Pawlikowski: Ida (2014)

Other films may depict the atrocities of the Holocaust in more detail, but few capture its existential burden as concisely and cosmically as Ida. Set in 1962 in the Polish People’s Republic, it’s about a young novitiate, Anna (Agata Trzebuchowska) who’s about to take her vows when her Mother Superior suggests that she pay a visit to a nearby town to visit Wanda (Agata Trebusza), her aunt and only living relative. Anna hasn’t seen Wanda, who now works as a prostitute, since she was handed over to the nunnery as a young girl, and yet it’s only a matter of time before Wanda reveals to her that her name is actually Ida, and that they are the sole surviving members of the Lebensteins, a Jewish family murdered during the Holocaust. In order to come to terms with her past, Anna – now Ida – joins Wanda in a journey back to their home town to confront the Polish farmers who may have been responsible for the fate of their family. That might sound like quite a visceral, cathartic story, but Pawlikowski chooses to shoot it in quite a meek manner, as if cautious to express too much, or to be too indiscreet about his subject matter. Great stretches of it could play a silent film, partly because Ida herself hardly ever speaks – and, when she does speak, is purely reactive – while Pawlikwoski’s old-fashioned 4:3 aspect ratio makes each shot feel like a convent, cloister or cell, reducing the sounds of the outside world to the barest of murmurs. Like Ida, then, the film feels poised at the threshold of taking vows, rendering its austerity particularly breathtaking and bracing – sensual, even – but also distilling the Holocaust to a challenge to faith – both Christian and Jewish – not least because of how elegantly and elliptically Pawlikowski reminds us that it was a religious genocide as well as a racial genocide, a clash between Christian and Jew as well as a clash between Aryan and Jew. For that reason, the early 60s backdrop seems crucial – just close enough to the Holocaust that it’s still in living memory, and all the anonymous perpetrators and casual bystanders have returned to the daily lives of the communities they helped deplete, but just distant enough that the catastrophe has been more or less legally and administratively resolved, leaving the sheer incomprehensibility and unimaginability of it to haunt the sites where it occurred. In that sense, Pawlikowski’s long, still shots – never reposed or composed enough to allow you to sink into any kind of contemplative peace – are a bit like the voids and wells of the Jewish Museum in Berlin, places where representation breaks down, leaving postures, movements and patterns that are purely ceremonial. As the film proceeds, Anna and Wanda feel more and more like the last people left on earth – people who should, by all accounts, be dead – as Pawlikowski makes it clear that their only options are to assimilate back into waking life or self-destruct. Yet the film also proceeds by converging those two options as well, until there’s no real difference between awaking from the film’s stunned stupor and sinking even deeper into it, in what must be one of the most agonising and existential tributes to Holocaust survival ever committed to film. 

Dolan: Mommy (2014)

Pushing through melodrama to out-and-out maximalism, Xavier Dolan’s fifth film returns to the subject matter of his first: mothers and their sons. This time around, we’re presented with Diane (Anne Dorval), a single mother barely managing to keep her son Steve (Antoine-Olivier Plion) in check, with the help of her reclusive neighbor Kyla (Suzanne Clement). Given that Steve is suffering from a pretty extreme case of ADHD, and that we’re dealing with a semi-fictional Quebec in which the State has the power to incarcerate wayward adolescents, the stakes are pretty high. However, Dolan makes them even higher by choosing to shoot the entire film in a 1:1 ratio. Technically, that means that the frame is perfectly square, not unlike the dimensions of an Instagram photo, as numerous critics have noted. When grafted onto a conventional, horizontal screen, though, it looks even more distorted – vertical, rather than merely square - and more like a SmartPhone screen, even if Dolan’s compositions often feel drawn straight from Instagram. In any case, it’s the ideal film to be watched on a SmartPhone, just because of how scrupulously Dolan’s ratio tends to remove sight as the primary point of access to the story, pulling us so deeply inside each of the character’s personal spaces that it’s more of a haptic than a visual experience, cinema for an era in which screens are more like proprioceptive co-ordinates than objects removed to a contemplative visual distance. It’s become something of a cliché that digital culture renders us closer-yet-more-distant than ever before, but Dolan is largely uninterested in the distance, drawing his characters closer and closer to each other, and the camera closer and closer to them, until it feels as if everything else is drawn into their most personal space as well, even or especially the most distant objects or vistas. As might be expected, that makes for a pretty claustrophobic experience - all the dialogue is shouted, screamed or sung, every song on the 90s-laden soundtrack is played in its entirety, and nothing (or it feels like nothing) is left on the cutting-room floor. Yet there’s also something calm and even cosy at the heart of the claustrophobia as well, as this addiction to closeness seems to unleash a deeper, more elemental yearning in each of the characters, a longing to be one with the beatified mother who presides over it all. Watching it, then, is a bit like experiencing a birth-in-reverse, as Dolan evokes the chaos and confusion of emerging from the womb, the sheer cacaphony, volatility and rawness of the new world, only to reabsorb us back into a liquid, amniotic ambience that makes you realise how much social media and digital culture draws you back towards this one primal longing to be held. Cliched from start to finish, it nevertheless uses cliché to exceed your ability to process it visually, suffocating and smothering you until you’re in precisely the position of Dolan’s characters: oppressed by the film’s closeness, but only because that very closeness means you still haven’t been totally absorbed into it. 

