The Movie of the Year 2009: Moments

And so we continue cutting together the patchwork of the year's best film, today's chapter culled together from the richest moments I've seen on screen in 2009 (there will be more, of course):

MOMENTS

Every part of ‘Sita Sings the Blues’ when the narrating voices contradict each other.

When Andreotti in 'Il Divo' returns to his home village to hand out gifts like a satanic Santa, arms moving from the elbows, eyes unblinking; the lines between generosity and bribery so subtly blurred in a film that seems to turn one man’s life into a comprehensive social history of post-war Italy.

Pretty much anything in ‘Tetro’ – the most physically beautiful film of 2009; the scene at the hospital community, any time Klaus Maria Brandauer appears; and especially the delirious section when a critic called 'Alone' pronounces her judgement on the world.

The converstion between Adam Sandler and Leslie Mann in 'Funny People' in which they re-affirm their love for each other; he’s never been more believable.

The woman who stumbles into shot when Krystof Zanussi is being interviewed in ‘Meeting Andrei Tarkovsky’; like a refugee from a Fellini set. Dmitry Trakovsky’s genius is to keep filming – he knows that’s what Tarkovsky would do too.  Here's a picture of Dmitry - a good friend of The Film Talk and an excellent director.

The choreographed dance in (500) Days of Summer; wherein a man dances to celebrate something that he thinks is miraculous, without realizing his partner rates it much lower.

And...Solo searching for William’s other taxi in the Winston-Salem night; Bahrani utterly avoids the cliché of a chase scene; to the point where the ‘coincidence’ of finding the other car appears nothing less than exactly what would happen in real life... The breakfast provided for the prison officer in ‘Hunger’, capturing the harsh and broken reality of northern Irish life through the 70s and 80s, and making a character who otherwise might be automatised into a recognizably human figure... Joaquin Phoenix and Elias Koteas saying everything and nothing while Gwyneth Paltrow leaves the table in the restaurant scene in ‘Two Lovers’.  Only one of them belongs there... The party in ‘Humpday’ – there’s something about it that makes me want to go there; there’s something about it that makes me want to stay in bed... Eddie Adams walking to his office as the linking sections of ‘An Unlikely Weapon’ – an artist damaged by what he saw, trying to make sense of it and give something back...

Your thoughts?

'Forget it, Roman?' Polanski and the Politics of What We Remember

A friend suggested I should comment regarding Roman Polanski's arrest and the attempt to extradite him to the US to face charges stemming from his admitted sex offence against a 13 year old girl in 1977.  I'm reluctant to do so, because the issues are complex and probably better handled in conversation where dialogue partners might arrive at a truth together, so I'd like to invite such a conversation in the comments below. ADDS at 10.50am, October 1st 2009: After a day of reading and attempting to respond to people's comments on this and other blogs, I'm further persuaded of the challenges indicated above.  I'm grateful for the conversation, but eager to emphasise that I don't have any answers here - I am trying to raise some questions that I think need to be discussed.  So, despite the fact that nothing in the original version of this post should have been understood to imply otherwise, let me state explicitly for the record: It is self-evident that Roman Polanski did a terrible thing, which was not merely a breach of the law, but morally wrong, and had the potential to be profoundly damaging to the victim/survivor.  I think the legal proceedings against him should be carried through to their conclusion; he should be held accountable under the law.  But I don't believe that this means that the issue can then be considered resolved and forgotten about.  My original post below indicates some of the other issues that I think need to be discussed in this case.  I am neither an expert on these matters nor do I have a monopoly on understanding them.  I am simply hoping to encourage a wider discussion in the hope that such a discussion will reduce the potential for such awful abuse to happen in the future.

