The Triumph of Style

I'm generally not one to favor that style-over-substance approach people like Guy Richie and Quentin Tarentino feel they can rely upon, but in some cases, it can be absolutely flooring. In some cases the style of a director can seem out of place in the majority of his or her films, but you put up with it because their films are interesting. I've always been a fan of Wong Kar Wai and felt that when he stepped away from his established style to make In The Mood For Love, it was the smartest thing he'd ever done (the film is beautiful in every way). Bits of the style he'd established in Chungking Express and Fallen Angels seeped into Mood, but it was essentially a departure. Departures from your established style can yield positive results (There Will Be Blood, Frenzy, Dersu Uzala), but, almost more exciting is what happens when you find the perfect use for the style you've created; the reason you had a voice in the first place.

My Blueberry Nights
by Wong Kar Wai

It's no secret that Wong Kar Wai loves America. He loves it as Sergei Eisenstein and Akira Kurosawa did before him. He loves it almost as much as John Ford loved it. His films have all been testaments to that love; He's made manic-crime films a la Point Blank; retellings of golden age Doris Day-Rock Hudson romances; he's structured entire films around pieces of American music; he's in the middle of remaking The Lady From Shanghai. He's the Jean-Luc Godard of Hong Kong; a cinephile's cinephile. Best of all he's managed (until now) to make his films incredibly entertaining in their own right, completely divorced from his fanboy's nature. When I say until now it's because if anyone else in the world had tried to make My Blueberry Nights it would have been unwatchable. A predictable, romantic comedy/road movie where the naive girl learns lessons from the kooky characters she meets along the way, all the while sending postcards to the boy she secretly crushes on. That is about as trite a plot as they come. But what saves it from certain failure is the fact that as I was watching it, Kar Wai's style (the very thing that had given me pause while watching his other movies) makes perfect sense. To put it simply this is the movie he was born to make.

This is Kar Wai's first english language movie (and if he were smart he might make it his last movie period) and stylistically he's never going to beat himself. The slow crank speed of his cinematography, the lingering, sweaty soundtrack, the shifting narratives, the blindsiding, ambiguous heartbreak, all of it adds up here in ways it never did in his Hong Kong films. Every cliche, every silly line, every tired plot device, every piece of narration, all of it would have killed any other film. Not this one. This is Kar Wai's loveletter to America and nothing (not even Norah Jones in the worst acting turn by a singer since John Lurie's debut in Stranger Than Paradise) could ruin it. The film has faults (even the title screams "wasted hour and a half!"), but they brought more smiles than anything. Rachel Weisz can't pick an accent? No sweat! Natalie Portman as a world-weary gambler? Isn't that cute!?! Cat Power is Jude Law's supposedly Russian Girlfriend? ...Actually, I really don't know what to make of that. Sure I guess she has the bangs to look kind of Russian, but she doesn't even fake an accent. And her music's all over the soundtrack. That one's a head-scratcher. But the point is that the folksy wisdom the lead inherits from the crazies she encounters feels fresh. He gets help from co-writer Lawrence Block in capturing that feel of modern southern lore, but here it's all in the camera. Silly, idealistic stories were meant to look like this, and to see that potential fulfilled (on both ends) was strangely satisfying. Never in a million years could I be asked to care about Norah Jones finding her way back to Jude Law, but, here I let it all wash over me like the gorgeous sunset, diner grease, cigarette smoke, and winter air that drift through the reels. Nothing has ever looked quite so perfect as the fluorescent lights of a Memphis dive through a camera in drop-frame slow-mo.

As it is I think there are two kinds of people who'll enjoy this movie: girls between 12-35 who love romantic comedies/Jude Law and me. Do I recommend this film to anyone who doesn't meet that criteria? HELL NO! But I can tell you that I was so ecstatic over the absolute success of Wong Kar Wai's storytelling that the fact that it's been told a million times never bothered me for a second. Sure it's been told before, to the point of irrelevance, but never by Wong Kar Wai. Never the right way.

