distributor wanted to make absolutely sure that the film would cash in on the then-roiling worldwide Kaspar Hauser craze. This would have been before he flubbed it up by calling himself "more popular than Jesus".

Outside the world of my faulty memory, Kaspar Hauser was an orphan of uncertain provenance who, barely able to read, write or walk, just showed up in Nuremberg one 1828 day. Under the guidance of a series of townspeople, he ultimately polished his language and social skills to the extent that he could describe, to rapt aristocratic listeners, his prior life: sixteen years spent confined to a single room, fed bread and water through a slot and taught a series of unhelpful skills by an unidentifiable cloaked man. A British lord showed interest in adopting him, but that didn't pan out. In 1833, Kaspar Hauser died of a stab wound which he claimed was inflicted by a stranger, but may well have simply been a miscalculated self-mutilation meant to revive interest in his legend.

The story aligns closely with Herzog's fascinations. It's a familiar tale from his homeland of Germany. It involves an outsider with many odd, inexplicable qualities who can of course be played by an outsider with many odd, inexplicable qualities. It's a rich mixture of fact and fiction — Hauser could have just been a trickster, and unfounded rumors inevitably came to surround him — that undergoes another stage of mixing when translated into a feature film. Had Kaspar Hauser never lived, Herzog would have had to invent him.

That said, the film is sometimes striking and sometimes amateurish, though when it's striking it's quite striking indeed, and when it's amateurish it's often amateurish in endearing ways. Take the star. In the role of Kaspar Hauser, Herzog, in his dogged pursuit of bizarre artistic goals, has cast a street musician named Bruno S. Upon glimpsing him on a television documentary, so the account goes, Herzog realized immediately that nobody else would do. As it happens, Bruno was a bit of a lost child himself, born of a prostitute and raised in harsh institutions, and he bears the predictable psychological scars. Evidently he was painfully difficult to work with — he wouldn't trust anyone, he needed a host of strange conditions to be met before he'd cooperate, he demanded same-day cash — but the resulting performance is unlike any other. While the balding, middle-aged eccentric outwardly resembles nobody's mental image of young Kaspar Hauser, he speaks, acts and reacts — word on the street is that acting is reacting, after all — in an otherworldly manner that just couldn't not have been the real Hauser's way. (For what it's worth, Bruno's still in the news.)

To yank a little something out of my mixed bag of clichés, the movie's something of a mixed bag; I admire so many discrete parts of it — a shot of Hauser and his silhouette-like captor sitting on a hill and a hilarious noble-savage-y monologue about a Greek vacation from the sleazily genteel Lord Stanhope repay the viewing opportunity cost by themselves — but the picture as an experience doesn't quite hang together. It's really more of a series of disconnected vignettes from Hauser's life, or at least the life he claimed to have. (The jury's still out on the verity of most of his recollections.) That resoundingly trumps the wedge-everything-into-a-standard-outline method of modern biopics, but the notion that Kaspar Hauser could've had more of a form continues to nag me.

The Thin Red Line (Terrence Malick, 1998)

I've written before on my habit of finding films to watch by looking for just the right kind of negative user reviews, since people seem to get more descriptive with complaints than praise. It's how I found Kelly Reichardt's wonderful Old Joy, it helped turn my eye toward Apichatpong Weerasethakul's stunning Syndromes and a Century and, if I hadn't already declared them my very favorites, it would prompt me to rush down Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris, Akira Kurosawa's Ran, Stanley Kubrick's 2001 and the complete works of Abbas Kiarostami.

It would also, as indicated by its writeup, lead me to Terrence Malick's first feature, Badlands. But it really would have demanded that I watch his third, The Thin Red Line, whose user reviews are pretty much the mother lode. A small, small sample:

• "If you like 'War' movies steer clear. If instead you like to spend about 3 hours looking at beautiful landscapes watch this movie or better yet the travel channel."
• "This film is too long and too boring. If you must see it, turn the volume down and play music while you see some nice scenery from the Pacific."
• "If you decide to rent it, be prepared by having new batteries in your remote control for all the fast forwarding that you're likely to be doing."
• "I would like to punch out this director for wasting 3 hours of my life. Of my list of the 5 WORSE movies I have EVER seen this one has been right at the top, NUMBER ONE, for the past 8 years since I nearly walked out of the theater."
• "The movie is slow slow slow. I spent the entire movie asking, 'Is it over yet?'"
• "I'm a former Marine with some experience in war and this movie is a load of bull. What this movie is, is a film version of either a bad modern painting or bad beatnic poetry."
• "This movie was not only incredibly boring, it rubs your face in boredom, it enshrines it. And it just never ends!"
• "Too slow, too artsy, too boring."