ADDS at 6.35pm, October 2nd:  Just read a helpful summary refutation of the arguments against Polanski's extradition.  I differ from the tone of some of the article, and still don't think that equating the concepts of moral justice, the restoration of a victim/survivor, and accountability with the potential for real rehabilitation for the perpetrator with the application of one country's particular legal system is good enough, but I found much of this article compelling.  Let me reiterate: I think that the legal process should take its course for Polanski, and accountable justice should be served: I have never stated otherwise.  But as I said before, my earlier post was not an attempt at addressing the case comprehensively - how could it be?  It was actually an attempt at talking about other issues surrounding the case; it has been suggested that this was insensitive of me, and if that is so, I apologise.  Talking about the issues in a meaningful way is not easy for anyone; and so I hope that we can continue the conversation in the same spirit of sensitivity to victims and survivors, mutual respect for other commenters and generosity toward each other that I was trying (and clearly not entirely succeeding) to advocate in the post.

Now, to my original post:

It seems to me that BOTH the extremes of 'lynch mob' politics and the ‘oh he’s an artist and European so it doesn’t really matter’ tendency are missing part of the story.  Some of the calls for Polanski’s punishment dabble in self-righteousness; but the attempts to mitigate his behaviour are ridiculous (witness the utterly absurd article published in ‘The Huffington Post’ that called for a boycott of Swiss chocolate, and asserted that his actions didn’t matter because the age of consent in California was 14 then, and is probably 13 now [this is not true, by the way]).

One hopes that the fresh interest in the story can allow space for serious discussion about the issues at the heart of the case, and not just whether or not one man should or should not be punished for his particular crime.  Some of these issues, I believe, include the following:

1: The sexualisation of children in our culture; the fact that the 13 year old victim in the case was being photographed for a magazine spread is surely part of the problem.  The groundwork for what happened at Jack Nicolson’s house in 1977 was laid by an entire subculture of the industrial-entertainment complex.  Polanksi is not the only guilty party; nor is the girl the only victim.

2: The role that trauma plays in the behaviour of people who abuse others.  No one would doubt that the loss of family members in the Holocaust, vagrancy and homelessness as a young man, and - obviously - the horrific murder of his wife must have taken an unimaginable toll on Roman Polanski.  Indeed, I have two friends who have spent time independently with Polanski, and both of them say that - to them - his scars are right on the surface.  One of them made one of the most tragic comments I think I’ve ever heard about another human being when he said, ‘Polanski is the only person I’ve ever met who has no sense of the transcendent.’  The man may already be living in a kind of personal hell.

Does this justify behaviour that appears to suggest a lack of conscience, or a disregard for the experience of the 13 year old girl?  Of course not.  Does it help to explain it?  Possibly; maybe even probably.  Does demonising him help to prevent other people behaving the way that he did?  Probably not - we know that pathological behaviour is not necessarily restrained by the threat of punishment; we also know that one method that does reduce the enaction of pathology includes working with the perpetrator in a therapeutic context.  It should go without saying that therapy that is contingent on dehumanising the person responsible does not exactly work.

In short, we have to find a way to talk about trauma that takes its effects seriously without giving people an easy pass for behaviour that causes suffering to others.  Our culture sorely fails at dealing with trauma – turning it either into an excuse for vengeance, or a Victorian-circus style exhibition of other people’s sorrow.  We are more than happy to invest time and money in tabloid naming-and-shaming, or in watching 'Dr Phil' or Jerry Springer, but many of us have hardly even begun to wonder what it would take to create spaces in our communities for the re-humanisation of everyday life, the graciousness and patience that healing from trauma requires, and a decisive choice in favour of seeing each other as vulnerable vessels, rather than robots in the supply-and-demand chain of consumer culture.  All these things might actually reduce the experience and effects of trauma so many of us seek to work through.

3: The fact that celebrity can sometimes get you out of jail free, in both a figurative and literal sense.    Another 76 year old man guilty of the same offence who didn’t happen to be an Oscar-winning director would very likely be treated differently.   At the same time, we might guess that the victim's mother never would have left her alone with this man if he had not been offering her fame on a silver platter.  The whole story smacks of a screwed-up value system that pervades when money and celebrity magnetise our time and trump our investment in the common good.

4: The fact that Roman Polanksi has made some astonishing films, that do, in fact, offer some insight into female experience, and are sharply critical of abuse by men.  'Chinatown' is, for me, a film I would find it hard to imagine my own love of cinema without.  I don't think he would have made such films had he not experienced the suffering we already know about.  And I don't think I would feel conflicted about how much I admire the film if he had not abused the girl.