Last Year at Marienbad / Carnival Non Drôle

There is only one other movie that comes close to resembling Last Year at Marienbad. Last Year, directed by Alain Resnais in 1961 is about a man stuck reliving a memory differently as he tries to explain it to a girl (time and reliving mistakes, was Resnais great obsession). He's in love with this girl and tries to make her remember their time together. As he recalls it, he remembers the scene differently each time and soon the versions of the story begin overlapping. People drift from one evening to another, different clothes, same dialogue and events. All the while the man's pleading voiceover mixes with an almost perpetual organ score. The organ plays even when violins are played by musicians onscreen, making flesh the frustration at the heart of the story. It won the top prize at Cannes, and with good reason: there hadn't ever been anything like it. There is only one movie that has since come close to its haunting, dream-like, angst-ridden feel: Carnival of Souls.
As far as markets, personnel and reception are concerned the films are as close as an orange and a buffalo, but, in the reels lie similarities strong enough to make someone mistake them for brothers (albeit one elegant, the other deformed and awkward). They both feature characters stuck in a world they cannot control, alienated by the forces closing in on them, trying to probe their mind for some meaning to their suffering. In Last Year the stranger has his thoughts twisted and doubted by the woman he loves. He tries desperately to make her see that she too, once, distantly loved him as passionately as he did. The memories are clouded by thoughts of her rejecting him in the past, present and future. Carnival of Souls follows a woman for whom every aspect of her life is uncertain: she survives a car accident in which, it seems, all of her friends have been killed. She moves to a strange place and is menaced by a spectral face everytime she is alone. The people in her everyday life are intimidating and make her feel uncomfortable to the point where she doesn't feel a part of the living world. Both films have people wandering in and out of time and space. Both have a haunting face that disrupts their mental stability (Herk Harvey, our strange shadowy auteur, in Carnival; Sacha Pitoëff in Marienbad) and leads them into the darkest realms of their soul. Both films would have had to have been labours of love for their directors: Herk Harvey made only one feature length film in his lifetime and Carnival of Souls is a very pronounced vision; I say the same of Resnais simply because Last Year at Marienbad is such a strange goddamned film. Who would spend the six weeks shooting the same scene ten or eleven times over, only to lose most of the footage on the cutting room floor and have a gothic whirlwind of anti-baroque moodiness to show for it? I hope for his sake that he knew what he was doing.

The final thing that binds these films like split embryos in a womb is the soundtrack, oh yes, the soundtrack. The only music we get from either of these films is non-stop organ music. Wailing, noodling, aimless, screaming organ music from frame 1 to frame ∞. This can't be an accident. Harvey went so far as to make his heroine a church organ player; when's the last time you've seen a movie where someone goes out of their way to take a job as an organ player at a church no one is ever seen entering? Both of these men knew something and organ music was part of the plot. Personally, I like a violin or a tuba every now and again. Not these two. It's pipes or bust. Now of course Resnais had much else to represent his style and vision as a director (I highly suggest Hiroshima Mon Amour, it is the Frenchest movie of all time. And of course, a blinding masterpiece of eroticism and loss), but Harvey only had Carnival of Souls. This means that both men thought highly enough of the idea of gloomy tales of alienation to pour a hell of a lot of effort into making them. For all my jaw-clenching, these are original movies and were made by men with vision, which is more than most films can claim. Resnais was obviously rewarded more than Harvey (ed. Now both films share a Criterion DVD sleeve. Though Harvey beat Resnais to the punch by about four years).

Personally, I can't decide which one I liked better on first visit. Last Year pulled ahead lately, but you have to admire the purity of obscure vision from both films. As far as motivating ideas and atmosphere go, Harvey and Resnais are just about even in my book. Composition: Resnais wins by a mile with his nods to the geometric avant-garde films of the 20s in the garden and every sweeping run over the exquisitely crafted, but soul-crushing hotel corridors. The images themselves say as much about the facile arrogance of the rich and so it is clear that Resnais had the more hyper-active brain. The shapes and contrasts, the beautiful shot of the hotel alone at night. He had ideas about relationships other artists have never touched and his movies are a testament to the wonderful mind he's still putting to use today. Harvey had some wonderful compositions and I can't help but wonder as to whether he was a misunderstood genius or a creepy amateur with a whole lot of luck. That Harvey achieves a number of truly awe-inspiring shots is to his credit, but his background gives me pause in my appraisal of him. I've seen his other work, as a maker of educational/safety shorts, and clever though they are, they aren't exactly early Kieslowski either. One can't deny that these are unique; those great expressionistic shots of the organ; the silhouettes outside the theme park; Candace Hilligoss's hair deserves special commendation for being so photographable; the dance of the ghosts; the walk through the empty town; the infamous face. He really makes a showing of himself. He, like Russ Meyer, is one of the few men who have provided people with something else to look at other than the thing they've paid to stand in front of the camera. Intention is another matter, but such is the burden of the cinephile. Our reward is to be able to bask in the wonderful enigma of a case such as this and have both texts at our fingertips.

Both films undeniably served as an influence for The Shining. And for that we can all be thankful.