I submit, on the contrary, that it is awesome, though it had the hard luck to be a World War II movie released two months after Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan. In the intervening years, cinephiles have divided pretty nearly into camps on this issue: you're the Thin Red Line type, or you're the Private Ryan type. There can be no exceptions.

Though I last viewed it years ago and thus shouldn't commit to a strong opinion, I found Spielberg's film just slightly too thematically hamfisted and stealthily maudlin for comfort. (And indeed, those qualities have, with varying intensity, cursed even Spielberg's best pictures.) Where Saving Private Ryan seemed to coast on the opening D-Day landing, The Thin Red Line uses its taking of a gunner-filled Guadalcanal bunker hill more effectively as a centerpiece.

Malick's cinematic style — near-perfect pacing, striking composition, incorporation of the natural world as more than a backdrop — also brings qualities that its genre desperately needed (and, alas, still needs ten years on). I'm unsure if the same can be said about Spielberg's style; whatever its technological accomplishments, it works mostly as a reinforcer of the "see, war isn't just gritty, it's really gritty" thrust of the war movies of the past two or three decades. And Peter Travers, of all people, said it best about Malick's non-hackneyed perspective on the film's events:

Ryan offers bloody D-Day heroics, adrenal stimulation and tearful sentiment, plus assurances that although war may be hell, it's also a hell of a character builder. Spielberg tells us what we want to hear. Line, adapted by director Malick from the James Jones novel about the key American victory over the Japanese at Guadalcanal, offers raw fear, combat numbness and moral uncertainty, plus assurances that war dehumanizes the men it doesn't kill. Malick tells us what we don't want to hear — an offense to Academy members, who traditionally vote for uplift.

Malick, who lives in Texas, doesn't play those Hollywood games.

Nevertheless — and here comes the partial concession to those user reviews — The Thin Red Line has its flaws, some of them sizable. Along with his affinity for nature, Malick seems to possess an ugly tendency toward glorification of the noble savage, and it's put on display during a set of early scenes where an AWOL company member lives the sweet life among the simple natives, dancing in harmony with the environment, feasting upon the sweet bounty that falls, ripe, from the trees, etc. (The opportunity to let this sort of thing rip provided by the native-heavy setting of Malick's latest, The New World, is a reason — the reason, actually — I haven't yet seen it.)

Also, there's a Hans Zimmer score, though it's more restrained than most and actually includes a few admirable choices. (The incorporation of a clock's ticking hands in the piece that opens the grueling hill-taking works surprisingly well.) Much has also been made of how the cast is littered with bug and soon-to-be-big stars in bit parts: John Travolta, for instance, appears briefly as a brigadier general in the very beginning, while George Clooney shows up to shout at a handful of subordinates for two minutes toward the end. And John C. Reilly, John Cusack, Jim Caviezel, Nick Nolte, Adrien Brody, Sean Penn and Woody Harrelson all hang around as well, in varying capacities. Would that the film had been cast entirely with unknowns, but I understand that (a) a whole hell of a lot of actors wanted to work with the newly-returned-from-obscurity Malick and (b) the studio wanted to see a lot of names.

And even though the movie's runtime is one of its most bitched-about qualities — unfairly, I think, since it's not much over two and a half hours — it's patently the victim of too many cuts, not too few. The material left on the editing room's floor glares conspicuously by its absence. By this point, it no doubt, it sounds as if the film is nothing but a bundle of errors, but what Malick gets right, he gets so right that the picture rises to the top of my list of favorite war movies. It's right up there with Apocalypse Now: they're both aestheticized, but I prefer Malick's aesthetics by a hairsbreadth.