5: The relationship between the US and Europe.  The French Culture Minister said on Sunday that 'there is an America that we love, and an America that scares us'.  I understand what he means – and I live here – but, despite the potentially mixed motives of the Los Angeles DA's office, I wish he had used a different occasion to make these remarks; implying as they do that demanding accountability for sexual offences committed in the US is an illegitimate cause, and the exclusive preserve of 'scary' people.  Something about politicians refusing to provide decent healthcare for the poor, or public commentators giving oxygen to the claim that a President who wishes to do so is the Antichrist might have been a better context for these remarks.  That's the America that scares me.

6: The obsession with sexuality over all other moral questions in popular culture.  Last week, another iconic figure of the 1970s was accused of imposing incest on his daughter; for some reason, I haven't seen much sympathy for the daughter in the media - in fact, some have used this to make the daughter look bad.  This is just one example of our culture's apparent paralysis when it comes to speaking maturely and compassionately about sexuality.  To return to the question of how trauma affects a victim/survivor’s behaviour, it would be easy to suggest that the events of the past decade in the US American culture wars has left my adopted nation vulnerably unsure of where it stands; it would also be easy to suggest that people who have been deeply wounded often project their woundedness onto an external enemy, or displace anger from one legitimate target to another.

7: The chances of recidivism: No one has made any suggestion that Polanski is going to behave this way again.  And, no matter what the gravity of his actions is, he was under the impression that he had made a plea bargain that would avoid him serving more time in jail.  Whether or not that raises questions about how the US criminal justice system operates is certainly worth discussing.

8: The response of the victim/survivor in the case.  I have not named her here, because she has repeatedly said that the publicity surrounding the case is harmful to her and her family.  I want to show some respect to someone who, it appears, has offered some of the few sensible, measured, and gracious words in the whole matter.  She has said that while what he did to her was a violation, and wrong, and deeply traumatising, that she would prefer the events to be forgotten, and for him to be allowed to get on with his life, presumably at least in part so that she can get on with hers.

But ultimately what I want to say is best summed up by a couple of memories, one from a movie, one from real life.

'Chinatown' famously ends with an injunction to the central character to 'forget it', to ignore injustice because injustice is the way of the world, or at least of this particular world. In this case, he's being told that there is something about LA; that the powerful will get away with murder; and that if you try to stop them, it will be more trouble than it's worth.  The supreme irony of the Polanski case may turn out to be the fact that the very same District Attorney's office fictionalised as impotent in his greatest movie turns out to be the one trying to send him to prison in the last years of his life.

But 'Forget it' is neither the first, nor the most important 'forget' in Roman Polanski's life.  He was a child in the crucible of the Holocaust, and at the other end of his life, he made a film about it; this film, 'The Pianist' is part of the cultural idiom enshrined by the deepest shibboleth arising from the Nazi genocide: 'Never forget'.

Roman Polanksi finds himself between two 'forgets' - both of which tell a truth about human experience: on the one hand, that justice, as understood by the legal system, is a game, a bargaining process in which people pawn morality in exchange for an outcome that satisfies the scapegoat mechanism, but may not serve any higher notion of accountability, reconciliation, or personal/societal change.  On the other, the shadow of the murder of his mother and his wife is long; even if he wants to forget it, our culture won't let him, which is exactly the same position that the woman he raped is in.  There has to be something better than this for everyone concerned.

I recall the English writer Jo Ind speaking at Greenbelt a few years ago, saying (and I’m paraphrasing) that sexuality is difficult terrain at the best of times.  Most of us have been wounded at some point by our experiences of sexuality; many of us feel shame for how we have sometimes treated others.  The story of Roman Polanksi and the woman he raped is not just painful for the victim and the person responsible; it may trigger all kinds of traumatic responses in people reading or hearing about it.  Jo Ind suggested that if sexuality is to become a site of fulfillment, wonder and joy, rather than shame, sorrow, and unfulfilled potential, it must always be treated with tenderness, not used as a weapon, nor as a way of reducing a person to the violations they've committed, or that have been done to them.  I’d want to echo this, and make a simple plea that, if we want to respect the victim/survivor in this case, if we believe that the criminal justice system should help offenders change their behaviour and not just make them suffer for what they’ve done, and if we want to live lives characterized by compassion and not the kind of self-righteousness that only turns inward and makes us hate ourselves, then we should turn the volume down and try to invest our conversation with a bit of humanity.

