The Subject Was Death

The following is a contribution to David Cairns' Blogathon entitled The Late Show, looking at the final films of actors, directors or any other notable talents. Head on over to Shadowplay to catch up with the happenings and the many brilliant words being spilled over many odd and interesting works in the autumn of many lives. 

Raúl Ruiz spent his whole career making one indelible impression after another. Based on personal accounts I've read and the experience I have with his films, the overwhelming feeling I always got was that he was always just behind you in the cinema smiling at you while you watched what he was up to. You could turn back around, whether through charmed confusion or plain ardor and he'd be there to wink at you, then nod to indicate that you're about to see something better. Even if you don't like his films, how could you not admire him? His movies were always adventures, if perhaps not always naive or traditionally thrilling. Even the byzantine corridors of Mysteries of Lisbon had reveals and reversals that turned an ordinary passage into a grave, bold twist of fate. Sure it's classic literature, but it never forgot to occasionally act like an action-packed serial. 

Naturally he was gone before I had a real opportunity to engage with his body of work. Don't get me wrong, I'm grateful there's a whole canon I get to experience at my leisure but one never likes to view a body of work as an obituary. How could I watch Lines of Wellington and not wonder how it would have turned out if he'd lived to finish it? But the sadness passed as I began watching this missive from a man on his way into the next life. Valeria Sarmiento, Ruiz's great love in life (after the cinema) had stepped up and completed it in his absence and done an absolutely marvelous job. Her hand seemed guided lovingly by the man himself, though no one without great talent could have produced such a splendidly textured work. Perhaps the best way to think of Lines of Wellington is as a wake. Sadness fills the air but there is joy here, and everybody in the world stopped by to pay their respects. One is torn whether to judge it devoid of the departed first author's influence. What is the film if not a tribute to the way Ruiz's camera made us feel, a stunning approximation of his style? I found it a compelling trip down a riverbank with the dead on both sides. What can one do when surrounded by sadness so profound as this, sadness, a lack that has actually produced a film. Lines of Wellington is about surviving. Naturally it's all Sarmiento and the friends of Ruiz can be asked to do, but they've done so much more. I'm incredibly grateful for Wellington. 

Death is the ultimate producer isn't he? You can work to whatever deadline you think you have, craft your life the best you can, roll with the punches, deal with bumps in the road and uncooperative performers, work magic time and again, but the fucker always gets final cut, don't he? Who's ever really ready to let a legacy lie? Francis Ford Coppola has a marvelous zen attitude toward death, I find, but I think secretly he's as nervous as I am. He gave a whole series of interviews around the time of Tetro and Twixt where he talked about death, how he's come up with mechanisms, games, to take the weight out of the event; Take the wind out of death's sails. He would ride an elevator to the bottom floor of his building and in the dark passage between the first floor and the lobby would pretend he would be dead when he hit the bottom. Everything seemed ok in those moments. But now he's out raising money for another mob film. Death can fuck right off, it seems. Three films for no money with no pressure were enough to get all the demons out (they make a hell of a triple feature, they do. Watch them backwards, Twixt, Tetro and then Youth Without Youth and see if you aren't bawling by the finish) and now he's back on the horse. I just know I'm going to be having this conversation with the bastard all my life. There's no playing fair with death. Ruiz's passing strikes me as so marvelously sly because he left after completing what really ought to have been his last film. If I may read into the motivation of someone I will never meet, Lines of Wellington was one more film than Ruiz knew he was meant to make, so he passed it to his loved ones. Is this provable fact? Not at all. It's just the narrative I gave to myself to make his passing seem less cruel, and more a final twist in a narrative Ruiz had been writing since he started making art for kids like me to consume, analyze and fall for. 