Badlands (Terrence Malick, 1973)

A well-known exchange between Pauline Kael and William Shawn goes a little something like this. Upon receiving her negative review of Badlands, the New Yorker editor complained, "I guess you didn't know that Terry is like a son to me." Kael's reply? "Tough shit, bill." This anecdote is often trotted out to, I guess, illustrate Kael's no-nonsense brio and critical iconoclasm, but I see it as more of an example of the bluntness of both the delivery of her opinions and of the opinions themselves. (I also wonder how Malick got to be "like a son" to Shawn, and also if he any incurred any sibling rivalry from Wallace.) If memory serves, Kael had few kind words for anything Malick released during her career. A whole contingent of filmgoers follows in her footsteps; I doubt it's much of an exaggeration to say that Malick bisects the entire group. You're fer 'im, or you're agin' 'im.

I'm fer 'im. I could scarcely be more fer 'im, since he gets right what so many modern filmmakers get wrong: pacing. (It's gotten to the point where good pacing accounts for the lion's share of my enjoyment: Andrew Dominik's The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford rose to the top of my 2007 list largely by its pacing alone.) It's less that I'm a fellow traveler toward any of Malick's countless, hard-to-pin-down goals: it's that his films are aesthetic oases in the desert. The Tomatometer seems to agree with me, having awarded Badlands a 100% (no kidding) rating. But for detractors, we need look no further than, yes, the Netflix user reviews:

• "Badlands is an exercise in academic, mind-numbing boredom by a terminally overrated director. In other words: a 'masterpiece'".
• "The music, scenery, and acting were O.K., but it all added up to boring."
• "I want my 1.5 hrs back that I wasted."

That would be the other side of the fence. I can't claim to understand these complaints, but I figured I'd provide them in the interest of fairness, balance and all that.

Even setting aside Badlands' near-perfect pacing — despite which, it must be said, the film is still a bit too short — and its photography so exquisite that it's almost unsuitable for such a grubby story, the picture succeeds on another, more basic (and thus more important) level: there's no psychologizing. As in Shohei Imamura's Vengeance is Mine, the killer — here, a 25-year-old garbageman who shoots his 15-year-old girlfriend's father and then takes the lass for a cross-country killing spree — is not explained away as the seeds sown by childhood trauma come to be reaped or whatever. He's just a guy, and he's sometimes decent — he seems actually to respect his underage lover, at least more than one would expect — but more often paranoid, impulsive, and just good enough at explaining away his actions with his strange internal moral apparatus.

Perhaps the line to be drawn here is one separating observation and construction. All fiction films, of course, are wrought objects, but some manage to deliver a viewer experience of observing characters, their actions and their environments while others, to my mind, don't quite get there and wind up looking like scene generation systems. Malick's films take their time, allowing characters to do what they need to to and audiences to absorb what's there to be absorbed without the noticeable presence of the directorial hand jerking things in the direction it wants them to go. Make no mistake: the hand is present. It couldn't not be. But I've come to believe that the skilled filmmaker's trick is to make that hand seem absent. Not that a great many films successfully obscure the hand, especially ones about murderers, where that blasted hand keeps pointing to this and that, gesturing desperately to tell the audience what caused what and why so and so did this terrible thing to such and such and oh, how awful evil is. But in Badlands, the hand is blessedly hard to see: there might as well just be two mixed-up kids, a car, and the vast American landscape. (Oh, and a really great score.)

Welcome to the Dollhouse (Todd Solondz, 1995)

The same friend who found Even Dwarfs Started Small unwatchably weird is also, ironically, the one whose enthusiasm for the films of Todd Solondz reminded me that I, too should go about cultivating such an enthusiasm. I'd already seen and vaguely remembered enjoying Solondz's first feature, Welcome to the Dollhouse, and reckoned that I shouldn't try re-familiarizing myself with the man's oeuvre without starting at the start and giving it a re-watch.

I'd remembered the picture as a colorful, strikingly-low key, nearly dialogue-free exploraiton of middle-school awkwardness with a very narrow geographical range — maybe just a house and a school? — and something of a dark undercurrent. Turns out memory was serving at maybe half capacity: there's quite a bit of dialogue and the locations span New Jersey (Solondz : Jersey :: Waters : Baltimore :: King : Maine) and NYC. I was right about the awkwardness — the movie's built on a foundation of the stuff — and more or less so about the dark undercurrent, though "dark undercurrent" is the sort of threadbare term I don't really use anymore.