Saulnier: Blue Ruin (2014)

From the first couple of scenes, you could be forgiven for mistaking Blue Ruin for anything other than a revenge thriller. Opening in the flat, affectless style that’s become such a hallmark of indie cinema over the last decade, it follows an unkempt drifter, Dwight Evans (Macon Blair), as he scavenges for survival across an anonymous stretch of Californian coastline. There’s no dialogue, very little sound and almost no sense of linear progression – just a series of static, photographic shots that are so unassuming that they don’t even really seem to qualify as mise-en-scenes. In fact, so unprepossessing and sombient are these first few sequences that they barely even register when Dwight abruptly travels to Virginia, upon learning that the man responsible for murdering his parents has just been released from prison. Even if you do fully process or notice the transition, it’s only a couple of minutes before Dwight takes his revenge, leaving us stranded, twenty minutes in, in a post-revenge world that’s utterly devoid of catharsis, totally unable to restore Dwight to his lost home. More like revenge committed by rote than with any real expectation of release, Dwight’s actions – if you can even call them that – render the world even deader than before, cloaking everything in a dazed murk that overwhelms any capacity for autonomy beyond the most basic flight-or-flight response. Watching it is like being steeped in the deepest, most debilitating depression, which is not exactly to say that it’s devoid of action, since Dwight’s actions produce a immediate ripple effect, but that every action sinks back into Saulnier’s sombience the moment that it’s occurred, even or especially the ultra-violent sequences that periodically puncture the narrative. As a result, the more the film escalates Dwight’s revenge into a series of subsidiary retributions and home invasions, the more it reiterates his fundamental and inescapable apathy, as if to denude indie flatness to the point where it becomes as visceral and unbearable as the most graphic violence. Taking two steps back for every step forward, Saulnier only accelerates to decelerate, until there’s virtually nothing left in the film at all, let alone any impetus to continue with the spiralling Southern Gothic bloodbath, which seems to proceed more or less autonomously. Like watching a stream-of-consciousness revenge flick in which there’s no unifying consciousness, every shot feels homeless and every act feels aimless, creating some surprisingly freeform, satirical moments, most memorably the appearance of Devin Ratray - Home Alone's Buzz McAllister - to give Dwight some much-needed tips on home invasion. However, the satire disappears in Saulnier's sensory deprivation chamber as quickly as the violence, leaving us with a vision of America so saturated with injustice that justice itself can no longer hope to compensate, let alone the wild justice so precious to the American vigilante cinema being channelled and corroded here.  

Gelb: Jiro Dreams of Sushi (2012)