I'll tell you the best approximation of grief I've ever encountered: In Bertrand Bonello's marvelously decadent wallow House of Pleasures (oh how I love that film) one of the denizens of a brothel succumbs to syphilis and the other girls are left to mourn her. Quite without warning we're in a dark room dancing with the girls to The Moody Blues' "Nights in White Satin." They're too broken up to speak, they can only sway and sink into each other for unvoiced support. One of them walks up the hall, not hearing the music, peering into the room. Darkness everywhere but for the candle lit bodies in a silken parlor filled with the most marvelous suffering you've ever seen. That is how one wants to mourn. We almost never get to. That is the sort of mourning Ruiz deserves. Sadness that compels one to dance. Perhaps fittingly, perhaps not, I saw Lines of Wellington before La Noche De Enfrente, Ruiz's final complete work as director, just after hearing about his death. Lines is a remarkable film, but it came with the nagging sensation that he wasn't really gone. The wake had been thrown too soon and like Don Juan or Tom Sawyer (or both) he was watching it from a safe distance, smiling just a little wider than he should at the tribute paid to him. He couldn't be gone. He had one more film coming out. 

Thus is the frustrating magic of release dates; they bring the dead back to life. We still have one more James Gandolfini performance to look forward to. What a horrible, bitter hope to give to us. Gone too soon. Everyone always gone too soon for my liking. Thanks to Film Comment, La Noche De Enfrente played New York's Lincoln Center and I got on the first train I could to go see it. The screening was patchily attended, to say the least. There can't have been more than fifteen people in the theatre. I settled in and so did this dreamy vision of life and art holding hands for a long walk down the beach of Ruiz's memory, consciousness, unconsciousness and desire. The first thing that really jumps out: the bit where Bluebeard the pirate talks with a young boy in front of a bluescreen beach. What's that about? Why the artificiality? There are no beaches in Chile? Aha! Forest for the trees. Rookie mistake. This is his version of the Byron Haskin technicolor fables that had invaded his childhood like pirates on a galley. Suddenly I was at a beautiful crossroad: the 24 year old in the theatre wanted to figure out the tricks being played, the 4 year old in the back of my head was intoxicated by the scenes of peculiar logic drifting into each other like rogue brushstrokes. I've been giving a lot of thought lately to what might have been the first film I remember seeing in a theatre. Best I've been able to narrow it down to were kid-friendly rep screenings of Treasure Island (Haskin, naturally) or 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea at the County Theatre in Doylestown, my home all these years. They still show those kid friendly matinees and the world's a better place for it. I remember being enchanted by tales of pirates, of being carried out to sea with a bunch of disreputable characters who you could never spend enough time with. Old Hollywood may have been built on lies but never let anyone tell you it wasn't magic. If I could retire to anywhere in time and space, it'd be to Hollywood in the 50s, because I could go anywhere in the world, do anything, be anywhere. The lies were exquisite back then. You could sink into them, like the girls in House of Pleasures, a similarly anachronistic voyage. Ruiz understands this. He doesn't try to lift us out of dreamland too often, but his last scenes are quite haunting without exerting too much effort. We are in the barrel of a gun for one brief scene after all. Doesn't get any more uncanny than that. 

Ruiz really did direct as if he were orchestrating your dreams. La Noche De Enfrente especially has a "Now you're here. Now you're here. Now this happens" sequencing that is truly the stuff of dreams. People walk from one room to the next, only to discover a whole new plot thread waiting to take them far away from the quiet retirement drink they were just having. Ultimately they shall have little consequence, but you'll wake up believing them. I was in the thick of all this when around the halfway point something drew me ever so slightly from the fantasia. Breathing. I had no memory of anyone coming and sitting behind me, but sure enough there was a low, wheezing sound, the unmistakable husky sound of a slightly sick older man breathing just behind me. For money I would have sworn there was no one there before the lights dimmed. The breathing continued right along with the film. I said nevermind and delighted in the things Ruiz was showing and telling me and it does feel like it's just to you, the viewer, independent of every other viewer. Dreams have that kind of intimacy. A thought strikes me, and I'm regressing to childhood in my seat so I entertain it. Could it be Ruiz seated behind me for one last screening? He seemed to be welcoming death with a joy-buzzer hidden in his palm all throughout the film, what with his conversing with historical figures and mixing his spiritual plains. Is it so far fetched that the man flew here to see his last work at a low-key venue, a small, sparsely attended theatre, someplace a throng won't recognize him. Tom Sawyer is sitting behind me, watching his own film, breathing down my neck. What a trick to play. What a damn good last laugh. It's so beautiful I want to believe it. I can't but I want to. I let the idea float away like pipe smoke to the carpeted ceilings and I settle back in, a little more invested than I was before. 