Dawn Wiener, the film's protagonist, is just the sort of dowdy, formless, nearly alien thirteen-year-old that girlfriends often pull out old photos to show you that they once were. (Or at least that's been my experience.) Naturally, she receives daily torrents of abuse in her day-to-day junior high lifeh, from a girl who's just about as skeezy-looking as one can get in the seventh grade who demands to watch Dawn "take a shit" to a backwoods bully who keeps announcing his plans to rape her. (This is all seemingly an exaggerated version of the degradations of grades six through eight, but lord help me, I seem to remember that time of my own life as a pretty good one, socially — not academically, since my teachers all copped this big attitude about me never turning in my homework.) Things aren't going much better at home: her college-obsessed brother starts a band whose 30-year-old-looking singer Dawn falls for — that the crush is unrequited goes without saying — and her tutu'd little sister, obviously the most favored sibling, up and disappears for a few days.

I first watched Welcome to the Dollhouse in 2002. Watching it in 2008, the old brain cells fired in different patterns. Borderline-unbelievably dorky main character? Cruel schoolmates? Tacky, somewhat retro sets? A bunch of eccentrics filling out the cast? Why, this is a lot like Napoleon Dynamite — but it's actually good! So what's the difference? Fewer Mormon inside jokes, sure, but also a less tenuous connection to the real world, or rather, a tenuous connection to the real world versus Napoleon Dynamite's completely absent one. Ladies, think back to how many of your boyfriends have claimed to be just like Napoleon back in high school; none can truthfully claim to have been, because the guy's such an elaborate, deliberate fictional construction that nobody's like him. The same goes for his environment: the film's Preston, Idaho is really just its own parallel universe, where our rules seem like they still apply but really don't. Viewers who like Napoleon Dynamite tend to be impressed by the very fact that what was onscreen was onscreen: it's a "Wow, look at that!" kind of appreciation. Viewers who like Welcome to the Dollhouse tend to be impressed by the sort of human experiences Solondz puts onscreen, however stylized they may be: a "Wow, that's true!" kind of appreciation. While my time in middle school didn't even remotely resemble Dawn's, I'll take a film for which I can relate to those who can relate to it over a film whose humor springs chiefly from the mention of tater tots any day.

Even Dwarfs Started Small (Werner Herzog, 1970)

A friend who I was almost positive possessed a higher threshold of tolerance for the bizarre than I do had a couple hours to kill, so he watched this movie at NYU's film library. He then shot a message to me calling it "literally TOO WEIRD TO WATCH." About half an hour in, the film forced him to turn it off — by strangeness alone.

And admittedly, Even Dwarfs [sic] Started Small is not a normal picture. Werner Herzog made it, so that knocks it straight out of the ballpark of normality right there. He's a filmmaker who deals in unusual concepts whose provenance even he himself can't explain — all his projects seem to sprout from ideas that nobody had before, or at least that nobody wanted to actually execute — and the unusual concept here is employing an entire cast of dwarfs/dwarves/midgets/little people. (I'm never sure which term to use. "Little people" seems to be the P.C. consensus, but it sounds as ridiculous as everything else reached by P.C. consensus. "Dwarf" has a specific meaning — something to do with limb proportionlaity — that I can never remember. Herzog uses "Midget" on the commentary, but I feel like I hear a lot of yelling at anyone who so much as utters the word.)

Not only is the movie's world populated entirely by midgets, all its objects are regular-person scale. Oh, and the world itself is a barren-looking Canary Island that resembles nothing so much as a Krazy Kat landscape, and the only building there seems to be the insane asylum in which the entire story takes place. Which means that most of the pint-sized characters are insane. And they take over the asylum.