And then - finally - let's have an intelligent public conversation about trauma, pathology, abuse, and survival.

For me, for a start, that would mean no petitions to stop Polanksi's extradition; and no lynch mobs lining up to destroy him for what he did; getting serious about a restorative justice process that seeks to respect the suffering of victims/survivors and hold people accountable for their actions, while taking defendants' trauma into account, no matter how rich or creative they are; and figuring out that vengeance doesn't serve to help victims/survivors heal any more than trying to pretend their pain isn't real.

And that's where I need to pause, and acknowledge that I am not an expert on any of this; and I'd love to have a conversation with you in the comments below in the hope that we can come up with some wisdom together.

The Movie of the Year: Overtures

OVERTURES

Three opening sequences have embedded themselves in my mind this year:

Youssou N’Dour’s anthemic call, at the beginning of Elizabeth Chai Versalihis’ ‘I Bring What I Love’ to the young people of Africa, tears streaming down his face, asking his people to be guided by their own vision to unshackle themselves from the dependency fostered by sentimentalized Western views of the continent.

The first section of ‘Up’, which I saw a few weeks before my own wedding in May, the most glorious animation and design fused with a powerfully resonant story: the arc of a love affair, beginning in childhood, and reaching a crisis with the death of one party; whole films have dedicated to this arc, of course; ‘Up’ manages to make you believe it in five minutes; the whole rest of the movie is about what happens next, and how love always outlasts its object.

And the first half hour of ‘Inglourious Basterds’, which manages to invoke the memory of Lee van Cleef, the ‘Hills are Alive’ sequence in ‘The Sound of Music’; and even the face of Stanley Kubrick.  Beyond that, it provides the most credible reason in cinema history for a French and German character to speak English to each other; announces the arrival of a fantastic actor – Christoph Waltz - on international screens; and declares Tarantino’s intention to make Nazi violence look even worse than it has ever done by the very absurdity of its portrayal in his film.

More suggestions?

The Movie of the Year 2009

Earlier in the summer I began an ill-advised attempt at writing haiku over at The Film Talk (what’s the verb for composing a haiku?  Haikuing?  Haiku-tecturing? Haiku-grammising?) in response to some of the films that have intrigued me this year.  The experiment was abruptly ended by an outbreak of good taste, but as we roll into the fourth quarter of 2009, in anticipation of the awards season ‘quality’ epidemic that’s sure to colonise our screens over the next few months, I thought I’d return to reflecting on how intriguing a year this has been at the movies. As the last three months of the year traditionally see the release of Oscar-bait, our vision of the best films of 2009 will inevitably be somewhat skewed toward films that haven’t been released yet.  I’ve mentioned before that Roger Ebert may have made the most sensible suggestion for renewing the Academy Awards in a fashion that would both help films released earlier in the year not to be forgotten, and allow audiences to expect decent movies from January to September.  In that spirit, let’s have a thought experiment: I’m going to attempt having two ‘best lists’ for this year; starting with this last week of the month, I’m going to post my treatment for the film of the year – a quixotic notional endeavour, in which the bits that made me feel happiest to be a film lover are cut together in a genre-bending masterpiece that exists only in my head, because that’s the only place it can exist – you will have your own choices, and I’d love to hear about them here on the site – so please share your own imaginings in the comments section.

We’ll break it down into sections – today I’ve written about the premises that I enjoyed the most; I’ll post again on Wednesday with thoughts on the best intros and moments; Friday will see the best endings and even closing credit sequences (trust me, there are a few) that I’ve seen.

And I promise to return to all of this when the year is done; some of these films will be forgotten in year-end lists, and part of the reason I’m writing this as a reminder to myself. Please forgive the indulgence if you’re not interested; but if you are, I’d love to have a conversation in the comments, starting today with your thoughts on the best premises and/or opening sequences you’ve seen this year.