We want to believe the fairy tales, that we can be abducted by life-loving pirates and into high-seas adventures we'll never forget. The truth, that we could never live the lives of fictional characters, is too painful for us to cope with, which is why we've got movies, isn't it? To paint fantasy with lights and people and words and imagine for a moment we've lived something we haven't. One dream at a time, some good, some bad. The best films can do this to us, anyway. He had a bit of an ace up his sleeve in the form of a 6 hour runtime (!) but when I stopped watching Lav Diaz's Century of Birthing I felt I was still in the Philippines and it would take another round of dreams set somewhere else to wake me from that illusion. That is why we watch, isn't it? Am I being overly optimistic? Childish? Good. I'll never get to be these people, so I want to live their lives for a few hours at a time. I want to go off and live dangerously with the likes of His Majesty O'Keefe, Lord Jim, Robinson Crusoe, John Carter, Mick Travis, Bluebeard the Pirate or even Ruiz himself, lovable character that he is. Was? Is? But one has to grow up, so we get our doses in two hour films and pretend. Next best thing we can do is dream. So when the film ended, I stood up, gathered my things and walked out of the theatre as quickly as possible, taking care not to look behind me, never to know the identity of the man behind me, if indeed I hadn't dreamt him up. Sometimes we need the lie. Death taps his foot, looks at his watch, and waits for the ugly truth to show up. I like the truth, so long as it's given to me in a good film, but I'll take the lie any day. What's the point a dyin' if we don't know what we're gonna miss? 

The Thing(s) In The Lake: Discussing Larry Fessenden's latest off-beat horror opus

Scout Tafoya Larry Fessenden's first film was a Super 8 remake of Spielberg's Jaws which included a pretty accurate miniature representation of the vessel The Orca. It's half parody, half-tribute, all proof that Fessenden was someone who got the details right and has his own way of doing things. When he started making horror films they felt real, every inch of them. They were horrific long before the monster showed up because he got the details of anxiety and aggressive behavior just right. The real villain of his film Wendigo isn't the violent and nightmarish forest-dwelling spirit at all. On top of being a unique director, Larry's also a singular presence on camera and of course one of the best indie film producers who's ever lived, so naturally when he took a break from directing I was fine with it because he was using his time admirably. That said I was more than a little thrilled to hear he'd once again directed a horror film and the more I learned about it, the more it became clear that he was returning to that little homemade Jaws parody with a bigger budget and a real monster. And that would have been enough, but Fess' is too interesting a filmmaker to leave it at that.

The joys of his latest, Beneath, are tactile. You can see the monster and the characters really touch it. That was a satisfaction I thought long gone from mainstream horror: CGI means you can have any creature you can dream up attacking your characters, you just can't prove it's there. If all this film's budget went into the mutant in the lake, then it was money well spent. But that sense of reality, of being able to reach out and put your hand on everything is also in the character design. At the start these people are shades away from cardboard cutouts (this is on purpose) but as soon as the first victim's blood fills the boat, they become real people with wicked survival instincts. If getting off the boat means everyone else has to die, then that's how they're going to play it. But it takes goading before the characters who seem primed to be the 'villain' take matters into their own hands. And characters who seemed fated to be heroic slowly prove they're less than meets the eye. It's a sort of slow-burner waiting to see who's going to snap and do something out of self-preservation. Their dialogue also has that weird, half-improvised feel of nervous people trying to seem imposing. It's just weird enough to be totally believable. And of course the film's best joke is that the characters can see the shore the whole time and the monster is kind of cute if you look at it the right way. They're only trapped because they keep damning themselves. I loved its old fashioned approach to the monster and loved the completely contemporary approach to the human dynamic.
 What'd you make of it? Did you want them all dead or were you rooting for someone to make it back to shore?