But believe me, we've only covered the tip of the iceberg: there are also chickens eating each other, twin blind dwarves in shower caps and dark goggles, an abandoned car that the inmates drive around in circles, the crucifixion of a monkey and a camel (which Herzog calls a "dromedary") that doesn't know whether to sit down or stand up. As this point, the film is probably starting to sound like nothing but a messy jumble of "weird shit", but some real organizing forces do hold the narrative together. There's a plot — the inmates are in control, not that they know what do to with it, and the warden's garrisoned in his own office with a compulsively-laughing captive — and a standard set of recurrent themes, but that's all unimportant next to the fact that Herzog has crafted a nightmare.

"The movie is a nightmare," Herzog admits on the commentary. "I was really into nightmares at the time." The man claims never to dream, so I suppose he's got to use his works as surrogates. Cinematic approximations of any kind of subconscious imagery don't tend to work because they fail to strike a realistic balance between making sense and not making sense. Too often, they're simply onslaughts of unrelated sounds and images, whereas real dreams (or nightmares) do allow a thread of coherence to run through them, if only one of the lightest gauge. Even Dwarfs Started Small possesses enough narrative structure to do this, but only just; its real strength lies in the real-but-unsettlingly-unreal stuff packed within that structure.

All of this makes the picture frustratingly difficult to describe verbally; like Herzog's other works, it must be experienced. Experienced and marveled at: my most frequently occurring thought while watching his stuff is, "Wow, he actually did that."

JCVD (Mabrouk El Mechri, 2008)

Jean-Claude Van Damme's turn as a version of himself who grasps all the absurdity, all the pathos and all the bathos of being Jean-Claude Van Damme sounded hugely promising to me, but El Mechri's film that surrounds the character reaches maybe 70 percent of its potential — charitably speaking. Critics are calling this project a bold move for both director and star — in the latter's case, maybe so bold that he'll never be taken seriously again, not that he was taken terribly seriously before — but I'd say it fails to the extent that it doesn't go far enough.

More accurate, perhaps, to say that it's bold in the wrong ways. The first sour note — and it's a sustained one — is the entire narrative structure, which slices, dices and tosses a reasonably straightforward story. Fresh out of losing a court custody battle and in need of cash to pay his legal fees, Van Damme stops at an ATM in Schaerbeek to transfer some funds. The machine rejects his card, forcing him to enter the post office — one of those European-y ones that also banks, I guess — which is currently undergoing a robbery by a pair of middle-aged thugs and their odd-looking leader. The criminal trio reckon they can ask a big ransom for Belgium's most famous native son, so they hold onto him. Police commissioner Bruges, who isn't inept but isn't exactly not inept either, comes to believe that Van Damme's the one robbing the bank, as does the rapidly-growing crowd outside. All this is builds in a near-random order, and nothing I can see in the substance warrants that form. The memory condition afflicting Memento's protagonist meant that the film's story was best told out of order, but JCVD? Not so much.

Someone made another bad choice — which is to say, an unwarranted choice — in the visual department. The film's colors are muted, but the contrast is cranked way up: shadows approach pure black, and, inconveniently, everything white (or close to it) glows brilliantly, bleaching out any nearby subtitles. Reason? None. Both the shuffled scene order and harsh aesthetics lend the story an unreality it can't do much with, and would actually be better off without; both techniques may well have been employed simply because they sounded neat, which make them unfortunate synechdoces for the larger end product. It sounded neat, but too little thought accompanied its execution.

A few choice moments reveal what the movie could have been. Much has been made, for example, of a long, surreal monologue wherein Van Damme confesses that he's just this Belgian kid who learned karate, came to America with no English and fell into a brutal, unforgiving industry that once put him on a pedestal but now looks upon him as a washup. It feels reasonably honest, and hints that there's a fascinating story to be told; who wouldn't want a truthful look into the life of a man who found his way into the bizarre fame of the B-movie martial artist in a foreign country? What does it feel like to be relegated to the direct-to-DVD market? One of the best exchanges has Van Damme demanding that his agent land him just one "big movie"; he repeatedly emphasizes that he'll do it for free, just to prove he can act in a real production again, not one where his salary constitutes the bulk of the budget.