Chef documentaries are often only as interesting or as innovative as the chefs they depict, which is perhaps one of the reasons why director David Gelb’s World of Sushi project – a documentary about sushi preparation across the globe – gradually morphed into Jiro Dreams of Sushi, a study of Jiro Ono and his Tokyo restaurant Sukiyabashi Jiro, the only sushi establishment to receive a perfect Michelin 3-star rating (despite only seating ten people and being located in a subway station) and arguably the greatest of its kind in the world. Opening with Jiro’s observation that “ultimate simplicity leads to purity,” Gelb more or less shoots sushi preparation as calligraphy, a search for grace that takes years to master, a few flicks of the hand and that’s all – and in that sense a gestural art, perfectly suited to Philip Glass’ rippling score, which is lifted wholesale from The Hours, but whose breathless, extended climax works quite wonderfully here as well. That said, for all that Jiro’s philosophy suffuses the film, he’s not actually in it that much, so utterly subsumed into his art by the age of eighty-five that he doesn’t really seem to exist anymore outside the procedures and textures of his restaurant, whose sculptural simplicity is beautifully served by Gelb’s clear, crisp photographic style. Absorbed into his endless quest for perfection with an intensity that’s somehow monomaniacal and meditative at the same time, he seems utterly divorced from the charismatic and flamboyant individualism of most other celebrity chefs, instead coming across as an embodiment of old-fashioned Japanese honour and etiquette, a character straight out of an Ozu movie. Repetition is his mantra as much as inspiration - "making an effort and repeating the same thing every day" - as he sets out to incorporate every aspect of sushi into his daily routine, which feels right for the only Michelin-starred restaurant set in a mass commuter space, as well as a chef who gets most of his best ideas on the train ride to work. For perhaps that reason, Gelb is very careful to outline the unique position of the sushi chef as a chef who doesn’t really cook per se – or doesn’t cook that much – but who instead merely curates, prepares and presents more or less discrete ingredients, only synthesising them seconds before they reach the customer’s palette, as if to distill “the ideal moment of deliciousness for each ingredient.” As a result, the film proceeds, to some extend, by moving from ingredient to ingredient – including a long sequence at the Tokyo Fish Markets that encompasses the minutiae of tuna, shrimp, octopus and halibut curation – as if to emphasise the integrity of the sushi ethos, its highly aestheticised quality control over every part of the process, from raw product to final product. At the same time, it becomes pretty clear that Jiro’s “ideal moment” is also a profoundly synaethestic moment, a sensory fusion that, among other things, requires him to immediately memorise the position of each guest, whether they’re right-handed or left-handed and what the main traits of their sensorium are likely to be. The result, as one food critic puts it, is probably the closest you can get to music without actually listening to it, and that’s true of the film as well, which, like Jiro, assumes that umami is a state of balance as much as a flavour, and sets out to master it.

Moodysson: Vi Är Bäst! (We Are The Best!) (2013)

Based on a graphic novel by Coco Moodysson, We Are The Best! is a riotous, exuberant coming-of-age story set in Stockholm in 1982, revolving around a pair of tweens – Bobo (Mira Barhammar) and Klara (Mira Grosin) – who decide to form a punk band. Neither of them can play an instrument, nor have they ever written a song, but once they rope in a third member – Hedvig (Liv LeMoyne), a guitarist – they start to make some headway, building up enough of a repertoire to perform in a local rock competition. That said, their musical progression is a bit beside the point, since it’s clear that their decision to become a punk trio is not really a musical decision, or at least not a specifically musical decision. Instead, it feels like an extension of their pre-adolescent rage, their burgeoning sense of the system that continually lambasts them for their haircuts, demeans them for being girls and, perhaps most pervasively, insists that as children they could never have anything of value to say. Yet because they are still children, there’s something wonderfully wide-eyed and mischievous about their countercultural gestures as well, an ingenuous joy that humanises their rage without ever infantilising it. Before they even think of a musical career, it’s clear that they have the dynamism and synergy of a live act, that ability to summon up chaos – and just barely contain it – that’s so critical to punk. In that sense, the film is a testament to punk as an ethos as much as a musical choice – a commitment to life as a live act - since for all the careful curation of late 70s and early 80s Scandinavnian punk the music finally feels somewhat incidental, the by-product of a restless D.I.Y. resourcefulness that improvises resistance and resilience from whatever is closest to hand. In the process, Moodysson – or the Moodyssons – beautifully capture that quintessential adolescent experience of being in a world of your own with your best friend, moving through the real world unimpeded and unobserved, fitting in everywhere because you don’t fit in anywhere. In other words, everywhere feels like an elongation of Klara and Bobo’s bedrooms – the more they tumble, scramble and sprawl across subways, public toilets and parties, the snugger and more tucked-in they feel – just as the film pays homage to an era in which bedrooms were the main venue for punk rock, setting power chords free to reverberate amongst calico, chintz and other vintage decor. Too incandescent to last, but lasting just long enough for the film to end on an upbeat note, their songs feel as if they’re over almost before they’ve begun, especially as more and more people insist that punk is dead – but that’s what makes the film such a mercurial, magical line of flight, another masterpiece from a director for whom radical feminist consciousness is and always has been irreducibly punk.