Lucas Mangum 
I'm glad you brought up character. I liked the issues the characters had with each other because it definitely helped make the film so much more than just a mere monster movie. Fessenden showed real competence by not limiting the conflict to two or three characters. Each person has some kind of secret beef with the other people on the boat and the tension escalates perfectly. I'd say it demands patience from the viewer, but the fact that they were also being attacked by a monster kept things moving right along for those of us with short attention spans.
And what a monster it was! I got really excited the first time it appeared on screen. It definitely conjured that enthusiasm I had as a ten-year-old seeing the shark in Jaws for the first time, or the squid in Disney's 20,000 Leagues.
 Did you have any issues with the film?


Scout 
Well, in hindsight they don't seem like issues and seem more like purposely thorny edges. For instance, the fact that the female character who we spend the most time with has slept with everyone on the boat (with one exception) would seem like misogyny, but it's clearly Fessenden turning up the cliches to 11. What got me in the end was the way the film treats her character in the final act - without spoiling anything, I was disappointed, even if it was essential to sort out the fate of another character. I guess my concern was whether there was a way to get to the ending he wanted without taking the approach he did (I apologize for the maddening vagueries, but I do want viewers going in with a clean slate). The treatment of women isn't misogyny so much as a general misanthropy, which while perhaps purposely directed at a generation that won't have been old enough to have made the mistakes they're accused of making, it works because of the parodic look at the genre, but also because there are so many ways for people to be vicious these days. One thing Fessenden rightly acknowledges is that everything gets filmed these days, whether through cameras or cell phones, which means no one can hide their behavior anymore. The lake serves as a nifty little metaphor for their forced exposure to each other. They have nowhere to swim to - they're stuck with the truth and the people it pits against them.
Beyond that I suppose I couldn't help feeling it was a deliberately slight affair (the patient attitude of the monster drains a little tension from the precedings, even if that's probably how it'd go down - more reality hemming in on tropes). Wendigo, Habit and Last Winter have real gravity to them that this wants. Perhaps it's the character sketching but it's hard to bet on anyone because they keep infuriating each other. I liked them all, which is rare, but didn't love anyone so my stake in the ending was minimized. But of course there's so much to latch onto here (it strikes me as a most European approach to horror writing) that it hardly matters that there could have been a little more. Next to Maniac, The ABCs of Death and American Mary this still emerges as among the most thoughtful genre films of the year and certainly among the best American horror films for quite awhile. As with Fessenden's other films, Beneath was certainly made with care.




Lucas 
All excellent points. My gripes: I felt like the Johnny character was handled poorly. We were led several different ways on what his fate would be, and without giving away too much, the way he ended up wasn't what I expected. Not in the 'pleasantly surprised' way either, more along the lines of feeling lied to by the screenplay. Also, I am a bit burned out on, without sounding too judgmental, films where everyone is a bad person. Of course, I fully acknowledge that it served this story well, but I wanted someone to root for. Night of the Living Dead explores the same concept of people's ugliness coming out in a crisis, but we still had Ben as our character to follow and identify with. Now the tension is handled so well and the film is so damn strange (in that wonderful Cabin Fever kind of way; it actually reminded me a lot of Eli Roth's debut), it was very easy for me to look past all of that. I think, and I can't believe we're already far enough into the year to consider this, but I think Beneath is gonna be on a lot of top ten lists this year. It will almost certainly make mine.



Scout 
As far as horror, yeah...this'll be on that list. No question. Even if we got ten great horror films between now and then, I'd still include it because it does so much so differently and there's too much right for me to get totally down on the few missteps. (I agree about Johnny, by the way, even if I had to admire the gumption of the script for treating his arc that way. Not satisfying, but twistedly believable, like so much of the film).



Lucas 
Oh yes, I have to give it props for not being afraid to be its own thing. It doesn't fit comfortably with any of the stuff that's come out in the last 5-10 years, and in my eyes that's a triumph. I mean there are pieces here and there like it's partly a found footage film, and the characters are your naughty kids in the woods (if three-dimensional) but even so it fiercely stands out.