THE BEST PREMISES OF 2009

Old guy saves the world through non-violence; gives a kid a car.

Middle-aged guy saves world through old movies; gives a guy a scar.

Old guy gets his world back by letting go of a balloon-powered house.

Depressed guy falls in love with both Gwyneth Paltrow and Vinessa Shaw; they love him back.  Kind of.

Depressed artist lives with an incredibly beautiful woman in Argentina but can’t write; learns to love his brother.

Old guy friends try to heal their boredom by failing to have sex with each other but film the foreplay and end up figuring out what happens when a generation is raised on boredom.

Old guy talks about the pictures he took; one of which ended the War in Vietnam.

Old guy runs Italy into the ground.

Old guy and young guy drive around in a taxi.

Guy lives on the moon.

Old guy saves dolphins from amphibocide.

Middle-to-older aged guys play loud music; get big in Japan.

Young guy enjoys bomb disposal; can’t choose between cereals.

The Only Film That Has Everything?

Tarkovsky's  'Andrei Rublev' seems to me to be one of the few films guaranteed to be watched centuries from now, if the art form that captured my heart (and so often betrays it - which means that movies are, in the end, very much like us) lasts past the point when our brains will have been made half synthetic by the friends of Ray Kurzweil.  I finally got to see the film at the weekend; I wanted to wait to see it in a cinema, cued by my old friend the wonderful film critic and art historian Mike Catto who says that watching movies on television is like going to the British Museum to see a mummy rather than visiting the pyramids.  I'm grateful for DVD letting me see films that otherwise would only be evocative titles in my head, but when opportunity arises to get into a theatre, I take it.

And so, 'Andrei Rublev'.

It's a film about resurrection - the central character (who certainly isn't a protagonist in the traditional sense - he responds to circumstances, but doesn't exactly drive the story) is acted upon by the tragic and awful events that can occur when political power and religious law get too tightly bound together; he changes his mind about some things; he loses the comfort to paint the icons that the world knows him for; he fails to intervene to save someone beautiful; he tries to save someone beautiful; he seems ultimately resigned to the world being broken, and to the medieval Russian church being utterly corrupt, but he eventually finds faith that there is a way to let his gift use him.  And, five hundred years later, in the film's coda, it does.

Now, I want you to forget what you just read: because it implies that 'Andrei Rublev' is nothing more than an epic adventure story, comparable to those other two-named eponymous behemoths 'Ben-Hur' and 'El Cid'.  Certainly it tells a story - although the fact that the story seems to include every psychological motivation and consequence known to humanity makes that an understatement so flimsy it might as well be gibberish.  I can't convey how the visual shock of this film affected me - my friend who loves it deeply is right when he says that it's as if Tarkovsky took a time machine back to the fifteenth century and unobtrusively filmed people suffering and praying and living.

It looks that authentic.

And it feels alive.  It has some of the most striking images I've ever seen - the horse rolling over and up at the beginning (which seems to me to be a direct reference to Robert Bresson's 'Au Hasard Balthasar', inverting that film's ending, and an explicit reference to the third day after the Crucifixion), the running of the monks in the rain, the girl frightened and angered by the paint smeared on the wall, the astonishing sequence of horrific pillage, in which one of the most terrifying things in cinema occurs (no more unpleasant than what happens to the bad guys at the end of 'Raiders of the Lost Ark', but the tone is so...real?...that you have to look away, and can't ignore what this film is saying about the misuse of power), the tension of waiting for the bell to chime, and the very last image: four horses, alive and representing life itself, a quantum leap beyond the film's earlier equine resurrection.

Like I said, it's a film about life after death, and resurrection of all kinds - the kind that billions of people imagine for the human race, the kind that's necessary to get up every morning, the kind that the medium in which Tarkovsky worked needs with a kind of desperation I'm not sure it has known before. Cinema's a miracle, but has forgotten this

For more on Tarkovsky have a look at my friend Dmitry Trakovsky's lovely documentary.  Meantime?  Life.