Alas, as an exploration of what it's like to bear all the hassles of movie stardom with none of the advantages, JCVD clocks out early, morping into a standard hostage-situation picture at its earliest convenience. At least bland cops-and-robbers movies identify themselves, thus warning the discerning viewer away. A film like this one, with its mix of cleverness with laziness in roughly equal measure, is much trickier to deal with. Upping the realism, spending more time on the dialogue and attenuating the stylistic oddities — a pseudo-documentary style might have been the way to go — might have done wonders.

* * *   2008

1. James Marsh's Man on Wire
2. Tarsem's The Fall
3. Alex Gibney's Gonzo
4. Mabrouk El Mechri's JCVD
5. Michel Gondry's Be Kind Rewind
6. Randall Miller's Bottle Shock

West Side Story (Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins, 1961)

Brace yourself for a cringe-inducing use of a common term here, but I can't say I watch enough musicals to be well-versed in the form's vocabulary. Or, to put it even more gratingly, I lack familiarity with the musical's idiom. All I know is that when I get the chance to see an iconic 47-year-old film in a pristine 70mm print, then, by god, I sieze it, vocabulary be damned, idiom be damned.

From my outsider's perspective, there's something of the work of a madman to a musical, or at least to one this complicated and dance-y. Not that West Side Story is structurally intricate — it's famously bannered as a Romeo and Juliet update, but we're talking a stripped-down Romeo and Juliet — but man, that dancing looks harsh. I don't even want to think about how much rote practice went into it. Think of how many thousands of hours of work are necessary to wear humans down to such unnatural synchronization and coordination. I'm bitterly casting off my youthful dreams of joining the Royal Ballet just thinking about it — and I didn't even dream of joining the Royal Ballet to begin with. (And don't even mention the singing.)

So that's the "work". The "madman" comes in upon consideration of the work's end: construction of an elaborate parallel reality where everyone can, and does, break into professional song and dance at a moment's notice. This has just come to be accepted as what musicals are, but to someone who doesn't often watch them, it's a tad... weird, the same variety of labor-intensive weirdness that fuels the construction of a twenty-mile domino line or the world's biggest twine ball. There's the weirdness of the very concept, but it's the smaller consequent weirdnesses that really get me, like how most all the characters — in this case, young New York ne'er-do-wells and their ladies — have the appearance of, well, dancers, people clearly older and in much better shape than the characters they're portraying would be, but covered with a costume layer of stylized normality. Impressive results, sure, but it's hard to get the untrained mind around the details.

George Chakiris, who played the embittered Shark leader Bernardo — these were the days when you could still get Greek to play Puerto Rican — showed up before the screening to reminisce a little about what it was like to be involved in both the film and the Broadway show that was its source material. Most of what he discussed was pretty inside stuff, though everyone seemed to find it impressive that he looks more or less the same as he did 47 years ago. This all went down at Hollywood's Egyptian Theatre, a setting that reminded me of what I miss about Seattle — or at least, what I miss about cities of at least 2.7 million. Up north, I regularly attended all sorts of film events — non-wide releases, revivals of older films, new prints, pre-screening lectures — and ultimately took their presence somewhat for granted. Having had my supply choked off for the last few years — or at least slowed to a university-provided trickle — makes me go wild with excitement when I so much as scan the Egyptian's (or the Aero's, or the Arclight's) calendar of events. Whoa, better simmer down.

Early Summer (Yasujiro Ozu, 1951)

With Early Summer, I've seen the entire top-tier-by-critical-consensus of Ozu's filmography. The man cranked out over 50 films in his 36-year career (of which 33 remain), but only three are widely acknowledged as masterpieces: 1949's Late Spring, 1953's Tokyo Story and 1959's Floating Weeds. Early Summer is what you might call a disputed masterpiece; in his commentary track, Japan historian Donald Richie — who can, and does, legitimately claim that he "wrote the book on Ozu" — says, in effect, that it's just slightly the least of Ozu's greatest, but that it still belongs in Tokyo Story's league. That seems right.

The film also has its place in what's called the "Noriko trilogy", a subset of Ozu's masterpieces: three films, all starring Setsuko Hara, all of which cast her as a character named Noriko. Not the same Noriko, mind you; just three characters who happen to share a name and handful of qualities. All the Norikos are somewhat iconoclastic, at least by the rigid standards of midcentury Japan, in matters of marriage and family, which is, of course, the subject of Ozu's entire filmography. Happy living with her professor father, the Noriko of Late Spring resists (but ultimately caves to) society's expectations that the find a man. The war-widowed Noriko of Tokyo Story, the only member of her generation willing to show her ex-in-laws a good time in the city, has opted out of the marriage/family structure entirely, instead finding satisfaction with her job and her tiny room. Early Summer also finds Noriko in the position of the unattached late-twentysomething, unwilling to do what tradition asks of her.

This time, though, Noriko's defiance has consequences. Having reached the ripe old age of 28 singly — I laugh, but I certainly haven't found my head turned by any 28-year-olds lately — she sparks concern in the family that she's destined for shameful spinsterism. Her busybody brother — a performance by Ozu favorite Chishu Ryu, and the first time I've seen him play his real age — springs into action, setting her up with a 40-year-old colleague. 28 and 40 doesn't exactly sound like the makings of a May-and-December in 2008, but evidently back then a man who'd reached his fifth decade without entering holy matrimony was a more suspect creature. In his stead, Noriko opts for the widower pal of her beloved, dead older brother.

Her selection sends a shock wave of scandal through the family nonetheless, not just because the groom-to-be already has a daughter but because Noriko dared to choose her own man without consulting the family. Coming from 21st-century America where family ties are basically van der Waals bonds, envisioning a scenario where you have to get the imprimatur of every family member — all of whom live under one roof! — on your spousal choice is difficult to envision. But maybe that there was such a phrase as "love marriage" in 1951 Japan says it all; I imagine the ensuing decades rapidly sent it into the same sort of obsolescence that "internet company" is about to enter. In any case, this story's Noriko escapes the thumb of Japanese expectations, but she more or less dissolves her famly in so doing.

It fascinates me that, despite the thematic nature of their work, neither Ozu nor Hara ever married; if memory serves, neither ever had any documented romances. I understand that Ozu was something of an ascetic, if a hard-drinking one, but Hara is more of a mystery, disconnected from and slightly above the fray she acted in stories about. (I don't believe this to be entirely disconnected from the fact that she's the only movie star I've found even close to appealing.) There's the eunuch-in-a-harem angle, I suppose — "He can't do it himself, but knows everything about how it's done" — but I prefer to think that, sitting well outside their subjects in life, they were better, more objectively able to depict them dramatically.

Before the Rain (Milčo Mančevski, 1994)

This film was made in Macedonia in 1994, so the subject matter is obvious. I doubt any viewers have accused Mančevski of making the Bosnian War too clear, but I'm beginning to suspect that's because the Bosnian War is unclarifiable. Think about it: no matter how much you've read on the subject, can you really claim the ability to explain it in reasonably precise terms to someone not from the Balkans? You'll be lucky if they grasp the difference between Bosnians and Serbians, although, if they were really honest with themselves, they'd admit that they consider even the differences between Christians and Muslims to be essentially trivial. (That's how it is in the crowd I I run with, anyway.)

Respectably, Before the Rain takes this problem head on, by incorporating the seemingly cyclical and bizarre nature of the conflict that shapes its themes into the very style of the film itself: it's actually made to appear confusing and circular, at least at first glance. The form is ostensibly a triptych. In part one, a young monk hides an Albanian girl accused of killing a Christian. In part two, a yuppieish Londoner tries to decide between her English husband and world-weary Macedonian photographer loverman. In part three, said lovermen returns to his homeland, to a more-than-chilly reception. As viewers have come to expect, each third of the film is connected to the other two, by varying combinations of character, location and theme, and, for the most part, it's done with more subtlety than usual.

The chief element of note is the film's shallow dip into the waters of surrealism. That's not to say that ghosts, monsters or the Sad Clown of Life make an appearance; it's that the story appears to form a just-about-closed loop. Mančevski somehow pulls this off artfully enough that it doesn't seem like a gimmick; beats me how he did it. Perhaps by not drawing a whole lot of attention to the technique; I'm sure it actually went under the radar of some. (Remember how even Quentin Tarantino, a filmmaker not known for his subtlety, caused this with the relatively straightforward Pulp Fiction: "But I thought John Travolta was dead!")